“’So I’m a parasite, a brain worm?’ That’s what you said to him? Boy, you do have a talent for killing the mood.”
“Killing the mood? What are you talking about? You shouldn’t even know what ‘the mood’ is! Who told you about that?”
She snickered in my backseat with one ear bud in from her old school flash-drive iPod shuffle and a thumbnail stuck in her mouth (left over from the terrible thumb-sucking habit she never really grew out of).
“Seriously, kiddo… that’s none of your business. And really? Put down your legs; you’re not sitting very lady-like.”
“Just keep your eyes on the road, will ya?” She mumbled, though I could still hear her. The Saturn was small and close and the CD player was empty, radio off. Though the highway was loud, the thup-thuping of the bridge we were driving over drowning out much of our conversation, I still heard her.
“Lily—I am keeping my eyes on the road, but that doesn’t prevent your red and green Christmas socks from shouting at the corners of my eyes. Put your feet down, please.” I activated my left blinker and changed lanes to pass a Hummer driven by a little old lady. I furrowed my eyebrows briefly at the paradox.
Lily reluctantly pulled her feet from off either side of the headrest. Even in pants, she really shouldn’t sit with her legs up like that. I know Grandma would have never allowed it.
“I wish you’d sat up front, Lily.” I looked in the rearview but she was looking out the window, her feet pulled up and stretched out on the seat next to her. Her twisted torso and adolescent middle strained the seatbelt. “I hate feeling like some sort of 13-year-old’s taxi service.”
“What, Galey?”
“Never mind.”
“Are we there yet?” She piped up from the backseat.
“Please don’t start. It’ll be another half hour, unless we hit traffic.”
As soon as I said it, I had to flick on my windshield wipers to combat the rain that seemed to fall from buckets on the bridge. It reminded me of that college prank where your roommate leaves a bucket of water on your door, propped open, and when you wake up and open the door in the morning, kerSPLASH! My next door neighbor pulled that prank on her roommate and scared the lot of us into never doing anything like it. From that day on, she unscrewed all the light bulbs in the room and switched all her dryer sheets with wax paper, ruining her clothes. Girls aren’t very good at pranks; we take them too personally. Girls just generally get too pissy about things. I wonder why boys like us at all.
Red lights appeared all along the line of cars and I had to step on the brake to keep from rear-ending the Cadillac in front of me. “Galey, pay attention!” squealed darling little Lily from the backseat, making me exhale through my nose and purse my lips.
Galey… like the thumbnail she kept sucking on, that nickname had lasted through puberty. She could never wrap her mouth around ‘Gayle’; it was always ‘Gayluh’ which sounded too much like ‘Gaylord’ for most of the family’s likings, especially my older brother who thought it would just be too funny. So we encouraged ‘Gahlee’ instead and when she learned to write in kindergarten and started drawing ‘My Family’ pictures, she wrote ‘Galey’ above my pasty, wobbly image.
It finally sunk in that Lily had somehow heard about my misfortunate use of the term ‘brain worm’ to my last ex-boyfriend. How she had heard about it was quite a mystery to me, since I hardly ever talked to Mom about my relationships and hardly ever talked to Dad about anything (and of course I’d never tell her because she’s my 13-year-old little sister). I suppose the news could have come to her through the grapevine of school bus drivers (my dad being one of them in the next town over from ours), but I’d like to think Lily doesn’t consort too much with the drivers. When I was a kid, I’d say hi to them and chat them up sometimes when I was the last drop-off of the day, but I would never want to know about their daughter’s boyfriends, never mind the daughters’ boyfriends of bus drivers from the next-town-over. Maybe Grammy Jo saw it on my Facebook; she learned all about the Web from her gay next-door neighbor who helps tend her Floribundas. Grammy Jo wouldn’t care a wit if she saw Lily sitting spread-eagled over the headrest; it’s Grandma Nelly who would’ve have a heart attack. But I guess it won’t matter to her, anyways. There aren’t any heart attacks in heaven.
“Lily, if you insist on listening to your iPod, please don’t hum. You know I don’t want to listen to Miley Cyrus or Lindsay Lohan or whatever teeny-bopper princess you’re listening to.”
Lily blinked at me in the rearview mirror. “Puh-lease. Lindsay Lohan is not a teeny-bopper princess. Apparently her dad thinks she’s gonna die. I read about it on AOL news.”
“Don’t believe everything AOL gives you, Lily. It’s AOL,” Unconsciously I encapsulated AOL in air-quotes over the steering wheel. “You should read CNN or even ABC News or something. If you’re going to use the Internet, at least patronize viable sources.”
“I’m 13. I don’t have to read ‘old people’ news yet, not like you.”
The seven-year difference between us was starting to sour, especially this year when I finished my teenage years and she started hers. It was cute when we were little and I held her as a baby, barely even more than a baby myself at seven years old. The saddest thing about her remark was how terribly old I did feel. It was as if turning twenty made me realize that no, I wasn’t getting any younger and I only had four-fifths of a century left to live, if even that! The average life expectancy is currently about seventy-eight years for American women, though it’s declining. I wish I’d been born Japanese. The Japanese have maintained the highest life expectancy for decades now; maybe I should start eating nothing but rice and drinking nothing but tea. The difference between the amount of caffeine in tea and coffee isn’t too great, is it? I’d probably have caffeine headaches for weeks.
The rain finally let up just as I was pulling off the highway. The black bag partially covering our old exit sign flapped in the wind, alternately revealing and concealing ‘Swan’ and ‘sea’. I pulled off the road into the 7-11’s parking lot and shut the car off.
Inside the 7-11, the only sound was the hum of the incandescent light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The lack of people made me slightly uneasy, although this section of town was right off the highway, typically frequented only by travelers of Interstate 95. Lily tagged along behind me, running her fingers over bags of candy and boxes of food, humming to her iPod and chewing on her thumbnails. I bought a Mocha Frappachino pick-me-up and drank half of it before I even got to the register.
My subconscious flitted with psychoanalysis and literary criticisms of the cashier as I mulled over how much I had to do after Thanksgiving break. Term papers due, finals to start studying for; and I probably wasn’t going to get much work done while I was at home. Lily didn’t know it yet, but there was a viewing to go to and a funeral the next day; relatives coming from the west to clean house for, dinners to cook, and smiles to fake.
“Can I get a candy bar, Galey?” I almost tripped over Lily standing between me and the door.
“You’ve got money, don’t you? Doesn’t Mom give you an allowance yet?”
“Not right now, cuz she says my grades aren’t good enough.”
“Well then I guess you can’t get a candy bar, hm?” I tried to side-step her.
“Please?!?!”
“No.” I put a hand on her head and tried to spin her around with my thumb and pinky finger. When that didn’t work, I zipped around her scowling face and strode towards the car.
“Come on, Lily!” I heard her little-girl ‘humph!’ and plodding feet follow me out of the shop.
I opened the front door for her and climbed into the driver’s seat. When she slammed the back door shut behind her, I rolled my eyes and awkwardly reached over the seat to close the open door.

The house that I pulled up in front of looked different from the one I had left three months ago. Sadie, the tall oak tree on The Town’s side of the sidewalk, had left her leaves on the yard but was herself reduced to a grizzled stump. She had fallen the way of the other oaks along the block, diseased and marked with an ominous orange sign.
My mother stood in the doorway, wearing Barbie Millicent Robert’s plastic face. She waved, “Welcome home, girls!” and walked uneasily towards my car. Lily jumped out and into Mom’s arms. I watched as Mom put her hand on Lily’s shoulder, delicately squatting to her eye level, and knew that she would tell her the news about Matthew.
I turned away and started to unpack my trunk. My backpack and my knitting bag I slung over my shoulders before putting my laptop case under my arm and hugging my pillow against my chest. The trunk lid creaked when I slammed it shut and the horn beeped as I activated the alarm. “Hi, Mom,” I said, stepping around her through the open front door. Lily was draped over her shoulder, silent tears running down her cheeks out of wide, shocked eyes. Big Brother Matthew is dead.

“Matthew? Where are you?” I was in our backyard, but the tree house was still standing and the shed hadn’t been built yet. I was six, and cold, covered head to toe in a snowsuit Mom and Dad bought me for our family vacation skiing in Maine. Sixteen-year-old Matthew played hide and seek with me because there were no other boys in the neighborhood and I was still of the age where I wanted to do everything he wanted to do. I hated this pink snowsuit because Matthew hated pink. I wanted Matthew to call me “Gil” because “Gayle” was a girl’s name and I wanted to be a boy so I could be just like him. I was very bad at Hide and Seek and he was very good. He said I did too much seeking with my eyes and not enough with my body.
“Gil! How long are you just going to stand there? Come and find me!”
I tried to run towards his voice but got confused and wound up standing still in a different spot, even farther, probably, from where he was. I started to get frustrated and sniffled.
“Don’t cry, kid. Maybe we should blindfold you or something, then you won’t be able to look for me—you’ll just have to find me.”
“Matthew…” I whined. I was lost and even though I could hear his voice coming from somewhere near the fence, I hesitated to go over there because of the dog next door that barked whenever I got too close. Matthew blended in with the bushes better in his camouflage snowsuit. The dog hated pink.
Finally, Matthew stepped out from behind a bush and came over. “How come you don’t play Hide and Seek like a normal kid?” He punched me gently in the arm. “Cheer up, Gil. Let’s go have some hot cocoa.”
I smiled and followed my big brother into the house. “Can I have extra shmallows, Matthew?”

“It’s extra shmallows forever now, Matthew,” I whispered to him, kneeling by the closed casket. Lily knelt on my right with her head down on her clasped hands. If I bent my head a bit I could see that her eyes were open, staring at the carpet. She told me when she turned ten that she didn’t want to be a Catholic anymore; that was when she still wanted to do everything like her big sister.
Over in a corner of the viewing room, Matthew’s fiancée told anyone who would listen about how her Matthew died in the prime of his life, that he never let anyone tell him there was something he couldn’t do. The picture adorning his casket showed him surrounded by red, white, and blue balloons and confetti last year, MASSACHUSETTS STATE SENATOR on a banner in the background. Matthew had been an EMT in high school and graduated from Brown University before going on to law school. He met Alicia at Brown and dated her for almost ten years before asking her to marry him. They were waiting until after she passed the bar; she failed twice in a row and now I wonder how long it will take her to pull herself together and try for a third-time’s charm.
Lily sneezed loudly beside me, making everyone jump. “Bless you,” I whispered to her, without response. After a second’s deathly silence, whispered conversations resumed. Someone coughed in the viewing line behind Lily and me, so we stood up and moved away. Lily sat down in the front row reserved for the family and I wandered over to where a cluster of my distant cousins were trying not to choke on their laughter.
“Just a few more feet, Wilkins, I know we can make it!” Intoned a short boy in black dress pants, a blue dress shirt only half tucked-in, and black DC shoes in a poorly-executed British accent.
“Yes, Thompson, only a few feet higher!” Exclaimed a tall girl in a little black dress and black flats. I didn’t recognize either of them by face; it had probably been ten years since I had seen either of them or the other two that stood in the circle. I did recognize my surname, Thompson, and quickly figured out who they were talking about.
“Wait, what’s that noise, Wilkins?” DC Shoes remarked, cupping his brow with his hand and looking around wildly.
“What noise, Thompson?” Little Black replied, holding up her two hands in mock surprise.
“THAT avalanche noise!” DC pointed up and ahead of him before covering his face with his arms and shouting sotto voce, “Aaaargh!!! Wilkiiiiiiiinsss! Aliciaaaaaa! Noooooo!”
All four cousins hid their mouths behind their hands and doubled over in fits of laughter. I joined in. When they saw me coming over, they tried to play it off like nothing was funny, but I smiled. “No, no, your skit’s hysterical.”
DC Shoes, still wheezing from laughter, asked “You think your brother’s death is funny?”
I maintained my smile. “No, actually and I have no idea why you think you can come all the way out here, be my family’s guests, and stand here and make a mockery of my brother’s death.”
All four started to fidget.
“My brother had his faults, like all of us do. But have some respect for the dead. I don’t remember your names so I can’t go and complain to your parents about how inconsiderate and rude you are. I also don’t really care about who you are. Just know for future reference that if you’re going to perform someone’s death scene, don’t do it at the viewing where the deceased’s family can see it. If you please—shut up and pay your respects.”
I returned to the front row where Lily was still sitting, staring off into space.
“Galey?” she whispered.
“What?”
“There’s a dead plant in that pot over on the windowsill. Don’t you think they should get rid of that?”
I nodded and stood up. I strode over to the sill and picked up the pathetic-looking Gerber Daisy plant. Its soil had settled into deep cracks and it looked as though no one had watered it for many viewings. The rest of the parlor was so well-decorated with living things in muted pastel colors that this dead plant stood out as much as if it were encased in its own closed casket. I carried it gently in the crook of my arm into the ladies’ room where I turned it upside down and shook it out into the art-deco trash can. Before I left the room, I watered it a bit with my tears.

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 09.01.2010

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