I'll Love You When You're More Like Me (13 page)

There was a slow fadeout on my face with tears glistening in my eyes. The tears were actually drops of Visine.

“That's a neat line,” Wally said. “I'll love you when
you're more like me. That's really what my father is saying to me underneath it all.”

“It's what the whole world is saying to me,” Charlie said. “Sabra, I think I'm going to gammon you.”

“Your game,” I said, picking up my pieces. “I'll never make it.”

Mama'd say that Charlie's house was kitschy. It was as far from the feeling in our apartment in New York as a cactus plant growing out of a china turtle's shell is from a bonsai tree. There were plastic slipcovers on the rayon slipcovers. There was a yellow vinyl recliner with a magazine pocket stuffed with old copies of
Gun World
. There was a machine-made sampler framed on the wall that said: R
ELIGION
S
HOULD
B
E
O
UR
S
TEERING
W
HEEL
, N
OT
O
UR
S
PARE
T
IRE
. There were two miniature American flags crossed under a picture of Charlie's father as a sailor in World War II, on the mantel beside a stuffed owl. There was wall-to-wall yellow carpeting with a floral pattern and a deer's head hanging out from the wall over the T.V. In one corner there was a glass gun case with a padlock on the door. In the opposite corner there was a very green and shiny-leafed plastic palm tree.

Charlie's mother was helping run a yard sale, so we had the house to ourselves. When I'd arrived there, I'd called Mama.

“Okay, Maggie, where in the name of blue blazes have you been? I called the hospitals.”

“At a friend's house.”

“Whose?”

“Mama, I have my private life and you have yours.”

“Mine has left for New York,” said Mama.

“I don't care where Lamont is,” I said.

“I told him you want to leave the show for good, so there's no point in his hanging around Seaville. How's your tummy?”

“I'm sure you've got more pressing matters to worry about,” I said.

“Are you taking Librax?”

“Like how to spend more money on Lamont,” I said.

“Lamont is gone, Maggie. Now come home. We'll have dinner and compose a letter to Fedora.”

“I'll be home for dinner,” I said.

“I want you to know you're doing the right thing, too.”

“By coming home for dinner?”

“By leaving
Hometown
,” said Mama.

After
Hometown
went off, Charlie and Wally and I lazed around watching a
Batman
rerun. I hadn't done anything like that since The Dark Ages when Sam, Sam, Superman had us trapped in suburbia and I was under the spell of Elvis Presley. Mama called what we were doing “lollygagging.” She'd come bursting into my room, turn off Elvis and say to me, “What are we doing lollygagging around here like Mrs. Average and her daughter, Mediocre? Let's go to The Apple for some fun!”

We'd head down the Palisades Parkway for New York doing eighty. We'd visit agents and casting directors Mama'd known when she was in the business. Mama would show me off and brag how well Sam, Sam, Superman was doing, exaggerating like crazy. (He was working for Tackier Brothers Toy Company then, pushing Adam Zee Worm, a computerized animal that said the alphabet, and One, Two, Three Flea, another one that counted to a hundred and
lived on a plastic dog's back.)

My own father had been an actor like Mama, only he hadn't lived long enough to make a name for himself. “It's in your blood, Maggie,” Mama used to tell me. “You're not just another salami decorating the deli ceiling—you're special!”

We'd end up someplace like the Promenade Cafe in Rockefeller Center for their Summer Sundae; Joe Allen's for pecan pie; or the Russian Tea Room for baba au rhum. Mama could always turn an ordinary day into something different; neither Mama nor I were ordinary-day types.

I was thinking a lot about that while the three of us hung around Charlie's. A part of me was standing over by the gun case sizing up the scene, and wondering how I'd fit in anywhere without
Hometown
. Until I'd talked to Mama on the phone that afternoon, everything I'd said about quitting the show had a make-believe feeling to it, because I'd really just been threatening Mama with the idea. There was nothing make-believe about Mama's tone of voice, though.

Charlie was talking about some new idea his father had to send him out to Oconto, Nebraska, to work on a farm. An old Navy buddy raised cattle someplace in Nebraska, and needed more hands.

“Maybe you'd like it,” Wally said.

“Maybe I'd
hate
it,” Charlie said. “I never even heard of Oconto, Nebraska.”

“Don't do anything you don't want to do,” I said.

“My father says I can't hang around here, it's not a boarding school,” Charlie said. “My job at Loude's ends in September.”

“Why Nebraska, though?” Wally said. “It's so far away.”

“That's why,” said Charlie.

“You should go to New York City,” I said. “You'd fit in there.”

“My mother thinks it's Sin City,” said Charlie.

“Nobody gives a hoot if you're gay in New York,” I said.

“If I told my mother I was going to New York City to live, she'd have to take all the dirty pots and pans out of the oven where she shoves them, so she could put her head in and end it all. Once a week my mother spends a whole day taking a Brillo pad to every pot and pan we own. They stack up in there until it looks like a Teflon graveyard.”

“You want to know something my shrink says?” I said. “She says the solutions to all your problems are right in front of you, waiting to be handled. They're like horses with the reins already attached to them. It's just up to you whether you want to grab hold of the reins.” If
my
shrink ever said anything that long she'd have to go to bed for a month to recover from complete exhaustion. It was really something Dr. Day, Storybook Sabra's shrink, had said.

“What would I do in New York?” Charlie said.

“Get a job. Meet me for coffee after my classes.”

“Where are your classes?” Wally said.

“I don't know yet, but I'm grabbing the reins. I'm quitting the show.”

“
Why?
” Wally said.

“I'm going to be a normal person,” I said.

“I can't stand overachievers,” Charlie said.

At that point Mrs. Gilhooley came through the back door calling out, “Charles? Are you in there? I need some help with a cornucopia I bought you for your room at the yard sale!”

“How did you know I always wanted a cornucopia for my room?” he said.

“Don't be so smart, this has got the waxed fruit already in it,” she called back, “and it's a knockout!”

Before I drove home, I dropped Wally off at his house.

“Would you go out sometime with me?” he said.

“You mean now that I'm going to be a normal person?”

“You have to start somewhere,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, “call me.”

13. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

Late Monday night, Legs Youngerhouse, the tennis pro at the Hadefield Club, was shot to death by a jealous husband. Tuesday morning we were busy preparing Slumber Room II for him, at the same time getting ready for Miss Wheatley's funeral. When my father discovered we were short one pallbearer for Miss Wheatley, he told me to call Charlie and see if he could get a few hours off from Loude's.

“For eight dollars an hour, I'll carry Legs on my back all by myself,” said Charlie. “I'm going to need all the money I can get my hands on by Labor Day.”

“It's not Legs you'll be carrying, it's Miss Wheatley,” I said, “and I thought you'd be more upset.”

“I got over Legs a long time ago,” Charlie said.

Mr. Llewellyn was practicing “High Hopes” again in our chapel. My father and Mr. Trumble were backing out the ambulance to rush down to the Hauppauge morgue for Legs' body.

Charlie said, “I broke the news last night that I'm going to New York.”

“You can tell me about it when you get here,” I said. “You'll need a dark suit, white shirt, quiet-type tie.”

“There's not much to tell,” Charlie said. “My mother wept until the nine-o'clock movie came on, and my father
said if I wanted to live in a big city I should consider San Francisco.”

“Why San Francisco?”

“I think because it's farther away,” said Charlie. “Are suede shoes okay?”

“As long as they're dark,” I said.

While I was dusting the coffins in the Selection Room, Deke Slade called to say they hadn't received a single order from any of Legs' family or friends.

“It isn't a P.O., is it?” he asked.

“Not that we know about,” I said.

“By the way, I'm having a party Thursday night,” he said. “Eight o'clock, if you want to come.”

“Thanks,” I said. “All the red roses you sent over for Miss Wheatley are dead already.”

“Then bury them with her,” Deke said.

In addition to “Evasions,” I wrote one other composition for English that Mr. Sponzini gave me an A+ on. It was called “Fear and Funerals,” and it was about all the superstitions responsible for the way we bury the dead.

I spent a week researching it at the Seaville Free Library. I started off by knocking down the theory that the wearing of black had something to do with showing respect for the dead. The truth was that mourners wore black originally out of fear that the ghost of the corpse would want to lure them to their deaths, too: Black was thought to be an inconspicuous color that wouldn't call attention to those nearest the coffin.

The coffin was carried out feet first so the corpse couldn't look back and beckon one of the family to follow it in death. The long, exaggerated eulogies were because no
one wanted to chance offending the dead. The flowers were to appease the ghost; the music was supposed to lay his spirit to rest, and so was the handful of dirt tossed into the open grave.

“What are you proving, Wally?” my father said when I showed him the composition.

“I'm not proving anything, just explaining how these things came to be,” I said.

“It seemed to me you're knocking the business,” said my father. “I don't care if you did get an A+. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.”

As a curious man, on the scale of one to ten, my father rates about –1 when it comes to the folklore of funerals. Although he'd never own up to it, I think he still carries with him a lot of the old guilt undertakers used to have about the profession. Some of them actually used to live in towns miles away from their mortuaries, and pretend they were commuting shopkeepers or salesmen.

You might call my father a bland conversationalist. He likes to make small talk about weather record highs and lows, anyone's family connections, a ballplayer's batting average, or anything that falls into the category The Way Things Were Back When. He and Mr. Trumble can do a whole number on the hurricane of '38, Pearl Harbor Day, or butter rationing during World War II. There's no radio back in the shop. The two of them reminisce while they work. You can turn on the intercom that connects the shop with our house and hear them:

“Wasn't she Louise Waite's niece?”

“Oh yes, a Waite on one side and a Palmer on the other. You can see the Palmer resemblance.”

“Well Louie was a holder of the Purple Heart, if I remember correctly.”

“It was the Congressional Medal of Honor, Mr. Trumble. Purple Hearts weren't that rare, you know. Artie Young got one, lot of boys did.”

I was always forgetting my father's aversion to certain types of information. There was a famous philosopher, I don't remember which one, who said the unexamined life was not worth living. My father seemed to feel the examined life wasn't. The afternoon of Miss Wheatley's funeral I was reminded again of how he felt. Three of Miss Wheatley's faculty friends from Seaville High had sent three large orchids with a card attached which said, “
Ruthie, we'll be with you before long: Gladys, Gert and Frances.
”

Charlie was riding in the flower car with Mr. Trumble, who was feeling tired from the trip to Hauppauge. I was riding in the hearse beside my father. My father's a very thin, tall man who looks a little timid because he has a habit of backing away from people when he talks to them, and because he wears these rimless glasses that went out of style in my grandfather's time. Both the backing away and the glasses are part of the undertaker's syndrome: I mustn't offend. The glasses, he believes, are the least offensive and conspicuous. I think he backs away out of fear his breath might smell. My father's always asking me or my mother to “okay my breath.”