Death: A Teaching

Mom was absent, working nights at O'Banyon's, a local bar, in addition to her day job as a desk clerk in a beauty salon. For a while, O’Banyon’s patrons had been a literary crowd; artists and publishers from the Art Institute scene, a politically charged group. Every Friday night they held a poetry slam. This had attracted my mother, ever enticed as she was by verbose manners of speaking and sharp intellects. That year, however, a place called The Green Mill began to be known as the poetry venue in Chicago, and O’Banyon’s inhabitants grew less literary and more punk. Although they continued to hold them weekly, O’Banyon’s poetry contests slowly had become transformed from performances of eloquent, politically charged monologues into raucous welters of discordant sounds.

She began this extra work when it became apparent to her that to extend the absence of my father, she had to gain financial independence from him. There were several times she had taken us with her to the bar during her first few weeks there. When her shift would end, she would say it was her unwind time.

“Have a seat over there, girls, put whatever you want on the juke box. I’m just going to have my unwind time. Just a few cocktails and talk with some friends, then we’ll go home, OK?” Sophie and I sat at the end of the bar and drank glasses of milk. We passed the time playing tic-tac-toe on the cocktail napkins and making up stories about strangers. Sophie picked out a man or a woman in the crowded bar and I began telling his or her life story.

“There, do that lady over there with the weird hat,” Sophie said, pointing her finger. I grabbed her hand and pushed it down.

“Don’t point; it’s rude. The one with the beret, the flat round hat?”

“Yeah, her,” Sophie said, watching her. She took a sip of milk and waited while I thought it over. The woman was smoking a long, slim cigarette. Her hair fell long and curly down over her shoulders, puffed out and a bit frizzy under her tan beret. She wore an army jacket over a white t-shirt with a black skirt, leg warmers, and army boots.

“Her name is Madame Champagne but people call her Sarge,” I said. Sophie giggled, leaned forward in her seat.

“She comes from a nice family. Her parents are Joe and Betty Champagne. They raised her up right; they don’t know where they went wrong. She started acting strange when she was 13 or 14, dressing up in army clothes, wearing funny hats.” Sophie laughed and slapped my leg.

“Then one day, she just took off. Joe and Betty got a letter a few weeks later saying she had joined up with the military and they had made her a sergeant right away. She told them that in all future correspondence, they were to refer to her as Sarge. Her only wish was that the army wouldn’t shave her head, that they would let her keep her curly locks. Alas, they did, on the condition that she would always wear a beret.” I straightened my posture and put my hand to my brow in a mock salute. Sophie smiled and saluted me back.

After a few hours, I had done a story for every person in the place and Sophie had fallen asleep at the bar. I went to find my mom and found her sitting on a guy’s lap reciting Sappho. I knew it was Sappho because she kept saying so.

“I recite Sappho, what in my mad heart was my greatest desire, who was it now that must feel my allurements…”

“What are you sayin?” asked the man.

“Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, I’m reciting her. Who was the fair one that must be persuaded, who wronged thee?” she continued, with a drunken, dramatic voice, great, sweeping gestures, and swaying body. Just then, applause broke out in the crowd from a poetry performance that had just finished on the low stage. Mom smiled and bowed as if they were applauding her.

“Thank you, O thank . . .”

“Mom, let’s get out of here; Sophie can’t keep her eyes open,” I interrupted. She swung to face me, squinted to get me in focus.

“Oh, OK. Shit. What did you say your name was?” she asked the guy whose lap she was on.

“Tom.”

“Oh, Tom. Can I ask how much you’ve had to drink tonight, Tom?”

“A beer or two.”

“Really? Well, how do you feel about taking my kids and me home and coming in for a nightcap?”

“Love to.”

“Excellent, let’s go.” She got up and staggered backward, almost falling over a chair before Tom jumped up and caught her.

My dad had been gone almost a month, the longest amount of time he ever stayed gone. Around this time, when I was ten years old, I had reached an age deemed old enough by my mother to be entrusted with a key of my own. She tied it to a piece of green yarn and hung it around my neck. I felt noble with it on, like I had just been knighted. It fit only the back door and I was to use it on days when she was at work and I was looking out for Sophie. Once I had the key, we no longer had to go with her to the bar.

Towards the end of the summer on a Friday after Day Camp, Sophie and I were coming into the house through the back porch when I nearly tripped over a body on the floor, my Uncle Joe. My mother’s only brother, Joe was a post-hippie poster boy during the 1980s, permanently clad in dirty bell-bottomed corduroy pants and a flower-patterned shirt complete with a butterfly collar. He had long, tangled, unwashed hair that attracted mites and fleas―the latter of which he gave to our dog, Missy. Every so often he would show up at our door needing a place to stay after a brawl in whatever commune he was living in at the time. Or sometimes he ran out of money and couldn’t afford even the slightest rent. He was asleep in front of the door when I ran into him and kicked him awake.

“Hi, girls; your mom around?” he asked, struggling to his feet.

“No, she’s at work already, but you can come in,” I said. We went in and he stayed behind.

“Something stinks!” he said. He was sniffing the air. There was a rotten smell I noticed also and assumed it was the garbage in the back trash cans. Sophie began calling Missy, and I began straightening up the apartment: picking up articles of clothing left in the place they had last been removed, stacking and neatly ordering my mother’s books, emptying overflowing ashtrays, clearing away used and soiled dishes from the living room. After a few minutes, I noticed that Sophie was still (more frantically) calling out Missy’s name.

To help rid her of the fleas she had caught from Uncle Joe, we had bought her a flea collar two days before and were anxious to record the progress, if any. Then I heard Uncle Joe’s muffled voice coming from the back porch. Sophie screamed. I dropped the glass objects in my arms, winced at the shatter, and bolted to the porch where Sophie was sobbing. The door was standing open and Uncle Joe was slowly backing out, mumbling condolences and reaching absently toward Sophie with hushing, petting gestures; a slinking apologetic shell. I shoved past him to find Sophie face down with her butt in the air and her hands extended in front of her, a kind of fervent worship pose, or in this case, one of agony. Gripped in her small fist was a glint of light, the sound of metal. Missy’s collar. I stifled a gasp and stared, open-mouthed. Intuitively already having the answer, I emitted a quiet question to the room: “What happened?”

“Dead! She’s dead Jane!” my sister shrieked. I snapped from my momentary trance and held her, a crumpled grief against me. Her hot tears felt like lava on my arm. Curled in the corner, hidden behind a chair was Missy’s body. The whites of her eyes, blank and milky, stared eerily at us, her tongue sagged lifelessly from the side of her open mouth covered with a white foamy substance. Staring at her, squeezing Sophie so hard I might have bruised her, I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder and jumped.

“Jane, back away, Sweetie, let me get her,” he said gently. He was carrying a blanket. I pulled Sophie to her feet. We stood by the door and watched our uncle gather up Missy’s body and wrap her in the blanket. I felt tightness in my chest and a panicky feeling came over me. How did this happen; how could she be gone? She was still a puppy. I broke into a sob, crying so hard I was gasping for air. Sophie wrapped her arms around my waist and cried too. Uncle Joe walked slowly toward the back yard with Sophie in his arms.

“Where are you taking her?” Sophie cried.

“Just outside here,” he said. “Can you get me a garbage bag Jane?”
“For what?”
“We need to put it in a bag honey; it smells bad,” he said. Sophie cried harder; I straightened my spine and steeled myself. Suddenly I felt dry and numb; all grief was gone. I walked into the kitchen as if mechanically, got a garbage bag, brought it to Joe, and watched as he dumped her small furry body from the blanket into the garbage bag. He tied off the top of the bag with two knots and set it down next to the garbage. I stood staring at the bag and the figure of my dog inside it. The shape of her head, her body still curled, somewhat stiff. She seemed so much smaller. Sophie ran into the house wailing. I stood there for a long time staring at the bag, feeling nothing.

When my mom came home, she broke down and cried. Sophie and I hugged her and patted her back.

“I won’t call your father; I won’t,” she kept saying through her tears.

“We can handle this ourselves,” she said. She took a deep breath, got up, and got a shovel from the back porch. She headed out into the back yard; we followed her.

“We’ll bury her and have a service,” she said, sniffling and wiping tears off her cheek with the back of one hand as she dug. The ground was dusty and dry, the dirt floated up to our faces and hair, mom’s tears left muddy tracks down her cheeks. We buried her there in the back yard. Sophie found two sticks and tied them together in the shape of a cross with her shoelace then stuck the cross in the ground on the pile of dirt that was Missy’s shallow grave. We stood around the grave and cried. My mom said a few words.

“Missy was a good girl. Loyal and sweet, good with kids. We’ll miss her,” she said, then turned and walked back into the house. Sophie followed her. I stood for a while longer at the grave. The grass swayed in the breeze, too tall and weedy. Birds chirped and sang, the phone rang in the house, a dog barked and howled in the distance. I stared at the ground and waited for more tears to come. My mom had cried so freely; I longed to do the same.

“You bastard asshole!” My mom yelled from inside the house. “How could you, Bobby, how?” she cried. I ran into the house. My mom was crying on the phone.

“Damn you!” she screamed and slammed the phone down. Without saying a word, she stormed out of the house.

When she came home about an hour later, she called us in the kitchen and asked us to sit down.

“Your dad did it. He came over here and threw a piece of ham wrapped around a double dose of rat poison through the window to feed to Missy,” she said, hands on her hips, face hard and angry.

“Why would he do that and how do you know?” I demanded. Sophie started crying again.

“He told me, that’s how I know. He called here and asked me if I needed him to talk to you girls and help you understand what death is. I told him we don’t need his help, that I would talk to you myself and we would be fine without him. ‘Wait a minute, how do you even know about Missy? What did you do?’ I asked him. He said he did it. He was the one who got the dog in the first place, he said, so he could take it away.” She walked across the room and tried to embrace me. I pulled away from her and took several steps back, out of her reach. She hugged Sophie and looked at me.

“Don’t be mad at me, Jane. I’m just telling you the truth.” She let go of Sophie and filled a glass with water.

“Why would Dad do that?” I yelled, tears burning the back of my eyes.

“He did it to get back at me. He just went too far and he knows it. He feels real bad. I’m not allowing him back in this house until he gets help. He just needs help.” She handed the water to Sophie, sat, and pulled her up in her lap.

I could imagine just what Missy had looked like responding to my dad’s voice calling her. She would have been wild with joy after missing him for weeks. Tearing through the house, nails ripping across the tiled kitchen floor, racing to the window. Smelling the gift he so generously passed to her through the open window, she would have been doubly pleased: pink tongue panting, teeth bared smiling, a blur of wagging tail.