Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights (39 page)

“I’m sorry, Hannah. This has been a terrible year.”

“You’d think I’d be really upset,” I said. “But it is easier than the other way. I know it will hit me before too long. But she was so sure, so ready. I thought sitting with someone who was dying would be like darkness, but it wasn’t dark at all. It felt light really. She was reading in the sun.”

“How’s Ed?”

“He seems fine. But we’re just at the start. You know how that goes.”

“Yes.”

“How’s Mom?”

“She’s getting along. She’s still with Arthur; she looks better.”

“Eric?”

“He’s in Phoenix running one of those races with rock and roll bands. He got the watch fixed. He wears it now. It looks right on him. He even laughed at your casserole remark.”

“Good. I better go. I’ll see you all in a few weeks. Will you call Karin and let her know. Her number’s on the contact sheet I gave you.”

“I will,” she said. “Take care.”

I locked myself in my room and lay down on the bed. I don’t know how long I was there, a few hours maybe. Scenes of the years Margaret and I had worked together ran through my mind. Her smiling at me across a set as some crazy thing we had rigged up worked perfectly.

Burying her head in her hands as an artful drape fell down over an actress who just kept speaking her lines through the fabric. The fabric puffed out with each word and the actor cat started tugging at the corner. The director was laughing too hard to say ‘cut’. The day the red and yellow Chinese candles I used in a romantic dinner scene turned into fireworks and set the table setting on fire. She’d nonchalantly poured her coffee on it. Apparently they’d been made in the same factory as firecrackers.

Walking down a deserted street in New York City, late at night, headed toward a tapas place we had heard was great, living dangerously for quality snacks. Dinners, breakfasts; tiredness and triumph. A smiling Ed coming out of a kitchen somewhere with one of his endless plates of food. As he would say, we’d had a good run.

Amy knocked on the door. They had decided on a white sari, but Amy had added a turquoise over scarf. Claire was standing by to help me dress.

“Claire talked to her boss about appropriate colors under the circumstances,” she said. “She checked with the Director. White shows respect.”

“White is fine.”

“It’s almost time to get dressed. The women have washed Margaret and are wrapping her now.”

“Where’s Ed?”

“He’s on the roof drinking chai. The men will carry her to the car and then down to the ghat.”

“Who’s going to do that?”

“Ed, Dilip, Chahel and one of the other guys from downstairs,” she said.

“I need to take a bath. Why don’t you come back in half an hour?”

“Okay. The Director is here. She wants to see you before you leave.”

“Okay. And, Amy. Thank you. You’re a wonderful young woman.”

She was smiling and crying as she closed the door. I lit a stick of incense I’d brought from Udaipur. Then I filled my ten-gallon bucket with hot water and squatted on the floor of the small bathing space while I washed myself all over twice using the measuring cup. I washed my hair and dried it as much as possible; it was long enough now, so I pulled it into a bun.

Amy and Claire helped me dress. Margaret would love the look—white silk with a sweep of turquoise over my head and shoulders. I wore my pearls. I smiled at the memory of my brother walking up to all of us at our cousin’s wedding; he said that when the Spring women show up in their pearls, they mean business. He’d bought Anna a string as an engagement gift and she’d worn them on their wedding day. Amy went to get the Director.

I was sitting on my bed when she came in with her huge eyes. She took me in and nodded. She sat in the chair by the desk.

“I am sorry about Margaret,” she said.

“Yes. This is a shock in so many ways.”

“Do you know what is going to happen now?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“She is ready. The women have washed and wrapped her. They were Hindu women, which is better. The men will carry her to the ghat. First they will dip her in the river, then they will place her on the pyre. Ed has bought beautiful wood.”

“She deserves beautiful wood. He loves her.”

“And he is rich,” she had the slightest smile. “You should just follow the men to the pyre. You do not need to worry about circling her, carrying fire, any of the other formalities. Everyone knows you’re not Hindu. The men will leave you and go sit on the steps to watch. When you are ready, light the straw under the wood. Light it at her feet.”

“I’m not going to light the fire.”

“She wrote something for you to read first.”

“I know, Ed told me. I can do that. But I can’t light the fire.”

“It’s for you to read to yourself, before you light the fire.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You’re just going to light a fire. It will be very easy.”

“No, it won’t be easy. I’ll be burning up my own mother.”

“Do you think those sons think they are burning their mother?”

“They’re Hindu. It’s different for them; they’re setting their mother free. I’m not Hindu.”

“Margaret said you would be like this.”

“You talked to Margaret about this?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Does Dede know?”

“There was nothing for Dede to know. Margaret didn’t want you to worry.”

“Well I’m beyond worried now. I can’t believe she wanted me to do this.”

“This is a beautiful day for Margaret. She is continuing her journey.”

“A new adventure,” I said.

We sat looking at each other. She was just like she’d been for almost nine months, still. She was waiting for me to do my work.

“By you,” she said. “You will send her with love and joy.”

“What about the pole part?”

“It isn’t always necessary, many times it opens in the fire. But she needs to be freed.”

“How will I know?”

“It will take three or four hours for the body to burn. Just sit and wait. The attendants will indicate what’s necessary to Chahel. It’s arranged.”

“And if I need to do that?”

“You’ve seen it, they’ll hand you a pole,” she said. “The fire will make the skull as dry and fragile as thin pottery. One firm strike is all you’ll need. You can go back and sit with Ed while the attendants give her to the river.”

She got up and pulled me to my feet. She daubed a smear of red between my eyebrows, then started to leave but turned back. “No tears.” She left.

The silk sari swirled like spirits around me as I walked up to the roof. This had not been how I envisioned wearing a sari for the first time. I could feel the red paste drying and shrinking between my brows.

The men were waiting. I’d seen the fourth man many times over the last months; I should have gotten to know him. The Director was gone. Amy and Claire were quiet. I went down to the dirt courtyard alone to wait. The men carried Margaret down on a woven wood mat. She was wrapped in orange cotton fabric, like a mummy. She looked like my grandmother’s bird. The women had used strings of marigolds on red thread, wound round and round in a crisscross pattern to bind the fabric to her. I was relieved that I couldn’t see her face. We drove in two cars. Margaret was in the back of one with Ed in the front seat. The rest of us went in the other. I sat in front. Margaret and Ed might still be talking, but no one said anything in our car.

We arrived at the top of the stairs. Curious faces turned our way, not all of them pleased. The men carried Margaret down and we wound our way past three or four pyres in different stages of burning. We walked around bodies on litters propped up on the stairs. I imagined the souls, trapped like birds behind glass windows, restless for their freedom. We reached a fresh pile of wood.

Shiva’s world is a muffled rift in the space we inhabit. It’s where the illusion of form is set afire and liberated. My mind drifted in the rift; I thought of Amy needing to be all one. I thought of the sugar cube. I thought of the baby I had lost. I thought about Jon, how we sometimes traveled in the rift when we made love. It’s all an endless and edgeless meeting of the soul, I thought, standing by the pyre while they dipped Margaret in the river and placed her on the wood. The orange fabric went dark.

Ed looked like his back might hurt, but he looked peaceful and purposeful. He handed me the folded note from Margaret. The men climbed the stairs about halfway up, like a high school football stadium, and sat. It felt like I should say something of my own to her, but my mind was skittering over words. I couldn’t put together any Emily. The only string that came to mind was
wild nights hope has feather
pleasure first
; even I knew that wasn’t right.

I pulled out the slip of paper with Margaret’s last words to me. It said: “Meow.” I looked up at Ed; he had a huge smile. I could hear Margaret saying, “Show up and act interested.” The Director was there; even she had a small smile. She nodded once; I should begin.

The attendant handed me a burning stick and I set it to the straw without hesitation. The heat blew out from the fire beating the sari like wings around my legs. I dropped the slip of paper into the flames. I didn’t need mementos.

My eyes were hot and watering from the smoke. I looked up to find Ed again; it was like looking up through salt water from the bottom of the sea. He was focused on the fire, lost in thought. The Director looked like a hologram wavering in the heat; she was watching me the way Arthur had watched my mother. I thought I saw Jon, but when I blinked away the smoky water the vision was gone. I wanted him with me, but I’d had to light the fire.

I waited until I was sure there was a good fire going, then I climbed the stairs and sat by myself on the end. I glanced down the row to Ed, Chahel, Dilip, and the man who I hadn’t gotten to know. Chahel and Dilip had beatific smiles. The Director was a little past them, sitting alone, watching. We were all watching our own movie.

My body cooled and felt lighter, just as it had when I left the bonfire in Hawaii. I wondered if Margaret felt the same way, the same lightness as she was released from the weight and heat of living, from the weight of the regrets that follow our seemingly inexplicable choices. Regrets that haunt; at the same time they push us down uncharted paths. The day-to-day of washing dishes and making the marriage bed was behind her now.

We watched as the howling fire burned away the yellow flowers and orange cloth, as it burned away her skin and fat and feathery hair, as she collapsed in on herself. Her limbs danced and swayed like a Manzanita in the flames. The smell of roasting flesh lay heavy under billowing incense.

I thought about Binky and Amber. I had thought of them from time to time over the last nine months. It was easier to be far away, working. It had been so many years since Bettina had been Bettina; somehow it made the loss softer. I hadn’t known Amber; I don’t think she’d tasted her butterscotch yet. I thought of them buried in all their trappings. It was suffocating to think of them that way, their bloody bodies buried on white satin. Buried in metal vaults under concrete. I wondered if they could at least talk to each other. We should have buried them in the same hole; we should have buried them in the same box. Better still, simply under shovels of earth, so they could melt back into the earth together, the way they had started out. None of us in the family knew that.

I wondered how this would all sound to the family. My brother might say I was crazy, or not. I thought he’d understand. My mother. I couldn’t guess about her. Like the rest of us, she was a work in progress. But she had coal mine courage; she kept climbing back on the wagon. Aunt Judith just felt small and wounded. I felt sorry for her to miss so much. I didn’t know the why of her pain. I didn’t know why there were such different outcomes in the same family.

I could see my father going out this way. It would have appealed to him. I could imagine him laughing and saying “Oh Jesus” when the flames really got going.

The fire burned down to the red place where the last work is done. It all tumbled together in hot ash and chunks of bone. We watched as the few hours that it takes to do all that, so much and so little, went by. The breeze shifted. It washed us in the smoke of other meaty fires. The sun set in peace. Our eyes adjusted slowly to the fading light. Sitting, watching, the veil is thin, like sliding beach fog only partially concealing the clarity beyond.

Chahel indicated that I needed to go back. I looked down the row at the Director but she didn’t look back. Her work was done.

The attendant handed me a pole. I raised it only a few feet, but I had a firm grip and brought it down with resolve. Her skull split open along the jagged last seams that had stitched together after her passage through the birth canal. There was a puff. I felt her let-loose spirit swirling above us becoming ocean sky.

I handed the pole back to the attendant. He looked at me curiously from his hooded dark eyes. Soot darkened every fold in the fabric of his white turban. The fabric folds rippled seamlessly into the dark folds of tidal wash skin running down his forehead to his ashy eyebrows. I smiled at him, his eyes danced in answer. My white sari had taken on the color of ash; my feet were covered with a fine dust. My sandals were the same color as my ashy skin. The fire gave off little heat now.

I climbed back up and sat next to Ed. He took my hand with a squeeze of fulfillment. We waited a while longer for the ashes to cool. I felt such tenderness for Ed. I knew her drugstore reading glasses with the wild frames she loved so much were scattered all over the house. He’d be gathering those up in time.

He’d be setting one place at the cabin table. They’d bought it at a barn sale in upstate New York and never did get the rickety out. They’d been living gingerly around that table for years, holding it down to avoid sloshing coffee or spilling wine as one or the other left or came back. There’d be some spills until he remembered he needed to hold it for himself.

I thought of Jon, standing around with a bowl of soup, a chunk of bread and an empty dress. He’d stayed constant with that slim connection. He’d left the earth under me so I could live my life forward. It was the greatest gift. I wasn’t dead; I could dance in the dress, get my ass pinched, make the bed, and be there when he worried about Chana away from home. He needed me too. I wasn’t my mother or Margaret; he wouldn’t be the only one to come when called.