Annie admired people who had religion—any religion as long as it wasn’t a cult. It was becoming a requirement for political office—being religious. She knew her American history, and had called the local WWHY radio talk show on a couple of Saturday afternoons to point out that this country was founded on religious freedom. She felt the same way about abortion though hated seeing it used as birth control. But thought it had to be there for the desperate. She was glad to see the RHU586 pill was fast replacing traditional abortions. She did not voice this view in public or even with her friends. So much was better left unsaid.
Annie went to church, any church she fancied that weekend for the singing. It could make her feel noble, redeemed, more accessible to herself. Even on the radio, a particular song could call forth nostalgic tears favored with abstract sadness. But she was not a crier in general or not in a long time at least. The mullioned triple windows across the sitting room deserved a song and she sang a few lines of various Beatles songs she knew. Perhaps she might ask for library books with 60s songs to learn her favorite in whole, instead of in phrases like a favored line of poetry. And wasn’t song the modern version of poetry—the lyrical phrases that the young could relate to instead of the great poets of yore or today.
Her mother’s death was recounted in a journal she ran across buried in a top drawer of her desk. She would have had it out to read some time ago, perhaps on the anniversary, and then stuck it there to be uncovered again by the archeology of her own life. The pages of the red leatherette were darkened around the edge. She wondered if people just kept their email as a diary. Weren’t Facebook entries the new diary? Not a secret thing like it had been when she was girl.
She read: Fog filled in the eastern horizon beyond the row of Leland cypresses planted at the crest of the hill. Twenty-one of us stood at the highest point in the cemetery clustered around the open grave, the sides of brown and gray earth and shale reminded me of the coloring of a an inner temple, dank and sunless. We processed to and from the grave along a black top road that encircled us from behind.
Annie’s mother’s body was the only intimacy with a lifeless from she had ever experienced. She had stroked her hair and cut a lock. Felt her arms and legs stiffen, felt the soft skin that she had felt all her life. How peculiar it must be to have a profession in which you touch cadavers. She did not think of her mother’s body in this way at the time. But afterwards, she wondered what it did to people to work around death, or bodies, or for young doctors to cut into cadeavers.
Mom’s death was an end to 15 years of watching over her decline. The end was not so clear after all those years, all those false alarms she came back from. I became inured to reality, it was the only way to stand it. But Mom sidled up to death. Inexorable it announcing itself—the end of having a parent at all, forever alone, an orphan.
Now Annie was frail, though temporarily, and there was no child to oversee her life. She was not helpless like her mother, but would she become like her anyway? “What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh,” wasn’t that one of her mother’s favorite sayings, along with “Be careful what you ask for you might just get it.” Didn’t that last one teach her to not even want something Annie wondered? She ate another chocolate.
She had been witness to her mother’s last evolutions, the collapse of her daily life, the dissolution of choices down to what food she would eat or refuse to eat, the same with medicine—these the last acts of selfhood. There were the threads that remained—the pink nail polish on her nails until two months before the end, the formal sensibilities about physical intimacy that must have mingled with the discomfort of the body slowly shutting down. She could remember all this as she read her paltry notes after the funeral set down in the red diary from 1996.
The phone rang. Wasn’t it always ringing? Once it had not been like that. The birds flew from the tree outside the triple windows as if this sound disturbed them too. Hello…and then she listened and then she screamed a guttural sound. The boy, Raymond, her student on Tuesday evening volunteer tutoring was dead. How?
It was all too much when she hung up. She counted to ten, gasping for air, beat the couch pillow. He had disappeared while playing on the field near school over the weekend. It was Joan. It was on the news. She turned on the TV, hating the voice of the newscaster.
Annie went to church, any church she fancied that weekend for the singing. It could make her feel noble, redeemed, more accessible to herself. Even on the radio, a particular song could call forth nostalgic tears favored with abstract sadness. But she was not a crier in general or not in a long time at least. The mullioned triple windows across the sitting room deserved a song and she sang a few lines of various Beatles songs she knew. Perhaps she might ask for library books with 60s songs to learn her favorite in whole, instead of in phrases like a favored line of poetry. And wasn’t song the modern version of poetry—the lyrical phrases that the young could relate to instead of the great poets of yore or today.
Her mother’s death was recounted in a journal she ran across buried in a top drawer of her desk. She would have had it out to read some time ago, perhaps on the anniversary, and then stuck it there to be uncovered again by the archeology of her own life. The pages of the red leatherette were darkened around the edge. She wondered if people just kept their email as a diary. Weren’t Facebook entries the new diary? Not a secret thing like it had been when she was girl.
She read: Fog filled in the eastern horizon beyond the row of Leland cypresses planted at the crest of the hill. Twenty-one of us stood at the highest point in the cemetery clustered around the open grave, the sides of brown and gray earth and shale reminded me of the coloring of a an inner temple, dank and sunless. We processed to and from the grave along a black top road that encircled us from behind.
Annie’s mother’s body was the only intimacy with a lifeless from she had ever experienced. She had stroked her hair and cut a lock. Felt her arms and legs stiffen, felt the soft skin that she had felt all her life. How peculiar it must be to have a profession in which you touch cadavers. She did not think of her mother’s body in this way at the time. But afterwards, she wondered what it did to people to work around death, or bodies, or for young doctors to cut into cadeavers.
Mom’s death was an end to 15 years of watching over her decline. The end was not so clear after all those years, all those false alarms she came back from. I became inured to reality, it was the only way to stand it. But Mom sidled up to death. Inexorable it announcing itself—the end of having a parent at all, forever alone, an orphan.
Now Annie was frail, though temporarily, and there was no child to oversee her life. She was not helpless like her mother, but would she become like her anyway? “What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh,” wasn’t that one of her mother’s favorite sayings, along with “Be careful what you ask for you might just get it.” Didn’t that last one teach her to not even want something Annie wondered? She ate another chocolate.
She had been witness to her mother’s last evolutions, the collapse of her daily life, the dissolution of choices down to what food she would eat or refuse to eat, the same with medicine—these the last acts of selfhood. There were the threads that remained—the pink nail polish on her nails until two months before the end, the formal sensibilities about physical intimacy that must have mingled with the discomfort of the body slowly shutting down. She could remember all this as she read her paltry notes after the funeral set down in the red diary from 1996.
The phone rang. Wasn’t it always ringing? Once it had not been like that. The birds flew from the tree outside the triple windows as if this sound disturbed them too. Hello…and then she listened and then she screamed a guttural sound. The boy, Raymond, her student on Tuesday evening volunteer tutoring was dead. How?
It was all too much when she hung up. She counted to ten, gasping for air, beat the couch pillow. He had disappeared while playing on the field near school over the weekend. It was Joan. It was on the news. She turned on the TV, hating the voice of the newscaster.
DRAFT SHORT STORY BY ROSIE DEMPSEY
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