6
TATUM
JULY 2001
It is too hot for a funeral. That is what I keep thinking. It is too hot for a funeral, and how am I expected to be burying my mom when it is 103 degrees, and I can’t think straight because of the heat? I am sweating and clammy and red faced, and my hair is sticking to the back of my neck and my skirt is flush against the backs of my thighs, and the sun is so bright I wonder if I might go blind.
She wanted to be cremated, scattered in our garden. She told Piper as much when it became clear that this time the cancer was too furious to be beaten back.
“Just some of the gals from the hospital, you girls, and some cake afterward, OK?”
They hadn’t told me it was as bad as it was until just a few days before she was gone.
And June, with Ben, had been blissful: he had found the money to turn the Romanticah short into a feature, and we’d celebrated his Tisch graduation with a real—if low-budget—shoot, spending the days tromping through Central Park with his small crew, his small cast, and me as his star, spending the evenings in his parents’ sprawling uptown apartment. They were in Europe for June, so I could collapse in his childhood bed without shame, without the next-morning embarrassment of sneaking out. In our earlier days of dating we landed at my tiny apartment most nights, but its starkness compared to the luxury he’d grown up in was claustrophobic and a little horrifying.
When Piper called and told me that time was running out, I felt as if I were watching the conversation like a film: I was there but not really; distant but still engaged just enough. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention, or maybe I’d just been so lost in falling down the rabbit hole of this new life that Ben breathed into me—a nearly working actress, a woman worthy of being adored—that I hadn’t wanted to believe the truth of Mom’s diagnosis.
He’d told me he’d loved me right before I left to say good-bye to her. We’d been together six months, and I already knew in how he looked at me, by how he touched me. But I wasn’t brave enough to say it first. As I was packing, grabbing whatever I could find that would be appropriate to wear to your mother’s funeral, he sat on the bed and said simply:
“Hey, Tate, I love you.”
And then I stopped grabbing whatever I could find and climbed back into bed with him and proved to him that I loved him too. Told him too. I’d told a million boys along the way that I loved them. This might have been the first time I understood what that meant, and even more so, how it felt to be loved back. To be seen. With my insecurities, with my bruises, with my baggage. It wasn’t a coincidence that I’d done my best work with him on Romanticah. He was the first person who ever saw through me, but not because he wanted to expose me, but rather because I was willing to expose myself.
And now I am standing under the light of a thousand suns, and Piper is plunked down on a tree stump in our backyard, her shoulders trembling, her head low. She is weeping, and I need to move to comfort her, to place a reassuring palm on her back, because that’s what older sisters do for their younger siblings when their mom has died. But I worry that if I move, I’ll collapse, like I’m a pile of emotional dominos and a tiny reverberation will send it all to dirt on the ground where we are about to toss the fiery remains of my mother’s broken body. Instead, Dot, my mother’s best friend from nursing school and then the rest of her life, offers Piper a hand, pulls her to her feet and into a bear hug. Piper burrows into her shoulder and wails.
The doorbell rings inside the house, which brings me to.
“I’ll get that,” I say, right as Piper manages, “Leave it, don’t.”
The heels of my shoes slide off from my sweat, and I ditch them by the patio glass door and rush through the hallway to the door. I realize how hasty I am as soon as I’ve swung the door open. Everyone we needed to be here already is. Well, not Ben. But I told him not to come. He is racing to get Romanticah edited in time for film festival submissions, which I used as an excuse to tell him not to join me. But also, I didn’t want him to see where I came from, didn’t need him to know, unequivocally, that I didn’t deserve him, even on my best days, even in our best life. My mother was a nurse and my dad sold life insurance, but not well and only when he was sober. It’s not that I was ashamed, really, but it’s not that I wasn’t either. Our house needed a paint job, and the carpet was left over from the ’80s. Ben grew up on an entire floor on Park Avenue, with a nanny and a housekeeper, and two parents who vacationed in Europe for the month of June. And even though he loves me, and even though he sees me, part of me (plenty of me) was still self-conscious: What if he saw how vast the divide was between us and decided that even when I put on my very best face, morphed into whatever role he needed from me, it still wasn’t enough?
He wouldn’t have been my first boyfriend to do that, and he was already miles ahead of them. Handsomer, more successful, better lineage. If all the rest of them could dump me, could deem me not worthy, what’s to stop Ben when he uncovers the blights of my past? So I sat on the edge of his bed in his perfect childhood bedroom, with a signed Yankees poster from Reggie Jackson framed above his headboard, and I assured him I didn’t need him to come. It was a masterful performance, really, convincing enough that he didn’t even second-guess me. He kissed my tear-stained cheeks, and stripped my shirt off, and then the rest of my clothes too, and afterward held me against him until I stopped shaking and fell into a fitful sleep that offered no rest.
The doorbell chimes again as I wrap my sweaty palm around the knob and swing it open.
Shit, I think, as the bright light of day greets me.
“Shit,” I actually say aloud when I see my dad standing on the precipice.
“Tate,” he says, his voice breaking.
He is dressed in an ill-fitting brown suit with a loosely knotted tie. He’s aged in the two years since I left the Canton outskirts, since I last saw him at my college graduation party, which my mom threw for me here in this very house. They were separated (again), and he got drunk (again), and she calmly asked him to leave and then he didn’t, so I less calmly asked him to leave, and then he toppled my graduation cake onto the concrete of the back patio, where it smushed into a depressing pile of cooked egg and flour and green icing. Piper grabbed him by the elbow and called him a cab, and we all pretended that he hadn’t just ruined the party like he had ruined a million things before. I’d gotten good at pretending by then: I’d graduated with honors from Ohio University, spent my summers in summer stock, where I’d met Daisy, been accepted to Tisch on grants and scholarships.
As Piper dragged him out, and just before he swiped a loose arm at the shelf with my mother’s and my snow globe collection, sending glass and water and sparkles careening to the ground, I’d pressed my face into something of a blissful smile and made a passing joke about how my dad had celebrated a bit too much at getting his daughter out of the house. This was my mask. My act. I counted on both so easily that I wanted to make a career of it.
“Who invited you?” I say to him today.
“Piper.” He flops his hands, which seem to want to reach for me, but don’t move too far from his sides. He knows better by now.
“Piper!” I shout over my shoulder to the back of the house.
“I’ve been sober for a year,” he says.
“Congratulations.”
“That’s the longest since—”
I wave a hand, cutting him off. I know it’s the longest since high school. I don’t need him to tell me. Like Piper and I didn’t used to hang the moon around the times when he was clear and present, like we didn’t shut the door to the bedroom we shared and turn up the radio and sing too loudly to drown out the times when he wasn’t. He was never violent, never even particularly cruel, only destructive to himself and unreliable, which meant that the one thing a child needed—stability—was the one thing he could never provide. Some mornings, when my mom was sick, it meant he’d be too drunk to drive us to the school bus, and we’d end up walking the route to the stop, usually missing it, then trudging to school on foot; some afternoons, it meant asking the neighbors if Piper and I could join them for dinner, because our fridge was empty and Mom couldn’t get out of bed and Dad was nowhere to be found. Well, he surely could be found, at A.J.’s, his bar of choice, but it’s not like we were going to go down there and force him home.
“I’m here to bury Mom, to help Piper. I’m not here to deal with you,” I say to him. The sun shifts from behind a cloud, and again it’s too bright, blinding, melting. I narrow my eyes, squeeze them shut, then blink them wider like this is all a mirage. But he’s still there when I open them.
“Dad,” Piper says from behind me, then brushes past me into his arms. He emits a sob that sounds so guttural, I literally step back into the hallway.
We return to the garden, me unable to look at him.
“I couldn’t not include him, Tate,” Piper whispers. “He’s our dad. He was her husband. He was here a lot these past few months.”
I nod, pressing my lips tightly together so nothing slips out I’ll regret. Piper was always more forgiving of him than I was. She doesn’t remember when our mom was first diagnosed when I was twelve, and Dad coped by blacking out on the couch and getting fired from his job. She doesn’t remember walking around the strip mall, going from store to store, asking if someone could give me a job, finally being granted a kind reprieve by Ralph at the pharmacy, who let me work as a bag girl. She doesn’t remember him forgetting to pick me up from choir practice three times in a week, and how humiliated I was to slink back into school to ask Ms. Byrdwell if I could use a phone to try to call him . . . or someone.
He was sober again by the time I was fourteen, when my mother was in remission, then not when I was fifteen, and it stayed that way mostly until I graduated. I lived on campus at college, but was home enough to see the pattern of ruin he left, and my mom finally saw it too. She kicked him out, but she wasn’t much better at sticking to her word than he was, and so their home became a revolving door for forgiveness. It wasn’t any surprise that Piper learned the same lesson: Come back to me, and I’ll absolve you.
Dot, my mom’s oldest friend, asks for us to hold hands, to bow our heads in prayer that Mom is no longer in pain, that she isn’t part of this physical world, that she is somewhere else, somewhere better. I don’t know if I believe this; I don’t know what I believe, really. But I dutifully drop my chin to my chest, and the sun is so very, very hot again, and I think of Ben and wish he were here but am also so relieved that he isn’t. That he isn’t seeing this mess of a life I’ve left behind; that he can’t see my weeping, which is now coming in waves, that he can’t see my father, who is clutching Piper’s elbow.
I think of the last time I saw my mother. Jesus, it was Christmas. When we watched It’s a Wonderful Life. She asked me if I was happy, as if I even knew what that meant.
I said: “I’m happy. But I’ll be happier when I’m employed, you know, working as an actor.”
She replied: “Don’t define yourself by that, sweetheart, don’t live a life marked by intangible achievements.”
“That’s not intangible; that’s real.”
She smiled at something I didn’t understand.
“You’re always saying, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it,’” I said.
“Well, that’s true.” She nodded. My mom had always been a writer—well, she’d always been a nurse. But she’d also been a poet, just for herself, she said, just because I can. “I want you to be anything you dream of. But mostly I want you to be happy. Those things aren’t always the same, you know.”
“But what if they are?” I asked.
“That’s why you’re young; that’s why you have the time to figure it all out,” she said, before rising to go make herself some tea.
I feel dizzy under the sun’s rays and worry I might pass out. Dot asks us all to step forward, to scoop my mother’s ashes and to send them out into the air, over the garden, over our home, back into the ground where they’ll bloom again in the form of flowers and snap peas and, if we’re lucky, perfect strawberries in later summer. I squeeze Piper’s hand tighter, unsure if I can do this, really let her go. But then I remind myself that I can do anything, be anyone. That is what I dream. I slip outside my grief, morph myself into someone else—someone who isn’t here burying her mother—and I release Piper’s grip and go.