Song/Story

If I really had to pick a favorite song, it would probably be this one, "Jesus, Etc." by Wilco. It's always been in my top ten favorite songs, but when I saw them play it live this April it pretty much jumped up to the number one spot--the band stopped playing completely and let the audience sing along to this song. Magic.

The story's not especially related, except that it's me trying to write about my weird summer and "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is always the album I take with me when I just want to drive around and figure shit out.

To Do

1. Be helpful
2. Get a haircut
3. Try not to worry.

I don’t want Cam coming to the funeral, or even the wake. He feels like he should, doesn’t understand.

“I don’t need, like…emotional support.” I say on the phone, pulled over in front of Granite State Glass.

“Shouldn’t I come though? I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do.”

“Please. It’s fine. I’m fine.” I take off my work shoes—high heels today, because I need the stride and the power and the height—and toss them into the back seat. I get flip flops out of the pocket behind the passenger seat and slip them on. Cam’s quiet on the other end of the line, and I know I snapped at him. I think back to the day his grandfather died, that we stood in the aisle of Hannaford’s while he told me and then started crying in front of the One Minute Rice.

“I’m sorry. I love you. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Okay. I love you too.”

I want to keep him out of this so badly. To not infect him with the hurt and the melancholy that runs through my family as surely as red hair and skin cancer. A genetic genius for sadness and grudges and above all not talking about it. Cam’s patient with me when mine flares up—the old familiar funk that sometimes comes over me for days, like some creeping gray creature I can’t name but can’t shake off my shoulders, with clammy muscly fingers that won’t loosen their pressing on my temples. He doesn’t get it, though, only rides with it. His family is all tall, hardy, hardworking Protestants, good Midwesterners through and through. We’re practically caricatures of Irish Catholics—from the peat bogs by way of Southie, with as much alcoholism and petty crime (and as little birth control) in our background as there would be if Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had directed our story.

My grandfather dies on a Tuesday; and I don’t feel anything. I never knew him. He didn’t want to know me, or any of us. He lived alone, called his children on their birthdays but didn’t come to my parents’ wedding, nor the funeral for my infant cousin Katie. Nobody ever talks about why. That’s all I know.

“You don’t have to do it,” my mother says, stirring a cup of milky tea at the kitchen counter. We’re discussing who’ll do the readings at the funeral. “It would mean a lot to Daddy, though.”

“I’ll do it. Somebody should. It shouldn’t be a stranger.”

“Sweetheart, there’s nobody but strangers.”

After the wake we all—aunts, uncles, cousins--go out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. The joke of the hour is “put it on the estate!”—we’ve been left more money than we thought—and everyone orders margaritas and cocktails. Oh, get the steak—put it on the estate! Have another—put it on the estate!

My chicken fajitas are cold and full of gristle, and I send them back. Our food’s already taken forty-five minutes, and I start to lose my grip a little bit when I haven’t eaten. If I’ve missed lunch, I will break down in tears at the slightest provocation. I can feel it coming now, as everyone else tucks into fish tacos and quesadillas and massive frosty goblets of sangria. I stare at my empty place and start to feel that stiffening at the back of my throat, the dampness around my eyes. I hate to cry, and I don’t do it often. People tell me it feels good, sometimes, to just cry, just let it out, and sometimes—jacknifed by heartbreak and Jose Cuervo on a dorm room floor—I’ve even tried, but the tears don’t come. Everyone’s offering me bites of their meals and I can barely accept because I’m afraid I’m going to start crying and they’re all going to think it’s about him and want to comfort me and think I’m so terribly sensitive and there will be a scene in the middle of this Mexican restaurant and I won’t be able to admit that my uncontrollable sobs are all about some goddamn chicken fajitas because I am just so hungry.

But I keep it together. I do not start crying about fajitas. I do not let a stranger read at my grandfather’s funeral. I dress like a grownup and stand up in the church my father attended every Sunday of his childhood and I give the best damn reading from the second letter to the Corinthians you ever heard. I give hugs and that small, sad funeral smile to everyone. I make sure people are introduced to each other. I make sure that my brother doesn’t sneak drinks from the bar. I make sure that my four-year-old cousin Lily gets a hot dog and that my eighty-year-old Aunt Helen gets some aspirin and a seat in the shade. I drive to Cam’s afterward, drink two gin and tonics and sleep for fourteen hours. I’m fine.