Steven and Fallon Carrington shared the first cotillion dance, naturally. "Salut, Commandant," I said, my face pressed against his ear. "Salut, Dollface," he answered. "And don't think I didn't see you flirting with the UPS man earlier today." He mimicked, '"Gosh you're strong to carry an industrial machine like that! Want a cappuccino to ease that burden?'"
Damn all-seeing, all-knowing brother.
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I said, "I was just trying to reel in a brew customer. The first one's always free. Isn't that the saying?"
"I think the saying is, 'Home is where the heart is.'"
'"There's too many fish in the sea.'"
'"Absence makes the heart grow fonder.'"
"Or some such crap."
"Exactly."
Three months till Shrimp visits this summer! The UPS man with the muscles nicely contouring his uniform shall be purely aesthetic distraction to make it through until then--a hypothetical wanton desire. Easy come, easy go, is what I will tell Danny next time he teases me about the Man in Brown.
Shrimp need not worry. I'll be waiting for him.
I'm right here.
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We have no body to view, no processional trip to a cemetery. Laura always planned things through, and that didn't change with her death. She asked for cremation and no burial. She who had everything was at heart a minimalist.
Instead, we have cookies after the service. The dining room is set up with a large buffet of catered food--light salads, polite sandwiches with the bread crusts cut off and cucumbers inside, the edamame Laura loved to nibble, set out in the beautiful bowls she brought back from Japan. No one appears to be eating much besides the sweets. Perhaps when an elderly person dies the mourners can reflect on that person's life with a celebration of food and memories, but that is not the case here. I don't hear anyone talking
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about Laura, no exchange of smiles and laughter-- Remember that time when she ... ? I hear chatter, but it's soft, humble. Or maybe I'm too high to properly distinguish the mourners' conversations over their tea and coffee cups. The spread of food is mostly a waste, but the caffeinated drinks appear to be a hit. I'm not the only person here who wants to jolt away the numb.
And who doesn't love cookies--tray after tray of delicate Italian butter cookies; ghraybeh, the Lebanese sugar cookies that were Laura's favorites; and an impressive assortment of homemade sweets contributed by the guests. I sample each variety. All these fancy cookies, but the universal truth remains the same: There is no substitute for the wholesome goodness that is chocolate chip cookies. I can picture the Georgetown society ladies arriving with their Saran-wrapped plates: Jim. Darling. I'm so sorry about your beloved daughter killing herself. Here are some chocolate chip cookies our cook made. The secret ingredient is cardamom. Delicious, no?
We stand at opposite corners of the dining room, Jim and me, the two pillars of Laura's life. I feel like I should go over to him, touch him, talk to him, tell him I'm sorry, but I can't. I don't. The food rises high between us, buffering all these people, the fillers of Laura's life. The gathered surround Jim, offering solace, but I remain alone, observing. If Jim notices me at all, I'm sure it's to think, That weirdo. Maybe now I can finally let her go. There's no more reason for her to stay.
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My feet are lodged to the floor in the remote corner of this expansive room. My head is dizzy and my body wants to sway. I yearn to take a very long nap. I place one hand against the wall to prop me up. I need something or someone to hold me steady. But all I have are cookies.
Professor Jesuit approaches me, looking old and kindly, which I hate. I look down, concentrate on the plate in my hand and the Oxy tingle-buzz coursing through my fingers. I have nothing to say to God's handyman. Although if I did, I might inform him that I've given the matter substantial thought, and I've resigned myself to the possibility that I am doomed to an afterlife of eternal hellfire, and I'm okay with it, really I am. It's not like I even believe in God, but still, I imagine Him and me in a powwow on Judgment Day. Saint Peter or whomever has the day off so God himself is going down the checklist for my entrance to Heaven. He goes: Well, Miles, you smoked like a chimney and indulged in way too many trans-fatty foods, and for Christ's sake, you were high at your own cousin's funeral, hut otherwise, you did all right in life. Didn't hurt anybody but yourself. Paid your taxes. Recycled. Helped little old ladies cross the street. (Didn't you?) But I don't know ... those snarky comments, that vile cynicism during times of crisis. I'm not so sure I like it. I will then have to set Him straight. Hey, Big Guy, get some perspective. Who gave us a world of Holocaust, AIDS, global terrorism, famine, ecological disaster, bigotry, genocide, warfare--shall I keep going down the list? Maybe it's
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ME who should be judging YOU, and not the other way around. So step aside from those pearly gates to Heaven or Hell, whichever the case may be, bucko. Let me through to Laura. We're not scared of You. Professor Jesuit passes me by. Minion.
The cookie plate in my hand mesmerizes me with swirls of color and texture, rainbow sprinkles and cinnamon rays and powdered sugar dust, and I must look up again because the cookies are dizzying me. I raise my eyes from their plate reverie, but my view of the mourners has clouded over, gone mute. My eyes lock with Jim's across the room, and in that flash instant, no one exists in this room besides the two of us. In that brief moment, our eyes remember a shared lifetime of Laura, and I see his chest suddenly heave, trying to contain a sob--he who has remained stoic and gracious throughout the afternoon, comforting all those who are trying to comfort him. It's like electricity passes between us, because I feel the heave in my chest as well, and tears well in my eyes. The plate trembles in my weak fingers and I must look back down again, return to my cookie-plate trance, steady my hand. To hold the moment any longer would mean neither of us could remain in this room, finish this gathering of mourning.
Jim's probably more of a weirdo even than me, in my opinion, but God can take note. I am not without empathy. I know what it is like to be Miles right now, a freak high on sugar and so much more, but I do wonder how it must feel to be Jim in this moment,
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too. He's a seventy-two-year-old man who marched for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, but chose to focus the latter part of his life on raising a child. What will the latter-latter part of his life now be? A philanthropist born into extreme privilege because his great-grandfather invented an appliance still used in most First World households, Jim parlayed his wealth and privilege for relatively modest selfish purpose--a grand house, grand trips--while choosing to funnel the bulk of his time and money into activism, into his hometown. And now to have his lifetime of giving come down to this one day. His cherished daughter, his one best accomplishment, took away the fundamental gift he had created for her. Life.
My cookie trance breaks when I am mauled in an embrace by the last person here from whom I would have expected--or wanted--comfort. "It's like it doesn't feel real or something, you know?" Bex, Laura's high school best friend, says to me. Her talents reside on the field hockey field, grunting and running and hitting, so I imagine she can be forgiven her lack of articulation skills. Bex is the person who named me "8 Mile," thinking I didn't know. She didn't even go to the same school as me. Yet the name traveled.
I'll never figure out how a girl like her managed to be invited to five proms this year alone; nor do I understand why at the moment of mutual acknowledgment of our shared person's suicide, this is the thought that occurs to me in relation to Bex. But it's true--she's not even that pretty, yet somehow her shiny white smile
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on pink dimple cheeks always wins out, despite her plain brown hair and eyes, her curveless, boylike, field hockey body. Bex is a girl who would never understand what it's like to have an 8 Mile but
t, because she doesn't even have a butt.
I step out of her arms. I don't want that stick touching me, even if she did love Laura. She's the reason I lost the last few years of Laura--Bex, and he who trails behind her, Jason, Laura's ex-boyfriend. At least he will not try to touch me. Handsome soccer-star boys who just finished their first Ivy League year won't bother trying to comfort a girl like me, heavyweight to his featherweight class.
"Hey," he says to us. He's so blond and handsome, it would almost be intoxicating, if not for his predictable, casual acceptance of it, as if those looks and that privilege were the natural right of any white boy from Woodley Park whose parents are both telegenic political media commentators.
What's there to say back? Hey? Bummer about that suicide and all, right, dude?
Laura took us by surprise when she broke up with Jason after New Year's. Now I get it. Laura wanted Jason to understand his freedom to move on. After.
Has Jason ever noticed how much Laura and I look alike? Shave me down a dozen sizes, straighten and dye my hair back to its natural color, take off the goth makeup and give me a fresh-faced
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cover-girl glow, and I could be Laura. I could be the one to console him. I could envelop him.
But it's Bex who jumps into Jason's arms, pressing her face against his lean chest. What would it be like to be her, open to touch, expecting that anyone would want it from her? She holds on to Jason tightly. In their embrace, I see that soon, their grief could potentially turn to something deeper. Laura wouldn't mind. I do.
I am not without my own knight in shining armor. Jamal has found me again. Not only is he my best friend, he's my psychic; I don't realize I am parched until I see him standing before me, bearing a tall glass of water. "Thought you could use this," he says. He hands me the water and I gulp it right down. He asks Bex, "Weren't you the girl who tutored my sister Niecy in math this year? Seems like I've almost met you about a dozen times." Niecy goes to the same school that Bex and Laura just graduated from. Jamal's a mama's boy; he had no problem going to the charter high school where his mother is the principal, but Niecy, she wanted her own path, the one with the fancy girls.
Bex loosens herself from Jason's arms and turns to Jamal, appraises him. What's not to admire about the black suit and baby-blue silk tie (for Laura), his caramel eyes and smooth cocoa skin, or the Afro hair he's disciplined into ten braids running the length of his scalp, knotted at the nape of his neck? Jamal must meet Bex's standards. She smiles, momentarily distracted from
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her grief. "Don't tell me. You're the brother who blasted all the D.C. go-go music from the speakers in his attic room so we had to go to the library to get any studying done in peace? I mean, I like old Chuck Brown and Rare Essence just as much as anybody who grew up here, but Niecy was trying to raise her PSAT score, and you weren't helping."
"You're Rebecca, right? Seven-up!" Jamal responds. Bex couldn't know Jamal's way of acknowledging a person he likes is to speak to them in snippets of songs, preferably by Parliament, his favorite funk band from back in the day.
"Everybody calls me Bex. Ho!" she sings back. I would not have expected a girl like her to speak in Parliament.
Jamal doesn't date white girls. Why should he, he says, when he lives in Chocolate City, surrounded on every block by the finest-looking flavors of nonvanilla?
I can no longer deny the Oxy, deny the sway gripping my body, throwing me off balance, hurtling me either toward passing out on the floor, or to a good long nap. Jamal sees it, catches me before I fall. His palm presses against the heavy folds of my arm, warming me.
"Go home and sleep it off." He leans over to whisper in my ear, and my body tingles all over again in anticipation of our private exchange, free of Bex's ears. "This is so not cool today, Miles."
Who's he to judge?
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I expect Jamal to take my hand and walk me home to the carriage house, which he would do if we'd whiled away an afternoon down by the canal, sharing a joint. Instead, his hand that's holding me up gently pushes me away, to regain my own balance. His attention turns to Bex, nonnegotiable, nonreturnable.
Teenagers. So fickle.
I am still high, but crashing down.
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