SANDRA
Richard Walker is a lot more popular dead than he was alive.
We haven’t hosted this many people in years. It’s like standing in an overcrowded elevator on your way to the forty-second floor. Someone’s always farting. Too much perfume, too much bad breath, too many murmured conversations and fake smiles, too much lipstick-on-teeth, and too many men trying to scratch their balls in their suits so no one will notice.
Most of the action is in the living room, where Caroline and Minna have set up rows of chairs in front of the fireplace, with an aisle in the middle like they’re preparing for a wedding. There’s no podium, no priest—just a small standing microphone that Minna rented, a half-dozen flower arrangements, and a huge cardboard poster of Richard Walker’s face, a professional shot he must have had taken for his company. He’s tan and smiling, leaning forward like he’s about to whisper the camera a secret.
“He looked so healthy then,” a woman says, shaking her head, as if it’s his fault he started aging and stopped looking so good.
“It’s terrible,” says another woman, sipping her gin and tonic.
“Is he in there?” says a young kid as he points to a small marble urn set up on the fireplace mantel, just behind the photo of Walker smiling.
“Only his body,” the kid’s mom says, as if that should give him comfort.
The kid keeps staring, fidgeting with his jacket. “How’d they fit him in there?” he asks finally.
The woman with the gin and tonic overhears and turns, smiling, with lipstick-coated teeth. “They burned him, sweetie,” she says.
The kid begins to cry.
When I was maybe five or six years old, a woman down the street, Mrs. Gernst, got flattened by a train. When I got older, I realized it probably wasn’t an accident—it was a late train, and she was so sick and swollen with age she could barely move, so what the hell was she doing crossing the tracks at midnight on a Tuesday?—but at the time my mom only said that God works in mysterious ways, a.k.a. God will make a pancake of a sick old woman who never did harm to anybody, so what do you think he’ll do to you if you don’t clean your room and brush your teeth and mind your gospel?
Somehow—don’t ask me how—they managed to stitch and cinch and stuff her, ice her down, stick her in a big wood coffin, and put her up on display, like one of the glazed carp my dad’s friend Billy had hanging on a wooden plaque on the wall of his living room.
That’s probably my earliest memory: the funeral of Mrs. Essie Gernst. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead person. I remember playing rummy in the back of her living room with Billy Iverson and Patty Horn during the speeches and the service, and how the whole house smelled like a combination of my dad’s old socks and the kind of powder my mom put down in our drawers and cabinets to keep the ants away.
Billy told me if I kissed Mrs. Gernst on the mouth, she would wake up. I had to do lip-on-lip, he said, and then she’d sit up and throw her arms around me and give me all her fortune—because everyone knew that Mrs. Gernst had a lot of money that she didn’t spend.
What the hell did I know? It worked in all the fairy tales.
(Cissy and I once played Prince Charming and Snow White. We were drunk on apple brandy she’d unearthed from her parents’ liquor cabinet, lying out by the creek on a big patch of deep purple moss on one of those Georgia summer days like we were living inside of a painted egg: greens and blues and bright splashes of color; everything brighter and better than real life should ever be. I was sleepy from the heat and the brandy and the slow rotation of the minutes, like even the seconds were too hot to move at normal speed. Cissy sat up on an elbow and leaned over me.
“You be Snow White,” she said. “I’ll be Prince Charming.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she leaned down and kissed me. Her lips were dry and tasted like sugar and her hair was wet from the creek and I could smell her sun cream and deodorant.
“What was that for?” I said when she pulled away, and I remember laughing even though I felt scared for some reason I couldn’t name.
“Now you’ll never die,” she said, and she was smiling, too.)
After the service was over, when the grown-ups had drifted into the kitchen to talk about nothing and drink coffee and watch the clock sideways, wondering how quickly they could leave without looking impolite, Billy gave me a boost so I could reach the casket. I remember Mrs. Gernst collected porcelain figurines and there were two cats nestled next to her, perched on tissue paper, eyes up, watching me. Her skin smelled like the inside of a garage, like spilled chemicals and someone’s wooden workbench; her lips were thin as paper and just as dry.
And I remember the sudden scream, and falling backward on top of Billy, who was laughing like a maniac. My mother came charging out of the crowd like the devil was at her heels, yanked my skirt up where I was, and gave me a solid spanking right there in front of Mrs. Gernst’s body, until my father intervened and dragged us both into the street.
Funny enough, I thought at first my mom was mad because I’d done it wrong. Mrs. Gernst hadn’t woken up. She was still dead as dead.
That was always my favorite part of the story, anyway. Not the happily-ever-after part—even as a kid I could see that that was a load of honky—but the kiss, the reversal, the waking up, like the past had never happened at all. It was better than confession and getting Jesus to absolve you after a few Hail Marys.
Maybe that was my problem all along, and Alice’s, too. We were waiting for Prince Charming and that magic kiss.
We were waiting—are waiting—for forgiveness.