(previously published in an anthology entitled WEDNESDAY NIGHTS’ HARVEST,
Seedling Press, Granville, Ohio, 1991)
They say tragedy brings the best out in people. I don’t know about that, but it sure brought them out in numbers when Mary Ellen Weller died. I’ve never seen so many people as came through the door of Barnett’s Funeral Home that weekend, and if you ask me, Mary Ellen never had either.
There was Mary Ellen, laid out looking all white and limp like a three day old Easter lily, dressed in the lavender organdy dress that she’d bought at Lazarus for my very own wedding. And there were all those strangers with their long, sorry faces and downcast eyes, not one of them red, and I could count on one hand the faces that I’d seen sitting at Mary Ellen’s kitchen table before.
We stood at the front door, Lou, the kids, Mary Ellen’s mom and me, nodding and making small talk, getting our hands patted plenty. I preferred standing in one place because the the carpet was so thick that the spiky heels of my shoes kept sinking in and tripping me up like the time I’d walked across Pottman’s marsh in my Sunday clothes when the road washed out.
Mary Ellen’s mom was shaking her head, saying, “So loved. So loved,” to nobody in particular. But I knew why all those people were there. Okay sure, a few of them were from the PTA or the altar guild, people who would only remember that she had a lovely smile or gentle manners and never knew that she lived on the fringe of their tightly knit circles hoping for just a phone call or an invitation. And maybe some were from Owens Corning where Lou worked. They knew her as a face on a Christmas card, festive and beaming, encircled with etched gold tinsel that cost an extra fifteen cents per card. But most of those people were just weevils in the fruit basket. They showed up for disasters and fed on the wreckage of other people’s lives.
Did you hear? Mary Ellen Weller killed herself. What/ You didn’t know her? Sure you did, remember? The cute little blond with the two kids. Smart dresser. Married to Lou Weller up at Corning. You know Lou. He used to sit in at our Wednesday night poker games. Quiet guy. Can you imagine? With two children. The little boy was in Johnny’s class. Before Johnny moved to Gifted and Talented. Saw her at the library sometimes. Who’d have thought? Going to bury her at the Baptist church, the one your Aunt Lucille goes to. I’ll go and pay my respects of course. It’s the only decent thing to do. You should come too. You’ll remember her when you see her.
I was her best friend. Sometimes I think she did it just to punish me, so I lie awake nights coming up with reasons why she was wrong. Who could’ve been a better friend? I was there the night Lisa had the croup and we sat on the steamy bathroom floor singing every silly nursery rhyme we knew and some we made up. I was the one who came and scrubbed her kitchen floor when her leg was in a cast all summer. And she cried on my sofa the day Sandy Boche called to say that Lou made a pass at her in the office.
Okay, so I got mad a hung up on her that time she called crying about Lou’s mother. I have problems too you know, and her whining about her mother-in-law got really old sometimes. But we patched it up. And I know I’m not the best keeper of secrets that there ever was, but I never told a soul when Mary Ellen got her breasts enlarged, and I can tell you, plenty of people asked.
If she’d only left a letter. If she’d only said, ‘look, it’s not personal, it’s not about you.’ Something. But she didn’t. So now we’re left to write that letter ourselves, each one of us, me, Lou, the kids, her mom, writing in our own hearts the judgment we are certain she has passed. Dear Lou, you never were a very good husband... Dear Lisa and Billy, you were too much trouble and you wore me out... Dear Mom, if only you’d loved me a little better... Dear Emily, where were you when I needed you?
I took the kids by the hand over to the casket. It was a real monstrosity, top of the line, best deal that Ralph Seymour had to offer (guaranteed to soothe the guiltiest conscience with a mere shake and your signature right there on the bottom line while Ralph twitched his eyes and smiled his yellow smile down at your trembling hand.) We tried hard not to look at her until the last possible moment and your could hear all three of us stop breathing. Mary Ellen looked so diminished and unimportant in there, like she’d jumped into a box meant for somebody else.
She sure looks peaceful, somebody said.
Peaceful? I wanted to scream at her, smack her in the face. Stop it right now, Mary Ellen! Who do you think you are, doing this to all of us? Did you think we would understand this?
Little Lisa, on tiptoes, peered earnestly over the edge of the lacy pillows and said, “Up, mommy.”
But that Billy, he just stared and stared. Like a soldier at the changing of the guard, unblinking, unseeing. Then all three of us walked back, solemn as could be, to where Lou and Mrs. Hammond waited, still smiling and nodding, talking about Hank Jarrell’s failed dry cleaning business.
That night, Lou sat at the kitchen table, his eyes fixed on the coffee and put in front of him as if he couldn’t remember what to do with it. It was the mug Mary Ellen drank from the other day when we wrote up our shopping lists. Had we ever done that shopping? I couldn’t remember.
“What was it, Emily?” Lou wanted to know. “A bad day? Hell, I know about bad days. Bad weeks even. But, geez.” He put his head down on his arms and sobbed, and a big black water bug scudded under the table right past his foot. I remember thinking that’s the biggest water bug I’d ever seen and wanting to stomp on it so badly, but I let it go because there Lou was crying and all. I wanted to shake him and tell him that nobody ever killed themselves just because they had a bad day, but the kids were right there, so instead I said, “Cherry pie, anyone?”
There was a time, years ago, when I thought Mary Ellen Hammond would be my ticket out of Ohio. You see, unlike me, she had not always lived here. She came when she was eighteen to attend the university. Before then she had lived in Atlanta, St. Louis, New York, and finally New Orleans.She had the knid of Southern accent that’s like soft butter slipping off a knife. I worked as a nurse for a general practitioner in town and met her during her senior year when she came in with a stomach problem. My boss, Dr. Richey, he was a pretty good looking guy (all of us in the office had a crush on him) and I knew the moment they met, something was going to happen. She was the golden girl, Mary Ellen was, and if anyone was destined to have good things happen to them it was her.
Sure enough, a year later, I watched my best friend and ticket to the real world marry and put down roots right here in Licking County, Ohio. Of all places.
Dr. Richey, “Don” to me by then, was a little older, with three kids from another marriage, but that didn’t intimidate Mary Ellen in any way. It was just my luck that everything about small town living enchanted Mary Ellen and so, while I never saw big city life with my own eyes like I’d wanted, I settled for seeing my own choked up world through Mary Ellen’s eyes, and it was enough.
Then Don, now “Don the Bastard”, left her. He took his ready made family into the arms of his new, barely pubescent, assistant, Darlene. “Dah-leen” as Mary Ellen said it, with a venom that only a scorned woman with a Southern accent can inflect. And so we began the “black years” when we combined our households and sat in the morning over coffee makingplans. We were going to split this town, this state even, and shake the whole Midwest loose, like dust from our feet,
But we never got to it. For one reason or another. I was the one who introduced her to Lou. I was dating his identical twin. Now that was a real hoot, dating two guys who looked exactly alike. For a while we even talked about marrying them. But things just didn’t develop that way for Lou’s brother and me. Mary Ellen, on the other hand, was hell bent to get married again. Lou was safe, he was kind, and Mary Ellen didn’t seem to be aiming much higher than that anymore.
Lou was so quiet that it scared me sometimes and I wondered what life was like at their house when I wasn’t there. Still, I never asked.
We left the funeral home each evening in a daze. No one talked about the eerie feeling of collecting the family together and driving back home, leaving Mary Ellen to keep her strange vigil alone through the night. I tried to tell myself that we weren’t leaving her. She’d been the one who left us. But it didn’t help. I had the inconsolable feeling that we had abandoned her life and were still doing it, even now.
That week we became our own crossbreed of family, thrown together because of our connection to Mary Ellen. We were amputees, walking with bleeding, puss filled stumps, promising ourselves we’d deal with our own pain later. By the morning of the funeral we had an automated sort of routine. Mary Ellen’s mom would get the kids out of bed and bathed while I fixed breakfast and made coffee. One of us would iron the little dress and pants we had laundered the night before while the other one took them, fresh and warm, and dressed the children. Most of the time while Mrs. Hammond and I moved efficiently from one task to another, Lou sat in a chair in the corner of the kitchen, staring and chewing at the inside of his mouth. It was like having one more child to care for and the last morning I finally lost my patience.
“Lou, try to be useful, will you?”
“Oh. Of course,” he said, rising slowly from the chair. “What do you want me to do?”
I think I was mostly concerned for the children. If Lou didn’t snap out of it, who would be there for them? “I think the car’s almost out of gas. Why don’t you go fill it up? We’ll still be a few more minutes getting ready.”
He moved like a dutiful, preoccupied child, toward the door. Something dark and angry inside me hammered to get out but I beat it back down for the zillionth time. The phone rang and it was my husband, Jeff. He’d patiently given me up for three days and was wondering if he could drive me home after the funeral. I had a life apart from all this that I’d almost forgotten. I was a speck of light at the end of a long tunnel.
Lou and I sat in the car after letting Mrs. Hammond and the children out at the funeral home. We would all make that long, final drive with Mary Ellen in silence, so now was the time to dispense with unfinished business. In the space of a dark afternoon, my future with Lou had been drastically altered.
“You’ve been a good friend, Emily.”
“And you were a good husband, Lou.” We were the condemned justifying one another.
“I should have helped her,” he said. “Somehow.”
“She never seemed to need help, Lou. You know Mary Ellen. Maybe she never knew all she had to do was ask.”
Sitting in the car feeling the beads of sweat roll down the back of my dress, I looked out onto the parking lot. We both sat like that a while, as if the answer to all this mess lay somewhere in the wavy air above the pavement, and we’d see it if we only looked long enough. I guess I knew already there weren’t going to be any answers. There wasn’t any consolation, and everything I had ever said to anyone until then had just been trite and pathetic. Mary Ellen, in her silence, had the last word.
Looking back, I think what I wanted most from Mary Ellen was absolution, and although I dug long and hard through memories of our friendship to find some shred, she never gave it. I found it later, in other friends, but it was never completely satisfying. Like a drink of cold water on a blistering day, it only really helped for a moment.
What Mary Ellen wanted from me, or any of us, is a question I will never stop asking. Maybe Jeff is right. I should stop beating myself up over it. But in some twisted way, I’m doing penance.
I’ve thought a lot about what the minister said that day, words we all heard on other happier days, words we’d sung out in radiant assurance with corsages pinned to our bosoms and new hats on. There was some huddled, whispered debate after the service as to the state of Mary Ellen’s soul. The ugly chill of doubt blew across that place like an out of season gust of wind leaving ravaged expressions in its wake. And of course, the weevils, with their smarmy condolences, wagged their heads and feasted on.
So, God, I don’t question too much what Mary Ellen thought of you. As my grandmother used to say, there are two kinds of people, those that stiffen their necks and those that bend their knees. I’d seen Mary Ellen on bent knees more than once or twice in my life. What I’d like to know, God, is what you thought of Mary Ellen. Did you believe in a strong capable Mary Ellen, like we did? Or did you see the Mary Ellen who never shared herself with any of us? We really needed Mary Ellen, God. I guess there was no room in our lives for a weary used up person. You’re larger than us, though, and I hope you received her back.
Maybe she did ask for help. Just not from us.
They put my friend, Mary Ellen Hammond Richey Weller, in the ground. And after the crowd dispersed, after Lou took Mrs. Hammond and the kids back to the house, we watched, Jeff and I, as they threw dirt into the hole. Each shovel full was a catharsis for me, as though little bits of me, the lazy parts, the part that kept its eyes half closed and didn’t look too hard at damaged things, were discarded and buried also. I would have liked to have thrown my anger into the hole that morning also, but like an ugly, yet devoted lover, it clung to me and I held it close a little longer. Even so, I was able finally to cry, as they smoothed the place where the hole had been and the wind rippling through the trees sent the first leaves of Indian summer showering down on our heads.
Lara McLaughlin
