Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

Only his wife and children are at the cemetery when he gets there, sitting on a bench several plots away; casket’s on a few planks above the open grave. “By the time your message got to us,” his wife says, “Rebecca and everyone else had left. They all had to be somewhere later this afternoon and didn’t know when you’d get back. They were concerned about you, paid their respects to you through me, and said a few words of their own to your mother. You’ll tell me everything later, all right? Now we should get the cemetery people to help us get the coffin in the ground.” “Did you get the poem, Daddy?” his younger daughter says, and he says, “Oh, the poem; Jesus, I even forgot to get it photocopied. I could have before but this librarian, you can’t believe it, she gave me the option to, but I wanted to hold the whole book, this beautiful old hardbound copy of Dickinson, as if it were a religious book, rather than read from this skimpy transient sheet—” and his wife says, “What are you talking about?” and he says, “The poem. ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’ There’s a capital D in Death. The prayer guy ever show up?” and she says, “He waited awhile, then said he had to go to another gravesite, and made some prayers over her coffin and left.” “So let’s do it ourselves, though we’ll have to get the cemetery workers to lower the box once we’re done. Maybe that’s all it should be anyway, since we’re the only ones left of her family who are still semisound.”

He drives to the office, returns with a cemetery official and two gravediggers in a truck behind him, and standing in front of the grave says, “Please, now let the funeral and burial and service and everything else begin. Sally, do you have anything to say?” and she says, “Just that we all loved you, Beatrice, very much. You were always wonderful to be around, wise in your ways, delightful to the girls, and, because you’re Gould’s mother, special to me, and we’re profoundly sorry to see you go. Kids?” and the older shakes her head and starts crying and the younger says no and then, “Yes, I have something. Goodbye, Grandma. I wish I knew you longer and when you were younger, and I feel extra bad for Daddy. And I love you too and am sorry to have you die and be buried.” “Thank you, dears,” he says. “As for me, if I mention the word love and how I feel I’ll blubber all over the place and won’t be able to continue. So to end the service, because I’ve kept everyone here way too long, I’d like to read something — I mean, recite — and very little because it’s all I know. I tried to get more but that’s another story, Mom, so just two lines of an Emily Dickinson poem you like so much. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ … what is it, Sally?” and she says, “‘He kindly stopped for me.’” “Right. ‘Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.’ Amen. Now if you gentlemen will lower the coffin, we’ll go home.”

HE’S WITH HIS mother in the park. He’s on a bench; she’s facing him from her wheelchair, drinking ginger ale through a straw. “Cold enough?” and she says, “It hits the spot.” She looks around, then at him. “Excuse me, but you were talking of my soda?” “The ginger ale; yeah.” “Hits the spot. It’s my favorite drink on a warm day and always has been, even when I was a girl. That’s so far back, nobody but me could remember. Ancient times.” She looks at the trees behind her. “They look like shadows.” “The trees?” he says. “Like shadows, but not scary ones. Those I wouldn’t like. Even at my age, I get afraid.” They do; he can see what she means. Silhouettes, at least. “Why do you think they paint them black?” she says, pointing to the trees. “What do you mean black? The tar they sometimes put on them, or whatever that substance is, so when the tree’s slashed or something — a limb sawed off — the sap won’t run?” “Aren’t all the trees there painted black?” “No, they’re just dark: the bark is. Elms or some others. I used to know trees. I can’t tell what these are by their leaves, though I know they’re not maple or oak.” “My eyes, I suppose, playing tricks on me again. One eye I can’t see with almost at all. The other eye lets me see things but very darkly. Together they’re practically of no use. And even worse than that, ugly, because I’m sure people, especially children, who look straight at them, cringe. The soda’s good,” she says, sipping. “I’m glad you like it. Better than the orange flavor, I thought.” “Oh, the orange would have been good too.” “So, the next time.” “If I’m lucky and live that long, though sometimes I wonder.” “What? That you’ll live till the next time I take you to the park? I take you almost every day. This isn’t a one-time thing.” “No. I meant ‘ancient times.’ You can’t expect me to live forever, you know.” “Yes, I do. Now let’s stop talking about it.”

A woman walks past, young, maybe around twenty-five. Tank top, shorts cut high, flapping a Frisbee against her thigh. The kind of body he loves: thick strong thighs, compact high butt, small waist, flat stomach, large breasts. Blond hair but seems dyed, and a pretty face and not dumb-looking. Looks at him as she passes, and he looks back and she looks away. She’s alone, and she sits on the grass in the shade about thirty feet from them, shakes her head hard so her hair falls in front of her face, parts it away from her eyes, and looks at him. He smiles at her, she just stares and then looks away; he turns to his mother, who’s looking at the tree covering above them as if she’s studying it, then back at the woman. She’s stretched out now, leaning back on her forearms, facing front, one knee up, other leg extended out, hair now in a ponytail. How’d she tie it so fast? Must be one motion — ah, he’s seen it done by his wife and his older daughter, so he knows: pull the tail back with one hand, other already has an elastic band stretched wide for it to go in, and, for women with straight hair like his wife and this one, done in a matter of seconds. But what was with that shaking-her-head motion, then, after the hair fell over her face, parting it and looking what seemed coquettishly at him? On the last he might be wrong, but doesn’t see the sense of the head shake. He looks at her long enough, without her once turning to him, to imagine her with no clothes on, on a bed, legs like that: one knee up, other leg straight out though turned a little toward him so part of her inner thigh’s exposed, breasts hanging over the sides of her chest as the outline of them (or just the one he can see) against the tank top makes them appear to be doing now. She grabs the Frisbee off the grass and turns it around clockwise between her fingers while looking at him, then looks at it and continues turning it, but faster, till it’s practically spinning. A good show, but for him? and why’s she looking at him so much? Maybe because he’s looking at her and she’s using the spinning motion as some sort of thinking trick while she wonders why he’s looking at her; and why is he? Wife’s in the apartment, he’ll be picking up the kids from day camp in two hours, he’s with his mother, and he’ll have to wheel her to her home and maybe wait with her and make her comfortable till the woman who looks after her gets back from a movie, so it’s not as if he’s going to make a move on the woman. If his mother sees him eyeing her, what’ll she think? That he’s a bit of a fool, eyeing someone so much younger and who’s dressed in a way to provoke those kind of looks, or that something’s wrong in his marriage, or some connection between the two, or simply that it isn’t right, staring at a woman that way, no matter how she’s dressed or what the disparity is between their ages — she knows because she was a beauty and must have got plenty of stares — and she’d be right, but it’s hard to stop: the woman attracts him, he’s sitting rather than really doing anything, it’s also that she reminds him of someone he went with twenty years ago (her breasts, though, were small, but everything else including her height was pretty much the same); wanted to marry her, even. Looks at his mother; she’s resting with her eyes closed, may be napping. “Mom,” he says, almost so softly that she wouldn’t hear; she doesn’t respond. He also raises his hand to touch hers, but doesn’t want to disturb or wake her; right now he’d rather look at and fantasize about the woman. She looking at him now? Take a guess: she is. Looks: she is but quickly turns away, looks straight up at the sky, shuts her eyes, and smiles the way people do when they face the sun contentedly: the pleasure of the warm rays, especially on your closed eyelids. But she’s in the shade. So she’s just feeling content, maybe from the coolness of the shade. But why would she close her eyes while smiling like that? A breeze she’s getting and he isn’t, or something she thought of that made her smile, and she only looked at the sky to look away from him: didn’t want him disturbing her thought? Fun she had last night? Sex she had this morning? A guy she likes, just met, something somebody recently said? Or just that he’s looking at her, this much older not very attractive man, and that he in fact looks sort of funny with his unruly wiry hair made more unruly by the humidity, and is probably going through some big sex fantasy about her, and she finds that amusing though also a bit pathetic. Then she gets up — Well, see ya, honey, he says to himself — and sits on the grass in the sun about ten feet farther away from him, which could still be thirty feet; he’s not too good at gauging distances. So maybe she had been thinking of the sun before when she had her eyes closed in the shade, but forget it, forget her, will ya? He can if he wants; it’s just that before he didn’t want to.