THINGS GO FLYING
Shari Lapeña
To Manuel
Pangloss sometimes said to Candide, “All events are interconnected in this best of all possible worlds, for if you hadn’t been driven from a beautiful castle with hard kicks in the behind because of your love for Lady Cunegonde, if you hadn’t been seized by the Inquisition, if you hadn’t wandered over America on foot, if you hadn’t thrust your sword through the baron, and if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be here eating candied citrons and pistachio nuts.”
“Well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our garden.”
—Voltaire
God is dead. . . . And we have killed him.
—Nietzsche
CHAPTER ONE
Harold’s recent habit of reading the obituaries at breakfast was his only new hobby in years. He didn’t know why he read them; it was something he couldn’t really explain. He reached for another jumbo carrot muffin, his hand fumbling around in the crinkly plastic packaging, his eyes glued to the page.
“Should you be eating that?” Audrey said from over by the kitchen counter, in her quilted housecoat and bare feet.
Lately, Harold had been letting himself go—allowing the pillowy fat to accumulate around his middle—in spite of the fact that he was terrified of having a heart attack. He ignored her.
Russell Darrell Lynch
Suddenly, in a diving accident, on Sept. 22, aged 61. Beloved husband, father, and grandfather. A great adventurer, Russell climbed mountains for charity, raising money through his foundation—
Harold, chewing his muffin, reflected that his life, should he die tomorrow, would certainly not warrant much of an obituary.
Audrey grabbed the muffins off the kitchen table and put them back on the counter, out of reach.
Harold seemed to be having a mid-life crisis, but it wasn’t about wanting to possess young, gorgeous women, or lusting after a car he couldn’t even afford to insure. He wasn’t sure what it was about. Crisis implied a certain energy, and there wasn’t much energy about Harold these days. What he was having felt more like a mid-life slump. A depression.
He told himself every day that he had much to be grateful for. He had his health. He had his sons, whom he loved unconditionally. And he loved his wife, Audrey, not with the same youthful enthusiasm they’d started out with—that was hard even to imagine now, let alone remember—but with something abiding. However, he was at that age when there is more behind than lies ahead—and what lies ahead isn’t all that appealing.
“My God,” he spluttered, startled out of his inertia, squinting at the newspaper and lifting it closer.
“What,” Audrey said. She was holding the coffee pot in one hand and a cloth for wiping the kitchen counter in the other. The boys hadn’t come down to breakfast yet—they were going to be late for school.
Harold was slow to answer, not quite believing what he’d read. “Tom Grossman is dead!”
Audrey came to peer over his shoulder.
“Heart attack,” Harold said. He felt a sudden weirdness flooding over him, an alarming palpitation of the heart, a difficulty breathing, a pooling of the blood in his feet.
After a long pause, Audrey said, “I wish you wouldn’t read the obituaries.”
Mercifully, the strange feeling was already passing. “It’s a good thing I do,” Harold responded, a little petulant. If he hadn’t read it in the paper, he might never have found out about Tom Grossman’s death, or at least not until long after the funeral was over, so different were the circles in which they now travelled. Tom had been his university roommate and best friend, but Tom had gone on to medical school, and Harold had gone to work for the government. Tom’s life had seemed to be always expanding, while Harold’s had seemed to be always contracting. Somehow, they hadn’t stayed in touch. He hadn’t seen Tom in close to fifteen years.
But it was Tom all right; there was a photo. Suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-nine. Christ.
Tom’s life had just suffered a pretty definitive contraction.
In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
“I suppose we should go to the funeral,” Audrey said, sounding doubtful.
“Of course we’ll go,” Harold said, thinking about how much time he had left, and about what kind of figure he’d cut among Tom’s mourners at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Would his black suit still fit?
“I guess,” Audrey said slowly, “I’d better figure out what we’re going to wear.”
• • •
AUDREY, IN THE bedroom getting ready for the funeral, had just put runs in her only two pairs of black pantyhose and was down to a single pair of charcoal grey. Shit. This time, she took a deep breath and deliberately slowed down, rolling them up her legs like you were supposed to. It wouldn’t help any for Harold and the boys to see her agitation. And she didn’t want to have to stop at a convenience store on the way and try to put on another pair in a moving car. There—the pantyhose were on and intact.
Audrey put her housecoat on over her dark blouse and pantyhose, hauled the ironing board out of the closet and plugged in the iron, worrying about Harold. Tom Grossman’s death couldn’t have come at a worse time. This wasn’t the time for Harold to be staring mortality in the face, or to have his life thrown into relief with Tom’s.
John appeared at the bedroom door and hovered, sulkily.
“What?” Audrey said.
“I don’t see why I have to go. I didn’t even know the guy.” Seventeen-year-old John balked at everything.
“It will be good for you,” Audrey said, beginning to press her good black skirt. John and his brother, Dylan, two years younger, had never been to a funeral. Audrey thought it was time they attended a funeral. She also believed it would do Harold good to be able to show off his two almost-grown sons, who were both tall, handsome, and looked good in a dark suit.
“I don’t want to go.”
She looked at him sharply. John complained about everything. His complaining didn’t bother her as much as it bothered Harold, but she had no patience for it today.
“Tom Grossman was your father’s closest friend for years,” Audrey said.
“Then how come I’ve never heard of him?”
She was suddenly annoyed by his attitude and his smirk, and she didn’t want to be annoyed. She had to attend a funeral in an hour with a depressed, socially awkward husband and two uncooperative teenagers, and Dylan had so far not even come in from the basketball net in the driveway to shower and change. Sometimes she wanted to rip that thing right off the shed wall. And worst of all, she had a nasty secret of her own that gave her a better reason than anybody else had for wanting to avoid this funeral, but she couldn’t get out of it either.
She put down the iron, looked severely at her eldest son and used the tone of voice she saved for when she really had to get results. “Go get your brother and get dressed. You have twenty minutes.”
She watched John shrug himself away from the door and resumed her ironing. Her thoughts turned automatically to Harold, reclining in his La-Z-Boy in the living room. He used to work on the house and yard at this time of year. Right now, the eavestroughs needed cleaning and the gate to the backyard was coming off its hinges. Thinking of the gate made her remember how Harold had once tried to get the boys interested in how to use his tools, but they couldn’t have cared less. Her sons were useless around the house, absolutely useless.
Finished, Audrey put down the iron, cocked her head, and listened intently. From long practice, she could tell exactly where everyone in the house was and what they were doing, and by checking her watch and making her various rapid mental calculations, she could
determine to the minute how far they were from being on schedule, and could make the necessary adjustments.
Because she was so good at it, no one appreciated how difficult this was or how much energy it cost her. Getting three people out of the house at the same time (she didn’t count herself, she was no trouble at all) at the precisely right time, properly fed, dressed, and prepared, making allowances for moods and the inevitable other difficulties— well, sometimes it came together like a beautiful, functional ballet. At those times she felt like a gratified choreographer.
But more often, getting the boys moving was like shifting wet earth. And now Harold was getting harder to shift too.
At least Dylan had come in—she’d know that careless slam of the door anywhere, those bounding, optimistic leaps up the stairs—and the shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall was running. Audrey slipped off her housecoat and prepared to step into her freshly pressed skirt. But first, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom she shared with Harold. It was unjust, Audrey thought, that when a woman reached a certain age, her shins began to look like kindling, and her thighs like pillows. Well, she wasn’t quite there yet. She’d put on weight, especially around the hips, but in the right clothes, she still looked presentable. She was still an attractive woman. And she’d produced two truly and equally handsome boys, her one real achievement.
She stepped into her skirt and put on her good pearl earrings. It was time to go get Harold. He needed roughly fifteen minutes to shave and dress on a regular day; today he might need twenty-three.
• • •
JOHN WASN’T APPRECIABLY different from other seventeen-year-old boys. He thought about girls a lot and about sex almost constantly. He treated his cell phone as an extension of himself.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and he didn’t give it a lot of thought. He lived moment to moment, trusting to luck or to his parents to make things work out for him.
Now, as he was dressing for the funeral, he heard a tap at his bedroom door and turned, expecting to see his mother checking on his progress. But it was his father who nudged open his door and stood there, strangely hollow-eyed. John found he couldn’t look at him. He bent down and pretended to straighten a dark sock.
“What?” John said. He tried to sound dismissive without sounding like he was looking for a fight. He had to get the inflection exactly right to pull it off; it was tricky.
When his father didn’t answer, John worried that he’d blown it. The adrenaline started and he looked up guardedly, wishing his father would go away. He didn’t want to deal with his father’s grief, or whatever it was.
But then he heard his mother’s voice from farther down the hall, calling, “Harold? Time to get dressed.”
Harold turned his head to look down the hall, and John, observing his dad’s profile, thought, he looks old. Then, gratefully, good timing, Mom.
His father turned back to him and said, “Never mind,” and left to do as Audrey told him.
Harold was no less relieved than John was that they’d been interrupted. He’d only wanted to tell his son that he appreciated his coming with them to the funeral, but lately, everything between them had smacked of a power struggle, and he’d feared John would see his attempt as patronizing.
“I’ve laid your clothes out on the bed,” Audrey told him, unnecessarily, as she moved past him in the hall to stick her head into John’s room.
Suddenly Harold felt like he was a sheep, that they were all sheep, being herded to who knew where by an extremely efficient border collie.
• • •
“WHEN I GET my G1, you have to let me drive all the time,” Dylan said from the backseat of the mid-sized sedan that was their sole family vehicle.
“As if,” John said, driving a little too fast and with a little too much flourish, but not quite fast enough or with sufficient flourish to make an issue of it, Audrey decided. Besides which, they were running almost ten minutes late due to the fact, unforeseen by her, that they would have to get gas.
That was John’s fault. He’d used the car last. She couldn’t be expected to keep track of everything.
Family car rides could be stressful for Audrey. The forced proximity created its own tension, there was John’s driving—and then there was everyone else on the road. This was Toronto, after all, on a Saturday afternoon, and half the drivers out there were pissed off about something. And the other half were late, like them.
“Turn here,” Audrey said, pointing to the entrance to the funeral home. But the parking lot was already full. They had to cruise around the block, and it was another excruciating five minutes as John stubbornly tried to parallel park on the street, although he hadn’t got the hang of it yet, and the space was tight, and other drivers honked at him, impatient to get by in both directions.
Doggedly, he kept trying, face tight with concentration, pulling the nose of the car up alongside again, trying to get the angle right, cutting it too shallow, then overcorrecting and cutting it too deep— holding up traffic—and turning red while Dylan sniggered from the backseat.
John pulled aggressively up alongside again and made another attempt.
“Way to go,” Dylan scoffed as John soundly bumped the parked car behind.
“Fuck off.” It was a warm, sunny, late September day, and John was sweating in his new dark suit.
“Hey,” Harold said, galvanized by the bad language.
John’s temper began to get the better of him, and he hit the bumper of the car in front, too.
“Jesus!” Harold said.
“Good enough,” Audrey said, opening her passenger side door. It was probably three feet to the sidewalk. Dylan opened his too, and said, “That’s okay, we can walk to the curb from here.”
Why couldn’t Dylan ever leave it alone? Audrey thought.
“You’re so original,” John said, trying to be scathing. But he was miserable, slamming the car door, shrugging self-consciously inside his damp suit. Suddenly, he crossed the street and walked rapidly away, down the residential block toward the funeral home, without looking back.
What a good-looking boy, Audrey thought, watching him go.
“What the hell is he doing?” Harold said.
He’d wanted his sons to come to the funeral. He was proud of them. They were his sons. There would probably be people here he hadn’t seen in years. But if John were going to embarrass him, it would have been better if he’d stayed at home.
“Did you have to be such a smartass?” Audrey said to Dylan, as the three of them crossed the street and began walking down the sidewalk behind John, who was now far ahead.
Harold said, “How many other families come in the same car to a funeral and arrive separately?”
But it began to look like Harold was putting too positive a spin on things. With disbelief, they watched John reach the main road, but instead of turning to his right toward the funeral home, or waiting for them, he jay-walked across traffic and carried on up the street.
He’d blown them off. Harold couldn’t believe it. The three of them stopped at the corner, watching John, Harold with his mouth hanging halfway open.
“He’ll come back,” Audrey said, wanting to comfort Harold, but realizing as she said it that she had no idea what their son was going to do. To her intense annoyance, Dylan looked impressed.
• • •
JOHN HAD NO idea what he was going to do either. Propelled by embarrassment, fury, and the need to distance himself from his unbearable, denigrating family, John kept going.
He wanted to make a point. He wasn’t exactly sure of the point he wanted to make, just that he desperately needed to make a point, and he couldn’t think of any other way to make it than by taking off.
He wouldn’t look back to see if they’d sent Dylan after him; it was beneath his dignity. If Dylan came after him, he’d tell him where to go.
After a few minutes, his pace slowed. Calmer now, he stopped at a light
to cross and waited.
The light changed. A car stopped in front of him so abruptly that the back end of it bounced. It was dark, sleek, and obviously very expensive—so clean he could see his reflection in it—and it was blocking his way.
John was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets and realizing how dark and moody and sexy he must look, because the blonde girl sitting alone in the backseat of the car, and now directly opposite him, gave him a bold once-over, hiked up her black dress to about crotch level, crossed her exquisite legs, and mimed a sexy kiss.
From where he stood, John got a good look at what the girl had to offer. He smiled. She smiled back.
Suddenly, life was pretty good.
The light changed and the luxurious vehicle purred away, the girl’s parents oblivious in the front seat. John stood where he was and watched the car go down the street. The girl didn’t look back. John could swear that, in the distance, he saw them pull into the driveway of the funeral home.
• • •
IT WAS AN open casket; Harold saw that right away. He made a mental note to be sure to tell Audrey that he himself did not want an open casket, when the time came. Harold didn’t want to look. But no matter how much you didn’t want to look, an open casket made you look.
Harold hated funerals. Funerals made him even more self-conscious than usual. Audrey was better at this sort of thing, although even Audrey, he noticed, was looking unusually stiff. She kept shooting little glances over at Tom’s widow, Adele, and their three almost-grown children, and looking quickly away if Adele glanced in their direction. Well, he didn’t want to talk to her either—it was bound to be awkward, and Harold loathed awkwardness—although he supposed they wouldn’t be able to avoid it.
They were late, but the service had not yet begun. The organ music swelled dramatically, the room was stuffy with breathing bodies, gaudy with funeral flowers. People were still filing up to the front, peering at the corpse, and moving on. It made Harold think of a graduation ceremony.