Sing Them Home Read online

  SING THEM HOME

  Also by Stephanie Kallos

  Broken for You

  SING THEM HOME

  Stephanie Kallos

  Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  “Jungleland” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1975 Bruce Springsteen, renewed © 2003 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4658-9

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my parents,

  Gregory William Kallos

  August 1, 1927–January 8, 2005

  and

  Doris “Dorie” Arlene Dorn Kallos

  October 16, 1931–January 6, 2006

  and my friend,

  Michael Thomas Maschinot

  November 8, 1957–June 22, 2007

  SING THEM HOME

  Prologue

  It’s so hard to explain what the dead really want.

  Not to be alive again, heavens no, never that: a passenger buckled into that depreciating vehicle of the body, that cramped one-seater with its structural flaws and piss-poor mileage, its failures and betrayals, its worn, nonfunctioning, irreplaceable parts. Even the body’s sensual ecstasies don’t have any allure for the dead, not anymore. Symphonic sex; meadowlark song; the silence that follows a prairie snowfall; the sky unzipped by lightning; that handful of nineteenth-century Russian wonders but especially Rachmaninoff and most especially Variations on a Theme of Paganini; Doris Day singing “Whatever Will Be Will Be”; eggplants, avocados, asparagus, sweet corn; the smell of warm Crayolas and breast-fed babies’ breath; the exposed, downy nape of a child’s neck; lightning bugs; infants’ feet.

  All of this would be pleasant to remember if the dead were capable of looking backward. But they aren’t. When it comes to time, the dead are tetherless. Like very young children in this way, they exist entirely in the now. They are blessed with an ability to be fully entranced by what’s in front of them.

  No wonder the living are a constant source of exasperation. The living—pathetically obsessed as most of them are with calendars, deadlines, delivery and expiration dates, estimated hours of departure and arrival; with measurements, quotas, statistics; always casting their eyes toward the room beyond the room in which they’re standing—exude this energy, for lack of a better word, that frustrates the dead to distraction, makes them so nervous that they’d jump out of their skins if they had any.

  The living are like spinning tops, powered by a need for atonement, or revenge, or by avoidance, guilt, shame, fear, anger, regret, insecurity, jealousy, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it all derives from the same pop-psyche alphabet soup and oh Lord here comes another best-selling book on the self-help shelf when really if they would just smash all the time-keeping devices excepting sundials, do a crossword puzzle, study the backs of their hands, notice their breath going in and out, drink their food and chew their water, relax, it would be a great step forward in the evolution of the species and the dead would be so grateful.

  Here, then, is one thing: They want to be undistracted.

  Another point of contention: They don’t want buildings named after them. They don’t want to be part of the school curriculum. They abhor being the subject of biographies, documentaries, sappy made-for-TV movies. They especially hate public-funded art: commemorative portraiture, statuary. For the most part, the dead are shy. Imagine how they feel, seeing themselves cast in bronze and on display for all eternity! And then there’s the theater. The humiliation of learning that one’s tribulations have become the stuff of legend and are erroneously reenacted every summer on the stages of community amphitheaters all over the world by bad actors speaking stilted dialogue! It’s a nightmare.

  The dead aren’t always irritated by the living. It is understood that the living mean well, believing that they are honoring the dead when they speak for them, about them. When they memorialize them in these ways. The trouble is, the living are always trying to interpret the dead, but this is entirely unnecessary. The dead aren’t like God. They don’t need go-betweens. The dead can speak for themselves thank you very much, and they do. All the time.

  The sad fact is that the dead have never yet come up with a uniformly successful way of getting their message across. Believe it: They’ve tried.

  Take the Jones children, for example.

  For most of their lives, they have been waiting for their mother to come down. To do otherwise, they believe, would be a betrayal.

  Other things came down: the ruined Steinway immortalized in a National Geographic photograph; the nibbled #2 pencil thrust improbably into the trunk of an Eastern Red Cedar; the red American Flyer, driven down so hard that half of it went into the earth while the handle and one set of wheels waved helplessly in the afterwinds. All these things returned to earth after being whirled about in an unimaginable dance that surely was so wonderful it might have given objects a consciousness, a power to tell tales, at least to one another. But not to them, these children, who didn’t share the miracle of these objects’ ascension and return.

  All these things went up and came down, but their mother never did.

  The phrase waiting for the other shoe to drop has a special significance for them; it seems more than anything to constitute their curriculum vitae, their professional résumé, their fate. Other forms of evidence and instruction have appeared in their field of view, but these clues have either gone unnoticed or been misinterpreted.

  The gift of bones is a profound comfort to the living—little else satisfies—and these children have done without it.

  They have begun to suspect that they are insane, that they were born out of nothing. Mythological beasts. Freaks of nature without maternity. Perhaps they entered the world through other means: deposited as bee pollen on a porch step, by accident, forming bit by bit into something vaguely human, but suspect to any who look closely. Maybe they arose from the ashes and mud ensuing a storm, or from the depths of a drop of rain, a spoonful of cookie dough. Maybe they climbed out of one of the bottles of iodine, mercurochrome, or cough syrup nestled at the bottom of their father’s medical bag. They could have come from any of these places; all of these possibilities seem every bit as plausible as the idea that they were born out of the body of a woman. Their mother.

  Like most siblings, they are different in many ways, but idiosyncratically alike in others. All three of them abstain from the use of blow-dryers. They spend inordinate amounts of money on shoes. None of them have ever seen The Wizard of Oz. A sense of humor eludes them.

  Their mother went up. She never came down.

  If only she had a different name, they often think.

  The dead just wish they would all stop waiting.

  PART ONE

  The Tornado

  Debris Project

  People who say cemeteries are peaceful probably have no means of reception for the powerful static of rushing voices that throb th
ere. I don’t believe all cemetery visits can be fruitful because there is no reason why, once having discarded the body, the soul should haunt its remains. My belief is that simply as a matter of tact and convenience some souls make an effort from time to time to be present at a common meeting place.

  —from Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother’s Life in Mine by Rodger Kamenetz

  Chapter 1

  The Mayor Ignores the Rules

  For someone born and bred right here in the rainwater basin of the central great plains, Llewellyn Jones—the mayor and presumptive leader of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska—is showing a sad lack of common sense. His ladyfriend and bedfellow for the past twenty-five years, Alvina Closs, is flummoxed.

  “Can’t you wait an hour?” she is saying. “You can still get in nine holes—maybe even eighteen—after it blows over.”

  “I’ve got a tee time reserved,” he answers. “I’m expected.”

  “We don’t live in Miami!” Alvina counters, shrilly. “It’s not as if there’s a crowd of people waiting to play. Why can’t you wait?”

  “I’m going now, Viney,” he says. Just like that. No explanation. No compromise.

  “You and your goddamned golf.”

  He gives her a level, noncommittal look. “I’ll be home by happy hour,” he says. Then he turns around and walks up the stairs and toward the bedroom, his posture erect, his gait processional. If he thinks I’m going to follow him up there, Viney says to herself, molars clenched, he’s got another thing coming.

  Plenty of others share Viney’s agitation. The smallest and least civilized townsfolk are the most distraught: the babies, all of them, even the easy ones, are confounding their mothers with uncharacteristic, colicky behavior. The babies have been fed and changed and burped and read to and sung to and walked and held but still they are out of sorts. They are determined to cry, naptime be damned. There are grumpy toddlers, too, throwing tantrums, caterwauling in unison. Family pets all over town are nervous and misbehaving—fluttering, howling, hissing, gnawing, mauling lace curtains, and mangling good leather shoes even though they know better. Premenstrual girls are arguing with their mothers, moping in front of the television, or daydreaming on polyester bedspreads behind violently slammed doors. Teenage boys contemplate their troubled complexions with dismay. Afternoon trysts are not going well. Noses tickle without relief. The carpenters in town curse and measure again, cut again, curse again, measure again. At the Williamses’ mansion, Miss Hazel’s most promising student strikes a C-sharp. Hazel cringes in the parlor; in the kitchen, her younger sister, Wauneeta, cringes, too. Downtown at the piano hospital, Blind Tom experiences a sudden unaccounted-for burst of tinnitus as he applies a cotton swab saturated with milk to a stained bit of ivory he found last week by the side of the road near Hallam. Next to the old train depot, the aged citizens encamped at the St. David’s Home for the Elderly are experiencing intestinal problems; not a one of them, not even Mr. Eustace Craven, whose bowels have emptied like clockwork for every one of his ninety-eight years, has had a decent BM all day.

  And in the living room of the house that has been Llewellyn Jones’s primary place of residence for a quarter of a century, Viney turns her back on the mayor and plants herself at the picture window—arms folded, mouth adamantly stitched shut, brows lowering, wearing an expression that no one but her dearest friend has ever seen.

  Viney rarely frowns. She does five minutes of facial exercises and acupressure every morning and makes an effort to keep her countenance (a word she routinely mispronounces as continence) relaxed and neutral. Time needn’t be the enemy. A person doesn’t have to spend a fortune on face-lifts and creams. Alvina Closs is seventy-four years old, almost seventy-five, but she looks at least ten years younger. Maybe even fifteen.

  She scrutinizes the ballooning clouds advancing from the south. The baby-blanket blue of the sky is darkening, graying. She can hear Llewellyn banging around in the bedroom, opening and closing bureau drawers. He must be changing into his shorts.

  Viney can’t for the life of her imagine what’s gotten into him. The mayor is usually so easygoing, a model of the compromising spirit. It’s one of the many reasons they’ve stayed together for so long.

  Many positive things could be said of Viney’s late husband, Waldo, but a flexible nature was not one of them. They had sex in the same position their entire married life, and Waldo required some form of red meat at every meal. He’d choke down a slice of turkey at Thanksgiving, but that was the extent of it. Chicken? “Dirty birds,” he’d say, although that didn’t keep him from eating eggs fried in butter eight days a week. Fish? Forget it, even when his friends brought home fresh perch from the Big Blue. It was meat, meat, meat with Waldo, which is why—Viney knows this for a fact—he dropped dead of a massive heart attack when he was only thirty-two years old, leaving her a young widow with four kids. He had a beautiful body. She’s still mad at him.

  The window needs cleaning. They haven’t had a good rain for days—although Viney’s oldest daughter said it sprinkled up in Omaha yesterday. The topsoil is parched, the wind has been relentless. There’s dust on everything. Viney takes up yesterday’s newspaper and her spray bottle of water and Coke and gets to it.

  The picture window is a relatively new addition. Waldo installed it back in 1962, not long before he collapsed in the parking lot of the Surf’n’Turf, where they’d gone to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Waldo was handy, that was one of his attributes. He made a lot of improvements to the house when he was alive. Up and down ladders, hammering, hoisting, sawing, drilling. All those comforting male noises.

  Alvina Closs has been a widow longer than she was married. She’s been an adulteress longer than she’s been a wife. She would have dried up for sure, grown shut down there—and in her mind and heart, too—if it hadn’t been for Llewellyn Dewey Jones, and Hope.

  Welly comes back downstairs and goes out through the kitchen door, not exactly slamming it but giving the action just enough oomph to set the door harp clanging overenergetically. What’s wrong with him?

  Viney hears him out in the backyard, thumping his shoes together, clearing off the dirt between the spikes. She pictures great bricks of dense sod being flung about the yard, and then falling into a serene, elliptical orbit with Welly at the center: a small angry god in argyle socks, giving birth to a new solar system in which the terrain of every planet is an immense, impeccably groomed PGA golf course.

  Viney resumes window-cleaning. She does a few nasolabial stretches and waits for Welly to reappear. Surely he won’t leave without patching things up.

  Viney’s house is one of the oldest in town, if not the finest or fanciest: a whitewashed two-story saltbox built back in 1910 by her great-grandfather as a wedding present for her grandparents. Her mother, aunts, and uncles were born here, as was Viney, as were Viney’s four children. She keeps her house, and Welly keeps his, even though they’ve been sleeping together since the nation’s bicentennial.

  In part, it’s for appearances’ sake—but it’s also because the house provides Alvina Closs with a sense of personal and historical continuity. Frankly, she’s never cared a good goddamn what people think of her and Llewellyn and their unusual arrangement, and she’s always deeply regretted the fact that Welly and the children didn’t move in here after Hope went up.

  But that’s a sore subject and another story entirely.

  Welly is in the attached garage now—another of Waldo’s contributions—opening the garage door with the remote. Maybe he won’t come back inside to say good-bye after all.

  The phrase friable earth voices itself in Viney’s mind suddenly. Where has she heard that expression? What does it mean? She goes to look it up.

  In 1966, Viney replaced the family Bible on the lectern with a massive Webster’s International Collegiate Dictionary. She makes a point of learning a new word every day and then using it in conversation. Staying mentally agile is crucial as one ages. There is no reason why a per
son should stop learning. Yesterday’s word was sangfroid.

  And then she remembers: One of her granddaughters—the one who’s having so much trouble getting pregnant—told her recently that she was diagnosed as having a friable uterus. Viney was a registered nurse for over thirty years and maintains a keen interest in the medical field; nevertheless this expression was unfamiliar. She didn’t have the heart to ask what it meant at the time, and a good thing, too:

  Friable, she reads. Brittle. Readily crumbled. Pulverable.

  How in the world does a uterus crumble?

  Viney looks up. Llewellyn has backed out of the garage and is loading his clubs into the trunk of his Marquis. He’s going then, without a word. His expression—normally so benign and handsome—bears a sour residue, the result, she supposes, of their recent spat.

  The sex in the beginning was very good, probably because it felt illicit, even though their adultery was completely sanctioned—more than that, encouraged—by Llewellyn’s wife, Hope.

  Viney and Welly still have sex, at least once a month, after lunch. Welly is an improviser, a person who bends, goes with the flow. They have their routines, of course, but overall their life together has been one of freedom, quiet adventure, and discovery—both in and out of the bedroom. Viney has kept them on a semivegetarian lacto-ovo diet since 1980—relying heavily on Fresh Vegetable and Fruit Juices: What’s Missing from Your Body? and The Vegetarian Guide to Diet and Salad by N. W. Walker. She credits this with their physical health, mental acuity, and active love life. Viney pictures the two of them engaged in stimulating conversation over glasses of beet juice until they are well into their hundreds. Dr. Walker himself lived to be 110. No one has yet found any reason whatsoever why the human body should die.

  All those years ago, when she charged through the front door of McKeever’s Funeral Home, and, ignoring staff urgings to be reasonable (“State law my ass!” she proclaimed), stormed down to the basement prep room to see Waldo’s pre-embalmed remains—such a strange word in that context, remains, because at that point Wally was still all there—she noticed a protrusion, something like a tent pole, midway down the sheet.