She loved her DVD player, Grandma Suzette.
Too much, probably. She didn’t get out a whole lot, and physically she was something of a mess.
Mom, Dad and I used to drive over there fairly often and take her out to this Italian restaurant where they had unlimited garlic bread. She would take any that was leftover home in a doggy bag.
Anyway, she died of this infection thing. I guess old people do that. Their systems are weak, so they get an infection when a young person wouldn’t, and the infection won’t heal, and their blood goes toxic or something and then they’re just dead.
We visited her in the hospital a few times before it happened, and my throat felt completely closed with tears that weren’t coming out because she looked so bony and gray, like her skin was made of crumpled tissue paper. I told her I loved her and brought her a metal box of peppermints and then it was really hard to know what to say—because she was so sick it just seemed wrong to tell her about my day, and we couldn’t make plans for the future because although we didn’t know she was going to die, it seemed pretty likely at that point, and generally it was just agony.
The last thing she said to me was “I’m going to take a nap now. Don’t drink my orange juice.”
I didn’t drink her juice, but we had to go home before she woke up and thirty-six hours later she was dead.
“Don’t drink my orange juice.”
That was it.
It wasn’t a real goodbye.
It was so unfinished.
I hate it when things are unfinished. When you’re not sure what people meant. Why did she think I would drink her orange juice? I had never tried to drink her orange juice.
Or had I? Drunk some once, back when I was a little kid, and she was remembering that time?
There was going to be a funeral. My sick alcoholic uncle Hanson came up from Portland. He always makes my dad really tense, he’s such a messed-up guy, and he stayed in a hotel but we had to have him over for dinner. He brought his own bottle of whisky and drank the whole thing right in the middle the meal like it was normal. But his mother had just died and it wasn’t exactly the time for an intervention, plus Dad has already talked to him about his drinking like a million times and Hanson never listened. All in all it was a pretty shattering weekend.
The funeral was at this place in Bothell near Grandma Suzette’s condo, and it was surprising how much Bible stuff was in the speeches people gave, given that we’re Christian but we don’t go to church. I was wearing a black dress and a dark blue cotton sweater and sitting in the front row with my parents, but I knew Noel and Meghan and our friend Hutch were in the back because I rode with them to the funeral parlor in Meghan’s Jeep.
I cried at the funeral because people were giving these speeches where they stood up and talked about Grandma. And her friends stood up, these old ladies, and spoke about how much they had loved her and whatever. It was just really sad.
After it was over we all had to drive to the cemetery and I was in the bathroom trying to get my face to stop shining after the tears, putting powder on my nose, when Meghan called in, “They’re making me move my car. Can you get a ride with your parents?”
I said yes, but then when I left the bathroom I couldn’t see my parents anywhere. The area in front of the funeral parlor was a sea of people dressed in black, old women with dyed hair putting their hands on each other’s arms, cousins of my dad’s looking faded and balding, a few little girls running underfoot wearing white tights on chubby legs. I ran outside and looked for our Honda. It was gone.
I didn’t want to get into a car with Hanson so I stood up on the porch and surveyed my options. Who else could give me a ride?
There was Nora Van Deusen. Standing by a hedge and not talking to anyone. There with her hands at her sides, staring into space awkwardly.
Nora.
Nora had come to my grandma’s funeral.
She saw me just as I saw her, and loped over. Nora is five eleven and has tremendous hooters. She was poured somewhat awkwardly into a navy dress that she probably got for church a year ago. It no longer really fit. She was holding a bouquet of white roses.
“Hi,” she said when she got to me.
“Hey.” I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m really sorry about your grandma,” said Nora. “She was such a kind person.” She thrust the flowers into my hands, not meeting my eyes.
Nora knew Grandma Suzette because she and I had been friends from third grade until the end of junior year. You know people’s grandmas when you’re friends for that long. She’d even had sleepovers at Grandma Suzette’s, and the two of us had stayed up late playing with the practically a hundred drugstore lipsticks Grandma had in her bathroom. And freshman year, Grandma took me, Kim, Cricket and Nora to see The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet, even though we were kind of too old for it by then.
“How did you know she died?” I asked.
“Meghan told me.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” Nora said. Because that’s the thing to say at funerals, I guess.
We stood there for a few moments in silence. “How’s your summer been?” she finally asked me.
“Pretty good. Aside from the death,” I said. “How’s yours?”
“Did I tell you I met a guy?”
“You haven’t been speaking to me,” I reminded her.
Nora blushed. “I met a guy.”
Oh.
That’s why she wasn’t so mad at me anymore.
It wasn’t that she missed me so much she decided to forgive me.
She had stopped liking Noel.
“I met him at Sunny Meadows,” Nora went on.
Sunny Meadows was a day camp connected to Nora’s church. She was a sports leader for them that summer, until August, when her parents would take her to Decatur Island.
“That’s great,” I said.
“He goes to Lakeside,” she said. “His name is—don’t laugh.”
“What?”
“Say you won’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“His name is Happy. Happy Mackenzie.”
I had heard of Happy Mackenzie, actually. He was stroke for the Lakeside heavy eight, and Jackson, who was a rower, had been at some kind of crew team sports intensive with him. It’s not the kind of name people forget.
“And is it a thing thing?” I asked.
“We went out twice last week,” Nora said. “And I see him every day at Sunny Meadows. So yeah.”
“A thing thing.”
“Pretty much so.” She grinned.
Nora has never had a boyfriend her whole entire life. Not that she isn’t attractive—she’s got gorgeous curls and huge boobs and she understands basketball, plus she can bake—but somehow she’s never gone out with anyone. “That’s really great,” I said.
This was like, the most generic thing anyone could say in such a situation, but Nora and I had been angry at each other for so long I didn’t feel like I could just dive in and interrogate her about Happy’s kissing ability or his giant crew muscles or any of the things I would normally want to know about.
“Did you read about the gay male penguins at the Chinese zoo?” I asked.
Nora looked at me funny. “No.”
“Yeah, well, there are gay penguins. That’s a documented fact. But these particular gay penguins kept trying to steal eggs from the straight penguins.”
Nora looked at me like: where was I going with this?
“They would steal an egg and leave behind a rock as substitute,” I continued. “To try and trick the biological parents. Then the gay ones would adopt the egg. Zookeepers kept taking away the egg and giving it back to the bio parents, and they kept stealing another one, again and again.”
Nora shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true,” I said. “Finally the gay couple had to be segregated from the other penguins with a little picket fence, because they wouldn’t st
op trying to get a baby of their own.”
“Okay. What’s the point?”
“The point is, they shouldn’t have done what they were doing, and even though they were penguins, they probably knew it; I mean, they were doing the worst, meanest possible thing to their friends and neighbors—but they just couldn’t stop, because they wanted a baby so, so desperately.”
“What happened?” asked Nora.
“Well, for a while they were ostracized, but finally zookeepers gave them an egg to take care of, from a straight penguin couple that had rejected one. And the gay penguins were so happy! They turned out to be excellent dads.”
“Cool.” Nora shifted from side to side.
“I mean, penguins in general are excellent dads. The dads hatch the eggs, pretty much. But my point is these guys weren’t sociopaths or crazy penguins or anything. They just couldn’t behave like normal people when they wanted a baby more than anything in the world. It was like the intense wanting made them psycho.”
“Ruby.”
“What?”
“You still haven’t gotten to the point.”
“I’m the gay Chinese penguins,” I said. “That’s the point.”
“What?”
“I know what it’s like to want something so desperately you feel like you can’t stop trying to get it,” I explained, “even when it’s not supposed to be yours. I know what it’s like to do something wrong, really wrong, because you want the thing so badly you can’t help it. And I know what it’s like to have everyone hate you for doing it too.”
“People can help things,” said Nora quietly. “Saying you couldn’t help it isn’t fair.”
Ouch.
“You made a choice to take Noel,” she said. “Don’t act like it wasn’t a choice.”
Okay.
Was that true?
Can people help behaving badly? Are we always able to say no?
My uncle Hanson can no longer help himself. Alcohol grips him and makes him do things—like it’s bigger than him and he’s weak in comparison with it.
But shouldn’t he be stronger? Shouldn’t he quit, or join a program, or get therapy, or something? Is he, in some way, choosing alcoholism the way Nora was saying I chose to pursue Noel?
If you think the person can’t help it, you can forgive him more easily.
If you think the person should help it, you get angry.
But if you think the person can’t help it, they’re probably not going to change.
And if you think he should help it, there’s some hope.
“Maybe it’s easier for some people to help things than others,” I said to Nora. “I think it’s easier for you than for a lot of people.”
“Possibly,” said Nora. “But I don’t think the penguins should have stolen eggs.”
Part of me wanted to say: You should have forgiven me ages ago. You should have tried harder to understand me. Noel never liked you back, so he was never yours to start with.
But then I thought: She came to the funeral. And I am not at all sure that after everything that happened between us, I would have come if it was Nora’s grandma who died.
For all her rules and accusations, Nora is definitely the kind of person who will show up at a funeral. And say the right thing. And bring flowers.
She had done that today. Which was something like an apology.
So I decided not to ask for another.
“I’m sorry I’m a gay Chinese penguin,” I said.
We looked around, and most of the cars had cleared out, driving over to the cemetery. The lawn in front of the funeral parlor was empty.
“Do you have the car?” Nora asked.
“No. My parents ditched me,” I said.
“So you need a ride?”
“Uh-huh.”
We got into Nora’s car, which was a silver Saab—very clean except for a back window cluttered with stickers that read EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE, TATE PREP B-BALL and other team-spirited-type things. We couldn’t see any of the procession that was heading out, but we had directions on a printed sheet of paper from the undertaker, so Nora pulled into traffic.
It was awkward in the car.
We didn’t know what to say to each other.
It wasn’t clear if we could really be friends or if being on speaking terms was the best we could hope for.
We pulled into the line of cars as it was entering the cemetery. Moving slowly, we snaked through and eventually stopped near a path that led up to an open grave with a coffin beside it. Grandma’s friends began to get out of their cars. All wearing black, they walked gingerly up the steep pathway. A few of them were crying. Others were chitchatting. I looked for Noel, Hutch and Meghan, but I couldn’t see them. That was probably for the best, since having Noel and Nora together would have made things even more awkward than they were.
“I need to give my condolences to your parents,” said Nora.
“They’re probably up at the top already,” I said. “We were the last car.”
Nora and I trudged up the hill in silence. Some of Grandma’s friends moved very slowly, and it didn’t seem right to pass them. When we got to the top, we gathered round the grave. It was crowded enough that I couldn’t really see, but I half listened to a funeral home guy read a passage from the Bible.
I thought about Grandma Suzette and how she loved me even though she didn’t really know what went on in my life. How she didn’t know how neurotic I could be, or how bad things had gotten with my friends, or what my sense of humor was really like. She just knew I was Ruby, and my face looked like my dad’s, and she loved me ’cause I was her grandchild. My actual personality didn’t much matter.
I was crying and Nora was giving me a tissue when we heard the pastor say: “Alvin Hyman Fudgewick, may you rest in peace.”
Wait.
Alvin Hyman Fudgewick?
We were in the wrong place.
In the wrong line of cars, at the wrong grave site, in the right cemetery, at the wrong funeral.
Alvin Hyman Fudgewick’s.
“Alvin Hyman Fudgewick is not my grandma,” I whispered to Nora. I grabbed her elbow. We walked away as quickly as we possibly could, before bursting into smothered laughter at the bottom of the hill.
“Quiet!” whispered Nora. “Alvin Hyman Fudgewick is dead and he would not like us laughing at his funeral.”
I snorted. “We are horrible people. I can’t believe we’re laughing.”
“Where is your family?”
“I have no idea.”
“Should we look for them?”
“Probably. Shall we tell them about Alvin?”
“You can’t call him Alvin,” said Nora. “You don’t even know him. You have to call him Mr. Fudgewick.”
“I cried at his funeral. I think I can call him Alvin.”
Nora paused. Then she just said: “Alvin Hyman Fudgewick.”
I burst out laughing.
We got back into Nora’s car and drove around the cemetery. Whenever it seemed too quiet, or there was a pause in the conversation, one of us would say “Alvin Hyman Fudgewick” and we’d collapse into giggles.
It was me and Nora.
Not the way we had been. We might not ever be like that again.
But laughing, which is something we’d always been good at together.
Alvin Hyman Fudgewick.
Alvin Hyman Fudgewick.
Eventually, we found my family, far at the other end of the graveyard.
My dad was sobbing on Hutch’s shoulder.
Grandma Suzette was already in the ground.
Uncle Hanson was drinking from a flask, sitting on the hood of his rental car.
My mom was furious with me.
I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
Another video clip:
Hutch is in Kevin Oliver’s greenhouse repotting a bonsai tree. His haircut is growing out and he has it tied off his face with a blue bandana. His acne flares in the summer heat, so his forehead
and chin look swollen and irritated.
Roo: (behind the camera) I’m asking people to define words for me. It’s a project for my film school applications. You’re my first victim.
Hutch: Rock on.
Roo: So. What’s your definition of love?
Hutch: (laughs) Nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing.
Roo: Come on.
Hutch: A reason people kill themselves.
Roo: Ahem. Would you like to know why you’re single?
Hutch: (smiles regretfully) Oh, I know why I’m single.
Hutch has been going to school with me since kindergarten. He’s been a roly-poly1 since seventh grade due to a tragic case of acne, the cruelty of middle schoolers and a tendency to quote retro metal lyrics in place of making ordinary human conversation. He works for my dad as an assistant gardener, and somehow we’ve become friends.
Just from proximity, I guess.
And because everyone else at Tate Prep shuns us.
Anyway, Hutch is funny, once he starts talking. He doesn’t like his parents much, and they don’t seem to like him either, since they never come to any school events. He seems to think hanging out with my dad and eating raw food for dinner at our house is preferable to whatever he might be doing at home, so he’s around a fair amount. I’m taking his cinematic education in hand. We made our own documentary film festival that we named The Kirk Hammett Festival of Truth and Glory, Hammett being Hutch’s favorite guitar player and subject of the best movie in our whole series: Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which is all about a dysfunctional metal band in group psychotherapy. We also saw this film about a guy who lived with grizzly bears (until they ate him) and another about all the incredible grossness of fast food.2
More from the Hutch interview in the greenhouse:
Roo: What’s your definition of popularity?
Hutch: I used to think people were popular because they were good-looking, or nice, or funny, or good at sports.
Roo: Aren’t they?
Hutch: I’d think, If I could just be those things, I’d—you know—have more friends than I do. But in seventh grade, when Jackson and those guys stopped hanging out with me, I tried as hard as I could to get them to like me again. But then … (shaking his head as if to clear it) I don’t really wanna talk about it.