The Futilitarians Page 7

  The night we learned of Rebecca’s death, Rachel and I drove from New Orleans across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway through the first bands of Tropical Storm Frances (Rebecca died on September 10, in the height of hurricane season) to the house where Rebecca had been living with M. The Causeway, at twenty-four miles, is the longest bridge over water in the world. But Frances transformed it into a dark tunnel, the bridge’s lights relentless little explosions against the windshield and harassing rain. We were riding inside of something terrible and terrifying on the way to something terrible and terrifying. I felt as though we could veer off the bridge and into the lake at any moment, be effortlessly absorbed into the tragic night.

  Leaving the city for the suburbs had seemed like a bad move for Rebecca. She did not have a driver’s license and would be completely dependent on M., becoming even more isolated from family and friends. I didn’t have a license at the time either, so I was riding shotgun in Rachel’s truck while she drove and cried and ranted, about Rebecca, about her shitty neighbors who were probably pilfering Rebecca’s stuff at the house, about what an asshole M. was. About how earlier that afternoon during her waitressing shift, as she stood at a table to take an order, her throat suddenly felt tight and constricted, for no apparent reason. And then it stopped, but she felt uneasy until the minute she got the call.

  The house Rebecca and M. shared was in a dismal subdivision with shoddy ranch houses and aristocratic, British-sounding street names like Westminster Road and Tottenham Place. They had lived there only a couple of months and I had never been. Parked in the driveway was a young sympathetic state cop, though I wasn’t sure why. Rebecca’s body had been taken away by the coroner’s office hours before. The cop escorted us in and informed us that M.’s mother was inside, which was news to us. She was cleaning the house and barely spoke to us, busying herself in the living room. I wondered if this was part of some pattern, of her cleaning up after her son’s messes. We looked around the open-plan living area: black leather couch, big television with black particleboard shelving on either side, lined with dozens of unmarked VHS tapes like a keyboard missing its ivories, all sharps and flats. In the dining area, a glass-topped table with black place mats. All of the windows were covered, but mostly with dark towels, not curtains. One was a souvenir beach towel from Biloxi, Mississippi. HAVE FUN IN BILOXI.

  Rebecca was always making imperfect attempts at domesticity with the wrong men. Once I drove past the apartment she shared with a different wrong man, uptown on Marengo Street, and saw a crushed television on the grass next to the sidewalk and their busted living room window two floors above it. I had just given her an old mirror I wasn’t using, because she was trying to decorate the place. Later, I tried to call but she didn’t pick up, and I never learned the story of the smashed television in the grass.

  M.’s mother obviously had not made it to the kitchen because there was a casual mess and an unfinished saucepan of safety-orange macaroni and cheese on the stove. Was that Rebecca’s last meal? Would’ve seemed fitting. Hasty, ill thought out. A chemically deceitful Kraft box nearby on the counter.

  I don’t remember exactly what Rachel was looking for, but I followed her to the bedroom, which was a wreck, its disarray sadly typical of Rebecca’s life, her impulsivity. Clothes that still had tags on them were mixed with dirty laundry in a pile on a leopard-print settee. It was a dancer’s wardrobe—most every article contained some high percentage of spandex, a degree of shimmer. Treacherous heels and patent leather boots spilled out of the closet. The young state trooper had also entered the bedroom and remarked that it was such a mess they couldn’t tell whether it had been ransacked or if that was its regular state. At the moment I could envision both, Rebecca regularly ransacking her own room, her long lacquered nails tossing clothes off hangers in a panic or rage, all of her choices suddenly unacceptable.

  The trooper must’ve sensed that his presence and commentary were intrusive and disappeared from the room, for which I was grateful. Especially depressing was the plastic storage container she was using as a bedside table, and even more so what was on it, half-used tubes of certain “intimate” products that I would never have left out in public view if I were planning to kill myself. Lord, that sibling impulse to judge and compare is so enduring. But did she not anticipate us seeing her life in all its sordidness? Was she thinking about us at all? Was she that lost to the world?

  In the middle of the chaos was a video camera, angled toward the unmade bed. I instinctively looked through the finder and recoiled, not because of anything I saw, but because of the complicity of my gesture, of leaning down toward the lens like M. might have. Then I thought of all of the unlabeled videotapes back in the living room, and the darkness stretched farther out around me.

  Sometime over those next few days, I told my other sisters about the camera and the videotapes. With little discussion about the videotapes’ implications, it was unanimously decided that we had to drive back across the lake and retrieve and destroy them all. Since M. had supposedly and suspiciously left town, some breaking and entering might be required.

  When the day came, we actually weren’t that nervous. We five remaining sisters felt armored by Rebecca’s death, righteous and protected by grief. The Tragic Plane had given us permission. This time, it was a clear sunny day when we crossed the lake and drove the unfamiliar piney roads in Kristin’s SUV to M.’s house. We parked out front, one of us lifting the unlocked garage door while the rest of us watched the quiet street of the subdivision, the replication of the same brick facing and vinyl bay windows and driveways and sloped curbs. M.’s lawn was looking shaggy, and two dead ferns dangled over the small concrete porch.

  We all ducked inside the garage and quickly closed the door behind us. Inside was a crazy array of man-toys—an inflated army-green raft, a four-wheeler, miscellaneous sports equipment, a large empty animal cage. Kristin had brought a couple of screwdrivers in one of her baby’s diaper bags, and she expertly removed the molding from around the door that led into the house.

  “Shitty new construction,” she murmured as she jimmied the lock open.

  The house held a totally different sadness in the light of day. M.’s mother had cleaned it into a sort of stillness—most traces of domestic activity erased. Sliding patio doors I had not noticed the night I came with Rachel framed the white plastic chaise lounge where Rebecca might’ve sunned herself (she was always so perfectly tan) and a lawn mower stuck in the middle of the yard, defeated in the high grass. Our first order of business was to stuff all of the unmarked videotapes into my sister’s diaper bags, in case we had to leave in a hurry. Then we did a tentative tour of the house. The bedroom had been cleaned and the camera was gone. Though the master bathroom had been tidied up, the laminate countertop was still dusted with the shiny mica residue of Rebecca’s expensive and beloved cosmetics. A box of tampons left on the back of the toilet.

  We paused for a moment in front of the bare, spare guest room where M. found her. The room was not giving up any of the despair and the horror that had so recently transpired there. It remained thoroughly unremarkable with its beige walls, single bed, and untroubled carpeting. We inspected the ceiling fan. Like the rest of the house, it seemed flimsy, installed up against the eight-foot ceiling. Rebecca was the smallest, thinnest of all of us children, but it seemed impossible that the fan could’ve sustained her weight. We all wondered, Why this room? Why not the bedroom? She did not leave a note. The hanging was the message and the room was the envelope.

  For years, that ceiling fan would continue to sow doubt about her death. Given the abusive nature of her relationship with M., couldn’t it just as well have been murder? M. had conveniently disappeared. No one ever heard from him again. Dad hired a private investigator, an ex–FBI agent he knew from the strike-force days, to look into him, but nothing came of it. Years later at a dinner party, the conversation somehow turned to a murder that was made to look like a suicide. As I was expressing an unusual amou
nt of interest, someone at the table who happened to be a medical examiner explained to me that it’s very difficult to fake a suicide by hanging. I confided the reason for my interest and the woman turned both firmly professional and compassionate, looked me full in the face. Most likely the coroner’s determination was correct, she said. The cause of death that ended up in the obituary for both sisters was “undetermined causes,” in collusion with the funeral home, the newspaper, the family, and society about the taboo of suicide. Nowadays when I scan the obituaries, it’s the phrase “died at home” that tips me off.

  We came to a room that must’ve been M.’s office, with not much more than a desk and a clunky IBM computer. One desk drawer was filled with bright hard candy. Another, a few Rolex watches, most likely knockoffs. For a moment, feeling even more criminal, I wanted to take one, but I shut the drawer instead. The walk-in closet appeared empty until I pulled the light chain. A blinding hundred-or-so-watt bulb illuminated a high shelf on the three walls of the closet. The shelf was lined with bouquet after bouquet of yellow roses in glass vases, in various states of desiccation. What was this? A vault of atonement? Of affection? Someone either needed to remember or needed to be reminded. (Yes, a few years later, the image in my father’s office of the dead-flower arrangements did remind me of this discovery.) Whatever it was, it seemed central to the mystery of their relationship, and an expression of that mystery found its way to the tomb at Lafayette No. 1 every now and then for about a year after Rebecca’s death. The bouquets’ appearances at the tomb made me feel sick and bitter, knowing I had to allow M. his own grief, when all I wanted to do was throw the yellow roses in the trash, something neither he nor Rebecca could ever bring themselves to do.

  After tapping the molding back into place and relocking the door that led to the garage, we went to lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant, trying to make sense of that house and failing. We agreed to dispose of the diaper bag’s cargo later that evening, planning to unspool the tapes and trash them over wine at Kristin’s house. When the check came, we sat in the red padded booth, reluctant to open our fortune cookies. Gathered on the tray with the bill, they looked sinister in their cellophane wrappers, harboring tiny slips of the future, of wisdom, of nonsense, waiting to be crushed open.

  A year and a half later, when Rachel died and we had to deal with her belongings, the Tragic and Trivial Planes collided again with great force. When we arrived at the house, four sisters now, wearily replaying a familiar scene, on the street were a discarded light fixture with a fussy Italian quality to it, painted metal flowers, and crystal pendants. It was what she’d tied her bathrobe sash to. In his derangement after having to cut her down, her new husband, D., had ripped it out of the ceiling that same day and thrown it on the curb.

  Rachel’s house was in a different type of disorder. She had just moved in with D., a fireman she’d married in Las Vegas a few weeks before, and his children, and was still unpacking boxes of kitchenware, CDs, art projects she’d worked on with her five-year-old son, including a particularly good one using recycled bottles and an old window frame. Some of it was detritus from her time on the Trivial Plane, but also what made her who she was, all of her tastes and choices. She’d started a new life, gone back to school, loved her young son as tremendously as any mother. We thought she had a chance.

  We chose a few pieces of jewelry to give to Mom and shoved Rachel’s clothes in trash bags to sort through later. Her style was much more conservative than Rebecca’s, reflecting a young mother who liked to be comfortable but also look good. In the pocket of a rather dowdy cotton shirt, I found a drinking straw cut down to coke-sniffing size and a trace of white powder. Why had I thought that Rachel’s destructive habits would die with Rebecca? Rebecca was often seen as the corrupting force, since she so outwardly embodied it, but the two of them obviously shared these impulses. I wondered if continuing to indulge in those impulses kept Rachel connected to Rebecca after she was gone.

  Hanging on the closet doorknob was a simple black crocheted purse with a long strap. Not much was in it save Rachel’s wallet and an unused, unopened eye-shadow case, wrapped in a receipt from Rite Aid, which I scrutinized. (As well as being a farewell, suicide is an invitation, for people to study your stuff, a forensic rifling that can last for years.) It was purchased the day before she killed herself. Who does that? I thought. Buys an eight-color eye-shadow palette from the drugstore one day and then hangs herself with a bathrobe sash the next? It was probably a casual, pick-me-up impulsive purchase, meant to make you feel a little better, a little prettier, the kind that fuels a billion-dollar cosmetic industry.

  I still have that CoverGirl eye-shadow case, an object that dovetails both commonly used definitions of vanity—the desire for admiration, especially in the sense of physical appearance—and that of Ecclesiastian futility. All is vanity. For well over a decade I’ve tried to throw that thing away, dislodge it from my own cluttered cabinet of vanities, but I can’t, and I never use it. It’s become both memento mori and cautionary talisman about putting too many eggs in the attractiveness basket, like Rebecca did, and sometimes Rachel, especially as I get older and the market competes so virulently to capitalize on my insecurity and degenerating cells. I truly believe that being beautiful contributed to the undermining of the twins’ sense of self-worth, made them vulnerable to all kinds of bad situations, especially with men.

  Here is the palette, purchased at the Rite Aid on Napoleon Avenue in mid-March of 2000, CoverGirl Professional Eye Enhancers Sonoma Sunset, or Crépuscule Enchanté (the packaging also includes the French translations of the different shades, which of course sound more glamorous and promising): Autumn Haze, Mink, Fresh Moss, Mint Green, Peach Nectar, Hazelnut, French Vanilla, and Champagne, half of them matte and half frost, a soft, aromatic confusion of nature and flavors. The tiny foam applicator is so old it’s crumbled off its tiny blue plastic handle. I’ve held on to other objects that Rachel and Rebecca actually wore—pairs of jeans, shirts, some earrings—but this eye makeup was in some kind of pure, shrink-wrapped state of being desired but never used, purchased and then forgotten about, as all objects became useless and irrelevant when she let go of both planes, all objects except her bathrobe sash.

  In January 2012, when Dad died, the old wounds and older bricks were opened up to daylight again by the cemetery’s mortar-splattered sextons. The marble slab engraved with the twins’ names and dates had been removed from the tomb’s entrance, as well as about a two-by-two-foot section of bricks, just enough space for my brother to reach through with Dad’s urn and place it on the narrow shelf inside. The family closed in around it and a small crowd fanned out behind us, including a very emotional Chris in a tweed cap and jacket, the only nonfamily ECRG member who really knew Dad, as the priest blessed Dad’s everlasting rest, reminding us that from dust we came and to dust we will return. A strong breeze knocked over one of the oversized arrangements of gladiolas flanking the tomb, and we joked that it was for Big Daddy, because he would erupt dramatically over spills at the dinner table, a near-nightly occurrence when we were growing up. We took turns tossing a flower into the tomb, and saying our silent good-byes. When it was my turn, I peered inside, looking for the twins’ urns, which were matching but not quite identical, like the twins themselves, but I couldn’t see them inside the dank opening. When we’d interred Rachel, Rebecca’s urn was in plain sight inside the tomb and I laid my hand on its cold ceramic glazing and then on Rachel’s, which was still warm with the March sun, but not for long.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see their urns. After all, it was part of the sextons’ job to shuffle things around inside the tomb to make room for more dead. The mere act of gathering there at our personal Southern Gothic set piece—the molting magnolias, the grid of crumbling mausoleums, all that indifferent yet affirming statuary—reunited us all on the Tragic Plane. The twins’ ghosts would begin reasserting themselves, and Dad’s presence in my life would be augmented by his loss. When
I’d drive by that bar in the mornings with my son, he was superimposed on those solitary guys in the threshold, residue from an old high school memory.

  One early evening driving in slow traffic down St. Charles Avenue to pick up Rachel at a friend’s house, I happened to see my dad in his lawyerly three-piece suit through the propped-open door of the Bamboo Lounge, lobby of sorts for the Audubon Hotel, known for all manner of transients. He was alone in this seedy bar, watching television. He looked both out of place and totally comfortable. It was almost dinnertime and I asked myself, why wasn’t he home with his wife and eight kids? One of those questions that probably answer themselves. By then, he had earned his big house in an old-money neighborhood, but I guess he was craving a different kind of comfort, something that reminded him of the back alleys of South Beloit, where he’d court trouble as a kid, working at the Black Hawk Grocery. Who knows. It was a perfectly framed tableau illustrating what an utter stranger my father was and always would be to me. One afternoon a few years later, walking to work under the sheltering balconies of the French Quarter, I saw him playing video poker in a black leather jacket through the door of Harry’s Corner, yet another stranger in another part of town. The aperture of the bar’s doorway turned kaleidoscopic, and I wondered how many of my fathers were out there.

  APRIL

  The Last Suffer; or, The Way of the Crisis (Via Dolorosa)

  For those of you who couldn’t attend last month’s ECRG, it was decided that since the date of our next gathering falls during the Christian Holy Week, in lieu of someone choosing a reading, we’d integrate secular and nonsecular ritual for our own attempt at shaping meaning and tradition. Someone brought up the Way of the Cross (also known as Stations of the Cross or Via Dolorosa) procession performed in the neighborhood during Holy Week, starting at the Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos Church on the corner, with prearranged stops commemorating certain events of the Passion of Christ, following Jesus’s path from condemnation to crucifixion, a mini-pilgrimage of the faithful. Pilgrims have been visiting holy sites in Jerusalem since the reign of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, in the early fourth century. For those who could not make the long journey to the Holy Land, reproductions began to appear in Europe around the fifth century, when a monastery in Bologna built chapels arranged to mimic the progression through the sites. Some Via Dolorosa reproductionists tried to accurately measure the distances between sites by pacing them off in the Holy Land and recording and re-creating them, so the faithful in Europe could walk the same number of steps between stations, but the outcomes were wildly divergent. Over the years, the number of sites and events people thought it was necessary to venerate varied from about seven to thirty-one, with most settling between twelve and fourteen. (We will use the traditional fourteen stations.)