Stephen Dixon - Frog

Olivia sits between her mother and grandmother at the funeral. The casket’s a nice wood and color, she thinks. Plain, simple, nicely shined. But she thinks her father would still say of it “Nice for somebody else, and not because I’m in it. But since it still looks too expensive and will only just rot in the ground and can’t even be recycled, not for me.” “Put me in a bag and dump me over the side of a boat into the ocean,” he once said to her mother. “Seriously, but of course not before my time comes; I can’t swim.” When she said “Shh, not even for laughs in front of the children,” he said “Only kidding, yak-yak, and you didn’t think I was talking about someone else?” She also thinks he wouldn’t like all the flowers around. He said he didn’t much like buying cut flowers, even though her mother loved getting them from him. And when Olivia picked them here and there out of the ground, which she was always jumping away from him in their walks to do, he didn’t much like that either. To him, even people’s private gardens and front yards were public parks, to be seen and enjoyed by everyone is what she thinks he meant. She knows he explained what he meant, because she asked him to, but that part she forgot. When her mother bought flowers he often put his nose in them and said “Smells very nice, like flowers,” and put them under Olivia’s nose and said “Breathe deep without stopping to think and tell me if it’s animal, mineral or vegetable.” He also wouldn’t like the electric candles by the casket. Garish would be the word he’d use. “Cheap, ugly, they even flicker,” he might say. “Either wax candles or forget it. I’m not worth the real thing?” He also wouldn’t like the things the rabbi’s saying about him. Too flattering, lots of the facts all wrong, making him sound the way he wasn’t. “Your eye is beginning to turn in,” her mother whispers to her. “Put your glasses on,” and she takes Olivia’s glasses out of her bag, rubs the lenses with a tissue and puts them on her. Also the unnatural deep voice like a stiff actor’s. Probably wouldn’t like there being any kind of rabbi up there. Just friends, he probably would want to speak about him in front of all these people, or only his brother. But probably no words and nobody up front and everyone staying in his seat and no getting up and down a few times on cue and just sad piano or cello music for the time of one side of a record followed by a few seconds of silence and then everyone go home or wherever they go and his wife, mother and brother and she could go to the cemetery to do very quickly everything that’s supposed to be done there. He said a few times that he never could stand anything nice said about him or his work to his face. Saying anything nice about him when he wasn’t around he didn’t like either, if it got back to him. “I hate compliments or giving them, except to my students if one really needs one and to my daughters and wife, but only if they don’t return them.” He also wouldn’t like that so many people are here. Maybe the only ones he’d like seeing if he was here would be the ones who read about it in the newspaper obituary yesterday or heard about it from someone who had and whom he last saw long ago and some he even thought were dead. “I like bumping into people I haven’t seen for years,” he said, “better than I like making a date to meet them. Best when it’s on a busy street and not muggy, overly sunny, raining heavily, unless one of us has an enormous umbrella for us both to fit comfortably under, or freezing cold. Snow’s okay no matter how hard it’s coming down, if you’re dressed for it, since it makes the encounter more fantastic. But no commitment to stay, this way, and the conversations are usually quick, lively and full of surprises — time speeded up, then a kiss on the cheek or handshake and good-bye.” He didn’t like crowds, that’s why he wouldn’t like all these people here. Once, yes, he did, he said — Ebbetts Field, Madison Square Garden, a half-million people marching to ban the bomb or around a factory that made casements for napalm. Lots of different faces, costumes, chance to meet a young woman, a single cause or event making everyone feel together or that things can get righted through sheer numbers. But no more and not for twenty years. A big crowd leaving the same place at the same time now made him jittery. Someone might faint, others could panic, gun might drop through the hole of someone’s pants pocket and go off, someone else could open fire on the crowd from a passing car or high on drugs or some political or even religious conviction drive into it, but maybe that’s going too far. It’s going too far. It’s off the point. Large crowds made him uneasy, that’s all, and there must be a couple of hundred people here. Three. Four. More people than seats. Or as many or near to it but most aren’t sitting close to one another. Where’d they all come from? Which ones did he know? Did a number of them come to the wrong funeral, directed by mistake into this chapel rather than one of the two or three other chapels having services now? Is there an important or well-known Howard Tetch in this city and some of his immediate survivors have the same first names that some of her father’s do and so a lot of people who read the obituary thought her father was he? “And talk about a change of mind?” he said not that long ago. “Nothing gets said to crowds or done through them, no matter how loudly a hundred thousand people yell back in unison. So now it’s one to one, two on two, six people around a round table, but that’s it if I can help it.” He’s refused just about every invite to a cocktail party or any big function like that the last few years. Particularly art gallery openings; no place to sit. He also didn’t like women’s perfume or men’s cologne or whatever it is men put on their faces and bodies and spray in their hair, when the smell of it got this strong and there were so many different kinds of it at one time. “It’s like drinking rum, vodka and scotch at the same sitting,” he said. “But my nose gets offended instead of my stomach. No, that explains it too much while adding nothing and making little sense, so in the end gainsays what I want to say. And that interpretation of my explanation’s trying too hard to be clever, which besides making the interpretation wrongheaded, worsens the wrongheadedness of the explanation even more. Too many fake fragrances, period. Or just ‘fake smells,’ since I should stay away from the sweet-sounding fake too.” He also didn’t much like fancy clothing on people on any occasion. Capes, floppy broad hats, big fur coats draped over women’s and men’s shoulders both. Ostentatious jewelry taken out of the bank vault or home safe for the day. Just overmadeup and overdressed people, hairdos that looked as if they took hours to do and cost a bundle, and so many here seem to have gone through much thought and great fuss getting ready for this. Just the shoes: so shined and new. “You didn’t give half a shit about me when I was alive,” he’d probably say, “hell with you now that I’m dead, or most of you. This is a show, no funeral. I’m just the ticket to be here, or whatever I am. The lure, the draw, the grease, the catch. None of those. The audience is the show, I’m just its reason for being, and a dead one at that. Did I have to explain that last remark too?” He also wouldn’t like being in that suit and which people were looking at him in when the casket was open. The shirt’s his: a blue button-down cotton oxford, one of two he owned and just about the only dress shirt he wore. The tie’s a nice design, color and style, one he wouldn’t have minded owning. But the suit he stopped wearing ten years ago but could never give away or throw out. Maybe wore it three times, at the most five. Everything else like that he’d eventually give away or throw out: shoes, shirt, pants, sport jacket, wallet or key ring or pen and pencil set he got as gifts from his mother and in-laws, but for some reason not this suit…. Ties, box of handkerchiefs, satin-lined bathrobe with a designer label, wicker picnic basket of different colored synthetic-fiber socks. Because it was so expensive, at least for him. Also because it was a suit, two complete articles made into one thing, each of which could possibly be used separately, and if it had come with a vest it would have been even harder to get rid of. No, the vest, if he couldn’t have bought the suit without it, would have been got rid of immediately and probably by leaving it at the store. He didn’t like the suit the day he bought it and left it at the store to be altered. When he was leaving the store that day, he told her mother some years later, he said to himself “Why’d I buy it? I don’t like it. I’ll look silly in it. Why do I almost always buy the wrong thing for myself? I came in to buy a sporty medium gray Harris Tweed suit with a vent in back and if possible with flap pockets and little domelike leather buttons. So why’d I wind up with a ventless dark brown of another kind of closer-knit tweed than I wanted, the perfect suit for a witness or guest at an execution or funeral?” He also wouldn’t like the white handkerchief in his breast pocket, though at least it was squared rather than triangled and sticking only a little bit out. Nor that the casket had been opened: that most of all. People he didn’t know filing past. Just people filing past, most probably thinking at the time what a good or bad job the embalmer did on him and later talking about it when they got back to their seats. His mother collapsing for a few moments when she saw him. Her mother refusing to go up to see him. Olivia wanting to go up but not being allowed to till the funeral director announced that the coffin would be open only two more minutes. “I’m not scared. It won’t give me bad dreams. It won’t be the last impression I’ll have of Daddy. I have pictures. He has books with his face on the backs of them. I’ll stare at them till the picture of him in there goes away. You keep telling me how mature I am for my age, so give me a chance to prove it. He’s my father, not yours. I only want to see him. I won’t touch or kiss him. Someone will have to hold me up. Uncle Jerry’s there now, so him. But one look for only a second, please? Please?” Any of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to be seen. He said a while back that when he died he only wanted to be burned without any mumbo jumbo and his ashes trashed. His mother was the one who wanted it opened. After it was closed a final time she said to Olivia’s mother “Why? I didn’t need to be shown he was gone. Because it had been done for his father and my parents and sisters and brothers, so I thought why not for him, but it was just repeating past mistakes. I should have given in to you. You shouldn’t have given in to me. If I still insisted, slobbering over your knees even, you should have told me to stop instantly or leave. It’s something I’ll never live down for the rest of my life. Married to Howard even for a few years, you should know how much stubbornness runs on both sides of his family and how we don’t mind walking over weaker wills, and that’s all you needed to have told me. A reminder of what I can be. Remember that for the next time. Not for a funeral — the next one will be mine — but any time when I want to get my way. Now let’s try to get through the rest of it.” If her father could think, what would he be thinking now? He can think, that’s all he can do now, except maybe see them from someplace, and he’d be looking at them and probably crying while thinking “Oh my poor children,” meaning Eva and she, “what’s going to happen to you without me? I shouldn’t be dead just for that. And what will I do without you? Well, it’s all got to be planned. You just don’t go to no place after your funeral and do nothing for a billion years. Up there no doubt has something for me to do from now on or else people like me would get tired and bored from doing nothing for so long and then make trouble for the place. Washing clouds. Cleaning air. And lots of enjoyable things to do with a lot of nice people after these chores are done. But it just isn’t fair for me, that’s all. Nor for them. Skip me — just for them. They know I loved them too much for me to just leave them like that. So, settled — it’s all got to change. Anyone can do the things that are planned for me, and besides I’ll have a billion years to do them in. But only I with their mother can take care of our little girls.” He wouldn’t like the chapel either. Too gloomy and uninteresting, just like the awful organ music they played. Wouldn’t have liked the furniture and paintings in the other room where her mother and grandmother and uncle and she saw people before the funeral began. He didn’t like being the center of attention anywhere. He would like it that he isn’t expected to say anything.