Illustration by Nivita Chaliki
Wine stained the edge of my mother’s mouth, making her resemble Nosferatu—absurdly comical, scheming, surveying for blood—irreverence incarnate. Tight-lipped and hollow-cheeked, she was deceivingly Puritan in appearance. How lucky she was to have been born in the 21st-century, for if she had stepped off the Mayflower, spectators would have tied her to a stake in seconds, the torches lit. Surely, her family would have joined in, tying her limb by limb to a post like one of those apple-gagged dead pigs at the fair. Loyalty. . . is not their thing. Throughout her entire life, they have threatened to light the match—it’s only a matter of time. Oh, my mother Addy, how everyone simultaneously pitied and hated her. Except me.
My uncle’s funeral was on the agenda. Sitting across from me in the kitchen, my mother was hunched over like a football player, clad in what she liked to call her “funeral blazer”: black on the outside, a hidden silk skull pattern within. She rustled her jacket as she began to give me one of her infamous pep talks. Her painfully raspy-cigarette voice was as intense as always while she advised me on how to mourn.
“Listen, Edna. When we walk into the viewing, don’t look grossed out. Uncle Milton will be real waxy. Touch his hand; it’ll be cold and slippery like a crayon. Don’t stare at his lips to see if the mortician left stitches. If you want to see stitches, look at your Aunt Sandra’s facelift. Stay off that cellphone. Make sure to kiss him goodbye and make sure everyone sees you doing so. Keep a napkin in your pocket to wipe off the formaldehyde. Remember, dying ain’t pretty, and you can’t let the kiss of death linger too long. Pretend that you love him. Pretend that you are Milton’s little girl. Pretend that the pain is too much to bear. Do not laugh at how botched your aunt looks. Instead, kneel and pray—pretend to if you cannot. Act like you feel his spirit, but not in a Ghost Hunters way. Actually, pray for me instead. I am the one suffering from all of this.”
She paused for a moment, then picked up her makeup bag and fished out a lip pencil, quickly adorning her lips in that harsh outlining trend that dominated the early 2000s.
“Don’t seem trashy. These people are opulent, remember that. I took him in before he died. Remember that your Aunt chickened out when his house became a falling hazard. Now cross your legs when you sit. Cry, but not too loud—they’ll find you suspicious. Remember: if you open your mouth about our lifestyle, the mortician will have to get out his needle and thread and sew your lips together. They’ll always blame me, frame me for something. I am their scapegoat. I am their Salem witch. They probably think I poisoned Uncle Milton or something. So tonight, try not to remember how you kissed a rotting body when eating the leftover McDonald’s in the fridge. Remember that I love you. Oh, and remember that huge liquor store is on the way home.”
***
A woman left in the dust, my mother resembled a down-home pioneer, wrinkled and contemplating—like children constantly grabbing for her breast—more, more, more. One can only give so much. She stood behind the funeral home, secretly chewing tobacco, stretching to reveal the years-old pregnancy stretch marks on her gaunt stomach. Oh, the innocent days of conception, when my fetus stretched and contorted her body like a rubber band. When I, fatherless, leapt from her womb in a worn-down state hospital. My out-of-wedlock birth was a disgrace among the family, a scandal that distanced Addy from the rest. But she was a martyr of sacrifice, keeping me blonde and apple-faced with our scant savings while she survived on cheap coffee and jugs of wine. She tugged at the Victorian poison ring my aunt had given her as a gag gift, the one she used to keep my Baby Aspirin in—a synthetic ruby locket wrapped around her skeletal finger. I stood next to her, pulling at my low-waisted dress pants that were an evil only 2004 could dream up. Bedazzled on the back, pressing against my stomach like Pillsbury dough—this was peak style. I have always been well-behaved compared to my mother, a sharp-shooter with her honesty. She was jealous of my good grades and virginal prudery. I was not her, but instead a regular goody-two-shoes like her sister Sandra, someone who attended Church each Sunday and shaved her armpits regularly; we were what she yearned to be. But my mother knew her last nail was already in the coffin.
***
We entered the funeral home, where gold leaf ornamented the chandeliers and across the damask wallpaper. The ceilings were mirrored, like a middle America Motel 6. The decor was like a jest at death, too sexy for a funeral home. This is surely how Milton would think about himself, too. I’m sure he’d feel like Hugh Hefner if only he knew who attended his funeral—much younger wives of business partners, faces lifted and stitched at their temples, cleavage emerging from their black mini dresses. I cringed. How he loved to cheat on his mail-order bride, the one who died from plastic-surgery complications. But, he couldn’t cheat death.
Pictures of him were plastered on poster boards. In one, he was wearing a pinstripe suit, shaking Rudy Guiliani’s hand as they stood in front of a demolition site, accessorized in hardhats. He grinned at the camera, ready to drill for oil. . .that sacred substance that fueled his Rolls Royces and kept his mansion overheated, just as he liked it. Unsurprisingly, the flower arrangements surrounding his casket were gaudy but not too feminine. The colors were blue and gold, with no hint of a pink carnation or red rose. He wasn’t girly. His wife’s urn was by his feet. It was made from illegally mined pure gold, but only a few knew it was empty. He had knocked it over on his carpet in a drunken bender. Instead of redepositing the remains back into the vessel, he simply vacuumed them up and put them out with the trash. When he walked barefoot over that expensive carpet, I always wondered if the leftover ash stuck to his feet like some sort of grim oceanside sand.
***
Sandra, my Aunt, entered the funeral home. My Mother’s tobacco-stained teeth, coated in that toxic slime of nicotine like dried-up honey, attempted to smile at her younger sister. Addy was not as sweet as honey, however—both her teeth and sisterly relationship were rotten. But, she played the game, hugged her while looking at Milton’s gold-plated casket and pretended to be teary-eyed. My aunt’s matching poison ring, emerald green, was long missing from her finger, replaced by a gaudy engagement ring. Perhaps she’d use hers to store relics of my Uncle Milton if she hadn’t lost it. A piece of his salt-and-pepper hair, a tooth.
“Hiii, so weird he’s gone, huh,” Aunt Sandra said in a whiny tone, fiddling with her choppy haircut. She reeked of wealthy New England suburbia, afternoon shopping trips, gimmick diets, and topiary. We all sighed.
My mother began to well up and whispered, “I wonder if the pain will ever go away.” We both knew she was lying. She nervously scraped the tobacco off her teeth with her fingers, to which I nudged her in slight disgust. Aunt Sandra glanced at us with a ditzy expression.
“I didn’t know you were so upset about it, Addy, considering the strange way he just up-and-died under your care. But Edna, I am sure you’re devastated.”
I could feel my mother’s brewing anger, her hot pink bedazzled nails ready to claw my aunt’s eyes out. I had to be tactical with my response. “Yeah, it’s really sad. I’ll miss Uncle Milton.” Perfectly bland, I thought, as there was no way I could be ridiculed for my response.
My mother’s eyes started to bulge. She picked up the pieces as Milton was dying, and Aunt Sandra knew that. Sandra loved to stir up drama at my mother’s most vulnerable.
It was a full-blown old western showdown now. I could sense it.
“Listen, Sandy,” my mother said, her body puffing up like a cobra. “I’m no killer. You think I did it, huh?! Slipped some arsenic into his ‘baby’ food? He was dying, Sandy, you just weren’t around to notice. He had cancer. Look at me! I look like the Crypt Keeper from all the stress of caring for him.”
“Oh, Addy,” Aunt Sandra replied with a nauseating peppiness, “I would never mean anything malicious. I know how tough you are. Nothing seems to hurt you.”
Now my mother was basically foaming at the mouth in anger: “Remember, he took my daughter and me out of his estate for ‘tax purposes.’ His own sister. But I still paid for his care on my own! No help from you, of course.”
“Is this necessary, Addy?” Aunt Sandy whispered in an unnervingly sweet tone.
I pulled my snarling mother by the arm, whispered, “Nice to see you,” and we escaped to our seats. A priest began the service, talking about funeral rites and the brevity of life.
I stared at my Uncle’s waxy body in his casket, waiting for him to move. Would he roll over? Grunt for more mashed potatoes, a sound I became used to after months as his caretaker? Nope, no movement. He simply lay there, indistinguishable from a wax figure one would see at Madame Tussaud’s. I looked over at my mother, who, instead of looking at the priest, had her eyes on Aunt Sandra. Her expression was half hurt, half disgusted. On the other hand, Aunt Sandra had her eye on the prize: Milton’s body. Gazing with an almost cartoonish upset, I could tell she probably did not feel too bad. Aunt Sandy was inheriting Milton’s mansion, after all.
Moments later, Aunt Sandra was called up to say a few words—my mother was not. Standing up like a proud show-pony, she approached the stage. Her spindly nails tapped on the podium as she talked. They were adorned in faux stick-on jewels. I saw one fall as she spoke, its sticky, rubbery back adhering to the coffin.
“Thank you to everyone who came out as we honor my brother, Milton. He truly embodied the American dream, starting a successful oil mining business and leading this country into innovation.”
I looked to my left. My mother was bored like a toddler waiting to go home. I, too, zoned out, white noise spewing from Aunt Sandra’s mouth until she said, “My sister and I thank everyone for coming out today.”
My mother’s eyes started to bulge again, and she whispered to me: “Yeah, I would thank everyone if I was put in the lineup of speakers!” The service was over, and we approached the casket to bid him adieu. I was always the squeamish type, and this was no exception. With a napkin in hand, I quickly gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then, as nausea started to set in, I briskly wiped my lips. My knees buckled as I realized—the smudge of flesh-colored makeup on the napkin was not mine, but Milton’s.
My cousins, Aunt Sandra’s sons, were the pallbearers. They were a lanky group of teenage boys, freckle-faced and ruddy. I had never spoken to them but I’m sure they thought of me as the illegitimate child, the token “mistake” of the family. No problem for me, though, as their cringeworthy awkwardness was enough for me to stay away. The coffin was shut, Milton’s face never to be seen again, as the boys’ adolescent spaghetti-noodle arms inelegantly tried to hold up his weight. But we all knew there was no strength there.
***
The cemetery, thick with marble angels and weeping willows, waited idly for Milton’s residency. His plot was dug out, a square opening of dirt. The brigade of Aunt Sandy’s boys picked up the casket from the hearse with a struggle. It began to shake from instability—my gangly cousins slipped and slid across the cemetery, their teenage acne glistening in the sunlight. Then, it happened. The smallest one, in a tweed suit and bowl-cut, lost his grip. The coffin popped open slightly, and one of Uncle Milton’s hands slid out. It was inflexible yet bobbing abruptly, like a pigeon’s wings taking flight. At that moment, all I could pay attention to were his shiny fingernails, unrealistically polished—how he would have hated the mortician for making them look feminine! But I swept to action, quickly covering my mother’s eyes. My mother had seen it, but protecting her was my instinct. Some days, I wished she would’ve protected me, too.
Aunt Sandra gasped and stumbled back awkwardly on her kitten heels. The oldest boy quickly shoved the hand back in and snapped the lid shut. Sandy went up to the coffin, petting it like a puppy and declaring, “Oh, Milty, I am soooo sorry,” dabbing her dry eyes with Kleenex. The aristocratic funeral party began to console my Aunt, and her victim complex shone as she became the center of attention. I looked over at my mother, expecting her to be distraught from the zombie-like image that had just occurred. To my surprise, a subtle smirk graced her face.
“Mom! What’s so funny?” I remarked, trying to keep her from tainting our reputation further.
“Those spineless boys of Sandy really put the fun back in ‘funeral,’ huh?” she chuckled.
The coffin was lowered down. Aunt Sandra pretended to wail, sounding more like a pig at slaughter, while my Mother was still trying to conceal her laughs. One of Milton’s business partners, older than the cemetery dirt itself, looked over at us. His nostrils, full of wiry gray hair, scrunched in confusion. I nudged my mother and shrugged at him, pretending it was a “normal” part of grief.
“Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust,” the priest announced and gazed at the coffin. It was finished.
***
Our old truck sat in the cemetery parking lot, bruised and gas-guzzling, waiting for us to go home. My mother looked back at the cemetery, scratching her poorly bleached scalp and fiddling with her keys. “Yeah, I’m never coming back to visit this place. Sorry Milton!” she proclaimed nonchalantly. I hopped in the passenger’s seat and looked directly at the baby doll head that sat on her dashboard. My mother had found it rolling on the side of the road. She was like a crow or magpie, picking up objects for her collection, her nest being the junkyard truck that was too good of a deal to pass up. Despite being decapitated, the doll was annoyingly cheery, with ice blue eyes that stared into my soul more than any human could. It was old—Victorian maybe. I imagined a child long ago, dressed in satin or lace, ripping the head off in a moment of Lizzie Borden-style rage. What else was a child to do when tuberculosis was looming and arsenic embedded into the wallpaper? Or, more likely, the babydoll was simply forgotten. Nonetheless, it unnerved me.
The doll’s stout plastic face frequently visited me in childhood fever dreams, those sick days when my mother would anoint my feet with Vaporub and puff cigarette smoke in my face. It would giggle maniacally as I attempted to run from it. My mother was never present in those dreams. I always wished to have one of those ditsy suburban mothers who made chicken broth for their sick children and sang them lullabies. The kind of mother who’d get a golden retriever from the pound and name it something preppy. The kind of mother who’d smile submissively at a compliment. But I came to realize there is nobody like Addy Walker. A woman so brass-knuckles that for her to keep you around meant nothing short of pure devotion.
The doll had stayed the same all my life; it hadn’t changed as my mother wrinkled and her teeth browned. Perhaps it was the baby she would have wanted—silent, unchanging, low maintenance. But, instead, she got me. My mother saw me staring at the doll head with unnerved curiosity. “What?” she chuckled.
“That thing gives me the creeps,” I remarked nervously.
“I thought you liked it!” She picked it up. “Kids like dolls, right? So I’ve kept it here for you if you ever wanted to play with it.”
And with that, she threw it out the car window, its face still smiling as it rolled into the abyss.
***
The smell of cheap air freshener perfumed our old pickup truck. It made me sick, but it smelled like home. A home where sleaze reigned, where things felt cheap and left me nauseous. We pulled up in the driveway, my mother practically levitating to the kitchen for a glass of whiskey. We were home.
“Hey Edna!” My mother hollered from the kitchen as I sat idly in my bedroom. “Go get my sweatpants, will you? This dressy stuff is so uncomfortable.” I went to look through my mother’s clothes. Rhinestone this, skimpy that. I opened her dresser, finding a pair of black office pants, some bras, and a collection of kitsch. Buried between fabrics, I discovered her yearbook. Filled with curiosity, I searched through the abundance of 70s feathered hair and aviator glasses for her picture. There she was, looking into the camera with a peppy grin, her hair blond and coiffed. The light in her eyes, the ignorant bliss, had long faded. I flipped through the pages, through the dozens of phone numbers labeled “Call me!” and suggestive remarks from suitors. Then, I found it tucked into a pair of underwear on the top shelf.
My mother’s current journal, which she used to reminisce, sat atop the piles of memoir scraps I’d been begging her to publish. I admired her writing. But she was private about her work. It was vulnerable, different from the tough facade she put on. Scratching my nosy teenage head, I flipped to the most recent entry.
Reflections on My Childhood, by Adelaide “Addy” Walker
It was the Summer of 1978, and I could not help but itch.
Rosacea plagued my once rose petal-smooth skin, cracking like a leather wallet. The nerves made it no better. I was a teenager the first time I saw death in the flesh. The first time I truly hated my brother.
First, I was hit with the stench.
Sickeningly saccharine, but also like a piece of bacon left to rot. Initially, it seemed a deer or raccoon had croaked in the field behind our country house in the Catskill mountains. But then, I saw the bloat. The belly.
An abundance of blood with tufts of russet fur. Beside it, a bag of doll stuffing and a hunting rifle. My brother Milton had killed a fox. It was a way of connecting to his “primitive” roots. Grinning, he held up his catch, ready to be taxidermied for the living room mantle, blood and guts strewn across our backyard. Now furiously scratching the blistering patch of teenage insecurity on my arm, I approached the picnic table where the once cunning creature was cut open like Persephone’s pomegranate, sacred and sanguinary.
“I know foxes are your favorite animal!” Milton exclaimed. “I wanted it to be a surprise but thought you’d like to have one of your own.” I held back tears which he didn’t care to notice. Decades-old bottles of chemicals like formaldehyde and mercury were lined up on the table. . .the ones he inherited from our neighbor, who’d made amateur taxidermies for money. Our family used to be like the pioneers in Dust Bowl photos: gaunt and sunburnt, with floral farm-sack dresses. Then, wealth came along through oil mining and Milton’s luck. And we became even more miserable.
Without realizing, my elbow knocked a glass eye off the operating table. While Milton gutted and sewed, my gaze trailed towards a movement in my peripheral vision. It was the eye: it had rolled next to my feet, perpetually banging into the side of a tree trunk. Yellow. Or perhaps green. Intended to make the creature look alive. It was like a sick game of marbles: the organic nature of our countryside backyard fighting with the inorganic, the eye that would never rot.
It is 2004 now, and death is still messy and sickening. A primitive instinct of stench and decay that screams “bad” or “stay away.” Humanity loves to remove this barrier, such as in my recently-deceased brother’s case. He was there, covered in the spider veins of illness, and then he was gone—out of sight.
Filling my gullet with alcohol after the coroner took my brother’s body, I numbed the pain. How else was I to mourn? Grieving for my family is a performance. They hid in fear when the tumors spread—when medicine had to be administered and doctor’s appointments attended. This is the American dream, huh? I picked up the pieces and heard the roaring coughs as he sat in my living room La-Z-Boy. He had brought the taxidermied fox with him when he came to stay, making its new home next to our television. It watched him die, as he had watched it. But, since I stepped up, my family has been suspicious of me. “Why did he die so quickly?” my sister asked after I broke the news—implying that I over-medicated him, or worse, poisoned him to take a load off. But she never saw him decline like I did. ”
I quickly shut the notebook, suddenly hearing footsteps in the hallway.
My mother walked in the room with a bottle of whiskey in hand, already drunk and brutally alone.
“Well, have you found my sweatpants?” she pondered, to which I shook my head no. She scowled, pushed me aside, and started scavenging through the fabric as she spoke. “I’m officially brother-less,” my mother sighed, taking a sip of liquor. Knowing the pity party that was about to ensue, I excused myself to our living room, a cavernous place, with wood paneling so absurdly 70s that it was ironically chic. Sitting down in front of the television, I began to pet the fox taxidermy which Milton slaughtered for my mother all those years ago. Its matted fur stuck to the oil of my fingertips, slimy and ancient. I wondered where all of his taxidermy tools had gone—all the old, lethal chemicals for treatment and knives used to gut the corpses. I remembered how I used to pet the fox, sitting next to my vacant Uncle, who shoveled down applesauce as he watched Jeopardy. My mother would always scream at me to give him his painkillers, and I would comply, forcing them between his tightened lips.
Then, I realized, with a gulp of pure horror—
When I gave Uncle Milton his pills that last time, I had forgotten to wash the lethal chemicals from my hands.