Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (15 page)

Marie needs to sit but she can’t. She’s suddenly caught up in her own conversation, which has quickly turned into a confession of sorts.

“Sometimes I wait and then when I think about Annie dying and everyone else along with her I scream,” she says, walking as if she is in a marching band, back and forth, back and forth in her own front yard. “I need to be more spontaneous. If I could pick one thing—that would be it. Spontaneous.”

Katherine can hear parts of the cell phone conversation and she has quietly folded her mother’s obituary and placed it back inside the shoebox. When she hears the word “spontaneous” the second time, she grabs the phone from Jill.

“Hey, you,” Katherine says. “Are you looking for a good time?”

“Like a traveling funeral?” Marie laughs into the phone. “The people I deal with can actually lean over the edges of their beds and tell me what it’s going to look like the day they die. A traveling funeral? I’m not so sure. I’m trying hard to leave. I am. I have calls in to three subs. I should know something by this evening.”

Katherine thinks for just a few seconds. She thinks about the routines of her own life that have swallowed her up and kept her locked into places that she no longer finds comfortable and she realizes this for the very first time because she is on a traveling funeral. She can also not let go of the feeling that her mother would be telling her something important, something like “Make more time” because that is exactly what her mother did.

“Spontaneity is good for the heart and soul and whatever else you believe in, Marie,” Katherine explains, trying to convince herself and Marie at the same time. “That’s what my mother would say anyway. This whole thing has already, in what—not even two days?—turned into something much more than a funeral. Remember what I said? These things are not really for the dead but for the living and you have to decide how you want to do that. I suppose I do also.”

“Do what?” Marie asks quietly, halting her march, placing her hand over her heart to still the beating blasts that propelled her to say things she already thinks she may regret.

“Live. How do you want to
live
?”

Marie cannot remember anyone ever having asked her this particular question. She cannot remember when she stopped long enough, beyond her moments of silence in her bedroom, to consider such a notion. She worries and talks about how everyone else lives. Her patients. Her children. Her husband. But her? She feels a hard ball forming in the pit of her stomach.

“Marie?” Katherine asks after a long pause when she thinks the cell must have gone into hibernation as they passed over some kind of invisible communication wall thousands of feet above the rest of the ringing phones and loud voices of the world.

“Isn’t this supposed to be about Annie?” Marie asks softly.

Katherine laughs. She’d love to push back the seat and become hysterical for a good week.

“About Annie? Oh, yes, I suppose that’s what she wanted us to think, but you know Annie—always pushing toward some secret and wild conclusion. Maybe this funeral will end up to be more about us, each one of us, than about Annie.”

Marie doesn’t skip a beat. She tells Katherine that at least she doesn’t have to finish thinking about her own life or what she wants for a few more hours.

“Not for long,” Katherine warns. “Wait until you get here. You are in big trouble.”

“Katherine,” Marie says suddenly because something large has roared to the forefront of her mind. It is something she has never told anyone, not even Annie G. Freeman.

“What?” Katherine asks as the Miami-bound plane hits its fly zone and she can hear Rebecca snoring softly above the pilot’s description of the flight and the temperature and the glorious fact that anyone who needs to can now use the bathroom.

“I’ve always wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle.”

“A motorcycle?” Katherine says back with a smile that could probably ignite three cycles without the use of an electric starter.

Katherine knows that Marie is serious and out of all the possibilities life has to offer, how interesting that the kind nurse would choose two wheels and an open road as her most pressing secret desire. When she closes her eyes and listens to Marie describe how being alone and in control of her time is so foreign to her that she can only imagine this dream where she is wearing a leather vest and riding into a sunset on two wheels, Katherine decides that it makes perfect sense.

“Do it,” she urges. “Where is the closest Harley dealer up there? They have classes.”

Marie starts moving in the yard again, then slaps herself in the head. “Here we are in the middle of a funeral. We shouldn’t be thinking about ourselves. What is wrong with me?”

“Look,” Katherine explains, “here is what I think. There’s a wound that opens when someone you love dies. It’s a raw emotion that needs to be revealed every now and then.”

Silence.

Marie is thinking, “Of course,” just “Of course that is exactly true” and she tells Katherine it almost makes her want to go to a bar and open her wound except she has too much to do and so many people waiting on her and—

Katherine cuts her off just as Rebecca tosses the funeral book into Katherine’s lap and the pilot gives them the okay to turn on some computer devices but surely not a cell phone.

“Hey, take a breath.”

“A simple breath, one at a time,” Marie responds quietly. “That’s good advice, always very good advice.”

They hang up after that without saying another word and Marie breathes deep and long and she drives to her next hoping heart and desperately ill patient with the windows, all of them, rolled down so that she can feel the California air on her face, imagining the entire time that Annie could have touched some of the air that has lingered long and wild in the swirling and very friendly winds of Northern California.

Katherine glides while Marie drives.

She turns to see that Jill is asleep with her head tilted against the two pillows and her hands open, palms up. She doesn’t have to unstrap her seat belt and lean forward to see that Rebecca and Laura are also asleep, because she hears them snoring not-so-sweetly in the seats ahead of her and that is what she writes because it is her turn.

K
ATHERINE
T
HOUGHT:
How lovely. Women at rest miles above the mostly sleeping world. We take turns, it seems, trying to imagine why we are here and what this really means and in the quiet moments that none of us seem to have during the rest of our lives, we think of ourselves. Where we are now, who we are when we knew you, Annie, who we would have become with or without you in our lives. I feel weary and then exhilarated. I feel confused about my direction and the fear that seems so real that has me treading in place. One minute I am there and the next I see something fuzzy on the horizon that is a desire I have yet to identify and then I think of you. You. Annie Freeman.

This is long because everyone is sleeping. So, too bad.

Remember that day when we were seniors in high school and I leaned over and told you that I had always wanted to skip school? Remember? Remember how we ran into the bathroom and waited until Ancient History had started and then we bolted out into the parking lot to your car and skipped last period?

Remember how fifteen minutes into the gig we turned to each other and both pretty much said at the same time, “This is goofy?” and how we got back in time to not even be missed during class?

I’ve always been torn that way. I’ve always wanted to skip the whole damn class and go behind the grocery store and smoke some weed and then head for the Hawaiian Islands and never come home. But then I think about something like the way my daughter still calls my name the second she walks into the door and I think, “Well, maybe this—being here—is paradise.”

So this is it. This is what your loss has me doing. I’m confused and I miss your sorry ass, Annie. Come skip class with me again. Hurry.

A
NNIE
T
HOUGHT:
You could always have skipped class. You could have but the real problem for you was wondering what you’d miss while you skipped class. Maybe something really wonderful was happening that day and then you missed it for what? A fast ride down the highway? The thrill of escape? Here’s what I know now dear Katherine. It’s very cool to skip class once in a while because you can copy someone’s notes the next day. Follow your own advice sweetheart. You told Marie to breathe and that’s what you need to do now too. Run from class. Do it. Take a breath and then stop and listen to the sound of your own beating heart. This minute is yours. Grab it hard.

17

Rebecca’s airplane dream is a breezy affair that has her singing in a kitchen that looks like something from an art deco film at the Sundance Film Festival in 1987. She is naked and thinks nothing of it as she watches herself prepare to leave the house without even considering putting on clothing.

She’s leaving on a ride to pick up someone or something when she spies a tiny, very, very tiny sign posted at the side entrance of a white house on the corner of a quiet intersection. Rebecca does not know why she turns her head to look at the house she has ridden past hundreds of times but she does. The wind blows her hair across the tops of her breasts. She can feel the sun beating against her arms, the back of her neck, the tops of her thighs. No one passing by mentions her nakedness and she turns the car into the slanted driveway, gets out, leans over to grab a towel and starts walking toward the house.

Before she walks more than a few feet she stops, throws off the towel, puts on a white polo shirt—nothing else—and then wraps the towel back around herself again.

Rebecca knocks but no one answers the door. She boldly walks inside and a woman quickly hurries from somewhere inside the house and greets her in the kitchen. They do not know each other but they embrace and the woman is eager to show off what she has for sale. Just a few things. Really, maybe just four things. “It is a very tiny sale, like the sign,” the woman explains, pointing toward the items she has spread out for purchase.

Rebecca picks up one bottle. It is a small mustard jar and it is full of pills.

“Vitamins, I think,” the older woman tells her eagerly. “I’m sure they would be safe.”

Suddenly, Rebecca thinks the woman must be mad. She does not want to startle her so she looks at the bottle, then sets it back down and without thinking further turns sharply, leans in close to the woman’s ear and whispers, “I’m naked under these two things.”

That’s when Laura shakes her gently awake and Rebecca screams, crosses her hands over her breasts to cover herself as if she is really naked, and looks as if she has seen Annie’s ghost.

“Shit,” she tells Laura. “A dream. It was crazy.”

“Are you okay?” Laura asks her, sitting back down as the rest of the people file past them to get off the plane.

“It’s just a dream. I thought I was naked.”

Laura laughs. Rebecca laughs too and they decide the bizarre dream is a combination of the hangover, airplane food for breakfast, being with a group of women whom you know but don’t really know, a pile of guilt from not being where everyone else thinks you are supposed to be, and the intensity of not knowing what is about to happen on the second leg of the traveling funeral.

Even with that boost of knowledge, Rebecca cannot forget the dream. She talks about it as the two women walk off the plane, and she decides, speaking mostly to herself, that the half-naked towel thing must mean she is hiding something that needs to be uncovered. Rebecca always embraces her thoughts, even though they have mostly been filled with anguish and loss and so much grieving time that it has been hard to recover all these years and see a side of life that is not covered in a shroud of black. Dreams, she knows, always lead to something and maybe—maybe—something is shaking itself loose and she’ll be able to walk naked everywhere and only need an occasional shawl and nothing else to protect herself from the evils of the world and insane and corrupt rummage sales. Maybe.

There is little time to linger on those thoughts of glorious recovery because as Katherine, Jill and Laura are standing near a Cuban coffee vendor and shouting about the vibrant colors and the warm late morning air, Laura suddenly decides she knows the name of the older woman in Rebecca’s dream.

“What?” Rebecca asks. “How could you know that?”

“The same way I know other things. I think our dreams may have crossed over. I was dozing while you took a nap. Hang with me here. I know a woman who used to do what you said the woman in your dream does. Before my neighbor got sick she did that. She’d try and sell a jar with stones in it and she’d always tell you a story about them in broken English like they were gold nuggets or something. She looked like the woman in your dream. She was the woman. We—you and I, Rebecca—just have some interesting connection that is about to get richer for many reasons.”

Rebecca gets it, sort of. She knows Laura’s wild mind is a gift and she believes that Laura can and does know things. Some of those “things,” she should probably just keep to herself. But she can’t help it. She wants to know. She has to know who it was but beyond that, she’ll wait a bit. Is there really something else coming to connect her with Laura beyond this trip, Annie’s death, what they already know?

“Who the hell is she? Your neighbor?”

“Jencitia Chalwaski,” Laura shouts to her startled friends.

They look at her as if she really is naked like Rebecca was in her dream.

“What?” they all ask, sipping their tiny cups of coffee that is strong enough to lubricate the bearings on the airplane that just dropped them onto Florida soil.

“She’s a who, not a what. Jencitia Chalwaski.”

Just as Laura gets the last letter out of her mouth, her cell phone rings. This is only amazing to everyone but Laura because her phone was not turned on and has not been turned on since they touched down in Miami.

“Magic,” she tells them as they freeze in place, white cups to lips, afraid to move, wondering if Laura has not already had several conversations with Annie during the last twenty minutes that only she can hear.

Laura turns away, covers her ears, and they hear bits and pieces, Jencitia’s name again, the word “maybe,” lots of questions, and they watch Laura shaking her head up and down and then leaving it down as she dances a bit from one foot to the next and then after a long time and another cup of powerful coffee that could fuel a rocket to Mars, she turns back to them and says into the phone: “I’ll ask them and call you back soon.”

“What?” they demand again in unison as she disconnects the phone, and Laura looks at them, smiles, and thinks how wonderfully lucky Annie was to have known the three women she now sees standing against an orange wall in the Miami airport.

“You are all beautiful,” she says sincerely, taking one of her mental photographs of the trio and loading it into the slice of space behind her right eye so that she can look at them, reserve the space and place of the moment in the Miami airport when her new friends were sipping coffee roasted from the bark of coffee plants that smelled of tar and she stood in front of them, one hand on her hip, smiling.

“What?” they ask again, just a bit louder.

She tells them. Laura tells them about her neighbor, Balinda Chalwaski, who has been taking care of her terribly ill mother, Jencitia, for the past eight years. She tells them that Balinda is forty-six years old, never married and has put her entire life on hold to nurse her mother. She tells them that last night Balinda finally took her mother to a long-term care facility and is now in the process of having a mild nervous breakdown.

“I’m like part of her family, I’ve helped her do simple things and not-so-simple things like go to the grocery store and pick up a newspaper because her mother can’t be alone for five minutes or even a minute at a time,” Laura tells them, watching as their cups stop moving and their minds focus on what she is telling them, what she is about to ask. “They are from Poland. Her mother speaks very little English.”

Chicago, Laura explains, has the largest population of Polish people in the United States and the Chalwaskis came to follow a cousin, to start a new life just like Laura’s grandparents before them started a new life from that same country.

“What does she need?” Jill asks first, speaking for all of the women. “This Balinda.”

“A break, just a small break, because it may be the last time she can leave until her mother dies,” Laura tells them, repeating what Balinda has just told her. “There is a Polish-speaking nurse at the home where she took her mother. The nurse is leaving in one week. After that, unless she finds an interpreter, Balinda will be back to her schedule and unable to leave especially if her mother comes home. It could be months and months or even years and years, depending on the health of her mother.”

All of the women understand schedules. They understand sacrifice. They know what it feels like to never sleep, to always get up first, to wonder in the middle of a day that seems as if it stretches to forever what was the initial question and they know that they all have many more miles to go, more hands to hold, more, so much more yet to give.

And to receive.

Katherine steps forward and simply says, “Yes.”

Rebecca and Jill nod and Jill says that Marie would understand better than any of them that Balinda needs them now in a way she can’t need them when she is the constant caregiver for her mother.

And even if they find Laura’s premonitions a bit strange, even if they are hoping that Laura cannot see so far inside of them that she spots something even more horrible than the death of Annie G. Freeman, they do not stop her.

Laura quickly calls Balinda back and gives her the name of their hotel in the Keys, tells her she can arrange a shuttle from the far terminal at the airport and lets her know that there will be a cold glass of dark beer waiting for her the minute she walks into their arms.

“Come join the traveling funeral,” she invites Balinda. “We’ll be waiting for you.”

The conversation surrounding the word “sacrifice” never quite ends. The women talk nonstop as they load up the van and wish out loud that it was a red convertible. Their words cross over each other as they throw their suitcases into the car, drive out of the terminal, then back, and then Jill hops out because they forgot the map and directions and they talk as they stop to buy a Styrofoam cooler, beer, several bottles of wine, snacks and Tampax for Rebecca who got her period fifteen minutes after the last cup of coffee.

“Praying for menopause,” she shouts through the back of the open van door as she flings her bag of supplies on top of their luggage, adds, “Damn it,” and climbs back in for the ride to the Keys.

Rebecca, they decide unanimously, still talking as Laura wheels them past the edge of Miami, is the queen of sacrifice. The deaths of her parents, her aunt and now Annie have devastated Rebecca financially, emotionally and physically. Rebecca accepts the title but swings the conversation to other kinds of loss. She tells them she’s had ample time to think about loss in all shapes, sizes and forms as she’s waltzed through hospital stays, caregiving and so many other funerals.

“Relationships. Animals. Jobs. Retirement,” she tells them. “Loss and then the grieving that comes after it arrives in many ways and forms. Think of it.”

Jill, the spouseless spinster, tells them about the dog who broke her heart. Eland, an Irish setter, was her hiking companion. They walked through the California hills together for nine years until Jill detected a slight limp in her companion’s front paw.

“Cancer that had driven a stake into her bones,” she recalled, turning her head to look out of the window as the city flashed by. “They tell you so many things to keep you thinking it will go away, that you can have another month or so, but it isn’t true and I didn’t think it was fair either.”

Sometimes, Jill tells them, her dog comes to her in her dreams barking wildly at a bird in a tree or dancing outside of her door because she knows they are about to go for a walk.

“I put her down fast,” Jill says as Rebecca reaches over to take her hand. “The second she could not do the one thing she loved to do more than anything—run—I knew that her heart was broken.”

Everyone has an animal story that brings them to tears.

Katherine’s mother’s yellow canary that sang every single time her mother put her fingers on the cage, and when the tiny bird died and they buried her at the edge of the tomato plants it was the first time Katherine saw her father cry.

Rebecca’s family dog who slept by the kitchen door and followed her to school so many times the principal finally let the dog come into the classroom, and when Sparky (“Really, we named him Sparky,” Rebecca said softly, as if she were sharing a secret) was hit by a car chasing a deer, Rebecca’s mother threw herself onto the living room couch and wept for so long that Rebecca ended up calling her aunt who drove fifty miles, wrapped Sparky in an old blanket, put him in her trunk and took Rebecca with her to bury him in her own backyard, because her mother had no yard, so that her mother would always be able to visit.

Laura’s cat, Pinky, who was actually black, and who she left behind when she went to college. When she called home, her mother would make Laura talk to the cat on the phone and the cat would wail for hours after hearing her voice. When the cat died, her mother cremated her and put the ashes into a ceramic bowl that still sits on top of Laura’s piano.

“Well,” Jill philosophizes, “I know what Annie thought about euthanasia and a person’s right to choose what to do with his or her own body and life, and I agree with Annie that throughout the course of a lifetime there is enough suffering. Enough is enough. Why do we make each other suffer? Why isn’t marijuana legal? Why do we plug people into machines who have no hope of ever doing a crossword puzzle again or reading a fabulous book?”