Second Helpings

Gladdie squinted at her Baby Shower Bingo card. “Does this have ‘bottle warmer’ on it?”

  “Yes,” I replied, pointing to the upper-left-hand-corner box. “Right here.”

  “Bottle warmer!” she roared, crossing off that box on her grid. “Hot damn!”

  “Anyway,” I continued, “I just hate all these stupid rituals. These big events are supposed to be fun and memorable but are really boring.”

  “People need rituals,” Gladdie said.

  “DIAPER GENIE!” Bethany announced.

  Gladdie scanned her card. “Do you see ‘diaper genie’ on here, J.D.? I can’t see so good.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Crooks!” Gladdie yelled to no one in particular, then turned her attention back to me. “This is the stuff that gives people something to look forward to.”

  “BABY MONITOR!”

  Gladdie pushed the card toward me, and I crossed off “baby monitor.”

  “We’re gonna win this thing, J.D.!”

  I sighed, my head not in the game. “I never look forward to anything.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because whenever I look forward to anything, it ends up sucking. The buildup inevitably leads to a letdown. It’s safer to lowball my way through life.”

  “BUMPER SET!”

  Gladdie put her hand on mine, and the contrast was striking. Mine—large, smooth, unblemished. Hers—shrunken, wrinkled, spotty and mottled, bumpy and blue-veined. Ancient hands. “And how happy has this made you?”

  “Not very,” I admitted.

  “ONESIES!” my mom yelled, since my sister was taking another potty break.

  I crossed off “onesies.”

  “Ain’t ya looking forward to takin’ a bite out of the Big Apple?”

  “Well, my parents probably won’t let me go,” I replied.

  “You gotta do what you want to do. If New York is what you want, you gotta go for it. If I’ve learned anything in my ninety-one years, it’s that you definitely won’t get happy going through life kowtowing to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  “It’s not so easy, Gladdie,” I replied. “You know how your son is.”

  “He’s a hothead,” she replied. “He got it from his father, God bless his soul.”

  Then I realized that this conversation shouldn’t have been happening at all, that Gladdie wasn’t supposed to know anything about Columbia. It must have suddenly dawned on her, too.

  “CAR SEAT!”

  “ ‘Car seat,’ sweetie?” Gladdie asked, innocently.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I snapped. “How did you know about Columbia?” The question, of course, was moot, as I already knew the answer.

  “Jeez Louise,” Gladdie said, wringing her hands. “Tutti Flutie only told me ’cause I asked.”

  “He had no business telling you. He wasn’t even supposed to know. He’s always doing this. Butting in where he doesn’t belong.”

  “Don’t use this as another excuse to push Tutti Flutie away. How many hoops you gonna make him jump through? When’s the dog and pony show gonna end?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t lowball this one, J.D. He’s a sure shot.”

  “NIPPLES!”

  I checked off another box as Bethany waddled back to her seat.

  “But he’s not interested,” I said, completely flustered. “You said he wasn’t interested.”

  “He’s more than interested, J.D. Even a half-blind old broad like me can see that. But I knew that you’re just like me in that you don’t like anything that comes too easy. You should see what I made your grandfather, God rest his soul, go through when we were courting. And Moe? That poor man still doesn’t know what hit him!”

  “BREAST PUMP!”

  Another box.

  “So I only told ya he wasn’t interested to get you all fired up.”

  “Well, it worked,” I said, sweaty, red, and burning up with the news, not sure how I could cool myself down.

  “No it didn’t,” she replied. “You ain’t together, are ya?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “And why not? Because you’re scared of what will happen? Don’t be a fool, J.D. You gotta take chances in this life or you’re already dead.”

  Before I could respond, Bethany yelled, “STROLLER!”

  I crossed off a box that completed the middle horizontal row on the grid and held it up for my grandmother to see.

  “BINGO!” Gladdie howled, her voice reverberating throughout the restaurant. We were victorious.

  April 30th

  Dear Hope,

  I’m going to have to put in about fifty years of indentured servitude to my parents to pay off our last phone call, but I’m not quite done venting yet.

  Marcus’s latest intrusion is about as surprising as a cardboard box of devil heads at the Osbournes’. He just cannot stop mucking up my life. He intentionally told Gladdie about Columbia (something he wasn’t even supposed to know about) in the hopes that she, in her uncensored, double-stroked senility, would spill the news and cause much parental pain and suffering. It didn’t quite work out that way—my parental pain and suffering came via an alternate route—but that doesn’t make his inability to stay out of my life any less infuriating.

  I don’t know how you expect me to believe that it’s “his way of showing he cares.” No offense, but that’s easy for you to say because you’re not here to see what he’s REALLY like. He’s the GAME MASTER, Hope. He’s an EVIL GENIUS who messes with my mind and my life because he has NOTHING BETTER TO DO now that he’s (allegedly) living a life of chastity and temperance. Thank God there’s only two months of school left, because I really don’t know how much more of this I can take.

  I have to ask you this on paper because I’m a wuss and couldn’t bring myself to ask you on the phone: Why don’t you hate Marcus? Don’t you hate him for doing everything Heath did, but living to tell about it? Don’t you hate him because he’s still here and your brother is gone?

  Here’s the thing that’s keeping me awake: If you don’t hate Marcus, then it’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to make a case against him. And where does that leave me?

  Bafflingly yours,

  J.

  may

  the second

  I saw her just four days ago. Alive.

  And now she’s dead.

  Gladdie died the dream death, in her sleep, at ninety-one. Yet that doesn’t make it any easier for me to accept that she’s gone.

  Grandmothers die. Matthew and Heath and other brothers who are too young to die, die.

  Read today’s obituaries: A college girl playing beach volleyball on a cloudless spring day gets struck by lightning in front of all her teammates and dies. A thirty-six-year-old nonsmoking father of four gets lung cancer and dies. A seventy-five-year-old retired police officer gets hit by a drunk driver and dies.

  Everybody dies, eventually. We’re all doomed, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to die.

  You might think that’s an obvious thing to say, but the truth is, I didn’t always have this aversion to death. Not that I was suicidal or anything, but if I died, I thought, I wouldn’t be that upset about it. Not that I’d have any conscious thoughts about the matter, because I’d be dead.

  But I really don’t want to die. Not now, when I finally feel like I’m so close to escaping Pineville and finally living my real life in New York, the life I’ve been waiting for so long to live.

  Then I remember: Thousands of innocent people whose only mistake was showing up for work early on a September morning died.

  No one in my family has ever been religious. I always saw religion as a kind of a crutch, something people used to make themselves feel better about their own mortality. I don’t blame anyone for doing this— in fact, I wish I were able to buy into it all. But I can’t. I wish I believed in the afterlife. I wish I believed that Gladdie was up there on a white puffy cloud, her husband at her side, entertaining all the angels with he
r stories.

  But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in anything. I believe that when you’re dead, you’re dead. And sometimes, as Gladdie prophetically pointed out to me the last time I saw her, sometimes you’re dead even when you’re alive.

  Why is it that the place I fear the most is the only place that can set me free?

  It doesn’t make any sense.

  Four days ago, Gladdie was laughing, joking, playing games. Today she’s in a coffin. This also makes no sense to me. Maybe I should find comfort in the utter absurdity of life and death. I can’t outwit something that only plays by one rule: It will win in the end. No matter which way I choose to move, death will always come out the victor, so I should just try to enjoy the game of life as I’m playing it. Isn’t that the point Gladdie was trying to make while she was alive?

  I think it would make Gladdie happy to know that I’ve learned something from her passing. She was a firm believer in better late than never. I just wish I believed that I’ll get a chance to thank her someday.

  the third

  What is wrong with me? I am the most fucked-up granddaughter in the history of procreation.

  My grandmother’s wake was today. I know I should write about how much she meant to me, but I can’t. Something even bigger than death happened to me today.

  Before I go any further, let me try to explain my state of mind.

  Wakes are horrible, horrible customs.

  In theory, I guess I can understand why some people would want to get a look at the deceased one last time, but not when she didn’t look anything like the Gladdie we knew and loved. Her face was waxy, and yet too pale and powdery at the same time. Her makeup was applied perfectly, which is to say, her eyebrows weren’t drawn on crooked and her lipstick didn’t smudge beyond her lip line, so she didn’t look like her usual nutty self. And they had her hands folded politely across her lap, which is something she would never do when she was alive. Whoever dressed her didn’t put on one of her signature crocheted berets. The more I looked at this coffin version of Gladdie, the more upset I got.

  The only people who mourned properly were my dad and Moe. Both of them sat in the front row, not really talking to anyone, deep within their own thoughts, their own memories of this woman they both loved in their own ways.

  Everyone else was so chatty about everything but the reason why we were there. My mother was flitting around the funeral home like it was a goddamn cocktail party, telling second cousins and great-aunts “how lovely” it was to see them again so soon after the baby shower, albeit for such a “sad occasion.”

  But it was Bethany who really stole the show. Mourners lined up to pat her baby fat. “It’s tragic that she will never get to meet my firstborn,” Bethany said over and over again, making Gladdie’s death more about herself than about Gladdie. It really was sickening.

  When I finally couldn’t stand it anymore, I headed to the only place I could be alone for a few minutes, the bathroom. I had my hand on the doorknob when someone grabbed my other hand and followed me inside. I didn’t even have to turn around to know who it was.

  “I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”

  Again, stronger and clearer.

  “I’m . . . so . . . sorry, Jessica. I . . .”

  It was Marcus. At a loss for words.

  “I know,” I murmured.

  “Gladdie was classic,” he said. “A real original.”

  “I know.”

  “I liked her immensely.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m really going to miss her.”

  “I—” was all I could get out before I turned into a blubbery blob.

  Marcus put his arms around me, and I buried my face into his chest and sobbed. I breathed in deep to take him in, his scent, which evokes burning leaves in late fall.

  When I exhaled, I shot a snot rocket all over his blue-and-white polka-dot tie.

  “Oh, Christ!” I groaned when I realized what I’d done. “I’m a disgusting mess.”

  “It’s cool.” Marcus laughed, and stroked my hair. “It’s an old tie, remember?”

  I did remember. It was the same one he was wearing the first time we spoke in the Caddie, when this whole thing between us, whatever it was, or is, began. I knew he had worn it on purpose.

  He pulled me tighter, closer than we’d ever been.

  “Marcus,” I said.

  “Jessica,” he replied.

  And . . .

  And.

  Jesus Christ.

  Without knowing who started what, our mouths met—his and mine, ours—moist and messy and . . . perfect.

  As we kissed, it was as if I were returning to somewhere safe. We kissed, and it was like coming home after a long, grueling odyssey. Marcus and I kissed, and kissed, and kissed, and I never wanted to leave this familiar place again.

  KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

  I de-suctioned myself from Marcus, to whom I was so forcefully vacuum-attached that I swear we made a lovely, lid-off-the-Tupperware air-sucking belch.

  “Is there someone in there?”

  Bethany!

  “Holy shit!” I whispered.

  “Jessie, is that you in there?” my sister asked.

  Marcus had my lip gloss all over his chin, as though he’d spent the morning sucking on a greasy pork chop.

  “It’s not nice to keep a woman who’s nine months pregnant and has a full bladder waiting!”

  I looked in the mirror.

  “Holy shit!” I whispered again.

  My face was all red and raw with razor burn. And was that . . . ?

  “Oh, shit! Shit! Shit! You gave me a hickey!” I mouthed, pointing to the grape-colored map of Florida he’d left behind on my neck.

  He shrugged, smiling, still holding my hand.

  Pound pound pound.

  “Jessie! I am going to explode if you don’t get out of there this instant!”

  “Just a second!” I called out nervously to my sister.

  “I don’t have a second!” whined Bethany.

  “What are we going to do?” I mouthed to Marcus.

  “We are going to walk out that door,” he said out loud, so anyone on the other side of the door could hear him.

  “Jessie . . . is there someone in there with you?”

  “No!”

  And before I could stop him, before I could devise a plan that involved him busting a hole in the ceiling and crawling through the air-conditioning shaft to safety, before I could even turn up the collar on my shirt eighties-style to hide my goddamn hickey, Marcus opened the door and said, “She’s a terrible liar, isn’t she?”

  My sister was so stunned that she temporarily forgot that her bladder was about to burst.

  “She thinks she’s such a great liar,” Marcus continued, “but she’s really terrible at it.”

  I swear, I don’t know why Bethany’s water didn’t break right then and there with the shock of it all.

  “We’ve occupied the lavatory long enough,” Marcus said. “Please, let us get out of your way.”

  And Marcus, leading me by the hand, cleared a path to the toilet.

  And Bethany—still unable to confront the fact that her little sister was getting it on with this lanky stranger in the bathroom of the funeral home that was hosting her dead grandmother’s wake—lumbered past us and shut the door.

  “That went well,” Marcus said, smiling so bright that his eyes twinkled and crinkled in the corners.

  I don’t know what made me angrier, the fact that he had tricked me into hooking up with him, or that he was being so blasé about it after the fact. I mean, I usually don’t believe in God and the devil, but at that moment, my agnosticism was replaced by the certainty that when my time came, I should be buried in flame-retardant underwear, because I was surely spending all eternity in hell.

  “Go.”

  “Jessica . . .”

  “Just go,” I growled.

  He blinked once. Twice. Three times.

  “I m
ean it!” I snapped. “GO!”

  His smile fell, his eyes got murky, and very un-Marcus-like, he slunk away without another word.

  Did I mention that his mouth was as soft, succulent, and sweet as a slice of mango? And that I can’t stop licking my lips, hoping for one last taste?

  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

  the fourth

  I am a skank.”

  I had shown up unannounced at Bridget’s house at nine A.M. to spill the whole sordid story. And this is the conclusion I had come to.

  “How are you a skank?”

  “I made out with someone I’m supposed to hate at my grandmother’s wake. That makes me a heartless skank.”

  I was laying facedown on her flowery bedspread, my arms shielding the morning sunlight, in agony.

  “You were, like, under emotional duress,” she said. “You weren’t thinking straight.”

  My eyes were shut so tight that I could see psychedelic floral patterns swirling across the retinal blackness.

  “I don’t even know his middle name.”

  Bridget didn’t respond.

  “Did you hear me? I don’t even know his middle name.”

  This seemed very significant to me.

  “So? Like, what does that matter?”

  “I made out with him at my grandmother’s wake,” I replied. “I should at least know his middle name.”

  “Ask him the next time you see him.”

  “Bridget, you’re missing the point!”

  “What’s your point?”

  What was my point? Was I feeling sinful because I made out with anyone at my grandmother’s wake? Or was I feeling dirty because I made out with Marcus, of all people, at my grandmother’s wake? Or was I feeling hypocritical because I had just spent a bizillion hours on the phone trying to explain to Hope why he was an evil genius, and it would be extremely messed up for me to have this intense kissing episode with someone I considered to be an evil genius? Or was I feeling idiotic for putting off such an amazing total-body blissful kissing episode for so long? Or was I feeling guilty BECAUSE I GOT CAUGHT?

  When I told Bethany that Marcus and I had been talking, that I wanted some privacy, so he could help me cope with my grief, she simply said, despite all the evidence to the contrary (the razor burn, the pork-chop lip gloss, the hickey), “Whatever you say,” and left it at that. I can only attribute her coolness to a nine-months-pregnant hormonal cocktail. However, it didn’t make the situation any less mortifying. The only thing that makes me even remotely okay about this whole thing is knowing that my making out with Marcus would’ve made Gladdie extremely proud. It’s exactly what she always wanted to happen.