I come back to LA for funerals
Emily Spacek
My cousin said recently that when she thinks about visiting our house when we were all kids she remembers having the impression that it was a mansion. She said the second-floor hallway was always dark and endless, there seemed one too many mostly empty rooms to get lost in, and while running around she felt even smaller than maybe what she really was. I don’t remember us playing inside much at all. I just remember my sister as a baby, and my cousin always wanting to swing on the swingset in the yard. I’d be stuck, then, between the swings and my sister, whom I had to watch like a pot of boiling water. I was always nervous and disinterested in what it was babies did. In fact, I remember I didn’t understand why my parents brought her home in the first place.
When my cousin said this, I was nodding and smiling across the dining table at her, which is a default move, modeled for me all my life by my own mother, the master herself of looking engaged even with ears turned off. My mother could turn sharp cold despite the initial friendliness she encountered people with. Sometimes, I become stubborn red with disdain when my cousin Maggie or anyone else says something unsympathetic towards my parents or my sister. While, at the same time, I have said out loud or to myself worse, all the worse.
*
It’s the funerals that bring me back to LA these days, but after Jay’s, Maggie’s dad’s, I stay. It’s summer break from my teaching gig and I’ve landed a two-month residency at the Cal State Fullerton Art Center. I think about staying with my dad for the empty week before my start date, but decide to rent a room in Culver City instead. It’s nearly a block away from my favorite sushi place and a short drive from my friend Dan’s. It’s to be a summer of art-making, but quite possibly, too, a summer of Dan, which is probably what I want more, though I’m not sure yet if I’m reading his signals right.
Nathalia, my younger sister, didn’t make it to Jay’s funeral. Our uncle, mom’s brother, now dead. He played drums in a cover band with my dad. That’s how our parents first met, and my dad told the story again when it was his turn at the mic. I don’t blame her for missing out, since she’s in between jobs up in Oregon and we weren’t that close with Jay. He moved to Mexico when we were teenagers, then back once Nathalia and I were both away for college. My mom never talked much about her past, so all we’ve come to know about the relationships between her and her siblings and their parents was what we witnessed in our lives. A lot of it, competition and critique. Because Jay was Maggie’s dad, I could have been better in my conversation with her at the dinner after the funeral, tried harder under the circumstances.
*
At our first sushi date it’s LA spring and feels like it. I brought the wrong clothes from New York, where it’s a different spring entirely. Dan says I have to meet his dog, who will change my anti-dog sentiments. He says he believes dating in your 40s is harder for men because their attractiveness goes on a steeper downhill, and I say I’ve struggled to make girl friends at this age, too, and we sound like a bunch of incels discussing the superficiality of women. It’s lighthearted, and I can’t tell if he thinks I’m cute when I take my sake with a sour face. Dan from college in Long Beach. Dan now. I know him from his hooking up with two of my then-friends. Dan-now lives in a studio and draws tattoos. Dan-now didn’t move to New York with the others. Dan-now might not have found much interest in me-then, but me-now isn’t me-then, is it?
*
When my cousin Maggie talked about my family’s old house, I could have read her story in two different ways, my decision. First, she might have been suggesting something about how in childhood everything seems twice as great, twice as expansive as it really is, as if the world itself is what changes and not the perspective. She was not complimenting the house, because it really wasn’t all that nice. It was big, yes, though not a mansion, and it was undeniably uninviting. A stucco home in sweaty Pasadena with tall, dark hedges lining the walkway up to the cement front porch. Inside the double-doors, the entryway echoed and reached up through both stories. The art was strange, mismatched. The furniture, the same. The most interesting thing about the house was the marine window at the midway stair landing that looked out into the neighbor’s yard. Or, the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, and the monster I believed lurked within.
The second interpretation I could have considered was that my cousin Maggie was saying the house (quite boring, quite the same as its dozens of twins all in the neighborhood) was daunting in her memory because of how much larger it was than her own childhood home. Since then and still now I don’t believe there was so much contrast between our two upbringings. Other than a few additional bedrooms, the swing set out back, and the double-wide garage with an extra car, some junk and gadgets, Maggie had access to many of the same things and privileges in her family. None of us got everything we wanted, and maybe it annoys me how she doesn’t see that. The classic family pinning one against another is boring to me, played out again and again between her dad and my mom, them and their other siblings, the lot and their parents. But when my cousin Maggie went on and on, I smiled and nodded, then spooned at my potato crab chowder, an excuse to look away.
*
Being back in LA is being back in my old ways and making excuses for avoiding my family. I find my own means of exploiting the free time. If I did have a girl friend to call, she might say things seemed to be getting a little out of hand because I have an appointment booked with Dan for a tattoo consultation. I consider calling my sister for advice about how to get out of it, but she’s in between jobs up in Oregon. It will be my first tattoo. Our dad has plenty. There’s a big wolf tattoo on his shoulder, outlines of clouds and a shaded moon as a backdrop. He came home with it as a surprise when I was in second grade. Now the lines are faded green on his old tan skin.
I tell Dan a little bit more about my dad when I’m sitting for my tattoo. We’re doing some Bob Dylan lyrics in simple handwriting wrapped below my elbow and a pair of dogs, spotted and facing one another nose to nose, just above—his design. My dad and Uncle Jay, the musicians, were the only artists I knew growing up. I think my aunt, Maggie’s mom, might have painted, but she was more wholly a mom, at least to me then. Always at home and making us snacks, watching movies with us on their big brown couch. I didn’t understand that some people have to create a work and life balance. Lately, I’ve swung myself hard out of that, choosing life, but a pathetic version of it, really, chasing a boy for distraction.
*
People get cancer and die. They get hit by trucks. Overdose all alone behind shut doors. At the residency, I can’t come up with a theme for the installation I’m working on. Meanwhile, the undrawable real memories of the people I’ve lost are getting muddied, and I can’t help but feel paranoid at that correlation. Draw something and it dies—you’ve just killed it by trapping it on the page, taking away its life. As if you can know anything or anyone well enough to capture them in the first place. The unrepresentable truth of life and death get reduced to a line or a color.
*
Dan shaves the thin hair below and above my elbow in preparation, and I like the way his gloved hands feel cold holding me still. There’s a bulletin board propped up by his station in one of the shop’s corners with pictures of all the stencils he’s done over the past few days. A skeleton shrugging, a lion with a sun head, three horses running, a brick sandcastle. It’s rare I’m in such a state, an uncomfortable stream of thoughts trailing out and having to sit with them when Dan takes a break from asking questions and I’m lulled into silence by the dull pain from his gun. Laying on the table, I turn my head away. Then, I feel like a fraud. I don’t know how to stand when I wait for him to wipe and wrap the area. I don’t know what to say once it’s done and permanent.
*
The first night Dan stays over I have already started working in Fullerton and he sleeps on blankets on the floor right next to my bed because he doesn’t want to crowd me on the twin mattress. He drove up in the middle of the night after hearing me on the phone crying. I don’t mean for it to happen this way, but we had just spent the day fishing and eating and walking through the big trees on the coast, feeling isolated from the city and the feelings between us were progressing. Laying in sand, I read aloud from the book I brought with me on California plants and we talked about reading a place through its flowers, shrubs, and trees.
In the morning, Dan is up before me and quietly eating a power bar out of the pack he brought in. I ask if he is hungry and wants something real, and then he tumbles into bed with me and crumbs jump all around.
*
Our mother was inside the room, the one set up with her favorite things and the bed that she’d die in, probably aching. I couldn’t bear to look at her transformed body. Down the hallway in the back bedroom of the house we lived in for many years. I don’t go in the room now when I’m visiting my dad for dinner and it’s dark out because I see her in the shadows cast by the dull night light he keeps on by the dresser. None of it was a surprise, her premature death. But it’s a surprise still when I look over my shoulder and remember that I won’t have the actual experience of her again. Videos and phone call logs become an inescapable pothole that I’m never prepared for and always collapse into, and when I think of her voice the sound waves of the recordings begin to replace the memory of what it’s like to hear her talking out loud to no one particular when working in the kitchen, when mumbling to her cat in the morning, when I’m warm in my childhood bed, her knock on my door, her good morning, her invitation. Come eat.
*
Because I can be cruel, I upload a voice memo recording of the eulogy my dad gave at Jay’s service into an email. I’m halfway through the summer now and Dan and I are leaving for the weekend, leaving for Joshua Tree. I’m feeling guilty about not spending more time with him, my dad. Feeling spoiled by my joy and guilt at the same time.
The night before the trip, I type out an email to my sister, lost somewhere up in Oregon.
Dear Nathalia,
I’m attaching a voice memo of dad at Jay’s memorial. It was really moving, and I thought you might be interested. I’m in LA until August, if you didn’t get my text before. Come home and see us. Dad could really use the support.
Love you,
Holly
*
After Jay’s funeral, we ate at a wharfside restaurant in Long Beach. When I said goodbye to Maggie, I told her it was really thoughtful to organize the whole thing and these mixed CD’s she gave out in his memory. That it felt more like a celebration in her dad’s own style, who I had always suspected but not realized was so artistically talented. She asked me where Nathalia was, and I told her she was up in Eugene. It surprised me that Nathalia hadn’t reached out to Maggie or her mom; hadn’t called or texted even after finding out to express her condolences. I felt slightly embarrassed about it, embarrassed for her. Or, maybe embarrassed for all of us. Only ever really getting together for such unavoidable moments as this.
I know you both didn’t know him that well, but your dad’s speech was really special, Maggie told me. He must be really sad. Yeah, I said. It’s been a rough go. He’s tough, though, I told her, and then made a quick move to catch someone else for an embrace of goodbye, leaving Maggie sitting still at the table, collecting her purse and jacket alone.
*
I’m at my desk, tucked in alone. The rough wood littered with different types and colors of ink, steel nibs, and steel-nibbed pens, and modern felt-tips. The paper is thick and blank. A photo of me and Jay at the beach is pinned on the wall before me. One of Nathalia as a baby and our parents. Mom. Also, a program from my first art show. I keep it still. I always keep them for reference. Of what? Certain times. Nothing to do with me. Or is it pride, self-satisfaction that I can make a life out of this? Meet deadlines. I need a new line, a thinner brush. What to draw. Don’t think. It’s a profile, not a landscape. Thinner lines please, always thinner, thin like no need to start with the face. I laugh. I’ve remade them all now and they’re looking at me pleading and asking, always asking, why I’m doing this.
*
When my dad called to tell me about Jay, I pulled over to the side of the road on my way home from somewhere. It happened in the night, and they told his wife and daughter not to go to the salvage yard, it wasn’t worth a trip just to see the crusted, flattened car he was crushed in.
I love you, I told my dad. Or did I?
Emily Spacek
Emily Spacek is a writer and metalsmith in the mountain west. She has fiction and poetry published or forthcoming in Whiskey Tit Journal, Paloma Magazine, Red Ogre Review, Poetries in English, Waxing & Waning, and Sugar House Review.