“You haven’t cried yet. Did you visit her in the hospital?”
“Yes. She couldn’t speak. At least, I couldn’t understand her. She mostly blinked her eyes. The doctors said she knew what had happened to her — the mind apparently wasn’t affected.”
Rachel was startled to learn the Big Star was a Jew. She couldn’t help wondering who prepared her for burial. In her mind, she saw the sexpot legs guided through Donna Karan pjs, silken string twisted nine times at the waist, then looped into the letter shin, which stood for God — though, at time of death, she was probably already clean as a whistle. When you’re rich and paralyzed like that, private nurses were always sponging you down.
“You look too thin, Rachel.”
“I feel fine.”
“But are you? I worry—”
Rachel silenced her with a hug. Only a month ago, such a gesture would have been unthinkable for either one.
Calliope pointed out the mother of the deceased, a mountain of a woman who looked slightly deranged. Her enormous bosom heaved in laughter and tears at Leslie Trott’s words. Eventually, he eulogized only to her and the grievers blushed to be privy to such intimacies.
They drove to the beach, north on PCH to points unknown. The sky looked like the bottom of an old porcelain bowl. When the rain began, it felt like the end of the world.
Calliope smiled dreamily. “We used to make this drive all the time, remember? San Simeon, Big Sur, Point Lobos…Do you remember what Sy used to sing?”
“We’re off to see the Wizard!—”
“And Simon — what was that crazy song…”
“‘Hit the road, Jack…’”
Together: “‘And don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!’”
They laughed and sang some more.
“Well, how far should we go?”
“Till we run out of gas.”
“Thelma and Louise.”
“You know, she’s a client — or was, for a while.”
“Thelma or Louise?”
“Geena — whichever one she was.”
The rain stopped. They got burgers and fries at a roadside place and crossed to the beach. Calliope had a blanket in the trunk. They spread it on a picnic table and faced the frothy gray-green tubes.
“This is nice,” her mother said.
“Mama,” said Rachel, plaintively. “I can’t stop washing — since I found out — about Father…and then there was this — this horrible thing—a little girl — this tumah—we washed her — and this whole — and, and the red heifer!” She laughed, then sobbed with great embarrassing snorts. “I don’t know, Mama! I think I’m going crazy!”
Calliope clasped her daughter’s hands and looked deep in her eyes, like a hypnotist. “Rachel, you are not. It’s just terribly sad and terribly confusing…”
“Well, I’ve been acting pretty strangely lately! Maybe I should — be — on an antidepressant or something.”
“We can certainly investigate that. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“I don’t know if anything will help.”
“Just talking about it helps — a lot. Believe me.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, sweetly chiding. “How would you know?”
“I have a little bit of experience in that area.”
Rachel shook her head tearfully. “Everything is a tumah—”
“What is this tumah, darling?”
“Mama, I can’t get clean! Haven’t you ever felt like that?”
“‘Out, out, damn spot,’” she intoned, like a schoolteacher. “But there is no blood on your hands, Rachel! There just isn’t. You know, sometimes there’s a difference between the truth and what a child perceives to be that truth.”
“Mama…did you know there’s a moth that feeds off the tears of elephants? Human tears, too — I read about it in National Geographic. It pokes the poor thing’s eye just so it can drink the tears. What kind of world would have such a thing?”
“Darling, please—”
“And there’s a bug — they call it a burying beetle. It digs the ground out from under dead things and buries them. I saw a picture of one, digging the grave for a mourning dove…” Rachel stood, unable to go on. She wanted to throw herself in the water, but her mother chased her down and held fast.
“No, baby! No!” she shouted as Rachel seized with tears, straining toward the maliciously indifferent surf. Calliope steered her back to the car, cloaking the frail, shivering shoulders in the blanket as if she were a princess — a mourning dove — who had launched her dead on a floating litter, toward unforgiving seas.
Ursula Sedgwick
When Taj Wiedlin hanged himself, Ursula took it as a sign for her to go. She went to Travel Shoppe and booked a deluxe sleeper — that’s what Sara did when she visited her mom. Ursula wouldn’t have felt safe on the road. She never got around to fixing the Bonneville, and besides, it was too big a target. They changed trains in Portland and began the journey east.
The cars were uncrowded. Ursula befriended a porter, a kind, fiftyish Captain Kangaroo — looking man. He was married, from Red Wing.
“Chanhassen,” he echoed, a little unsure, then scratched his head. “That’s a suburb — boy, I should know that place. Relatives there?”
“Sort of. What’s the weather like now?”
“Well, it’s going to be a pretty hot Fourth of July, I’ll tell you. June, July and August are generally humid.”
“My friend told me Bob Dylan was from Minnesota.”
“Hibbing. Oh, we have many famous people. Loni Anderson, Roger Maris, the rock singer Prince — though my daughter tells me he doesn’t call himself that anymore.” Samson shifted in his sleep. “Lots of writers, too,” said the porter. “Sinclair Lewis — he wrote Main Street—and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.”
“They made a movie out of that.”
“Sure did. That was Mia Farrow. There’s a woman who’s had nine lives.”
“And nine children, at least.”
The porter thought that was funny. With a glance at the baby, he asked about her husband. Ursula said she was separated. “That’s a shame,” he said, tickling Samson’s neck with a finger. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”
“He’s actually a boy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry — never could tell them apart, even my own. You know, you really ought to go to one of the fairs while you’re there. Best in the world. And come the Fourth…”
“County fairs?”
“Granddaddies of ’em all! Oh my, I’d guess St. Paul has the biggest fairgrounds in the whole country. There’s Forest Lake, Pine City, the Cokato Corn Carnival. ‘Princess Kay of the Milky Way’—that’s a beauty pageant. Win, and they carve your face in butter.”
“I’m not so sure I’d like that.”
“When I was a boy, they had midways: sideshows and tattooed ladies, weird stuff in formaldehyde jars. Things are a bit different now — well, they’re a lot different. Biggest entertainers in the world come by to sing. Garth Brooks, Tony Bennett. Anyone you can think of.”
“Maybe I’ll take my friend’s mother. She lives in St. Cloud.”
“Oh, she’ll take you—we don’t like to miss our fairs. She’ll have you baking cakes and riding a greased pig.”