When we got to D.C., the black dress looked so wrinkled. I had it cleaned four or five times but could not get it to lie right. I left it in plastic, pressed against the back of my boyfriend’s closet. When that relationship ended, I folded the dress over my arm and carried it to the apartment of another man, this one much older, where I didn’t have much reason to stay dressed, much less wear dresses. I remember telling him how I wanted, just once, to go someplace in my life where I could wear a ball gown. He took to calling me high-maintenance, nothing’s-ever-good-enough-for-you, snobby bitch, and when that relationship ended, he put all my clothes in a white garbage bag outside his door, the satiny collar of the black dress peeking through its neck.
With those bags, and with the furniture from my childhood home, too long in storage but still bearing the smells of the things we cooked there, the stains, the dust and creases we’d made there, I moved into my first real apartment on my own.
And I remember that with all the white, white walls, the clean kitchen, the new carpeting, it felt alive and like it wanted to know me. That first night I ate pizza off a moving box while the walls swam around me. The apartment wanted to know my business. Who was I to be there? How had I arrived there? I went to the garbage bag full of old dresses and pulled out the black one with the satin collar. I opened the closet door fast and hung it up in the apartment’s mouth, shut the door again. Immediately, I felt more at ease. Now I could hang up my art prints and stick pretty shelf liner inside the kitchen cabinets. Now I could unpack the dishes. I carried grief like that black dress, and there were days that it was pressed into the back of the closet, and there were times I wore it many days in a row.
In that dress, I’d stood next to the twin closed caskets at the front of the room. There were no flowers. I couldn’t afford anything extra. My name had not been on their bank account. The small amount of money I would eventually inherit, the money that would keep me going, was tied up in probate. Their insurance was enough to cover plain coffins and cremation. The caskets didn’t need to be closed; I could not afford to line them. I was ashamed.
I didn’t put an obituary in the paper, but people came anyway. A co-worker of mine named Jessica stood next to me, trying to make me laugh the whole time, and the other people who were there looked at her disgustedly. The director of the funeral home told me where to position myself so that I could shake the hands of those who came offering sympathy, but thank God for Jessica and her jokes! When the director was not looking, we left the room and explored the funeral home. I tried the knob of the basement room where the director had showcased the coffins to me. I showed her the others I’d had to choose from. “You should have gotten pink ones with pink satin inside,” she said with a laugh, and rubbed her palm against them like she was a car model. She opened a drawer in a little side table and it was full of straight pins. She said, “They use these to pin the eyes closed!” And I laughed. My stomach muscles stretched and burned. It felt good to laugh. She had offered to take me out to eat sometime, but it never came to pass.
When all the people I worked with at the supermarket were gone, when my third-grade teacher, Ms. Roofson, who lived on the same street, was walking back home with her white pocketbook clutched against her hip, I went back into the viewing room alone.
It was a different place. There were suddenly flowers everywhere. The florist must have owed a favor to the funeral director. Or maybe he brought flowers over from the other viewing rooms, those services long done, those visitors already at their grave sites. One arrangement between the two coffins reminded me of the horseshoe of red roses presented at the end of a derby.
When the director came in to sit beside me, I went weak. I cried and shook my head and told him everything. I told him how I didn’t have any family. How I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know anything about money, about the house or the assets they had or did not have. I showed him an index card I’d been carrying with me—it was full of phone numbers of people others said I should call for help, and checked-off tasks, and tasks still to do, and ideas about next steps, the phone number for the morgue, where their bodies had stayed too long. The little card was soft from so many erasures and rubbing, and I told him that the morning after I got the call I was crying and suddenly felt my mother’s hand rubbing the back of my hand. And I got very still and didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t want to know I was just imagining it.
He was kind and put his hand on my shoulder. He smelled of the Vaseline in his hair. He told me I should bring some flowers home, so I did, walking mechanically back and forth from the room to my car, loading them up to the ceiling. When he told me to take one chrysanthemum from the top of each coffin to press into a Bible, I did exactly that. I was so grateful for someone telling me what I should do—I would have done anything he said.
When I couldn’t fit any more flowers into my car, I went back into the funeral home, and the director told me I should say goodbye to my parents. He left me alone. I felt like that was it, and I was running out of time. The white chrysanthemums spilling over their wooden caskets were already starting to brown around the edges.
I told them I loved them and not to worry about me, that I would find a way—like we were all in it together. I thanked them for sending me to that funeral home, for I felt that I had been sent there, and that the show of flowers and the funeral director’s kindness were proof that everything was going to work out, somehow. People would help me. I would get by on their kindness until I could find a way to get by on my own.
It wasn’t enough. I loved them so deeply. There was something else I needed to say to them, but I couldn’t figure it out. All the tasks listed on my index card—there hadn’t been time enough to prepare for this moment. As I stood there, I imagined my parents were flowers, growing in the direction of the light coming through the slits in their caskets, growing toward me as they waited for me to say the right words.
I couldn’t breathe. The scent of the flowers made the air so thin. I went into the hallway to catch my breath and found myself standing outside the funeral director’s office. He was on the telephone. He didn’t know I was there.
“She’s pitiful, really,” he said to his wife. And he said it was pathetic my mother and father had not planned for this eventuality. What eventuality? For this? He told her that he didn’t think I was ever going to make it. He told his wife that they had to do a better job by their daughter. I turned back to the viewing room and hurried to their caskets. I was shaking all over and put a hand on each one. The director had called me pitiful, and he’d blamed my parents for what had happened. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to leave their bodies in the director’s keeping. I wanted to see their faces. I thought if I could just see them again, maybe the words I needed to say would come spilling forth. If I’d had more time, I wouldn’t have been scared. I would have opened those coffins and gathered them up in my arms. But I heard the director coming, and I could not face him.