Bark: Stories

THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME

The day following Michael Jackson’s death, I was constructing my own memorial for him. I played his videos on YouTube and sat in the kitchen at night, with the iPod light at the table’s center the only source of illumination. I listened to “Man in the Mirror” and “Ben,” my favorite, even if it was about a killer rat. I tried not to think about its being about a rat, as it was also the name of an old beau, who had e-mailed me from Istanbul upon hearing of Jackson’s death. Apparently there was no one in Turkey to talk about it with. “When I heard the news of MJackson’s death I thought of you,” the ex-beau had written, “and that sweet, loose-limbed dance you used to do to one of his up-tempo numbers.”

I tried to think positively. “Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,” I said to someone on the phone. Every minute that ticked by in life contained very little information, until suddenly it contained too much.

“Mom, what are you doing?” asked my fifteen-year-old daughter, Nickie. “You look like a crazy lady sitting in the kitchen like this.”

“I’m just listening to some music.”

“But like this?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“You are so totally disturbing me,” she said.

Nickie had lately announced a desire to have her own reality show so that the world could see what she had to put up with.

I pulled out the earbuds. “What are you wearing tomorrow?”

“Whatever. I mean, does it matter?”

“Uh, no. Not really.” Nickie sauntered out of the room. Of course it did not matter what young people wore: they were already amazing looking, without really knowing it, which was also part of their beauty. I was going to be Nickie’s date at the wedding of Maria, her former babysitter, and Nickie was going to be mine. The person who needed to be careful what she wore was me.

It was a wedding in the country, a half-hour drive, and we arrived on time, but somehow we seemed the last ones there. Guests milled about semipurposefully. Maria, an attractive, restless Brazilian, was marrying a local farm boy, for the second time — a second farm boy on a second farm. The previous farm boy she had married, Ian, was present as well. He had been hired to play music, and as the guests floated by with their plastic cups of wine, Ian sat there playing a slow melancholic version of “I Want You Back.” Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. I wondered how it was done. I myself had never done anything remotely similar. “Marriage is one long conversation,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Of course, he died when he was forty-four, so he had no idea how long the conversation could really get to be.

“I can’t believe you wore that,” Nickie whispered to me in her mauve eyelet sundress.

“I know. It probably was a mistake.” I was wearing a synthetic leopard-print sheath: I admired camouflage. A leopard’s markings I’d imagined existed because a leopard’s habitat had once been alive with snakes, and blending in was required. Leopards were frightened of snakes and also of chimpanzees, who were in turn frightened of leopards — a standoff between predator and prey, since there was a confusion as to which was which: this was also a theme in the wilds of my closet. Perhaps I had watched too many nature documentaries.

“Maybe you could get Ian some lemonade,” I said to Nickie. I had already grabbed some wine from a passing black plastic tray.

“Yes, maybe I could,” she said and loped across the yard. I watched her broad tan back and her confident gait. She was a gorgeous giantess. I was in awe to have such a daughter. Also in fear — as in fearful for my life.

“It’s good you and Maria have stayed friends,” I said to Ian. Ian’s father, who had one of those embarrassing father-in-law crushes on his son’s departing wife, was not taking it so well. One could see him misty-eyed, treading the edge of the property with some iced gin, keeping his eye out for Maria, waiting for her to come out of the house, waiting for an opening, when she might be free of others, so he could rush up and embrace her.

“Yes.” Ian smiled. Ian sighed. And for a fleeting moment everything felt completely fucked up.

And then everything righted itself again. It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services. People shouldn’t have been set in motion on this planet only to grieve losses. And without weddings there were only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot, as if it had been watching all those matches that had killed her. I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest, as if it were all that writing that had been the thing to do him in. And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund, as if one paid for fairness with one’s very life. I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rock with their names engraved so shockingly perfectly upon the surface it looked as if they had indeed turned to stone, been given a new life the way the moon is given it, through some lighting tricks and a face-like font. I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.

Someone very swanky and tall and in muddy high heels in the grass was now standing in front of Ian, holding a microphone, and singing “Waters of March” while Ian accompanied. My mind imitated the song by wandering: A stick. A stone. A wad of cow pie. A teary mom’s eye.

“There are a bazillion Brazilians here,” said Nickie, arriving with two lemonades.

“What did you expect?” I took one of the lemonades for Ian and put my arm around her.

“I don’t know. I only ever met her sister. Just once. The upside is at least I’m not the only one wearing a color.”

We gazed across the long yard of the farmhouse. Maria’s sister and her mother were by the rosebushes, having their pictures taken without the bride.

“Maria and her sister both look like their mother.” Her mother and I had met once before, and I now nodded in her direction across the yard. I couldn’t tell if she could see me.

Nickie nodded with a slight smirk. “Their father died in a car crash. So yeah, they don’t look like him.”

I swatted her arm. “Nickie. Sheesh.”

She was silent for a while. “Do you ever think of Dad?”

“Dad who?”

“Come on.”

“You mean, Dad-eeeeee?”

The weekend her father left — left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back — he had said, “You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.”

And I had said, “Are you on crack?” And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, “Yes, a little.”

“Dadder. As in badder,” Nickie said now. She sometimes claimed to friends that her father had died, and when she was asked how, she would gaze bereavedly off into the distance and say, “A really, really serious game of Hangman.” Mothers and their only children of divorce were a skewed family dynamic, if they were families at all. Perhaps they were more like cruddy buddy movies, and the dialogue between them was unrecognizable as filial or parental. It was extraterrestrial. With a streak of dog-walkers-meeting-at-the-park. It contained more sibling banter than it should have. Still, I preferred the whole thing to being a lonely old spinster, the fate I once thought I was most genetically destined for, though I’d worked hard, too hard, to defy and avoid it, when perhaps there it lay ahead of me regardless. If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why “learn to be alone” in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

Maria came out of the house in her beautiful shoulderless wedding dress, which was white as could be.

“What a fantastic costume,” said Nickie archly.

Nickie was both keen observer and enthusiastic participant in the sartorial disguise department, and when she was little there had been much playing of Wedding, fake bridal bouquets made of ragged plastic-handled sponges tossed up into the air and often into the garage basketball hoop, catching there. She was also into Halloween. She would trick-or-treat for UNICEF dressed in a sniper outfit or a suicide bomber outfit replete with vest. Once when she was eight, she went as a dryad, a tree nymph, and when asked at doors what she was, she kept saying, “A tree-nip.” She had been a haughty trick-or-treater, alert to the failed adult guessing game of it—you’re a what? a vampire? — so when the neighbors looked confused, she scowled and said reproachfully, “Have you never studied Greek mythology?” Nickie knew how to terrify. She had sometimes been more interested in answering our own door than in knocking on others, peering around the edge of it with a witch hat and a loud cackle. “I think it’s time to get back to the customers,” she announced to me one Halloween when she was five, grabbing my hand and racing back to our house. She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy she liked sat there — the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain. Nickie’s childhood, like all dreams, sharpened artificially into stray vignettes when I tried to conjure it, then faded away entirely. Now tall and long-limbed and inscrutable, she seemed more than ever like a sniper. I felt paralyzed beside her, and the love I had for her was less for this new spiky Nickie than for the old spiky one, which was still inside her somewhere, though it was a matter of faith to think so. Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. When, in the last few months, Nickie had “stood her ground” in various rooms of the house, screaming at me abusively, I would begin mutely to disrobe, slowly lifting my shirt over my head so as not to see her, and only that would send her flying out of the room in disgust. Only nakedness was silencing, but at least something was.

“I can’t believe Maria’s wearing white,” said Nickie.

I shrugged. “What color should she wear?”

“Gray!” Nickie said immediately. “To acknowledge having a brain! A little gray matter!”

“Actually, I saw something on PBS recently that said only the outer bark of the brain — and it does look like bark — is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.”

Nickie snorted, as she often did when I uttered the letters PBS. “Then she should wear gray in acknowledgment of having half a brain.”

I nodded. “I get your point,” I said.

Guests were eating canapés on paper plates and having their pictures taken with the bride. Not so much with Maria’s new groom, a boy named Hank, which was short not for Henry but for Johannes, and who was not wearing sunglasses like everyone else but was sort of squinting at Maria in pride and disbelief. Hank was also a musician, though he mostly repaired banjos and guitars, restrung and varnished them, and that was how he, Maria, and Ian had all met.

Now the air was filled with the old-silver-jewelry smell of oncoming rain. I edged toward Ian, who was looking for the next song, idly strumming, trying not to watch his father eye Maria.

“Whatcha got? ‘I’ll Be There’?” I asked cheerfully. I had always liked Ian. He had chosen Maria like a character, met her on a semester abroad and then come home already married to her — much to the marveling of his dad. Ian loved Maria, and was always loyal to her, no matter what story she was in, but Maria was a narrative girl and the story had to be spellbinding or she lost interest in the main character, who was sometimes herself and sometimes not. She was destined to marry and marry and marry. Ian smiled and began to sing “I Will Always Love You,” sounding oddly like Bob Dylan but without the sneer.

I swayed. I stayed. I did not get in the way.

“You are a saint,” I said when he finished. He was a sweet boy, and when Nickie was little he had often come over and played soccer in the yard with her and Maria.

“Oh no, I’m just a deposed king of corn. She bought the farm. I mean, I sold it to her, and then she flipped it and bought this one instead.” He motioned toward the endless field beyond the tent, where the corn was midget and standing in mud, June not having been hot enough to evaporate the puddles. The tomatoes and marijuana would not do well this year. “Last night I had a dream that I was in West Side Story and had forgotten all the words to ‘I like to be in America.’ Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Jesus, what is my dad doing?” Ian said, looking down and away.

Ian’s father was still prowling the perimeter, a little drunkenly, not taking his eyes off the bride.

“The older generation,” I said, shaking my head, as if it didn’t include me. “They can’t take any change. There’s too much missingness that has already accumulated. They can’t take any more.”

“Geez,” Ian said, glancing up and over again. “I wish my dad would just get over her.”

I swallowed more wine while holding Ian’s lemonade. Over by the apple tree there were three squirrels. A threesome of squirrels looked ominous, like a plague. “What other songs ya got?” I asked him. Nickie was off talking to Johannes Hank.

“I have to save a couple for the actual ceremony.”

“There’s going to be an actual ceremony?”

“Sort of. Maybe not actual actual. They have things they want to recite to each other.”

“Oh yes, that,” I said.

“They’re going to walk up together from this canopy toward the house, say whatever, and then people get to eat.” Everyone had brought food, and it was spread out on a long table between the house and the barn. I had brought two large roaster chickens, cooked accidentally on Clean while I was listening to Michael Jackson on my iPod. But the chickens had looked OK, I thought: hanging off the bone a bit but otherwise fine, even if not as fine as when they had started and had been Amish and air-chilled and a fortune. When I had bought them the day before at Whole Foods and gasped at the total on my receipt, the cashier had said, “Yes. Some people know how to shop here and some people don’t.”

“Thirty-three thirty-three. Perhaps that’s good luck.”

“Yup. It’s about as lucky as two dead birds get to be,” said the cashier.

“Is there a priest or anything? Will the marriage be legal?” I now asked Ian.

Ian smiled and shrugged.

“They’re going to say ‘You do’ after the other one says ‘I do.’ Double indemnity.”

I put his lemonade down on a nearby table and gave him a soft chuck on the shoulder. We both looked across the yard at Hank, who was wearing a tie made of small yellow pop beads that formed themselves into the shape of an ear of corn. It had ingeniousness and tackiness both, like so much else created by people.

“That’s a lot of dos.”

“I know. But I’m not making a beeline for the jokes.”

“The jokes?”

“The doozy one, the do-do one. I’m not going to make any of them.”

“Why would you make jokes? It’s not like you’re the best man.”

Ian looked down and twisted his mouth a little.

“Oh, dear. You are?” I said. I squinted at him. When young I had practiced doing the upside-down wink of a bird.

“Don’t ask,” he said.

“Hey, look.” I put my arm around him. “George Harrison did it. And no one thought twice. Or, well, no one thought more than twice.”

Nickie approached me quickly from across the grass. “Mom. Your chickens look disgusting. It’s like they were hit by a truck.”

The wedding party had started to line up — except Ian, who had to play. They were going to get this ceremony over with quickly, before the storm clouds to the west drifted near and made things worse. The bridesmaids began stepping first, a short trajectory from the canopy to the rosebushes, where the I dos would be said. Ian played “Here Comes the Bride.” The bridesmaids were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hadn’t I thought of that until now?

“I take thee, dear Maria …” They were uttering these promises themselves just as Ian said they would. Hank said, “I do,” and Maria said, “You do.” Then vice versa. At least Maria had taken off her sunglasses. Young people, I tried not to say out loud with a sigh. Time went slowly, then stood still, then became undetectable, so who knew how long all this was taking?

A loud noise like mechanized thunder was coming from the highway. Strangely, it was not a storm. A group of motorcyclists boomed up the road and, instead of roaring by us, slowed, then turned right in at the driveway, a dozen of them — all on Harleys. I didn’t really know motorcycles, but I knew that every biker from Platteville to Manitowoc owned a Harley. That was just a regional fact. They switched off their engines. None of the riders wore a helmet — they wore bandannas — except for the leader, who wore a football helmet with some plush puppy ears which had been snipped from some child’s stuffed animal then glued on either side. He took out a handgun and fired it three times into the air.

Several guests screamed. I could make no sound at all.

The biker with the gun and the puppy ears began to shout. “I have a firearms license and those were blanks and this is self-defense because our group here has an easement that extends just this far into this driveway. Also? We were abused as children and as adults and moreover we have been eating a hell of a lot of Twinkies. Also? We are actually very peaceful people. We just know that life can get quite startling in its switches of channels. That there is a river and sea figure of speech as well as a TV one. Which is why as life moves rudely past, you have to give it room. We understand that. An occasion like this means No More Forks in the Road. All mistakes are behind you, and that means it’s no longer really possible to make one. Not a big one. You already done that. I need to speak first here to the bride.” He looked around, but no one moved. He cleared his throat a bit. “The errors a person already made can step forward and announce themselves and then freeze themselves into a charming little sculpture garden that can no longer hurt you. Like a cemetery. And like a cemetery it is the kind of freedom that is the opposite of free.” He looked in a puzzled way across the property toward Maria. “It’s the flickering quantum zone of gun and none, got and not.” He shifted uncomfortably, as if the phrase “flickering quantum zone” had taken a lot out of him. “As I said, now I need to speak to the bride. Would that be you?”

Maria shouted at him in Portuguese. Her bridesmaids joined in.

“What are they saying?” I murmured to Nickie.

“I forgot all my Portuguese,” she said. “My whole childhood I only remember Maria saying ‘good job’ to everything I did, so I now think of that as Portuguese.”

“Yes,” I murmured. “So do I.”

“Good job!” Nickie shouted belligerently at the biker. “Good job being an asshole and interrupting a wedding!”

“Nickie, leave this to the grown-ups,” I whispered.

But the guests just stood there, paralyzed, except Ian, who, seemingly very far off on the horizon, slowly stood, placing his guitar on the ground. He then took his white collapsible chair in both hands and raised it over his head.

“Are you Caitlin?” The puppy-eared biker continued to address Maria, and she continued to curse, waving her sprigs of mint and spirea at him. “Và embora, babaca!” She gave him the finger, and when Hank tried to calm her, she gave Hank the finger. “Fodase!”

The cyclist looked around with an expression that suggested he believed he might have the wrong country wedding. He took out his cell phone, took off his helmet, pressed someone on speed dial, then turned to speak into it. “Yo! Joe. I don’t think you gave me the right address … yeah … no, you don’t get it. This ain’t Caitlin’s place.… What? No, listen! What I’m saying is: wrong addressee! This ain’t it. No speaky zee English here—” He slammed his phone shut. He put his helmet back on. But Ian was trotting slowly toward him with the chair over his head, crying the yelping cry of anyone who was trying to be a hero at his ex-wife’s wedding.

“Sorry, people,” the biker said. He gave the approaching Ian only a quick unfazed double-take. He flicked one of his puppy ears at him and hurried to straddle his bike. “Wrong address, everybody!” Then his whole too-stoned-to be-menacing gang started up their engines and rode away in a roar, kicking up dust from the driveway gravel. It was a relief to see them go. Ian continued to run down the road after them, howling, chair overhead, though the motorcycles were quickly out of sight.

“Should we follow Ian?” asked Nickie. Someone near us was phoning the police.

“Let Ian get it out of his system,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said and now made a beeline for Maria.

“Good job!” I could hear Nickie say to Maria. “Good job getting married!” And then Nickie threw her arms around her former caretaker and began, hunched and heaving, to weep on her shoulder. I couldn’t bear to watch. There was a big black zigzag across my heart. I could hear Maria say, “Tank you for combing, Nickie. You and your muzzer are my hairos.”

Ian had not returned and no one had gone looking for him. He would be back in time for the rain. There was a rent-a-disc-jockey who started to put on some music, which blared from the speakers. Michael Jackson again. Every day there was something new to mourn and something old to celebrate: civilization had learned this long ago and continued to remind us. Was that what the biker had meant? I moved toward the buffet table.

“You know, when you’re hungry, there’s nothing better than food,” I said to a perfect stranger. I cut a small chunk of ham. I place a deviled egg in my mouth and resisted the temptation to position it in front of my teeth and smile scarily, the way we had as children. I chewed and swallowed and grabbed another one. Soon no doubt I would resemble a large vertical snake who had swallowed a rat. That rat Ben. Snakes would eat a sirloin steak only if it was disguised behind the head of a small rodent. There was a lesson somewhere in there and just a little more wine would reveal it.

“Oh, look at those sad chickens!” I said ambiguously and with my mouth full. There were rumors that the wedding cake was still being frosted and that it would take a while. A few people were starting to dance, before the dark clouds burst open and ruined everything. Next to the food table was a smaller one displaying a variety of insect repellents, aerosols and creams, as if it were the vanity corner of a posh ladies’ room, except with discrete constellations of gnats. Guests were spraying themselves a little too close to the food, and the smells of citronella and imminent rain combined in the air.

The biker was right: you had to unfreeze your feet, take blind steps backward, risk a loss of balance, risk an endless fall, in order to give life room. Was that what he had said? Who knew? People were shaking their bodies to Michael Jackson’s “Shake Your Body.” I wanted this song played at my funeral. Also the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Streets.” Also “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—just to fuck with people.

I put down my paper plate and plastic wineglass. I looked over at Ian’s dad, who was once again brooding off by himself. “Come dance with someone your own age!” I called to him, and because he did not say, “That is so not going to happen,” I approached him from across the lawn. As I got closer I could see that since the days he would sometimes come to our house to pick up Maria and drive her home himself in the silver sports car of the recently single, he had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six. I grabbed both his hands and reeled him around. “Whoa,” he said with something like a smile, and he let go with one hand to raise it over his head and flutter it in a jokey jazz razzamatazz. In sign language it was the sign for applause. I needed my breath for dancing, so I tried not to laugh. Instead I fixed my face into a grin, and, ah, for a second the sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn.