The Undertaking of Tess Read online

  Part of Birdie’s mind.

  His jokes.

  His guarding over us.

  His smell.

  He won’t walk me down the aisle if I get married to Charlie Garfield.

  They’re all bad, but #5 really got to me because there is was something about the way Daddy smelled that kept me coming back for more. I got to missing it so bad that I ended up sniffing every nook and cranny in the house to get a little whiff of him.

  On this important morning that’s two weeks after I let Daddy drown, Louise Mary Fitzgerald Finley, who is Birdie’s and my mom, is stomping around our wooden house on Keefe Avenue. She’s looking for money.

  There’s a crash and a bang in the bathroom, and then off she goes to the kitchen to slam open cupboards and shout, “If that lazy s.o.b. had gone to work the way he was supposed to instead of going fishing, I wouldn’t be … goddamn it all!”

  She’s wailing at the top of her lungs because even though she blew out twenty-nine candles on her last birthday cake she has never outgrown her tempers.

  “She’s got her Irish up,” Daddy used to say with a smile when he came into our bedroom to escape when the two of them would be in a fight. Besides not having a big enough Friday paycheck, his hoisting a few after work bugged Mom too, which was so unfair. He was a bartender, for crissakes! Whiskey and beer were to him like … like gas and oil to a filling station attendant and popcorn and Jujubes to the man who owns the Tosa movie theatre.

  Mom also sometimes would get mad and tell Daddy that he was winking too much at that “French slut at the bar.”

  Now, I don’t know if cocktail waitress, Suzie LaPelt, is a slut because I’m not exactly sure what that is, but she does have La in her name as in ooo … la … la so her people definitely come from France. Major export: Evening in Paris, a perfume that is too popular around here. During Mass on Sundays, it stinks the church up so terrifyingly bad that when Daddy crossed himself with holy water at the front door, he’d bend down and whisper to me, “Smells like a French horror house in here.” Also tongue kissing comes from that country. And same as polio came from Poland, trench mouth comes from France too because of all the trenches they got over there during the war.

  Birdie and me know Suzie LaPelt pretty good because we always beg begged Daddy to take us with him to Lonnigan’s to play the Arabian Nights pinball machine, drink Shirley Temple cocktails, and listen to everyone laugh at his jokes and call him, “Good-time Eddie.” And on special occasions, like St. Patty’s Day when everybody in the neighborhood gets three sheets to the wind, even Father Ted, especially Father Ted, Daddy would let Birdie and me entertain the customers too. We sang this song from the movie White Christmas with cute scarves tied around our necks. “Sisters, sisters, there never were such devoted sisters.”

  Mom barges into the living room to open up drawers in the tables and look for change under the sofa that Birdie and me are sitting on. She’s having a conniption fit, but not ripping her hair out. She would never do that. It’s red and very beautiful, not like mine that goes lighter in the summer and back to being darker red in the winter, but all of the time is mostly a rat’s mess. She doesn’t like Birdie or me to touch her hair, but especially after it’s been sprayed with Aqua Net. My sister would still pat it if she was allowed, but I wouldn’t ’cause I don’t love her as much as Birdie does. I think our mom accidentally swallowed some of that stiffening spray and it went down her throat and into her heart.

  She hasn’t put on her make-up yet, but she looks very nice from her gold crucifixion necklace down. She’s wearing a black dress, not her favorite color, yellow is, because it brings out the gold in her hair, but it’s August 12, 1959, the day our daddy is getting pretend-buried and she has to look the part. Since she’s gonna leave for church soon, I’ve got to put my pedal to my metal too. I came up with my most important and newest list last night that’ll help keep me on track:

  TO-DO LIST

  Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.

  Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.

  If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing.

  Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.

  If you aren’t an expert like I am on the subject of death and what happens to your body after you leave it, there are three basic things to know. Right off the bat, the deceased person pays a visit to Mr. Art Shank, the owner and undertaker of Shank’s Funeral Home on Lisbon Street. He lets me sit on a high stool and watch him sometimes, not because he likes kids, but because he likes the Braves and he gets sick of listening to them play baseball on the radio with dead people who can’t cheer along with him when “Hammerin’” Hank Aaron gets a home run.

  After Mr. Shank pumps the stiff back up with embalming fluid that makes them nice and spongy again, he dresses them in their favorite outfit. Then he applies tan make-up to whatever skin is showing. “Not the whole body,” he taught me. “That’s not cost-effective.” He also dabs pink rouge on their cheeks, and if they’re a lady, he puts pretty eye shadow on their closed lids. When Mr. Shank is all finished sprucing the body up, he always stands back and admires his work before he places it in the satin-lined coffin that got picked out by the family. It heads over to the church after that for its funeral.

  At St. Catherine’s, the coffin can be left open, but only if the dead person’s face wasn’t messed up by a tree falling on it (Mr. Martinson) or a crazy person gave it forty whacks (Lizzie Borden) or if you get fried in the electric chair like I might for not saving Daddy because Mr. Shank is great at what he does, but he can’t work miracles even if all the biddies in the parish think he can. They are always dropping off pineapple upside down cakes, and the Italian nanas leave spaghetti and meatballs in red sauce at the funeral home’s back door. Those old ladies also make sure to sit in the first pew and say nice and loud after every funeral things like, “My goodness, Art is so talented!”

  “The Leonardo da Vinci of undertaking!”

  “Why, Ruthie looks better dead than she ever did alive!”

  The reason they brown-nose Mr. Shank left and right is because they wanna stay on his good side so when they kick the bucket he doesn’t fix their wagons like he did Mrs. Heinzhelder. I was listening to a baseball game with him the afternoon he “prepared” his old high school girlfriend who dumped him for Mr. Heinzhelder. The Braves were beating the pants off the Cubs, so Mr. Shank had an extra bad smile on his face when he patted on orangey face make-up, drew red lipstick way outside the lines of Mrs. Heinzhelder’s mouth, and dragged her black eyebrows down to her temples. He also gave her something that she wasn’t born with. An ugly mole on her cheek that he called the coo de gra.

  When he got her right where he wanted her, the undertaker laughed like a cartoon devil when he asked me, “What do you think, Miss Finley?”

  I was scared to tell him the truth because I don’t want to be on his table someday and have him make me look really cruddy too. I am an excellent straight-faced liar, but I didn’t think I could say that Vera Heinzhelder looked the best she ever had without cracking up, so I ended up telling him, “She … ahhh … no offense, Mr. Shank, but she … ummm … looks like a pumpkin that got dropped from a second story window.” He grinned even more devilishly and said, “Perfect!”

  (This goes to prove again that honesty is the best policy, but only if you get backed into a corner and you don’t have any other choice but to come clean. The more somebody knows about you, the greater danger you’re in because they can use that information against you. Example: our mother.)

  When the funeral is over, the coffin is lifted up by men named Paul, which is one of life’s little mysteries. (What would gumshoes Stew Bailey, Jeff Spencer, and Kookie Burns from 77 Sunset Strip think about six strong misters with the same na
me showing up at every funeral in black suits? They’d think it was suspicious, I bet, and worth investigating, same as me.)

  After the Pauls take the casket down the aisle and out the church doors, it’s driven in a black hearse that everyone follows behind in a sad parade that crawls over to Holy Cross Cemetery. It gets set six feet under in a hole that caretaker, gravedigger, and Birdie’s and my friend, Mr. McGinty, digs the night before in the dark with a lantern because he feels stronger then. The crying people usually throw flowers on top of the coffin, but Mrs. Gersh threw herself because she lost her only child, a nice little girl named Eva who choked on an apple. That was over a year ago, but Mrs. Gersh still misses her daughter so much that she visits the cemetery every day come rain or shine, like the mailman. Only instead of letters, she drops off stuffed animals and cute little sweaters that she knits. She lies down and screams on top of Eva’s grave, “Please let me have my baby back. Please.” I always close the house windows and make sure that I’m not out on the back porch or in the cemetery around eight in the morning, which is when Mrs. Gersh shows up. I just can’t take that. If Birdie or me died, our mother wouldn’t howl like that, or ask God to return us. She probably wouldn’t even cry if she’d already put her mascara on.

  Our father’s pretend funeral won’t be a big production. It won’t take hardly any time at all. For one thing, his coffin will be easy to carry because no matter how hard the men of the Shore Patrol looked for Daddy in Lake Michigan, he never turned up. Not on the beach. Nowheres else either. The only thing I have left of him from that day is his Swiss Army knife that he left behind in the boat. I took it up to church and had Father Ted bless it, so now it’s not only lucky, it’s holy lucky. I keep it on me at all times when I’m awake, and all through the night, it’s under my pillow.

  Birdie and me are wearing our matching red shorts and white blouses and not black this morning because even though it’s really important that my sister, who wasn’t there when Daddy fell out of the boat, goes to both the funeral and his pretend burial ceremony, it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen no matter how much or how hard I beg our mother.

  “Your turn, Senorita Birdie,” I say, because I’ve been trying to make her feel better about Daddy being gone by doing some of my funny voices while we play her favorite game of all time—cat’s cradle. “Vaya con Dios.”

  Imitating voices is something I found out I could do one day up at school when I was making fun of Sister Raphael during choir practice. I was as surprised as everyone else was! I think it was some kind of miracle, because all of a sudden, like turning loaves into fishes, I sounded exactly like the crabby, old penguin!

  A little while after that, I figured out it wasn’t just her I could imitate. With some practice, I could do lots of different voices from television shows like Daffy Duck’s—“Thuffering thuccotash”—and Mighty Mouse—“Here I come to save the day.” Zorro was trickier to learn than the nuns and cartoon characters, but I worked hard at it because he became Birdie’s and my favorite after the Pope removed The Cisco Kid from the television because the Kid’s horse’s name was Diablo, which means devil in the language of Spain. Pope John the twenty-third doesn’t care for the devil, or Spanish, he likes Latin better because it’s the foreign language they teach at the seminary, which is where the boys who can’t get dates go instead of high school. Since priests are the only people in the world who know what words like Domino Vobiscum mean, I hate going to Mass because it reminds me of going to a matinee movie and getting a message from Flash Gordon when I don’t have my decoder ring on me.

  I should talk. I don’t know what the heck, “Vaya con Dios,” means either. I only know that whenever I lower my already very deep voice for a girl, and say it like Don Diego, which is Zorro’s name when he isn’t wearing the black outfit and smacking his bullwhip, my sister goes into stitches and says, “Do it again, Tessie. Do it again!”

  That’s another one of the things I love about Birdie. Her big belly laugh. It makes me feel like at least I’m doing one thing right. Since Daddy isn’t here anymore, somebody around here has got to pick up the slack because when they handed out funny bones, Mom went to the little girls’ room to powder her nose.

  My sister at least tries to be funny, but she can’t tell a joke, not even a simple one. She’ll say, “Knock … knock.” And then I’ll say, like you’re supposed to, “Who’s there?” And then she’ll say, “Birdie.” And then I’ll say, “Birdie who?” Then she’ll say, “It’s me, Tessie. Let me in.”

  See what I mean? That’s why I had to work hard on a very good fake laugh for two days. I don’t want her feelings to get hurt because they can very easily. Just like her outsides, Birdie’s heart is very delicate.

  Still giggling a little, she wiggles the bakery string that she’s got looped around her fingers in my face. “Your turn.” I don’t like this game. (I call it crap’s cradle in my brain.) I’m only playing it because I love her, and I can erase some of my sins by making a sacrifice, which this is, because Birdie’s gonna beat me, she always does. She’s not good at telling time or reading or figuring things out, but she’s really, really great at card games and she is a goddamn cat’s cradle genius!

  “Theresa!” Mom yells outta her bedroom. She never calls me Tess, or Tessie, like Daddy Birdie does. She thinks nicknames are low class. “Get in here.”

  “That’s okay. I give up. You win!” I say to my sister after she drops her hands and the cradle collapses in her lap ’cause the sound of our mother’s bossy voice can make whatever is going on in Birdie’s head come to a grinding halt. “Be right back for round two.”

  I’m not sure Birdie hears me though. Besides “tweetheart,” Daddy called her his, “little dreamboat”—another great nickname because she can drift off, and sometimes it really does seem like she falls asleep in the middle of things.

  She’s also very sweet with blah-brown hair, pale-blue eyes, a baby-talking voice, and her ears lie close to her skull, but I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture. She does have some not so good points too. Birdie is VERY high strung. If you stand next to her for too long, you can feel her vibrate like the tuning fork in music class. She also picks at scabs, and she can be more stubborn than a blood stain. Once she gets something locked into her mind nothing, and I mean nothing, me or anybody else says will open it back up again. Our mother says Birdie is also, “Thick as a brick,” because she weighed next to nothing when she was born and her brain got short-changed. Besides being dumb, she also thinks that my sister might be, like they say in the cowboy movies at the Tosa Theatre when one of the prospectors starts acting weird, “Touched in the head.”

  “Theresa Marie!” our mother hollers again. “Are you deaf?”

  “Keep the string warm, I’ll be right back, my little dreamboat,” I tell Birdie, but she doesn’t answer me again because she really is going more drifty by the second. She wet the bed last night.

  The Hungarians

  In the bedroom that belongs to only her now, our mother is sitting on the throne stool in front of her vanity mirror, her all-time favorite spot.

  My eyes go straight to where there should be a picture of her and Daddy next to all the beauty potions. Where’d it go? They were at the Milky Way Drive-in. She was sitting on the hood of a jalopy and our father was looking up at her the way he always does did. Like she was a four-leaf clover. Mom is staring at him with a lucky look too, which is so hard to believe that I bet she paid to have the picture guy at Dalinsky’s Drugs doctor it up.

  “You rang, madam?” I ask my mother in my excellent Maynard G. Krebs beatnik voice.

  “Knock it off,” she says without taking her eyes off herself. They are a very unusual blue, somewhere between my navy ones and Birdie’s light ones. Hers are shot with blood today. I’ve never actually seen her cry in person, but I knew she did last night because Birdie and me could hear her through the wall that separates our bedroom from hers. I think she was crying because she couldn’t fall as
leep without Daddy. Him not cuddling her? I can see how that would set her off because I can’t drift off to sleep unless I feel my sister’s breath blowing like a summer breeze on the back of my neck. I’ve been wondering for awhile if I didn’t wash the dirt off it for a whole week, could I sprinkle a few seeds back there, let my sweat water them, wear my hair in a ponytail so they’d get some sunlight, and would they grow into a little sweet-smelling pink peony bush? That seems like that would work, that’s all the ingredients you need to grow something, but I’m gonna ask the best gardener I know, our gammy, the next time I see her, which could be today at Daddy’s pretend funeral, if our mother would only play ball.

  When she says to me like she read my mind, “I want you to call your grandmother,” my knees almost give out and my tummy shrinks into a medicine ball. The idea that she could ESP my thoughts is one of the most sickening things I can think of.

  “Ahhh … how come?” I ask, hoping she doesn’t say, ‘So you can ask her about planting pink peonies on the back of your dirty neck so you and your sister could fall asleep every night breathing in one of the best smells in the entire world, you idiot.’

  Mom doesn’t say that, but what she does say is almost as scary, “Because I told you to, and I’m the boss now.” She goes back to gliding on her bright-red lipstick that makes her pale skin and black A-line dress with the white collar really stand out.

  “What do you want me to say to Gammy?” I ask her.

  “Tell her that you and your sister are starving.”

  Now, I’m not against lying, it really is one of my best qualities next to my funny voices, but I don’t like doing it to people I adore unless it’s an emergency, which this isn’t. Mom must’ve forgotten about the boatload of food the ladies from church brought over. She wouldn’t let me answer the door because we aren’t, “Charity cases, for crissake,” so they left their tuna-noodle casseroles and beef stews on the front porch, alongside the million containers of goulash that got delivered by the other ladies who wear babushkas to church instead of hats or scarves. Birdie and me ate the goulashes already because we feel really bad for the fattest people in the parish. It’s sad, really. No matter how much or how often those babushka-wearing ladies eat, they stay starving, which is why their neighborhood nickname is, “The Hungarians.”