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She was found dead on her apartment floor with the big purple dildo still clenched in her fist. The police officers and various lab people quietly walked through her apartment taking pictures and taking notes on the immediate surroundings of the body. They looked around her apartment with squinted eyes and wrinkled brows searching for how this poor woman might have died. The look of heightened tragedy was on their faces as if they were theater actors who had stumbled onto a movie set and were playing it too big. But they were professionals. They could hold in their laughter until later. They would have a giggle over the pictures. It would probably even end up in some scrapbook that they would take out and show the rookies all the terrible and sad ways to die. Their faces were all composed in a way that perhaps denoted she might have died from something else other than a heart attack while in the throes of pleasuring herself. No one looked at the dildo. I noticed they kept saying “victim” when they referred to her, always just above a whisper. I suppose she was a victim of a kind. A victim of her own pleasure, of her semi-advanced age (she was only sixty-three), her body, her life as much a fate as fate. Aunt Francis Marie deserved better. She did manage to pull it out in time and was dragging herself to her open dresser drawer before her heart finally gave out. The look on her face must have been one of complete terror. I didn’t think people’s faces could stay that way after they died. Some of the terror was still left on her face like a horrible echo. I wanted to bend down and somehow change her face back to the way I remembered it, but for some reason I thought better of it. Maybe I thought I might contaminate the “crime” scene. The record player was still on, the low hum and scratching of the needle running across the paper on the record. I walked over and cut it off. She had been listening to Johnny Mathis.
I remembered how she used take me for ice cream after school when mom wasn’t able to get off of work to pick me up. We would walk down from her apartment on the third floor, the same apartment she would die in thirty five years later, and she, with a Salem cigarette in between her thin fingers, would buy me ice cream from Bernie’s Ice Cream parlor. She would rarely get any, said she was watching her figure. We would sit on the park bench in front of Bernie’s under the afternoon sun and I would eat my ice cream cone and she would smoke her cigarettes. Afterwards, we would go back to her apartment and she would let me watch cartoons until mom picked me up. It’s strange that looking at her sprawled out on the floor all I can think of is her carrying me to get ice cream. She was the most fun of all my mom’s sisters. When she laughed it wasn’t like others laughed. She laughed with her whole body. Her head thrown up, her voice raspy but shrill, and her whole body shook like a spasm. She was the best laugher I ever saw. And she never laughed unless something was really funny. Most folks nervously laugh or laugh sort of over the top when they know something isn’t all that funny, but not Aunt Francis Marie. When she laughed, you knew it was really funny. But she was also the most troubled of my mom’s sisters. Four marriages in fifteen years and boyfriends in between and sometimes during her marriages. She wasn’t happy unless she was with someone, and then she was positively miserable. She loved night clubs that were decorated as if they were from the fifties. They were becoming rarer these days but there was still one over on Shaker and Fifth, but it wasn’t very popular and there was always just a few people in there. But that became her night club in her later years. Almost every night of the week she could be found there drinking her Tom Collins and smoking a cigarette listening to the jukebox. She said Tommy’s had the best jukebox in town. It cost a dollar now but she would say it was worth it because they no longer played those songs on the radio anymore—Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Andy Williams. They were the voices of her youth. She sang to them, danced to them, made love to them, fought and divorced to them. Men came and went but they would always be with her. They would never leave her. She said no one sings like that anymore, pointing at the jukebox or record player. In some ways she was the most sensitive of mom’s sisters.
Since I was the one who had to identify her body I had to sign some forms. The police officer gave his condolences and then they gently pulled the dildo out of her hand and dropped it in to a plastic bag. They then picked up her body and slid a plastic bag beneath her and then zipped her up. I watched the plastic ends connect as they hid her face from me. Part of me was relieved. I didn’t like seeing her so fragile, so exposed. But it was more than that. I didn’t want to be reminded of her face. How it was contorted. I didn’t want to imagine her final moments lying like that naked on the floor trying to just put the dildo in the drawer before she called 911 all the while Johnny Mathis playing in the background. Her body was so thin. Her breasts had lost their shape and fell loose at her sides. When she was very young she was full-figured but the older she got the less she liked to eat and her body lost all its shape. Now it was just an outline of what it had been. One could see the hints of what was once a beautiful woman. Aunt Francis Marie once told me she hated time because it would take all her beauty away. She said she would fight it with every ounce of strength she had. She took exercise classes five times a week, rarely ate red meat, and drank endless glasses of vegetable juice. I can’t imagine what thoughts were running through her head in those final moments when she knew she wouldn’t make it to the dresser drawer. Maybe at that point she didn’t care. Maybe by that time she was already gone, perhaps at Tommy’s listening to the jukebox, or with some old lover in the back of a 57’ Chevy, or perhaps at her high school prom with the skinny boy she always showed me pictures of, her in her blue gown with a white corsage, he in his white suit with a red rose in the lapel. Maybe they danced all night to the music she loved and maybe that would be where she would always be. I’d like to think moments like that are heavier than others and leave a fingerprint that after life we can go back to and inhabit again. Maybe human lives were special and were as heavy as planets which curved space-time. Maybe lives curved space-time too? Maybe she is with that boy and they’re dancing and the music will never end and the morning will never come and we are here bearing witness to her dead body and will never know what her last thoughts were or whether the look of terror on her face bespoke what her last thoughts were or whether it was just the pain?
Her body slumped in the black body bag. As gentle and delicate as they were, at the end of the day it was still a body in a bag and no amount of delicacy would change that. The door shut and they were gone. I heard their steps down the hall and heading down the stairs their footsteps growing fainter until there was only the silence in the room. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and her flower scented perfume. The late afternoon light streamed in through her windows. Constellations of dust swirled in the light. The room looked lonely without her in it. It became inexpressibly sad. I sat down on the couch I used to watch cartoons on and just sat and breathed and watched. Her ash trays were empty. She was gone. She would never walk through that door again. She would never sit on this couch with her feet up, her toe nail polish drying, and drinking a Tom Collins watching a bad horror movie as she liked to do. I got up and looked in her refrigerator. Not surprisingly all she had was five oranges, two apples, a zucchini, three bananas, and a six pack of Natural Light, two missing. I took a beer from the fridge and gently put the needle back on the record and cut it on. “Chances Are”…The music was heartbreakingly tender. Johnny Mathis’ voice sounded otherworldly. I never much cared for him. There was something about that music that always ended up being creepy. I think it was that it was completely artificial and fake. All optimism and joy, no sadness, no loss, no despair. Everything was wonderful all the time. Maybe that was why she liked it so much. It didn’t remind her of anything real. The beer was cold and good. I imagined how many afternoons my aunt had done this exact same thing. In these moments she would have had to be happy. I got up from the couch and lied down on the floor where she died, half my body on the rug and half off. I put my ear to the cold floor and listened. The music hummed through the hardwood floor. I put my body in the exact position Aunt Francis Marie died in to see if I could intuit what she might have felt. I couldn’t feel anything except her absence. This apartment over the years had stored every sound she ever made. Somewhere in the wood of the walls was every word and every laugh and every sigh she had ever made. And no one would ever be privy to it, only the dead walls, the furniture, and the hardwood floors. My aunt was still here. I moved through her echoes, through conversations that ended decades ago. The air was thick with her voice and no one would ever hear it again.
I looked over her apartment before I left. I found her key on the nightstand and locked the door as I left. Outside her apartment building I suddenly felt the urge to get ice cream. Bernie’s was no longer there but there was another one maybe one more block down. It wasn’t as good but it was there. I sat on a park bench and licked my ice cream cone. It tasted good-- sweet and cold. The taste of the ice cream, or maybe it was just sitting on a park bench again and eating ice cream, but I remembered once when Aunt Francis Marie carried me for ice cream and an old man trying to cross the street was hit by a car. We ran over, she holding my hand tightly. The street, filled with workers, vendors, shoppers, all ran towards the accident. The old man’s eyes rolled back in his head and blood was coming out of his mouth and eyes. She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. And then just like that he was gone. Everyone standing around looked up at the driver standing by his open door. They dragged the driver away from his car and started beating him up. Apparently he was quite drunk. Aunt Francis Marie touched the old man’s forehead and she took my hand again and we left the old man there on the street.
We’re most human when we’re burying our dead,
when we stand on the very edge and peek over,
bottomless and endless fall; and we can’t help but gasp,
imaging our fates married to that drop, with the score
of souls tumbling, twisting, hurtling through its dark shape,
fighting to be born, or sleeping, or just waiting in the void,
as some of us here measure our hearts and prepare for the end,
imagining when it is our turn to fall, to slip through the world
like a tear drop sliding down the cheek of the wind.
And we here, impossibly alive, trying to feel the sun on our skin.
Some days I wonder if I’ve earned this life.
Sitting by the smokers outside our classroom
I zone out and wonder who will be the last one of us alive
and wonder how each one of us will die. I picture each of us
on our death beds, surrounded by family, kids and grandkids, friends,
some of us dying sooner than we should; and I can’t help
but feel profound love for these incomplete people, striving,
wrestling heroically with themselves, rising, falling,
each smoking a cigarette in between their classes.
And some days I wonder if she will wait for me. I don’t think she will.
People mean well, but they can rarely wait for you.
Life is very fast, fleeting, and fragile; waiting makes it seem more so.
But I understand. Really I do. She can’t help it.
It was always going to be like this. As soon as she called me
that first time and I eagerly picked up the phone it was already done.
I knew yesterday when she crossed the street to meet me for lunch
and her cell phone rang and instead of waiting she took the call.
We embraced, her phone still pressed to her moving lips.
Sometimes the world is undone by such small things as that.
