Even after a careful sniff, swill and spit you cannot discern whether it’s the curative chemicals, the plain death, the shucked-out bodies resting somewhere below the floorboards that you sidle over, the airy hollow homishness of the décor (in tasteful mauve and teal tones), or the stiffly be-suited employees perpetually scurrying off behind pine doors to drink coffee, chew crullers like cud, and yam on about hunting and groceries that dominate the bouquet of this funereal habitat's opus of violent, defiant antisepticism. Whatever it is, the towering opposition to the living, in general, manifests itself quite specifically in a marked hostility towards germs, bodily functions, as well as any and all biological liquids and solids. This hostility is so great that in the bathroom you don’t even feel like you’re shitting. Menstruation is still conceivable here, because at its root, to menstruate is merely to eject the possibility of life’s formation by expelling it into the world possessed of only mucus, membrane and blood. But shit, shit is far too full of breeding life.
There are only seven mourners in the assigned “Windsor” parlor of the chain funeral home. The tall red candles framing the head and foot of the coffin are the only objects that signify ceremony.
The bag of bones does not appear to know who any of the seven mourners are, with the exception of herself and her handlers. She is wearing fleece pajamas and a robe with snowmen on it. Elvira, the old lady, is replete with the smell America has come to expect of their old and institutionalized; ‘Old People smell’ is the most easily identifiable smell in the free world, with the possible exception of ‘New Car smell.’
Her bombed out eyes haunt around their fleshiness trying to name these others. Her gaze slides after each of their movements sailing from one body to another, casting ashore on their pink lips, coming about on the curves of their spines, lighting upon their round cheeks, their buttocks, and their bellies.
She pines for them to feed her. All she can think about is hash browns. One must have some structure, something golden to move towards. She already inhaled three on the way here and will have three more on the way back to the Veteran’s Home. That morning at McDonald's she lucidly announced to her handlers that they better get some extra because breakfast ends at eleven.
As the younger woman in black leans down by her chair and looks into her face, ‘What an over tragic little fool and plump to boot,’ flashes like closed captioning across a blank screen. And the bag of bones groans softly, gurgles a little and then whispers, “Who, who...”
The plump little fool doesn’t hear the old lady; she is too busy pondering the formation of her spine, reflecting on and then perfecting – through minor doll-like adjustments – the angle of her head. She is melting down her face to attain the softness appropriate to mourning. It ain’t easy to hold a posture of sympathy under these circumstances. The old lady’s breath stinks like grease and rotten salmon and summer melons. As the little plump fool looks down, fighting the instinct to recoil, she is struck by the remembrance card with the predatory floating eagle emblazoned over the flag; the red and blue do battle with the tissue paper spanning the musculature of Elvira’s skeletal palm.
The seven mourners have placed four high back chairs and a love seat in a semi-circle. The handlers hope this will give the environs a more personal feel. Locked into this half-moon formation (because forward is casket and backward are rows of folding chairs for people who just couldn’t make it) the mourners catch up on life: graduations, koi ponds, investments strategies in this market, new jobs, car troubles, other illnesses, allergies. Only occasionally interrupted by a peculiar pause when their joviality is cut down by the ever present overly rouged corpse.
Elvira, the bag of bones, holds the death card with the big bold eagle and shoots glances at the coffin. Her eyes are trying to sneak out of her own skull. They are sick of this crap. She has had her hash browns and she is sated. After all, they have been living apart from each other in the home for years; he hasn’t opened his eyes in months. It was rumored that she had a boyfriend on the side, in the other home, the first home. That, and the cost, is why they moved her. She exhibits no reaction to this death thing. The only anomaly her handlers have noted is that three hundred and forty dollars is missing from her bank account; they postulate that she used the cash to buy new underwear and probably some hash browns when on the weekly group trips into the Wal-Mart.
The deceased brought her to this country in 1952. They had no children. They lived in the same dark apartment with high windows and a galley kitchen for thirty years. It was a bitch to clean out when the handlers moved them to the first home. Elvira was not much of a homemaker; she never dusted. She dyed her hair with Egyptian Henna; they found cases of it on the closet floor and under her bed. The plump little fool keeps one of the containers on her dresser at home in some sort of infantile offering. They found a lacy black teddy under his bed.
The priest appears out of the chemical air and performs the most unceremonious ceremony imaginable. He mutters something about how the deceased went to church on Tuesdays, body willing. Then another prescient personal observation about how the deceased, a military man, would salute our holy Father whenever he passed his darkened room. The Father is all dolled up in a horrendous mantle, circa 1970s, struck heinous with abstract geometrical shapes in primary green and yellow, a pox on its polyester surface.
Father so-and-so deploys that calm pattern of speech that religious officers often use. The emissaries of higher powers must believe that this cadence makes people think they are connected, closer to some source of the divine. As if they are fooling anyone with that crap. As if people don’t know full goddamn well – and better than most contemporary men of the cloth – that if there is a divine, said divine, bears no relationship – whatsoever – with a performed sense of calm.
Elvira is inscrutable. The handlers like to think it is her sadness or her delirium, perhaps her oblivion. It might just be this place. In here everything leans toward something without being anything – old Sundays, old friends, worn chairs – tasteful not wasteful – nicely done up, but not ornate.
The two women that are not Elvira perch awkwardly on the edge of the fatted love seat trying their best not to recline or sink down into it, trying their best to behave as if they are on a hard wooden pew while the small group haltingly prays out the Lord’s Prayer. Then it's off to the burial.
“What is it you want me to do now?” Elvira asks the handler leading her by the arm to the casket’s edge.
It's all pretty dignified in that suburban sprawl sort of way.
The funeral procession travels to the Veteran’s Cemetery. Used to be farmland, but now in this part of the county the only Great Harvest is a Target. There is a tremendous amount of construction at the cemetery. Bulldozers have stripped clean the hills, there is a thin layer of red dust over the graves, the equipment, the small stuffed animals, the figurines, and now on our cars think, in unison, all three of the peeved men who are driving at the behest of their sentimental wives.
The procession waits. They are eight minutes early and even though there is no burial before them they will not be permitted to start until their designated hour, lest all be lost to chaos then.
The deceased receives a full military send off. All of them are impressed by the guns, what a treat. During the part with the bugle and then when they hand her the flag and the spent shells a thick molasses sadness founded on ritual conditioning pours out from the souls of all present. Everyone tears up. The transcendent attractiveness of the moment is only lessened by the awkward nose-blowing of the cemetery liaison in the back left corner of the room.
And then it's really done. Outside everyone says how surprisingly touching it had been.
One of the handlers turns toward Elvira and motions to the small plastic Ziploc packed with shell casings, “Isn’t that lovely, really special, that they gave those to you?”
Elvira nods, and then, “What are they?”
The other handler speaks up, looking woefully into Elvira’s eyes, “They’re the shell casings from the salute they did for Tom, Elvira, for you to keep with you.”
“Oh,” Elvira says turning her walker with precision towards the hot car where her hash browns wait. Flat-out refusing to be handled, “Oh, I thought they were batteries.”
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