Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (21 page)

No one says anything for a while. It is the longest stretch of silence since dinner started. It is because they are imagining exactly what they would do.

“Well, Annie had that one luxury, didn’t she?” Laura asks, motioning the waitress for more wine. “She knew she was going to die and this is what she chose to do. Really, it was a way to spend more time with us even after she was dead.”

“That stinker,” Rebecca smirks. “She was using us even past the bitter end.”

Everyone finally agrees that their first response would be to collect the people they love the most, to touch them, be with them, rejoice in the last few hours of their time with them, time to say whatever it is that was sticking to the inside of their heart before it really was too late.

“That’s what people should always do,” Rebecca tells them. “We all know it and we try and do it, but it’s one of those things that slips away. And then someone dies and there is a funeral and we all get together and say things we should have been fucking saying the entire time. It’s always like that. What’s with us?”

It comes back to love, they decide. Love and the fear of loss and the even greater fear of opening yourself up in ways that would also leave you open for a bit of rejection and loss if it didn’t quite work out the way you had been dreaming.

“What about love?” Jill chides them. “I’ve told you about my great love, the one I let slip away because I wasn’t woman enough for her. But what about your first great loves? Tell.”

They all look startled for a moment and then they each fold back into the musty files of their minds where such things are kept buried toward the back of the file cabinet. They look startled enough for Jill to pick up the dessert menu and then she holds up her hands as everyone protests and she quickly reminds them that they are in the midst of a traveling funeral where celebration is the main ingredient. “Besides, the sugar will loosen you up so I can hear your stories,” she admits.

And it does.

They switch to dark, rich wine that is alive with a speck of cherry sweetness and as the cakes and tortes are delivered they start their stories which are as sweet and rich in the retelling as they were the last time they were brave enough to haul them out and shine a bright light on this part of their past.

“What you think love is, and how it should be, changes, but I’m still as much a sucker for romance as I was the very first time I thought—let me emphasize the word ‘thought’—I was in love,” Laura says. “Now I look back on it and smile at my innocence, but that was all part of my own journey. And part, too, of what made all my other loves so much richer.”

A college romance, she shares, sipping her wine and then sitting back in her chair as if to open herself up to make the memory larger, more vivid. Her entire senior year in college was occupied with the strains and intermittent joys of luscious sex, romantic interludes in between classes, and the ridiculous notion that the affair was going to last for the next fifty-five years.

“It’s amazing how we do that, get so caught up in all that planning and thinking about forever,” she confesses. “Sometimes I think I was so busy planning my next fifty years that I lost sight of the moment.”

First love is often blinding, they decide as the tables around them fill, as the night begins slipping south and as their stories blend into a chorus that wears the clothes of youth. Think, they all agree, what it would have been like if they knew then what they know now.

“My God,” Rebecca moans. “We’d never get out of bed.”

Ah, they all sigh, the sex. The delicious fabulous juicy moments of abandonment of time and place and self for the pure and sensuous joy of bodies falling into souls and hearts and the delirious tumble of love that wraps itself inside of something that is often nothing more than a purely physical moment.

“How did we get away from that?” Katherine demands. “The joy of sex. Knowing deep inside that it’s beyond okay to crave the release, the pure pleasure of abandonment?”

And then she tells her story. A story that winds itself from her first grope in the back of the high school gym, to a friend’s basement, to a college apartment, to a marriage that disrupted her libido for way too many years, and into this place now where she admits that she is afraid of letting go, “just fucking letting go.”

There is silence for but a second and then Laura, who has skated through life with a teenage daughter who has all but disappeared as a young adult, and Rebecca, who has experience paddling the same raising-a-teenager boat, agree that sex, in the throes of teenagerhood, is not an easy task. But, they ask, but—could it be that the relationship she is in is not the best? Could it be?

“My God,” Katherine almost shouts. “I think you may be onto something here. Alex, the man in my life now, was the first man in such a long time that I never dared to think that it wasn’t just that moment, just me getting to that next step. But, well, the sex is good—”

Balinda cuts her off, pushing her chair back and leaning across half the table.

“Good is not good enough. Girl, what are you thinking? I’m one to talk considering the state of my life but I . . . oh my God . . .”

Balinda slaps her hand over her heart and drops her head onto the table. “Shit, just thinking about this guy gets me more than a little wet. He was a friend from work and we had this chemistry and we flirted like hell and one night, I swear to God, we ended up in the elevator together alone and we both agreed right there to go to a hotel and we made love, I mean
love
and not just sex for like twelve hours, and then we did it again for weeks and months.”

The women are spellbound. They are all leaning in so far that their chairs are about to tip over and flip them onto the table. No one can breathe. They are on the brink of panting when the waitress interrupts them with a sentence, just a sentence, that changes the direction of everything.

“I’m so sorry, but there’s a man at the bar who just bought you all a drink . . . and . . .” The waitress pauses because the table smells like sex even though they are just talking about it, and she looks around to see if she has missed anything.

“Who?” they all ask at once, looking inside the restaurant and toward the bar.

“He comes in often and he thinks he knows who some of you are,” the waitress says, swooning just a bit from the fumes off the table.

“What?” they all say again as if they have practiced for this moment.

Jill takes over and says she’ll go speak to him. They ask the waitress to come back in a few minutes and then they all turn to look at Balinda.

“So?” the chorus demands.

“It was too crazy,” she admits, picking up her story. “I was like obsessed and thought about him and sex all of the time and he was the same way. It was like this wonderful addiction that didn’t leave room for anything else. But we couldn’t stop. I would see him getting out of his car and go pull him into his back seat. But that’s all we did. The connection was very physical and I loved him that way but it would have been destructive to go on. So we did something terribly mature. We made a pact that we’d never settle for anything less and that we’d reconnect in five years if we hadn’t met someone to fill that place we had with each other and he left. And I never saw him again.”

The women forget for a minute that there is a man at the bar who claims he knows them. They forget about Annie and about their own sexual needs and desires and they stare at Balinda as if she has just told them that their faces are on fire.

“Shit,” Rebecca says for all of them. “Shit.”

Balinda tells them that the five years have come and gone and the man never contacted her and she could not contact him because of her mother.

The conversation moves like a rocket from there. The women admonish her. Call him, they shout. What the hell? Did you make a plan for who would call or who would not call? Did you say we should contact each other anyway in case we are both afraid? Do you think you could love him beyond the bedroom and into every other room of your house and life? Really, what in the hell does your mother have to do with love?

Jill, who had been half standing to meet the man at the bar, sits back down. The women fall into a conversation that they decide later Annie would have loved. She would have loved their yelling kind of discussion and the way they forgot about everything else except that moment, the conversation and each other. She would have loved the way they pushed aside their plates and talked with their hands. She would have loved the way the traveling funeral was moving them to talk and act and live in a way that redefined the way they lived and loved before the door opened, the Bali bra fell apart and the traveling funeral was born. She would have loved how each day of her funeral made them bolder with each other and more open about what they liked and didn’t like about life and the person sitting next to them.

Thirty minutes later, after Balinda decides she must locate this wild lover, after Jill recounts again the great love of her life, after they spontaneously call Marie and she talks about Bill, some wild man from the years after her college graduation, and after they think they will not be able to move or walk to another bar no matter what Annie has ordered, Jill remembers the man at the bar.

“Oh no,” she says, jumping from her seat and searching the bar for a man, any man. “I forgot about the guy at the bar.”

He’s left.

The bartender smiles and she points toward the traveling funeral. “He saw that you were having a great time and he said, ‘Tell them it wasn’t necessary that we actually speak.’ ”

Jill thinks there is more. Bartenders, she is certain, like beauticians, know everything. They are the world’s attendants. They rub your scalp, see you with your hair pulled back behind your ears or your heart hanging in your whiskey glass, and so you will tell them anything.

“Do you know him?”

The bartender smiles. She is terribly beautiful and when she leans in across the bar to talk to Jill, Jill can feel her heart press against her ribs and a sensation of yearning move from her fingers, along the inner part of her skin, deep into her heart.

“He comes in here a couple of times a year, when he visits from Europe—Italy, I think,” she tells her, making certain to touch Jill’s hand as she speaks. “He’s an artist. He’s also in a wheelchair. He’s been disabled his entire life, fell when he was a kid, if I remember correctly. He said he was married once to a woman named Annie. He knows she was meant to be alone. He knew it had nothing to do with his bad legs because he told me the sex was fabulous but that marriage was not on his or her Most Wanted list.”

Jill freezes in place. She is mesmerized by her attraction to the bartender, to some kind of awakening that has been sleeping for so long she can barely recognize it, and because a brilliant clue to the puzzle of Annie has just landed in her lap.

“What else?” she asks. “What else?”

“He’s a gentle soul. Told me he and his Annie spent their honeymoon at a posh hotel here in New York and that Annie sent him a note just before she died and asked him to come here if he was in town this month. Funny thing, though, is that she sent him the note after she died. It was like a very interesting kind of last wish. I’m sure she sent him something else and that there was more to the note but that’s all he told me.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“You’d never believe it. Really.”

“I’m a bartender. If a bird flew out of your right ear I’d think it was perfectly normal.”

“It’s almost ridiculous to say it out loud because it sounds like it’s something from a movie, now that I think about it. You’ll want to throw me inside of one of your coolers if I tell you why we are here and what we are doing and who Annie is and what brought us to this bar.”

“Tell me. I might throw you in the cooler anyway because you’re so damn cute.”

Jill tells her and doesn’t even realize that the bartender is flirting. She tells her the entire story and gets the phone number of not only the bartender but of the beautiful man from Italy who paints as if he can see the inside of the universe and who loved a woman named Annie and who bought her friends a drink, tipped his hat, and then left for the airport.

23

Rebecca cannot believe that she is on her way to a city that she knows absolutely nothing about except that it is mostly always cold there—even on July 4—that it sits on the edge of one of the Great Lakes and the people who live there on purpose, even though they could live someplace warm, like to do things like eat outside in the middle of winter, skate down the frozen highways and wear clothing that is made of wool even in the middle of summer.

“Duluth?” she whines, in the tiny airplane with only seats enough for the traveling funeral members, two short men, and a lone flight attendant who warns them that they don’t even have beverage service. “Where the hell is Duluth?”

The two male passengers laugh. They look as if they eat a lot of protein, walk great distances for warm beverages, and would be more at home behind a dogsled than in the seat of an airplane dressed in a wrinkled business suit.

“Hey,” one of them jokes, “you are talking about God’s Country up here. Knock it off, lady, or you’ll make it snow in June. Happens all the time. Not that we’d mind a little snow this time of year. It’s been weeks since we’ve seen any.”

Rebecca likes this northwoods giant and she gives it right back to him.

“What good is a lake that’s frozen ten months out of the year?” she snorts. “I bet you are the kind of guy who likes to go
ice
fishing, for crying out loud.”

“Love it,” he answers. “We like to go north for our summer vacations so we can keep up with our snowball fights and stuff like that. I hate it when we get too warm.”

This is how it goes as the airplane follows the frozen tundra across the top of Minnesota and the conversation sways like the moving tops of the forest the women can see below them. The plane ride from New York City to Minneapolis was a quiet zoom that included an in-flight call from Marie who is just a few hours ahead of them and already standing at attention in the Duluth airport, a discussion of the New York portion of the trip, a decision to try and get at least one extra hour of sleep because the traveling funeral is beginning to take its toll on the pallbearers, who agree they have never, ever in their entire lives had this much fun at a funeral or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.

And then, just as the plane bumps through some low clouds and it looks as if they are in the middle of a stretch of the world so remote, so green, so filled with trees and the dotted blue smiles of the ten thousand lakes they have seen advertised, the pilot, who sounds as if he is twelve years old, announces that they are ten minutes from landing and “although no one was allowed to leave their seats during the first portion of the flight—don’t do it now either.”

Charming, they agree, every single thing about this portion of the trip is terribly charming, including the two passengers who want to take them fishing and have no idea that the shoebox is full of the dwindling ashes of Annie G. Freeman. The two guys also do not bother to ask why everyone has on matching shoes; they haven’t even picked up on the bandanas and why in the world as they know it these women are traveling to Duluth in a pack. They just can’t wait to get back home. They are very happy boys.

The landing is smooth and swift and astounding because the Duluth airport is not the largest banana in the world, and the pilot scoots the plane, like he’s probably done a hundred times, into a slot the size of a toothpick without the slightest hesitation. And this is where Katherine tells them, as they are waiting for the itsy-bitsy plane door to open, that there is no tape for this portion of the funeral. No car rental. Just a note saying,
Someone will meet you & you will be off to the White Cap Lodge.

“That’s it?” Jill asks. “The White Cap Lodge?”

“It’s up on the North Shore,” one of the traveling fishermen tells them, overhearing the conversation because they are all sitting so close to each other it’s impossible not to hear every spoken word. “Old place, cute. Nice people.”

“I take it that’s the North Shore of Lake Superior?” Laura asks. “I’ve seen photos of it. It looks beautiful.”

“It is. Rugged and beautiful. It’s where lots of us go to camp and fish and to get away. Some hearty souls live there year-round. You can still hike back into the woods for miles and run into some salty old or young bird who’s given it all up and headed into the forest for good.”

Katherine recalls that Annie’s family, maybe her grandmother, had a cabin in Minnesota. She has a blurry memory of a scattering of stories about a summer trip, a Thanksgiving spent at the cabin or a spring break north when everyone else was going south. Then the door finally opens and they all get off the plane, and know within seconds that they are definitely north of any place they would care to stay for a long period of time.

“Holy crap, it’s cold,” Balinda shouts into the wind as they disembark. “It must be twenty degrees colder here than it was in New York.”

“Something could be blowing in,” explains guy number one. “Usually right before something hits, a day or so, we get a stiff breeze. Don’t worry, if you get stranded here we’ll have an excuse to get you all out on one of the lakes or we’ll put a fly rod in your hands.”

The women laugh all the way to the terminal, which reminds them of a small bus depot, and where there is but one lone person in the waiting area outside the front door. He looks just slightly older than a teenager and he’s polite and kind as he hoists their bags into a van and apologizes because Lou wasn’t able to pick them up.

“Lou?” they all say at once. “Who is Lou?”

Paul, their able and adorable driver, smiles and says, “Lou, she runs the lodge. She’s my boss. She’s training me to do everything, she says, so she can take a day off once before she dies. But she won’t really take a day off. Lou won’t ever take a day off unless it’s for something like a funeral, but we make believe anyway and I’ll be there if she needs me.”

“Where’s Marie?” they all ask as if they have been rehearsing.

“Is she always like that?” Paul asks.

“Like what?”

“She was here three hours ago and real tired. She called. I came to get her. She seems, well, not confused but maybe she was just tired.”

“Marie has a very stressful job,” Rebecca tells him.

“Oh, well, Lou will take care of her until we get there. Like I said, she never takes a day off.”

The women decide to be polite but they are all thinking about this “funeral” that Lou, whoever she is, would take a day off of work for. Paul drives them out of the parking lot and through Duluth, which they find absolutely lovely. They cross over a bridge that they quickly name “the Golden Gate of the Northwoods” and roll down the windows in spite of what they think is chilly air and stare as two huge ore boats creep slowly from the mouth of a river and under a raised drawbridge on the other side of the bay that has traffic at a standstill. Rolling hills slope toward Lake Superior and they can see that Duluthians have been working hard to try and renovate the old mining city with its stunningly beautiful buildings. The streets were built wide enough years ago for a team of horses to turn around and now for snowplows to do figure eights without having to back up.

Charming, they agree. A bit on the nippy side, but charming.

Paul listens to them and looks into his mirror while they are talking as if they are speaking in a foreign language. He occasionally answers a question and then whips his eyes back to the front of the van where he concentrates on maneuvering past the city limits and out along the shore of the lake. “The Lake,” he calls it as if Lake Superior were the only real lake in the entire world and indeed it looks large enough to be a small ocean. He speaks of it as if he were talking about a disciple, a living saint, an admired sports star or the woman who just pulled him out of a burning building.

“I suppose when Annie came here, she probably drove past every single thing that we are seeing right now,” Rebecca assesses. “If she did it when she was a teenager there’s a good chance she thought she was driving to the edge of the earth or hell or someplace just this side of either one of those places.”

“Maybe she came in from the other side or something,” Balinda asks innocently.

“There is no other side,” Paul says quickly and then puts his hand over his mouth because he’s been listening, which it is impossible not to do, but he is a young man filled with manners learned from his northwoods ancestors.

“I never looked at a map,” Jill says, “but I’m guessing that’s Canada up there, and to the left would be a set of timbers way taller than half the largest cities in the world.”

“Yes,” Paul answers.

Katherine tears at her memory wishing she could uncover something that Annie once said about her Minnesota roots but her brain is a dark and dusty spot behind her eyes, she tells them, so they’ll have to wait and see what is around the next bend.

The bend is a long one that gives them more than an hour to discuss how the parents of teenagers often forget that kids that age, who are really closer to adulthood than to childhood, develop their own social systems and “families” and have no desire to go up to the cabin or over the river and through the woods once they hit a certain age.

“Remember?” Laura asks. “Remember how stinking awful it was to have to be dragged to some stupid-ass family event when you wanted to stay home and just be with your friends?”

“Was that it?” Jill asks. “Do you think it was some kind of family issue or major mom or dad related event that happened up here?”

Katherine stops them. She has a “feeling” something is about to play out, she tells them, laughing and blaming Laura, the traveling funeral psychic, for having caught her gift of perhaps knowing things before they happen.

“It would make sense for this to be a family place because it’s close to Chicago,” Katherine says as they round a corner that is so close to the water it looks for a moment as if they are going to be swept out to sea, or in this case, a very large lake. “It feels like family up here, close, warm, friendly and those are the vibes I’m picking up.”

Young Paul looks as if he’s suddenly seen the ghost of Annie. His eyebrows have gone up into his hairline and he’s slowed the van to a crawl. Katherine suspects he knows more than he’s saying but she goes on anyway.

“So my guess is that something is about to happen, or we’ll make it happen and it will all fall into place.”

“Maybe . . .” Rebecca starts and then trails off as if she’s gotten lost inside of her own head. “Maybe not knowing every detail about this trip and life is part of the lesson of this funeral. Maybe Annie wanted us to know that sometimes it’s okay to plunge feet-first and fast as hell into something without thinking the whole thing through. Really,” she goes on as if she’s trying to convince herself. “Think of all the fabulous things that have happened in the world because someone has just
done
it—you know, just jumped off the cliff and worried about the dangers when it’s all over.”

Rebecca sighs and leans her head into her arm as if she is suddenly exhausted.

“Well, that makes sense, if what I have learned of her is true,” Balinda says. “I think sometimes I think too damn much. I worry about this and that and everything else and then I wake up and four more years have slipped right out the back door.”

Katherine starts laughing and then puts her hand on Balinda’s arm so she knows she is not laughing at her.

“See,” she says. “This is exactly what I was talking about. Listen to us. Entire worlds are opening up and we are flinging around some very cool thoughts. It’s spontaneous, which is pretty much how this whole thing happened, for us anyway. Annie’s the one who had time to plan the whole thing out and here we are riding along in this terribly interesting stream.”

They are still laughing twenty minutes later when Paul turns into a gravel road that is arched in branches from birch trees that must have been planted the year Paul Bunyan waltzed through this northern part of the world. A wooden sign painted with the words
White Cap
greets them and then Paul turns and advises them to “hang on.” The road twists first left and then right and he tells them that the original owners put the road in this way to save as many trees as possible. “Hasn’t changed a bit in all the years I’ve been alive or all the years before I was alive, from what they tell me,” he adds as they round another corner and come to a wide space where a house sits.

“Come on in,” Paul says and when he sees them reaching for their luggage he adds, “Leave the bags, please. I’ll be taking you to where you are staying in about an hour. There are some drinks inside and Lou is waiting to take care of you. Marie should be in there too.”

“We aren’t staying here?” Katherine asks, surprised.

“No, ma’am, but it’s not far to your place.”

“See?” Katherine says as they file into the house that has clearly been converted into a small lodge. “I told you something funky would happen right away.”

They enter a small lobby that reeks of a gentle, warm, “up-northness.” There are wool jackets hanging on wooden pegs, throw rugs placed up and down the hallway, and old photos hanging haphazardly on the wall as if someone had been dancing up and down when they placed them there. Before they can get close enough to examine the photos they hear a voice.