When Kyle hung up the phone, having just promised to drop his grandma’s ashes in a bowling ball from a parasail, his friend Sarah was standing behind him, slipping her arms around Kyle’s waist. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You must have been really really close to her. I remember when my grandma died. I was sixteen and it really tore me to pieces. She died in Tampa and I rode a bus all night and all day to get down there and my parents got really mad at me but I couldn’t help it, I had to be there. Her name was Hermione. She collected seashells. She played the piano.”
Kyle unclasped her arms from his waist and headed for the kitchen. She followed, reminiscing about the death of her grandma. Sarah was like that. Anything that happened to you reminded her of something in her own life, however remote the connection. If he had mentioned Raoul, she would’ve remembered a Raoul, or maybe a Ramon, or a Newell, or maybe the Sun God Ra, and she could yak about it for as long as you’d let her. You were never at a loss for conversation with Sarah. She could talk for both of you. That was the nice part about having sex with her—she mostly shut up and you had a little peace and quiet.
He poured himself a cup of cold coffee and put it in the microwave and lit a cigarette. She hated cigarette smoke. It made her sick. He blew a little her way.
“That is just so incredibly sad,” she was saying. “Have you ever thought about what it would be like to die? I mean, actually? I just can’t even comprehend it. It must be terrible.” She was trying to put her arms around him again and he slid between a chair and the refrigerator to block her and then crouched down and pretended to look for something in a low cupboard.
“Was she alone when she died?”
He nodded. “I think that she was ready to die,” he said. “I think she was actually looking forward to it. People come to that point where they’ve lived long enough and everything around them starts to seem weird and they go, like, Okay, I’m done now, get me out of here.”
It was bullshit, but he liked to b.s. her, it kept her off balance.
Kyle wasn’t set on Sarah. Not at all. They had hooked up at a Super Bowl party, in somebody’s apartment. She was cleaning up during halftime and he pitched in and washed dishes and when he said, “God, football is boring,” it endeared him to her, and the dishwashing too, and the bridge to couplehood appeared. She invited him home and they snuggled together and did stuff that felt good and the bridge to couplehood was crossed. It was a convenience, it saved time looking for a date, and then they moved in together to save on rent. An economy move. He was happy trying out the idea of couplehood so long as she didn’t take it as the first step to the Big M, which of course she did. Probing questions: “How do you feel about me?” she would murmur over the cornflakes. “Tell me the truth.” Or “Where do you think we’ll be two years from now?” Or “What do you think is the best age to start a family?”
“Well,” he said, “unless you adopt, you have to start them at zero and let them grow up from there.”
Big looping hypotheticals to which he could only shrug and make up an answer.
Still, it was better than the panicky groping in high school, in some parents’ basement, the girl scared and yet egging you on, saying no no and yes yes at the same time and wanting to be violated and also to keep her innocence, pulling, pushing, pleading, protesting. Sarah was all for it. She said, “I want you.” She still did. Pulled him into bed and got the show on the road.
“When is the funeral?” said Sarah. “Not a funeral. A memorial service. And it’s on Saturday.” He had to test his parasail. The shroud lines needed refitting. Last time he flew, it tended to drift sideways. And he wanted to paint eyes on it. He built it from a kit with money Grandma gave him a year ago to go to Europe. “Go see the world while you’re young,” she said. “I always kicked myself that I didn’t. Got married at nineteen and had a baby at twenty and that was it, the doors closed. No reason for you to make the same mistake. I didn’t even see New York City until I was seventy-two years old. What a comment!” They were driving back to Lake Wobegon from Fisher’s Supper Club in Avon where she’d taken him for the deep-fried walleye. She’d had a whiskey sour and a glass of champagne. She was feeling gay. She handed him the check. “Do what you want but don’t use it to pay your bills, for heaven’s sake. Have some fun.”
Sarah was opposed to the parasail, afraid he’d crash to his death. So many stories about homemade aircraft crashing. Famous people, rich, accomplished, going up in the air in some flimsy contraption and a gust of wind comes up and they spiral down and splatter on the rocks. “Think about me,” she said. “Think how I’d feel.” He’d taken it up on a test flight over Lake Minnetonka in June and it was glorious, the best cheap thrill he could imagine, better than a roller coaster.
*
His friend Duane Dober had an 18-foot speedboat with a 75-horsepower outboard. Duane wore pop-bottle glasses and lived in dread that a ray of sun might catch a lens and burn a hole into his brain and leave him a helpless cripple who makes ashtrays from beer cans so he wore long-billed caps and stayed out of the sun as much as possible but he loved to race around in his boat with the prow up in the air and smoke dope and listen to the Steel Heads. When Kyle called and said, “I need you to tow my parasail so I can deposit my grandma’s ashes in the lake,” Duane saw it as a chance to thumb his nose at the fishing community. They gave him a hard time about his wake. Well, he’d show them. He imagined he might race around at top speed towing Kyle and rock the fishing boats in his wake and they’d yell and shake their fists and then a cloud of ashes would descend on them. “I’ll be there,” he said.
Kyle remembered what convinced him to buy the parasail—it was a letter from Grandma, along with a check for $500—her beautiful handwriting on little sheets of pale blue paper—
Dear Kyle
I’m in Columbus GA, attracted here by the name “Chattahoochie” on my road map, which is the river between GA and AL, but you probably knew that. Anyway, it is spring and so delicious I’m stopping here and not going on to FL after all. The town is just a riot of flowers and sweetness, magnolias and the like. The B&B was full up but they gave me a little shotgun cottage across the street, tucked into a bower of jasmine and honeysuckle and I don’t know what all, the air is like spun sugar. I have a little porch, a sitting room, bedroom and bath, and a tiny kitchen, plus a clock radio, a few books, soap and towels, a box of cheese straws and am happy as can be. Also a kerosene lamp in the bedroom, a real one, and last night I woke up and got a whiff of kerosene and it made me teary-eyed thinking about Aunt Josephine and her kitchen at night, her washing dishes in hot soapy water, me drying, and the lamp lit. I will tell you about her someday. She was a saint.
This is a street of old frame cottages with lawns of silvery grass, where I know nobody and nobody knows me, which suits me just fine, kiddo. I am a pilgrim and it’s good to be on the move so we don’t get attached to possessions and place. I am also a romantic and we need to travel so we don’t get too disillusioned by people. I am thinking of the school board’s move to require the pledge of allegiance, but don’t get me started.
I am also trying to escape from your mother’s birthday, darling. Nothing makes you feel old like when your kids get old. That’s the killer.
Deprivation is exciting, don’t you think. It’s one reason to travel, to strip down to essentials. I always pitied poor Flo her vast salt-and-pepper shaker collection which began when she inherited a couple hundred of the damn things from Aunt Ruth who simply adored figurines that dispensed seasoning. So Flo became a prisoner of the collection, expanded it, tended it, bought glass display cases for it, gave an interview to the paper about it, and now she is worried about vandals so she hardly dares leave the house for a day to go to Minneapolis. There is nothing in my house that I would grieve over if someone smashed it.
(Flo has never been able to throw away keys. Did you know that? She has hundreds of them, some rusted and going back fifty years. The houses they would have unlocked were never locked in the first place and the cars they started are in junkyards but she keeps them all. If you ask her, she’ll deny it, but I’ve seen the box in her basement.
I am going to sit out on the porch and inhale flowers for a while. So little time, dear, but what there is is sweet. I hope you are getting some sweetness in your busy life and that you feel at home in this world. Lonely men tend to sink—into liquor, or homicide, religion—you name it. Don’t sink, boy. Fly. That’s an old lady’s advice. Fly.
Love to you, dear,
Yr Grandma
P.S. Here’s some money I saved by not going to Florida. Spend it on something you always wanted.