I was five when I saw my first dead body. Pop had always kept a Do Not Disturb sign on the door to the embalming room. And beneath it, because I needed reminders for what the words meant, he’d drawn a frowning girl. It was a sign that told me, No, Mary. Not now, Mary. I’m working, Mary.
I sat, as I often did, on the steps, staring at the large swinging doors where he disappeared for hours. Most times I’d listen to the sounds of whirring machines, rolling wheels, drawers opening and closing. But this time the room on the other side of the sign was quiet.
I scrunched the fabric of my nightgown in my fists, and slid, step by step, to the bottom, needing to hear the noise of my father working. Since the accident I was frightened by the quiet. Stories of Dead Eddie and playing the game were fun when I was with other kids, but alone, all that was left were the dark stairwells, the rats, and the memory of those yellow work boots.
I hadn’t made a conscious decision to disobey the sign. I was simply outside of the swinging doors and then I was inside, the room cold, the shiny floor tiles continuing up the walls. I couldn’t take my eye off the metal table in the center of the room or the heaping mound on top of it, draped in a sheet.
I set my foot inside the perfect square of one tile and let the other land beside it. A strange and powerful scent drew me deeper into the room. A scent I’d known all my life from my father’s hands.
At any time I could run back through the swinging doors and up the stairs to the part of the house I knew. That is what I thought as I began to skate, zigzagging around the edge of the room, my slippers making a shushing sound across the floor.
Oh, but the feeling of skating through the shiny room where I wasn’t allowed, the feeling of my impulses triumphing over the sign—it all thumped through me like a song turned up loud in Pop’s hearse. I skated with my arms out to the sides. I skated round and round the table, near the great lump, then away toward the white cabinets, near the shiny tools, then away toward the wall.
When I finally stopped, I saw up close what I had tried to convince myself I could not possibly have seen: a foot. A bare foot—waxy, the color of an unpeeled potato, a Yukon gold like we grew in our garden. Right away I thought of questions I was in no hurry to answer: Why was there a foot lying on the table? Who did it belong to? And what else was under that sheet?
I let the white cloth brush against my arm, but that was all. Water gurgled through a pipe along the ceiling, and the swinging doors suddenly seemed very far away. When the room quieted again, I heard my name, just a whisper. “Mary.” I looked to the toe as if it had spoken to me. The voice grew louder—“Mary”—and when I turned to run, it was right into my father.
What relief to fall into his arms, my cheek against his plastic apron. He bent down, the plastic crinkling, until we were at eye level. I felt the warm weight of his thumb on the tip of my nose, his indication that I was in trouble but not very much. I was now safe to lower my shoulders, to breathe out. Because this was why I had come downstairs: to find him. To ask if it was time for breakfast and if I could have the pink cereal.
Still holding my shoulders, he leaned back as if to see me more fully, inspecting me the way he might if I’d fallen off my bike.
“Pop?”
“Yes, Mary, what is it?”
I wanted to ask about breakfast, but a different question pushed it out of the way.
“Tell me, Mary. What?”
I looked into his face, dented and nicked from a rough-and-tumble boyhood, worry lines between his brows as he waited for me to speak.
“I wanted to know, can I touch the foot?”
A smile formed. His new smile that showed the sorrow and the strain he’d absorbed that tragic summer.
“Well,” he said and paused a long while. “I don’t see why not.”
His smile became an unsure laugh.
“No,” he said as if finishing an argument in his head. “No reason at all.”
He took my hand and we moved closer to the table. But I pulled back, not so sure anymore.
“It’s all right,” he said. “This fella won’t wake up.”
Slowly I reached forward, first with my whole hand but then with only my pointer finger. And I touched the foot—prodding the heel, then the fat pad closer to the top, and finally the very bendable big toe. It felt like a trout we’d caught and kept in the cooler. I broke out into giggles, hysterical nonstop giggles.
When I could breathe again, my question felt squeezed tight. “Is there only a foot under there?”
“No, Mary. There’s more.”
He pulled the sheet upward to expose a yellow, bruised slab I only recognized as a leg when I noticed the coiled hairs. This time, laughter exploded through my closed mouth, the sound strange and wet. I poked my finger into the doughy flesh, allowing my mind to connect this leg, this foot to my father’s work. Maybe this was someone he would help bury.
“Is there a hand?” I asked.
I kept my poking finger extended, as if to keep it far from the rest of me. Pop was already reaching beneath the sheet. When he lifted the wrist, the dull yellow fingers curled forward. Though he held it still for me, I would not touch it.
The hand, somehow, made me understand that the body had once been a living thing. This was a hand like Pop’s, something that held a mug of coffee in the morning, that petted my hair when I was close by and being a nuisance. I shook my head fiercely and stepped back from the table, losing a slipper, the shock of cold tile rocketing through my foot.
It was after midnight when Pop and I sat at the kitchen table eating pink cereal.
“Just because you’re hungry,” he told me, “doesn’t mean it’s morning.”
The room felt unfamiliar with its black windows, and the heat set low for the night. I prodded at my cereal, watching the pink slip away into the milk. I had never noticed it doing that in the daytime, maybe had never eaten it slowly enough to discover that the thin pink coating was a trick, as if nothing in my world was what I’d thought.
I let my spoon sink into the bowl.
“Maybe it’s time to call it a day,” Pop said.
He took my hand and helped me from the table. He guided me through the darkened first floor, past the clouded mirror and plastic flowers. I watched my wool slippers climb each step to my room.
Death was starting to mean something more concrete to me. It meant the troubling change in our town’s grown-ups, who forgot to ask where you were during the day or how you got so dusty. It meant angry men standing against buildings with nothing to do. It meant the foot you touched in the basement could have belonged to someone like Eddie.
I remained silent as Pop kissed my forehead good night and closed my door.
I was glad to be under the covers again, my father’s footsteps creaking down the hallway to his room. But as I lay there with the night-light casting my walls in orange, I felt alert to every shadow in the room, every noise, and through the bedroom wall, a woman’s voice, sharp with disapproval.
“You’re just coming to bed?”
Many of these women over the years tried to sneak in and out of my father’s bedroom without my noticing. His status as a widower attracted caretaker types, who longed to nurture him. I don’t remember all the women but Bernice, whose voice I heard that night, was starting to feel permanent. Pop’s answer was soft-spoken, contrite. If he’d ever had an excuse for working into the night, forgetting time, forgetting his latest girlfriend, he’d already used it up.
I heard only murmuring, laughter, more murmuring. Then Bernice snapped, “Touched a foot?”
Pop finally raised his voice, arguing that I’d soon get used to it.
And Bernice practically shouted the question that would come to define my place in Petroleum, “Do you understand what a strange child she’ll be if this becomes normal to her?”
After that night, I couldn’t forget the body in our basement, two stories below my bed, one story below our kitchen table. I began to notice the rhythm of the work that went on in our household. The phone call. The arrival of the body beneath a sheet. Pop’s late nights in the basement. The house filling with old men in suits, hunched like crows, old women trembling in pretty hats. The sound of ladies weeping in my father’s arms and his soothing voice, how he sounded like he did on the commercial.
Maybe he felt relief finally showing me his workspace, ending the trickery to hide it all those years. To my father, this was honorable, tender work. A part of his life, a reality of our home.
“You’ve forgotten that death is rare and traumatic for most people,” Bernice told him. “You might want to keep it that way for Mary.”
Their relationship was serious enough that she occasionally tidied up our house and kept an eye on me as Pop worked. She cleaned in knee-length dresses and my father’s mucking boots, which she liked to wear because they were several sizes bigger than her feet and she could step into them even if her hands were full, moving from room to room with rags and sprays and handfuls of the various things we had dirtied.
She dusted around us while I sat beside Pop on the sofa, choosing casket fabric from the fat three-ring binder. I loved to touch the swatches of taffeta (though customers always chose polyester). My favorite colors were named after flowers: buttercup, orchid, peony, magnolia. I loved to open the tackle box, where he kept makeup. He let me paint thick, putty-colored grease on the back of my hand.
Bernice helped wash it off. She scrubbed too hard. Later, she scrubbed the house with bleach and sprayed with Lysol to cover up what she called the “smell of death.” Afterward, she lay down in a dark room, complaining of headaches she believed were from the formaldehyde and my father believed were from the cleaning products.
The problem with dating my father was that you also had to take on his business and me. If he had ever fretted about whether a woman could learn to love his mood swings, his drinking, his habit of going to work early and finishing late, this set of baggage (our home and me) was the hardest sell.
Bernice came into my room one day, wearing my father’s boots and carrying a stack of folded clothes. She sat on the bed, holding the laundry, and watched me at play.
“I washed an outfit you might want to wear for school,” she said. “I added a bow to it. Would you like to see?”
But I was like my father; it was hard to break my attention when I was at work.
I folded sheets of tinfoil into shiny metal beds and placed my plastic dolls on them. I whispered words like Glory and Our Little Angel, then draped them head to foot in Kleenex. I played wearing latex gloves, powdery inside, loose on my hands. I heard Bernice draw a breath. I looked up to see her mouth open as if to speak. I peeled off a long piece of tinfoil to make a second metal bed. Bernice closed her mouth, hugging the stack of clothes to her chest. And I could feel the shame of the strange child I’d become.