But time and distance had taken its toll. Bobby had moved up in the world. He had new friends. He and Lois had bought a home in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, where the corporate offices were now located, and had joined the country club. Monroe had stayed at home to manage his wife's father's tire store.
Bobby arrived at the church around 1:40 and said the appropriate words to Monroe's wife, Peggy, and a few other classmates. Then he walked over to the casket. He reached out and patted the body lying there, a body that was supposed to be Monroe but was only some cold, hard thing just taken out of a freezer. It startled him. Why was he so cold, had they put him in an icebox? What was lying there in a brown polyester suit and tie looked like a bad mannequin someone had made of Monroe as a joke. What was death anyway, some cruel magic trick pulled by the universe? One moment people are here and then somebody waves a cloth over them and in an instant they are gone.
What was once Monroe had disappeared. Where had he gone? Bobby wondered, just as he had as a child, what happened to the rabbit that the magician pulled out of the hat and made disappear was Monroe hidden in a secret compartment somewhere waiting to come back?
He knew he should be feeling something more but he just felt numb, almost detached. And as he sat in the pew listening to the minister drone on and on, he realized that he had started to hum a little tune that for some unknown reason kept playing over and over in his head. A tune he had not sung in years. Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think. Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink. He knew he should be paying attention to the service but he could not concentrate.
When it was over, the women, as usual, handled everything well; they even seemed to know when to cry. And how to cry, what casserole to make, and where to bring it. All the men did was show up and line up as pallbearers and even then they had to be told what to do. As he carried the body he was still unable to comprehend that it was really Monroe in the box he was lifting. It couldn't be. He was only forty-nine years old. He was supposed to have had so many years left.
Monroe had been walking down the aisle at the Wal-Mart garden and patio center, looking for a good crabgrass killer, and the next thing he was on the floor, dead of a massive heart attack. They say he never knew what hit him.
But Bobby wondered if Monroe had felt it coming, if he had had even a few seconds of wondering what this was. Was he dying? Was it all over? Had he been shocked to realize that this was it, the way it was going to be? Did he have a second to think about the last thing he said to his wife or his children? Did he think about what he had not done? Was he mad, was he scared? Had his life passed before his eyes, as they say it does? Or did it just go black? Is it like sleeping? Do you dream? Was Monroe somewhere watching him right now, pleased he had come after all these years or did anything Bobby did today really matter?
If Monroe had known how short his life was to be, would he have done things differently? Would he have wasted so many days just fooling around his workshop or looking at baseball games? What would he have done, had he really known how fast life goes, like one train whizzing past another a roaring noise, a vibration, and then gone as fast as it came.
After the graveside service, they went back to the house. Peggy had set up a little table with a candle on it, where she had put out some photographs. Bobby walked over and saw the one of Monroe sitting on a pony, the same pony he'd been on, and school pictures, Monroe's wedding picture, frames with his family's pictures of him holding a string of fish, Monroe getting heavier as the years went by but still that same, sweet, good-natured Monroe, who had gone along with every crazy thing Bobby had thought up. After a while, all the guys eventually went out on the back porch and stood around talking, trying to remember all the funny things over the years. That time when Monroe had shot his little toe off when he tripped over his hunting dog, the time he had been caught trying to steal Old Man Henderson's wheelbarrow, all the nutty times of their childhoods. One of the guys passed a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey around and they each took a drink. Most of them, including Bobby, had lost a parent but that was to be expected. This was different. This was the first friend of their own age who had died.
This was too close for comfort.
Death did not scare Bobby; he had seen too much of it in Korea. What scared Bobby was the moment or even the few seconds when you might know you were dying and that everything was over. He had almost drowned once and had thought for a fleeting second that maybe it was his last moment on earth. But at the time he had been so young and after he had the devil scared out of him, he'd promptly forgotten it and continued to take stupid chances. The young can forget easily. As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to forget your own mortality. There are so many reminders. Little individual end of the worlds start to happen all around you. When your grandparents go, your parents are ahead of you, but when they go, you look around and realize you are next in line. Then one day you are actually talking about cemetery plots and insurance.
It was about five when the get-together was over. Before he left to go back to the airport, Bobby decided to take a walk around town. He had not been home since his mother's funeral all those years ago. As he walked down streets where he had once known every face he passed, there were now strangers who had no idea who he was. They thought this was their town. Streets and houses that he had once known as well as the back of his hand had all changed. He walked along his old paper route but there were strangers in the old Whatley house, strangers sitting on the porch where the Nordstroms used to live. He cut down a few alleys, which years ago had seemed twenty feet wide, and was surprised to see that they were just narrow little footpaths, lined with garbage cans.
He had not remembered so much garbage. He walked by his old house. He and Anna Lee had sold it a few years ago and he was glad to see it looked just about the same, only so much smaller than he remembered.
Everything was much smaller. Downtown was just a block long. It had seemed so much bigger, like an entire city, as he remembered it. He stopped in front of the window of the Morgan Brothers department store and wondered how they had managed to get a winter wonderland in that little window. The barber pole was gone. Almost every business on the street was closed for good, except for the hardware store and his dad's old drugstore. The glass doors to the old Elmwood Theater were chained shut, and a poster of the last movie shown there, in '68, was dusty inside the glass frame. He stood outside on the sidewalk and stared up at it. God, he thought, the hours he had spent inside, the theater filled with screaming children and squeaking seats being flipped up and down. The green tin light sconces up the sides of the walls, a place so dark you would be blind for a few minutes as your eyes adjusted, until you could make out those little white lights on the floor by each row of seats and you would head down the aisle, your feet carpeted by some wonderfully soft, multicolored maroon and pink and green stuff leading you deeper into the theater, closer and closer to the big screen, where life was exciting and full of a million possibilities and dreams. He walked over and peered inside the lobby but could not see much. He did not know if it was because of the Jim Beam but as he stood there he could almost hear the large glass machine popping corn.
He could taste the salty, buttery taste of that popcorn in the greasy red-and-white-striped bags. And even though the diner had closed years ago, he could still remember the tangy taste of mustard and chili on the hot dogs, washed down with bottles of ice-cold Orange Crush. And as he went by the drugstore he could taste all the root-beer floats, lemon and strawberry sodas, the banana splits, and the steaming hot-fudge sundaes he had eaten over the years.
So many sounds and smells. He thought, I must be drunk. He walked back to his car and got in and sat there alone. It was fall and the leaves were just beginning to turn and a thousand new memories flooded his mind.
That time. That place. That feeling. What he would not give to get it, to find it again for a day or even an hour, but he knew it was as impossible as trying to catch smoke in your hand. How could anyone know, when he or she was living it, that they would someday look back with longing, that these would be the good old days? No one tells us, "This is the happiest you will ever be in your life." Why had he wasted so much of it dreaming about going to other places? For the first time, Bobby realized the thing he missed most in the world was gone forever and he sat there and cried like a baby. He wanted his childhood back. He wanted to go home, walk down the hall, and climb into his old bed, and wake up with his future laid out before him on a red carpet. He wanted to go back to when a day seemed to last an eternity and the field behind the house was a vast expanse that led to magic places and the swimming pool was as long and as wide as a lake.
When your best friend was your blood brother and all the girls thought you were cute. He wondered whatever had become of the Bubble Gum King of 1949? That boy who was going to fly planes, jump freighters to the Orient, be a cowboy, and do so many wonderful things.
Nothing too terrible. He had just grown up.
A bad childhood followed by a happy adulthood is one thing, and a good childhood followed by an unhappy adulthood is another. But for Tot Whooten, a miserable childhood had followed her like a black dog right into an equally miserable adulthood. She had been so busy she had not noticed until one day when she looked around and it seemed clear to her that life was not a constant struggle for other people. They seemed to actually enjoy it and look forward to the dawning of a new day.
It had suddenly become obvious to her that if you wake up every morning and it takes you almost an hour to talk yourself into just getting out of bed, something is wrong. Every morning for the past twenty-plus years she had been her own mental cheerleader, doing back flips and chanting, "Be happy you are alive, life is great, rah rah rah… sis boom bah! You will be dead soon enough, don't waste your life away, get up, get up, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, it's a new day," and so on. But this morning the cheerleader inside just sat down with her pompoms and flopped back on the bed beside her, saying, "I'm exhausted… I give up, I can't do it anymore." She was like that Old Man River, tired of living, but feared of dying, and this morning she had realized that she could no longer jcs' keep rolling along.
After a lifetime, day after day, of getting up and taking care of first her brothers and sisters, then her own children, a drunken husband, her parents she was like the elephant, so exhausted from carrying such a heavy load that she just fell down and couldn't get up. Poor Tot knew that not only could she not go on but she did not want to go on. Each of her children had been such a disappointment, and she had not had one good holiday in her life. Every Christmas had been the same. James drunk as a coot by ten in the morning, passed out by noon, and Darlene and Dwayne Jr. constantly fighting over something. Darlene was on her fourth marriage and her daughter Tammie Louise seemed to be taking after her only ten and already crazy about the boys with the motorcycles.
The last time Tot had seen Dwayne Jr. he had come to visit and walked off with her good silver candlesticks to buy more dope with, she guessed, or to hand over to that skinny girlfriend of his, the one with the penciled-in black eyebrows who smoked one cigarette after another.
Where he had found her was a mystery that she was afraid to solve.
And neither one of her children would listen to her. They both snapped, "Well, look who you married." Not that she hadn't tried with Darlene. She had sent her to the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl, but Dixie had sent her back home with a note.
Dear Tot,
Darlene does not know her right from her left and I am afraid she will never make a dancer. You work too hard for your money to waste it on any more lessons.
Sincerely, Dixie
Then, after years of putting up with James and his drinking, and begging and pleading with him to quit, they found him one day passed out in the back of the garage, sick as a dog from one of his long binges. The doctor finally told him, "If you take one more drink it will kill you." After all the years of Tot threatening him, crying, that one sentence did it.
He sobered up and soon was holding down a good job and the next thing she knew he was sitting in the living room telling her about some woman he had met in AA. He looked her right in the eye and said, "Tot, for the first time in my life I am really in love." There she sat, after having borne his two children, put up with his drinking for over thirty-two years, and he had the nerve to tell her he was in love for the first time in his life. At that moment it occurred to her why people are driven to murder and she made a mental note not to support the death penalty.
If she had had the strength, she would have killed him, but she was unable to move. So she sat and stared while he went on and on about how sometimes in this life people are lucky enough to find their true soul mate. How for the first time since he was a boy he was able to laugh again. How the world looked bright and new and shiny again.
About how much he liked the new woman's children and that he felt he now had a chance to be a better father this time than he was the last time, now that he was sober, that is. Then he finished off his dissertation on love and second chances. "I can't tell you how much better I feel now that I've been honest with you."
"Oh good. I'm so glad you feel better."
"My sponsor said that the sooner I told you, the better off we would both be."
"I'm glad he thought so," she said.
"So now that you know, what do you want to do about it?"
"What do I want to do about it?"
"Yes," he said and looked at his watch like he was late for an appointment.
"I want you to get up and call that woman and tell her that you are already married."
"Oh, now, Tot, be reasonable. Jackie Sue needs me and you don't."
Tot could not believe her ears. "Jackie Sue Potts? Who's been with every man in this town?"
"Tot, don't say anything you will regret. You don't know what a hard life she has had."
"She's had a hard life?"
"Tot, the past is the past. We all have to live in the present, one day at a time."
"I'll tell you one thing, One Day at a Time. I'll give you a divorce but on one condition. You take that woman and you get as far away from us as you can because I will not live in the same town and have to see her or you, do you hear me?"
Tot had felt like a complete fool. Not only was the girl younger than her daughter, but all this time she had been fixing Jackie Sue's hair. She had been doing it so Jackie Sue would look good for a date with Tot's own husband!
Of course James had not moved and soon she had to see him and Jackie Sue floating all over town, showing off their new baby. That morning she wondered why she had finally reached the end of her rope. Maybe it was because she was just so tired. So bone tired that at long last she could not hold on anymore. By seven o'clock that morning the phone started ringing. She knew it was Darlene, wanting to know if she could drop her children off at the house so she and that new husband of hers could go off to the stock-car races. But for the first time Tot did not pick up the phone. Several more times before noon the phone rang, and several more people wanting something were annoyed because she did not answer. She heard the phone, but even the sound of the ringing did not stir the slightest, smallest interest or need to answer. Tot wondered what had happened. What in her had finally broken. What had undone her at last so she could lie there as peaceful and as silent as a radio that had suddenly been unplugged. That was it, she thought, I am unplugged.
Dead inside at last. No more currents running through me, forcing me to keep going, to turn on, to feel anything.
Was this permanent or was this just the vacation she had never had in her life? How long would she be off, she wondered, and she hoped it was forever. It was so peaceful, so soothing, so painless to be alive but not to feel. It was as if she had stepped out of her body and left the house, although the woman who used to be her was still there, empty, hollow.