32
It has been fourteen weeks since I’ve heard Andrew’s voice and all I want is to see his face in front of me. Instead I am looking at big, pillowy gloves coming straight at my head. Not at the same time. My partner’s first combination is right jab, left hook, right hook, which I am supposed to swerve from. Okay, it’s not called “swerve.” Or “duck,” which is the only other word I can think of, but something that I can never remember what they call it when you move out of the way, but in that very specific boxer way where you’re gone, but still near, so you can hit them back. It has to do with the rhythm of your weight. How quickly and easily you can shift so you’re gone when they’re there, but right there before they’re gone. I’m still learning.
And the worst part is that I can’t hit back. We’re taking turns—my partner, Dave, and I. He’s on offense, so I’m defense. Dave’s a seventeen-year-old…kid, I guess you call them. I don’t know. I never hung around one that age before because I jumped over that group when I was fourteen, and going to that all-girl Catholic school, I just never saw one this close up. But here Dave is, with legs like a man, hands still young, every part of his body looking a different age, like someone hit the random button on the CD player of his growth. It’s his turn to punch and my turn to shift my rhythm and move my weight toward him, which is the trick, see, because that’s when you can switch from just being in the getting-hit-but-trying-to-cover defense role to the yes-your-punches-are-so-in-my-face-but-I’m-moving-toward-you-backing-you-up-while-effortlessly-missing-your-hits-ready-to-make-my-own position.
But that is not happening. What is happening is that Dave’s punches are hitting me. Not hard. He’s got big, pillowy gloves. I’ve got a mouth guard. I’m able to do some swerving-duck, but still I am getting hit. Repeatedly. On purpose. And I start getting annoyed. He’s seventeen. Energy comes out of nowhere on him like growth spurts shooting out his hands, but I’m trying. I’m stepping forward, shifting the weight, moving my head. It’s very hot. My face is melty and wet. I swerve another duck, glance up, and catch Dave smiling at me. Hard. Happy about all this. And suddenly, I start to cry. Silently, but cry. Which I realize is a tactic Tyson and Ali have never used, probably because it doesn’t work, although maybe Dave can’t tell I’m crying because my face was already quite wet, but now tears are adding lots more, then my nose joins in this liquid fest, but still I try to change my rhythm and shift my weight, which is right when his left hook nails me, busting my lip against the safe mouth guard.
I can tell he feels rotten. So does the coach whose back was turned when it happened. I consider sticking around to make them feel better, but all I want to do is leave and maybe never return. I promise them I’ll go to Cedars Hospital, but, honest to God, I just want to go home. I take the towel they give me with the ice wrapped in it, get in my truck, and speed to the 10 where anything can get blotted out if I ride it long enough.
Andrew has been out of my life as fast as he came in. I keep telling myself this is for the best. He’s married with two children. Stay away.
He must have come to that decision, too. He told me that first night we were together in December that he had been good, his word for not sleeping around. Until me, I thought. So it’s good that he hasn’t called me in three and a half godforsaken months. I just wish I completely felt that way.
I skipped my exit. The sign snuck by me like those subliminal ads you hear about in films, so I get off at Hoover to turn back around. I decide to check my messages while pretending to myself that I’m not hoping one from Andrew is miraculously there. I hook back onto the 10 as my answering machine clicks on.
Suzanne’s voice is telling me that she tried to reach me on my cell phone, Jesus, she wishes I would leave it on, just call her immediately. I am almost at my exit and consider waiting until I’m home to call her back, but she sounds angry, frantic, and scared all at once so I punch in her number, as trepidation makes a wider space in my stomach than I can hold because Suzanne’s voice sounded exactly as it did when she called to tell me about Momma’s—
“Hello?” My sister is practically shouting.
“Hey, it’s me, what’s wrong?” I try to sound normal, hoping my tone will force her answer to be normal, but my words are hindered by the towel-wrapped ice and my enlarged lip getting in the way.
“Why are you talking like that?”
“It’s nothing, I’m fine. My lip got hit in boxing tonight, but it’s nothing, I’m—”
“Boxing?” Like I said I was in the Arctic, she made it sound that far-fetched.
“Suzanne, what happened, why’d you—”
“Daddy died.”
“What?”
“Dad-dy died.” She spit the syllables out.
“No, Suzanne, no.” The trepidation has kicked itself inside out and is knocking me down from within, as fear, panic, and dread shoot out from it.
My sister is silent as I move my truck over to the shoulder of the 10. I am astonished that some part of my brain was untouched enough to heed a long-ago-heard safety advice—when in danger on a highway, pull to the side.
“Where? When? From what?” It is too impossible. Time and distance from my father have disappeared, leaving the irrational thought that I was just about to see him, was finally going to get to see him. I suddenly realize I have been dreading this news for years.
“Florida somewhere, a few months ago, I think. Heart attack on the kitchen floor. That woman called to tell me.” Suzanne doesn’t have to tell me who she means. Ever since Cousin Elsie called Momma to say she saw Daddy in Sarasota, she has been referred to as “that woman.”
“Said it had taken her weeks to find me,” Suzanne continues. “She wanted to know how Momma died, but I wouldn’t say. What a ghoul that woman is—forever calling and bearing bad news.”
“Oh, God, oh, God, no. Now I’ll never…” The silent scream inside me pierces through my skin. I can barely feel my tears. I try to breathe around the panic and fear and dread that are taking all the room inside. Only small areas of my body—fingertips, elbows, heels—have room for my breath to enter and leave. I gasp air in while dispelling sobs, but the two collide. Oxygen squeezes by, just enough to keep me alive. My body is screaming against this information, fighting with punches and hooks and jabs not to know what it has heard.
The silence on the phone is thunderous. If my sister had been speaking, I wouldn’t have heard it so clearly.
“I need to finish driving home.”
“Are you okay to do that? Maybe you should wait. Where are you anyway?”
I assure her that I’m fine by regulating my breathing to coincide with emitting words—a task so monumental that I have new found awe for our ability to do it without thinking.
I just need to get off the 10, I tell myself as I punch the button to end the call and pull my truck back into the flow of traffic. If I can get home and call her from there, I am sure this news will have changed. A fluke is what it was, like an accident on the highway that will be all cleared up by the time I reach home, the updated report from Suzanne assuring me of Daddy’s noninjury.
I immediately listen to my messages again when I get home. I hear Suzanne’s first dreadful one that I hung up on without erasing, then I wait to hear a “Call me back; the news I told you was wrong” message from her, but it isn’t there. I take the towel off my lip and open it up. The ice has mostly melted; small chips of it are stuck in the white thread among specks of my blood. My lip feels pillowy large, but hard. The pain is forming a concrete mass inside. I dial Suzanne’s phone number with a mixture of hope and dread. She picks up on the first ring.
“Good, you made it; I was worried.”
I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. The news about our father hasn’t changed.
“Should we go home?” Then I immediately realize that was dumb.
“Home? Where and to what? He’s not there anyway. Who knows what plot of land in Florida he’s buried in.”
Oh, God. The body. My father’s body is no longer him, hasn’t been since he died God knows when, yet that is what I want. The body to bury, to watch it go in, to throw myself on it one last time, one last contact since when? To honor it at its end, a goodbye to his physical self. The self that I derive from. I have no idea where my father’s spirit is, nor where what it inhabited is. He is displaced in his death from me, just like in life, but I guess not for him and that feels even worse.
“I’m gonna go.”
“Do you want us to come over? You don’t sound good. Or want to come stay here?”
I can’t bear to see Suzanne’s face, to see any likeness of him, the likeness I always delighted in: his nose, the shape of his eyes, a certain grin. I can’t see them on her, so alive and well, knowing that those on him have been set loose like homing pigeons never to reach their intended end. “No, I’ll be fine. I’ll call you, okay?”
After a few minutes of convincing my sister that I’ll be okay, and assuring her that I am keeping ice on my lip—which I’m not because what’s one small injury on my body when my daddy’s body is dead?—I call Reggie. My sadness-terror rushes forward to meet him when the phone stops ringing. I’m reassured to hear his voice, but crushed that it’s his machine.
“Reggie, it’s Yvette.” There is small comfort in the facts of our names, though I worry he won’t be able to understand my lip-busted speech. I realize I’ll have to enunciate each word, and just thinking of that is painful on every level. “My…” I can’t continue. “Daddydied” has become one word. “My…” My mouth twists out to make the next sound, but a noiseless sob catches it, distorting it from saying what I can’t. “Dead.” Okay, that’s part of it. I gulp some air. It hits my lungs for the first time in what feels like years. “Dad.” I try to get the “dy” out. I’ve always hated the word “Dad.” It sounds so done with, so obligatorily child-of. I have never wanted to call my father that ever and definitely not now. The “dy” comes out as “me.” But at least sounds are escaping, if I pause and say nothing Reggie’s machine will cut me off, and I know I won’t be able to start this message all over again. “Will you call me?” There is meager relief in getting a full sentence out and the routine sounds of that one helped. “Maybe you could come over or I could come there?” I am begging and hate that I am, but I feel a kind of all encompassing insecurity that I never before have. And he did come over when Momma died. “Please call me, okay? Okay, bye.”
I hang up the phone reluctantly. I wish I could just stay on his answering machine, connected to him via the phone line until he comes home and picks it up, then will come here and be with me. But the phone is in its cradle and I am sitting on my couch alone. The clock reads nine-fifteen. What a truly horrendous time to find out my father is gone from this earth. It is too early in the evening for me to know what I know. I am certain that earlier in the day or later at night would have made this manageable somehow.
At least Reggie is fanatical about his phone messages. Maybe before he gets home, he’ll check from a pay phone, then drive over here. Please, God. I wish Andrew’s arms were holding me in a way that never lets go even when the arms have to.
I curl up on my couch, retreating into it as far back as I can. Like I’m on a precipice from the world’s unendurable drop. The wet, now warm towel is pressed to my lips. It’s no longer doing any good, but it’s comforting, like holding on to a rail.
I can feel my mind trying to back up and move away from this knowledge that it doesn’t want to know. And the knowledge has started moving everywhere inside me, rerouting itself to reach my body’s cells, but they are in flight—shooting every which way before this information can catch them. They don’t want to know that the two who made them—made me—are dead and gone. Life is not an inextinguishable right. Both of my parents are no longer here, therefore one day, neither will I be and vaporized into where?
I stare across the living room and find minuscule safety in this position, so I hold the gaze, not ever dropping it, while waiting and hoping and praying for my phone to ring, for Reggie to be here, for anything to happen that could somehow obliterate this demise, to see someone who has one parent left, who can still sometimes lie to themselves that the end doesn’t come whenever it decides.
I still haven’t heard from Reggie. It’s been twenty-four hours since I left my swollen-lip jumbled message on his machine. Could something’ve happened to him, too? Jesus, not a one-two punch of tragedy, I think as I dial. As I leave Reggie another message, the speaking reopens my lip and blood comes pouring out. The Band-Aid I put on feels oppressive, a reminder of the risk from any communication I make.
I have just hung up the phone when it rings, so I answer it quickly, hoping it’s him immediately calling back.
“Our father’s been dead to me for a very long time,” Suzanne says. “This changes nothing as far as I’m concerned.”
Then why’d you sound so flipped out when you told me? I want to ask, but don’t because it is difficult to keep thoughts in my head long enough for a second sentence to follow a first.
“So, no, I don’t want to do some kind of service with you,” my sister continues. “I’ve moved on already.”
How very efficient of you, I think as we get off the phone, having nothing more to say to each other, though volumes are being transmitted by the sheer act of our hanging up.
My body is beaten up and stiff from the crumpled pose I stayed in on the couch all night long, and my lips are swollen and throbbing red. I can feel my entire body’s internal width and depth fully defined by the aching and soreness. I’m hungry without appetite; exhausted without sleepiness.
My mind is stuck. It recoils from what it knows, then moves awkwardly ahead when I have to speak or perform a task. Backward and forward in a herky-jerky mode. I am frightened that if I don’t somehow jar myself, I’ll stay in this disconnected to-and-fro groove. I need to talk, to walk, to move through a prescribed course of events, and see the specific sight I never have before, my father in a coffin, for my mind to believe and interpret this event. I need family.
On the fifth day since Daddy died, or since I found out that he died, and having still not heard from Reggie—has he suddenly decided to drop me and is using my father’s death as a particularly grisly event to coincide?—so lumping his absence into the barren tundra that is my mind, I decide to go to a funeral from afar. I have no choice. I don’t know anyone here who has recently died, and that’s a dreadful invitation to want, so it will have to be a stranger’s and I’ll just keep my distance, like some bad TV movie where the killer appears at the funeral but conspicuously far from the grave.
Which is a bit how this feels—a killer of parts of me that I didn’t know even existed before. A cellular longing for my father. An inability to comprehend that he is truly and completely gone. A terror has set in inside me that with him out of this world, I have been unleashed into a void that I won’t return from. But at least choosing the outfit for this function is easy: black skirt, black shirt, and black shoes I won’t topple over in. Balance has been an issue these past few days, though I guess the lack of sleep and food could have something to do with that. Gloria brought me a fruit salad yesterday. She saw me haggard and bleary at the mailbox, so I told her why before she could imagine the usual reason for that physical state in this town. Though I’d take hungover whore over grieving daughter any day.
I have no idea if there even is a funeral today, but in a city this large, I figure someone has to have died recently. But just the thought of checking the newspaper or making a call to find one exhausts me, so I find a cemetery nearby and hope for the best. Or worst, I should say.
The Normandy cemetery is one of the oldest in Los Angeles. A huge leaping sprawl of land near the 10 by downtown, its sepulture services aren’t as fashionable as Forest Lawn’s are in Burbank near Warner Brothers and Disney, but giant pine tree branches roam above the graves, a wind is blowing gently, and cobblestone walks twist and sort themselves throughout, taking me past families who have long since dissolved.
The first headstones I study are old and settled into the earth as if the person they represent was meant for nothing more than to claim this land and prevent modernity from growing here. The distance between me here and them there via the death dates is oddly comforting, a silent somber notice of time’s impersonal march.
A small black swarm of people catches my eye as they rise on a far-away hill, then vanish over the side. A few stragglers make up the rear. There’s one. I head toward them on the winding path, telling myself I’ll read more graves later if I feel like it. Driving over, I had the absurd hope of finding a substitute grave for Daddy. One with something similar, the name—Paul’s not so hard—or some other sign, to represent Daddy’s spirit close by, but at this point, all the tombstones I’ve read are very much only for the person buried deep inside.
I assume I must be noticeable to the mourners as I walk toward the plot where their ceremony has begun, but hopefully not by much. The purple tent covering the glowing hole in the ground is gaudy above the cemetery’s green grass, a flag of grief under the early summer sky.
The funeral I am crashing from a—respectful, I hope—distance has just begun. The gravestones around us are carved in Russian with intricate symbols and letters I can’t read. Pictures of the deceased are emblazoned onto the headstones beneath the words, so the dead smile out through glossy marble in the universal language of a countenance.
A wind is blowing the priest’s incantations away from me, as traffic noise settles in my ear. I pseudobury my father to the sounds of the 10 freeway.
Bending my head in prayer, I ask Mary to help him find peace and deliver him to rest. My mother’s soul I didn’t worry about so much, but my father’s is a different case.
I suddenly realize that someone is staring at me. I glance up to see an older woman with frazzled hair and a frowning mouth nudge the woman next to her and point at me. My attire is appropriate for the occasion, so it can’t be that, though my lip must look really bad—but from this distance, how can she tell? When I was getting dressed I had wished for some kind of hat for my mouth, something to disguise its bad-hair-day-like misshape, but the only thing would have been a gag that really would have been disturbing for mourning.
Then it hits me. I never thought how this might look. An unknown person—a woman, at that—appearing at the graveside. An entirely different TV movie plot than the one I had envisioned spins out in my head. I consider waiting until the end of the funeral and explaining myself to them, but I realize it would sound way too weird, probably even more proof to them that I was sleeping with…
Okay, I am feeling guilty for a sin that I didn’t commit. At least with him, the deceased. At least, I think it was a him, but maybe souls become sexless, so now he’s not any gender.
I feel horrible that I barged into their grief. What was I thinking? Suzanne would be scandalized if she knew. I move toward other graves and look earnestly at names I cannot read. Hopefully that woman won’t come over and speak Russian to me. I try to find a marker for someone they won’t know that I can pretend to have come to visit and just got distracted by their service. I wish I was a mime, my actions eloquently delivering a new truth I hope they’ll believe.
I force myself to sit by a woman’s grave—Irina something-I-can’t-pronounce, buried in 1934, seems safe—until the funeral ends, then the older, frazzled-hair woman glances surreptitiously at me as the last of the mourning party leaves.
Oh, good God. If Reggie would have called me back this week, he might have come here with me, and I wouldn’t have had to worry about all this misinterpretation. Damn him for not calling me; what is his problem? I can’t even think about that friendship ending. I never want to visit a cemetery again. I hope Suzanne and Matt aren’t buried here. And what if Andrew dies soon and suddenly? He could have a heart attack, too. He’s healthy, but who knows? I guess I’d find out the same way I did about his daddy role. That’s a funeral I definitely could not attend, especially like I did this one.
Will you stop with these thoughts, please? Let’s just keep this to Daddy and stop including everyone else, such as complete strangers burying their kin.
I drive home and fall asleep on the couch. I wake up at five in the afternoon in a room of sadness, a room that springs up and encircles me in its walls wherever I move.