Although I pretend not to notice, I can tell that there are people in the room staring at me. While I’m not vain, I’m not stupid either; it’s not like I don’t know what I look like. I know what they’re seeing. By all empirical measures, I’m a social misfit trapped in a model’s body—maybe an eight on a scale of ten. I have hair like those girls in shampoo commercials. I mean it—it’s some glossy, thick stuff. Left to itself it’s a sad, mousy brown, but I have it shamelessly dyed to a Harlequin Romance chestnut just in case I run into my own personal thong-clad Fabio. I’ve been told my whole life that my eyes–hazel with slivers of cat-eye yellow–are “striking.” At five feet ten, my only real complaint about my body is that I have a hard time finding size ten shoes. And tall men.
All the staring does make me self-conscious, and I fight the urge to find a mirror. As if on cue I notice the large mirror on the opposite wall. And then I wonder—why a mirror in a funeral home viewing room? It’s one of those really ostentatious, oversized mirrors. It must be there to make the room look larger. At least I hope that’s its purpose….it’s not like the corpse is going to sit up and do a makeup check.
Which in the case of Great Aunt Tina is probably a good thing
, I think to myself as I get closer to the casket at the front of the line. Roger Duke does fine with his male clients. He weed-wacks their bushy Andy Roony eyebrows down to an acceptable length and can recreate a comb-over like nobody’s business. But generally speaking I disagree wholeheartedly with my mother’s cousin. Duke’s female clientele never look like they’re “just sleeping.” As the line moves along, I see that Great Aunt Tina’s skin is encrusted with a thick layer of orangish foundation. The word Oompa-Loompa immediately springs to mind.
“Smile!” A camera flash lights up the room like a strobe light at a rave.
“Grandpa!” I fake-whisper, and crouch-run in for a hug. I have to crouch because my grandfather has somehow shrunk to the size of a lawn ornament in the last twenty years. He’s wearing the same powder blue polyester suit that I’ve seen him wear to every formal occasion since I was seven. He gives me a toothless kiss on my cheek, and pushes me back towards the coffin.
“Squat down a little! You’re too tall!” he says, as I pose by the head of my dead great aunt.
Most in the room take this in stride. They know that, basically, my family likes to take pictures of dead people. Not just take pictures of them, but have people pose with them like a bride and groom on their wedding day. “Move a little to the left…can you move your heads closer together? Let’s get another one with you on the right side. Can we get the flowers in the picture? How ‘bout a little smile?”
It’s sort of weird to blow out a cheesy grin when you’re one foot away from an orange cadaver, but I’m a veteran. I beam like I’m Great Aunt Tina’s sole heir while my grandfather snaps a few more photos, then I move aside for the parade of mourners.
“I saw you with that boy,” says Grandpa Leo. He puts his camera on a table and pulls me down for another kiss on the cheek
“What boy?” I say, looking around. And then I remember. “Oh, you mean Christine’s friend? I cut his foot with the heel of my shoe. He was wearing
sandals
. Can you believe that?”
“Royalty can wear what it wants.”
I snort-laugh. “He’s a royal pain in the ass alright.”
“Saw you talking with Prince Roman.” I turn towards my dad’s voice just in time to get nailed with a slobbery kiss on the other cheek.
“His name is Prince?” I say, reflexively wiping my cheek with my hand. “Like the singer?”
By now my mom has stepped into our little circle. She was the most likely inspiration for the song
Short People Have No Reason to Live
and doesn’t even attempt to bestow a kiss; it would require a ladder and a dramatic ascent that could trigger the bends. By this point everyone is laughing heartily at me.
“Prince isn’t his first name,” she explains just as I’m starting to feel really stupid and sort of pissed. “He’s Prince Roman Karl Franz Joseph Max Heinrich Ignatius Habsburg von Lorraine.” In response to my blank stare she adds, “Of Austria?”
Chapter Two
They say you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl. It turns out that it’s pretty tough to get the girl out of the trailer park in the first place—at least this girl. You stay in the trailer park and you never have to worry about the psychological ramifications of an abrupt move to a different socioeconomic class.
Off Colfax Avenue at the edge of Denver, Happy Trails Park (formerly Happy Trails Trailer Home Park) is the run-of-the-mill trailer park where I grew up. The Denver Metropolitan Rejuvenation Project was launched ten years ago and provided subsidized mortgages to low-income renters, which pretty much described all of the mostly elderly residents at Happy Trails.
As a result, today Happy Trails is filled with pseudo-houses, those prefabricated residences that are constructed in pieces at a factory and then sort of slapped together on-site like a kit car. It’s actually hard to tell them apart from smaller suburban ranch homes. Mine came complete with vaulted ceilings, upgraded cabinets in the kitchen and a “luxury tub” in the master bathroom. You couldn’t actually hitch one to your Ford F-150 diesel and take off to the next crystal meth lab.
Every once in awhile, someone will buy a piece of land in Happy Trails and park an actual rolling RV on a concrete slab. This isn’t actually against the zoning regulations for Happy Trails, but, as my neighbor Mrs. Wellmore once stated, “Even trailer trash have standards.” Before they deploy their living room slide-outs, mount a satellite dish, or hook up to the septic system to dump their holding tanks, residents gather at their door and gently suggest to the newcomers that they consider the local Wal-Mart parking lot home until a space at the KOA Kampgrounds opens up.
Which is what I’m doing the next afternoon when my best friend, Kat, pulls up alongside me in her Honda Accord.
“Still enforcing the trailer park caste system?” she says, looking over the group of fifteen or so mostly elderly residents behind me. “Who’s the Untouchable this time?”
“Would you mind speaking to the new people without me?” I say, turning to Mrs. Wellmore, an old lady with a white puff hairdo wearing a pastel flowered robe. I am pretty much the only person in the crowd wearing clothes that are meant to be seen after nine o’clock a.m. or by people other than your mom or spouse. “My great-aunt’s funeral is this afternoon.”
“Oh, you poor thing! Of course, sweetheart, of course!” she says. She turns to the assembled mob whose average age is about eighty-five. “Leigh has such a close-knit family!”
I am actually relieved that Kat’s early. What started off as a well-meant effort as part of the Rejuvenation Project to combat crime by encouraging permanent residency has morphed into a torches and pitchfork scene akin to an AARP battalion storming a Social Security office.
I jump into Kat’s car and shut the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
Kat’s known my family for a long time. She’s against ogling dead people in caskets, so didn’t come for the viewing last night, but, like me, she’s used my great aunt’s funeral as an excuse to take the day off. Which is a good deal for me. My 1993 Dodge Neon, currently at 300,000 miles, cannot be trusted to drive any further than the end of my driveway without a Triple-A team following me in a support car.
I immediately kick my beige heels onto the floor of the car.
“Cute suit,” says Kat, eyeing my pink-pinstripe-on-desert-beige pants as I struggle to extract myself from the form-fitting matching jacket. The papaya lace camisole underneath makes this one of the cutest outfits I presently own. Before I can respond with a “thank you” Kat follows up her compliment with, “So…do you have any friends who aren’t cotton heads?”
I choose to ignore her blatantly ageist comment and change topics. “I’ll have you know that I personally impaled the foot of the Crown Prince of Austria last night.”
She pops the car into reverse and swings her arm around to the back of my seat, craning her head and torso around to back up. “Yeah, I heard.”
“You heard? How?”
Now in drive, she slowly maneuvers the car past the crowd of my aged neighbors. “I ran into Christine and them last night.”
“At the Funky Buddha?”
“Uh-uh. Walking downtown. It was late. They’d just seen a movie.”
“He’s not really a prince anyway,” I say peevishly. I don’t tell her that I spent two hours on the internet the night before trolling for information on him. “Austria’s a parliamentary representative democracy. The monarchy was abolished in 1918.”
“Yeah, but a girl can always dream. Christine says that Austrians have the option of reinstating the monarchy by petitioning the Parliament. Besides, how many people do you know who are the next in line to a throne that doesn’t exist anymore?”
“How is it that Christine knows almost royalty anyway?”
Kat shrugs. “I guess they just reconnected a couple of months ago, but they met in–”
“I’m worried about his jaw,” I say, cutting her off.
“His wha’?”
“His jaw,” I snap. “The House of Habsburg-Lorraine was completely inbred. All that inbreeding…some of them had jaws like bulldogs. Charles the Second couldn’t even chew his food because his grandmother was also his aunt. And he was insane, mentally retarded, and impotent.”
Kat shoots a sideways look at me. “You’re effing weird.”
Her insult—contracted curse word and all—is said with the greatest affection and I am not offended. I know how much effort she has expended of late to reform her mouth. Time-honored curses like the F-bomb and sonuvabitch have been replaced with laughable substitutes like “holy old leguva bench” and “Jesus tapdancing Christ.”
Kat and I have been friends since college, so my peculiarities have sort of grown on her. “He asked about you,” she says. “As soon as he heard that we were friends he wanted to know where you lived, what you ate for breakfast, and whether or not you had ever considered writing a book about...how did he put it? ‘Funereal rites and fashions.’”
I groan and sink down into the seat until my nose hooks the diagonal seat belt strap. “Stop, stop, don’t tell me anymore.”
“Roman went to law school with Christine at Denver University,” says Kat. “So scratch mentally retarded. He owns some kind of construction company. And I’d be willing to give him a little tumble to check on that impotency thing for you.”
“Thanks, Kat.”
“Hey, that’s the kind of friend I am,” she says. “Always thinking of others.” She lifts her feet up onto tiptoes to hold the steering wheel with her knees while she twists her waist-length blonde hair into a bun on the back of her head and stabs it in place with a pen. She can get away with a bun because she’s been married for eight years and just doesn’t care anymore.
She recently informed me that she only shaves her legs and armpits on national holidays, which really isn’t as much of a sacrifice as it may appear—she’s one of those women with silver-blonde hair, water-blue eyes, and porcelain skin who produce colorless, translucent body hair. “I was, like, twenty before I realized that other girls shaved every day,” she once told me. And unlike the rest of the female population, whom she refers to as “muffburgers,” Kat has never had to have her junk waxed. Apparently she’s like a Barbie doll down there.
Kat turns the car onto Colfax heading west. “I gave him your phone number,” she says.
“You
what
?” This is a potentially bad development, and I reach into my purse and turn off my phone so any calls I get will go straight to voicemail.
“He asked for it!”
I don’t respond. I don’t have to. Kat knows that I have the social skills of a potted plant, and that the only thing that tops talking to me in person is having a telephone conversation with me. My friends are convinced that I have some sort of debilitating conversational Tourette’s Syndrome, and think a trip to a neurologist couldn’t hurt.
I’ve tried to explain. It’s the silence—it makes me nervous. Once I’ve exhausted the conventional script and the conversation flags, I jump right in like a scattershot of bullets to say something controversial, offensive, or blatantly moronic. “Do you ever wonder how long you have to be friends with someone before you can go to the bathroom while you’re on the phone with them?” The victim of this bit of conversational genius understandably never called again.
It’s a pretty quick trip up Colfax and down Quebec to Fairmount Cemetery which holds the moldering remains of multiple generations of Fromms. The first wave came from Virginia in covered wagons in the late 1860’s, thereafter sealing their affinity for portable housing. At one hundred and twenty years, the cemetery is old by western standards, and possibly has more trees in it than all of the eastern plains. Kat turns onto the entrance drive and slows to a crawl. We pass weeping birches sprinkled among clusters of blue spruce, and families on blankets picnicking under the canopy of American elms.
My Grandpa Leo used to bring my cousins and me here on crisp autumn afternoons to jump in piles of leaves. On Halloween the whole family makes a trip to top the Fromm tombstones with tiny pumpkins before hauling off anyone under thirteen to trick-or treat. On Christmas Eve we light candles and sing carols. Flags on the Fourth of July, Easter egg hunts in the spring. Even when you’re dead you can’t get away from us.
There’s no need to give Kat directions. She makes a series of lefts and rights and finally pulls over to the curb by a ten-foot-tall marble Romanesque statue of a woman weeping, a handkerchief held to her eyes—our own professional, eternal mourner marking prime Fromm territory. There’s already a line of cars in front of ours. We walk on the balls of our feet across moist neon green grass, sidestepping aeration plugs and goose droppings until we reach a black tent erected over rows of folding chairs. I raise my hand to my mom and dad in the second row, and purposely lead Kat to the last line of chairs.