For I am poor and needy,
and my heart is wounded within me.
Psalms 100:22
SueAnn’s jaw pops out of its socket, and she cries out, “Oh! Ma’am, please.” The pain is concentrated and intense, as if a laser is cutting into her jawbone.
The mammography technician barely takes notice of her, other than to ask disinterestedly, “Are we compressing your breast too much?” She continues to squash SueAnn’s breast against a cold metal plate.
SueAnn pulls back from the apparatus. “It’s not that,” she mumbles. She draws a deep breath, thunks herself on the left side of her face, then cradles her chin in her two hands. “You’ll have to excuse me, ma’am. My jaw—it snapped out of joint when you pulled down on my shoulder.”
The technician says nothing, and SueAnn realizes the woman does not believe that the shoulder manipulation was the cause of the jaw slip—a “TMJ issue,” as her dentist terms the jaw problem.
“Ahh, that’s better. Back where it belongs,” SueAnn says.
“Are you ready now?” the woman says, her voice overly pleasant and artificially nurturing in the way that really means go to heck.
She says she is fine, and the technician asks her to step forward and then pulls down roughly again on SueAnn’s shoulder. This time there is a distinct pop when her jaw goes out of joint, and both she and the technician say, “Oh, no!” and SueAnn steps backward. Why in the blue Jesus does she even have to undergo this exam—she is not yet fifty, which she thought was the customary threshold for beginning the darned procedure. And there is the other thing, the thing she cannot say, and even thinking it is sinful: Who gives a fig if I get cancer, anyway? In some ways, it would be a mercy.
On one wall of the examination room hangs a large poster: Twenty Rules to Live By. Some of these consist of pay-it-forward-type good deeds, but there are also a few fun ones, like “Visit Paris,” and “Drink champagne for no reason.” But the last rule delivers an emotional blow nearly strong enough to again wrench loose her jaw: “Call your mother.” Kyle, honey, why didn’t you?
When SueAnn arrives home from the mammography center, she takes off her shoes and sits down for an iced tea and the afternoon newspaper before Gilbert comes home from work. The Hope Springs Clarion is an afternoon daily she counts on for the local scuttlebutt. But today the newspaper has instead published Tulsa news on the front page. She learns that in three weeks a time capsule will be opened in Tulsa, marking Oklahoma’s centennial. A portion of this time capsule project in 1957 included burying a ’57 Plymouth Belvedere in front of Tulsa’s county courthouse, and the car is to be publicly exhumed on June fifteenth. A picture of the pre-burial car appears above the news story. The photo is black and white, but the story reveals that the auto is actually painted gold. A gold car with fins, a ’50s American car, like something Elvis might have owned, even if he was a Cadillac man. Though she was not born until 1962, SueAnn has always felt a great nostalgia for the ’50s. Sure, she knows about HUAC and all the other stuff, but also there were malt shops and sock hops and strapless gowns with netting and crinolines, and wonderful musicals like Oklahoma! and Carousel. Poor Elvis had not yet ended up on the bathroom floor at Graceland with his pants around his ankles.
I’m going, she decides. I’m taking a vacation day from the Dollar Thrift-O and I’m driving to Tulsa to watch the gold Belvedere be dug up. Kyle would have loved this so much; they could have gone to the event together. But her son, too, rests in an underground vault. And that’s a fact, Jack.
Over dinner, Gilbert gives SueAnn the silent treatment. Her husband does not approve of her attending the Wednesday night suicide survivors group. For one thing, he prefers not to acknowledge the suicide of their son; he has made clear his belief that one should not “wallow.” For another, he thinks therapy groups are foolishness and hokum. As far as Gilbert is concerned, the fact that the therapist is from San Francisco and two of the other participants are from the East and West Coasts points directly to the airy-fairy nature of the activity. Not only that: Gilbert is miffed about her missing the Wednesday night Bible study meetings, though she still goes to church Sunday mornings and evenings. As she begins clearing the table, Gilbert finally speaks.
“You could just talk to Pastor Russ once in a while,” he says. “What’s wrong with Oklahoma people? And what’s wrong with trusting in the Lord for help?” He pours himself a cup of coffee, splashing the tablecloth. “Next thing, you’ll go Hollywood, come home wearing them big sunglasses like I seen your doctor wearing.”
SueAnn says nothing, but she thinks, saw. She attended Tulsa Community College for only one semester, but she tries to better herself, and she has come to realize she has always been smarter than Gilbert, anyway. Sometimes when she comes home from the therapy group, SueAnn goes straight to the computer and googles some of the words Dr. Jane and David and Holly have bandied about during an evening session. They use words like “paradigm” and “synchronicity,” and once Dave even said something about hegemony, which at first SueAnn had been unable to find online, as she had not known how to spell the word. They do not talk down to her or indicate that they think she is dumb; rather, they assume she is following their conversations, when in fact sometimes she is not. She usually sits next to her fellow Oklahoman, a widower named Clay who drives down from Ponca City once a week for the meetings. She senses an unspoken bond between them: they do not see “Okie” as a dirty word. SueAnn still remembers what Connie Chung said when she came to Oklahoma City after the bombing. Chung had been overheard calling Oklahoma “backward,” motivating some construction workers to spray paint the Porta-Potties at the bombing site “Connie Chung’s office.”
Gilbert glares at her, apparently waiting for her to say something.
“Pastor Russ is a good man,” she says, “and I do turn to the Lord, but there’s something about being with other people who have, you know …”
“It’s morbid!” Gilbert says, pushing himself away from the table and leaving the kitchen with his coffee. She cannot reproach Gilbert for not wanting to think of Kyle’s death; Gilbert was the one who found their fifteen-year-old son in the garage and had to cut him down.
SueAnn picks up the remote and switches on the TV in the adjacent family room—a phrase that stings, now that her only child is gone—so she can occupy her mind while she washes the dishes. She has been advised in the grief support group that anything is better than letting the mind “run the same tapes over and over again.” Dog the Bounty Hunter’s leonine head takes up the entire television screen, his bleached and mulleted pompadour blowing in the Kona breeze as he drives a criminal to the hoosegow. Dog begins to philosophize, as he often does just before he turns in bail jumpers.
“It’s just like what happened in Romeo and Joliet,” Dog says. The criminal in the car stares ahead impassively. SueAnn knows Joliet is a prison; Dr. Jane would say something about Dog’s frame of reference. Dog Chapman’s muscular arms are massive as redwood trunks and adorned with armlets and bracelets. Her husband would never wear jewelry, but she can remember when his biceps were as enormous as Dog’s. She was only twenty when she married Gilbert Smith, and with his high Choctaw cheekbones and thick black hair, at the time he was the most dazzling man she had ever seen. In those days oil-rig men were still considered particularly desirable catches, and Gilbert had been a roughneck in Houston and had also worked a couple of times on a derrick fire crew with Red Adair.
If Gilbert is balding and if his powerful arms have gone soft and his hard abdomen morphed into a beer gut, she has dimpling on her rump and her breasts have begun heading south. At least I wear an underwire, she thinks, a rarity in Hope Springs. In the Dollar Thrift-O, she daily observes women wearing polyester pants and voluminous flowered shirts, the women’s breasts drooping close to their waists because they wear cheap cotton bras with no wire.
Gilbert is hammering something in the basement, so after she finishes the dishes and turns off the TV, SueAnn opens the door at the top of the stairs and calls down that she will be back a bit after nine. She hustles out of the house, not wanting to be late for the grief support meeting. I’m going to keep mum tonight, she decides, not feeling up to undergoing scrutiny. Dave will probably do most of the talking in any case; the New Yorker has an opinion about everything.
SueAnn opens the door of the Silverado and climbs into the driver’s seat and snaps a Hank Jr. CD into the player. She once expected more for her life; when she was young, no one could have convinced her that she would work in Dollar Thrift-O and drive a truck. As a girl she never dreamed of being a supermodel or a singer in Nashville, but she assumed her destiny was something a little grander than being a store clerk. Though she feels a bit disloyal for another of her yearnings, it is also true that she imagined ending up somewhere other than Oklahoma. But she never took the fantasy far enough to imagine where she would go and who or what might possibly take her to someplace like California or New York. She did, though, imagine she would have many children, not that she would have to wait ten years to carry a baby to term and that she would never again conceive. She would especially not have expected to outlive her own offspring. As she starts the truck’s engine, she pretends for a moment that she is driving a Plymouth Belvedere, a golden car with glamorous fins like a shark on wheels, her son sitting in the passenger seat, singing along with Hank Jr. in Kyle’s recently changed voice, a smooth, pure tenor.
A few months before he did it, Kyle had excused himself from the dinner table, saying he needed to do some research on the ’net for a report about the 1950s he was writing for his history class. “I don’t know why they think we should care about any of that crap,” he complained as he scuffed away from the table.
SueAnn had said, “Don’t cuss,” overlapping Gilbert as he said, “Watch your mouth, or do you think you’re too old for the strap, sport?”
Half an hour later SueAnn knocked on Kyle’s bedroom door but entered before he said come in. Her son was hunched over the computer, his head framed by the Kid Rock concert poster on the wall, wearing headphones and the black hoodie that made him look like one of the street thugs pictured on the front of his rap CDs. Her philosophy was: Don’t fight with teens about clothing or music—save your energy for the big stuff. Glancing up at her, Kyle swiftly minimized the screen on his Mac, then shut down the computer entirely. He tipped one of the headphones away from his ear with a rough gesture.
“Knock loud!” he said, his sullen face inflamed as much from acne as annoyance, the poor kid. Inexplicably, she heard a Bill Haley song emanating from his headphones, muffled but recognizable, I’m gonna rock I’m gonna rock. Kyle bared his teeth at her like a growling dog.
Vexation overtook SueAnn as suddenly as a May tornado, and she found herself lurching forward and pulling down her son’s black hood, yanking the headphones from his ears. “Don’t sass me!” she said, and when Kyle only smirked and reached to pick up the headphones, she struck him on the shoulder and blurted, “You’re a bad news bear!” She hit him a second time, harder, then left the bedroom as hastily as possible, too ashamed to apologize.
The truck runs out of gas shortly after SueAnn leaves the house, making her more than half an hour late for the grief support group. She has to wonder if Gilbert left the tank empty to sabotage her. As she walks into the church fellowship hall, SueAnn glances into a room off the hallway, a room Dave told her serves as an A.A. meeting place. She hears people laughing intemperately, followed by myriad simultaneous fits of coughing. She knows that many recovering alcoholics smoke heavily, trading away their lungs for their livers. Even in the hallway, she can smell the strong aroma of burning coffee. Another burst of loud laughter—what on earth is so funny about alcoholism?
She hurries past the recovering drinkers and into her own meeting room, where she takes the empty chair next to Clay.
“I didn’t even know Reed had a gun,” Holly says. “My god, it was an enormous shotgun—where did he manage to hide the thing?”
Dr. Jane looks over at SueAnn, but does not smile or wink at her as she usually does when SueAnn arrives. The rebuke is minimal, but SueAnn realizes she is being scolded for her tardiness.
Holly says nothing more after her rhetorical question and sits with a vacant expression on her face. After a few moments of silence in the room, Dr. Jane says, “SueAnn, has anything come up for you this week that you’d like to share with us?”
The words fly from SueAnn’s mouth; her vow of silence seems to have had no legs. “I can’t take Gilbert’s disapproval anymore,” she says. “Since we lost Kyle, Gilbert’s like a bully.”
Dave asks if she has tried to talk with her husband about his behavior.
“He would never tell me what’s bugging him, even if he knew what it was,” SueAnn says. Everyone looks at her, waiting for clarification. She continues. “If Kyle had shot himself like Holly’s fiancé did, things wouldn’t be so hard for Gil.”
Holly flinches sharply in her chair and says, “What do you mean?”
“It’s the fact that Kyle hung himself that Gilbert can’t handle,” SueAnn says. “He just don’t—he doesn’t think that’s very manly, though he’s never really said so. And there’s been talk in town that maybe Kyle was hanging himself for a sexual thrill.” SueAnn knows what she does not now reiterate: Kyle’s hanging was not an act of autoeroticism gone wrong or any other kind of accident; he left a note.
Dr. Jane spends several minutes making a few generic replies to SueAnn’s comment, but no one else says anything further. After a bit, Dave speaks. “I tried the Viagra,” he says, blushing deeply and looking at his lap. No one says anything, not even Dr. Jane, who looks down at her wristwatch, and the silence seems to go on for a long time. Then Dr. Jane says, “It’s nine o’clock—we’ll have to pick up next Wednesday.” Everyone immediately stands, the scraping of chairs on the floor the only sound in the room.
Pastor Russ is off on a rant against homosexuals, again. The minister is preaching to the choir, all right, SueAnn thinks. Every time he says the word “abomination,” there is a flurry of nodding among the congregation and a few utterances of “Praise Jesus” and “Amen.” Gilbert sits uncharacteristically still next to her in the pew, not fidgeting or scratching himself as he often does during the sermon. He is an active guy, and sitting motionless does not come naturally to him. She knows Gilbert agrees with Pastor Russ’s condemning remarks against homosexuals and that he is profoundly disturbed by the note Kyle left. “My own son, a fairy” was her husband’s initial response to Kyle’s note. She knows she is neither a good enough Christian nor a worthy enough human being to be able to forgive such disloyalty toward their child. And Gilbert most certainly does not want anyone in town to know about the note and its revelations. He tore up the sheet of paper before the 911 responders arrived.
“Leviticus 20:13!” shouts Pastor Russ, waving his arms in a manner that SueAnn cannot help but think of as stagy. He pulls a crimped handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes at his brow. Since Kyle died, more and more frequently she senses that nothing around her is authentic, that everything might be a giant con. Pastor Russ continues: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death! Their blood shall be upon them!”
SueAnn figured out long ago that what is accepted as fact is often just not true. “Ain’t Necessarily So” has always been her favorite song from Porgy and Bess. When Pastor Russ begins railing against the homosexuals, she sometimes fantasizes that Libby Payne, the organist and vocalist, might suddenly launch into the song, her tight red curls bobbing up and down as she pounds the keyboard, knocking the congregation off kilter. But she knows Libby would be more likely to sprout horns than do something like that, and probably no one in the chapel shares SueAnn’s secret doubts about Scripture. People call Oklahoma the Bible Belt, which SueAnn finds an accurate description. Belts can be good—they keep one’s pants where they belong. But belts can also be used as a garrote.
She joins the congregation in singing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” her mind absenting the chapel. At the time she gave birth to Kyle, the obstetrical community, particularly in a rural town like Hope Springs, still entertained some odd ideas about infant development. She remembers being told that babies were born blind; that the smiles of a newborn were not smiles at all, but crude reflexes or even gas on the stomach; that babies could not comprehend anything adults said to them. She had always suspected these beliefs were false—heck, her old Australian cow dog could understand everything she said. And in fact Kyle proved SueAnn’s suppositions to be correct. Two seconds after he was born, he grabbed the stethoscope out of the doctor’s hand, instigating a roar of surprised laughter in the delivery room. Some blind kid, SueAnn remembers thinking. And her baby son knew the word “bottle” when he was only a few weeks old. She would say, “Are you ready for your bottle?” and he would turn his flossy head, hyper alert, an expression of undeniable awareness in his clear blue eyes, an old soul. Oh, Kyle.
Sometimes in her heart of hearts, SueAnn cannot help but have a particularly wicked thought. What if Pastor Russ is a homosexual himself. Maybe he’s like that pastor in Colorado, Ted Haggard, or even like that senator in the airport men’s room. Those guys had played people like a two-dollar banjo. She looks closely at Pastor Russ, looking for traces of effeminacy, but sees none. But Kyle was not effeminate, either. Though he said in his note that he had come to realize his sin of homosexuality, SueAnn thinks probably her son was just confused. Wasn’t fifteen too young to know whether you were homosexual or not? She wishes he had been able to talk with her about things. Call your mother. The sad reality, though, is that at the time she probably would have referred him to Pastor Russ for counseling. She closes her eyes. Jesus, please give me strength, Lord.
Just after SueAnn rings up an elderly man’s purchase of tube socks and a two-pack of white boxer shorts, she sees that Holly from the grief support group is the next person in line. Funny, she had not really thought of Holly as someone who would shop at a bargain store—she’s from the West Coast and has always looked to be on the rich side. SueAnn feels the heat of a blush overtaking her neck and face. What is the proper protocol, she wonders, for greeting someone you know only from a therapy setting?
“SueAnn!” Holly says, “How nice to see you—especially away from the Suicide Club.” She laughs as giddily as the reformed drunks at the Bethel Baptist fellowship hall.
Taken aback by the flippant reference to the support group, SueAnn fumbles with the items she rings up for Holly: exfoliating towelettes, a corkscrew, a plastic bathtub duckie, a Steely Dan CD, and four scented candles. “That will be eight-seventy,” she says. “It’s nice to see you, too, Holly.”
Not knowing what else to say, as she bags Holly’s purchases, SueAnn asks, “Are you going to group tomorrow night?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Holly replies. “But there’s something else I’ve been wondering about. Are you planning to go to Tulsa to see the Belvedere dug up?”
SueAnn cannot imagine why Holly has asked her this, but she answers semi-truthfully: “I haven’t decided for sure.”
A heavyset woman wearing a cropped T-shirt bearing the phrase Oregon: the Beaver State has stepped in front of Holly and places a basket of items on the counter, so SueAnn only smiles as Holly says, “We’ll talk later,” and turns to leave.
What in the Sam Hill does an L.A. woman like Holly want to do with the Oklahoma centennial time capsule? If she was hinting that they ought to drive to Tulsa together, SueAnn is not sure what she thinks about the proposal. How do you feel about that? Dr. Jane might ask—the shrink’s default inquiry. I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about anything.
“You might could get that took care of,” Belly Shirt says, pointing to SueAnn’s head.
SueAnn is mute, wondering what’s wrong with her head—or is it her hair?
“Your earlobes are nearly tore through,” the woman says. “The one on your right side is ninety-nine percent ripped out. That happened to my cousin—you need to get it fixed by a doctor.”
“Thank you,” SueAnn says. This answer is part of the Dollar Thrift-O employee policy: Just say thanks. But she feels her stomach eddy with resentment. Forgive me, God, for malicious feelings.
After the woman leaves, SueAnn touches her earlobes, fingering the long slits that used to be tiny holes. Twenty years of wearing heavy earrings have pulled down her earlobes, turning the pierced holes into unsightly slots, clefts that sometimes bead up with blood if she tries to wear earrings. She had not really realized that other people might notice. Good Lord, another body-maintenance chore; she does not need this.
“It’s about time to hit the hay, isn’t it?” Gilbert says.
SueAnn picks up her sewing basket and says, “I’ll be in as soon as I finish up with my mending.” If she plays her cards right, SueAnn can usually time things so that bedtime works out for her. If Gil begins yawning and seems as if he is ready to call it a night, she comes up with a chore she needs to do or a phone call she has to make. Though she says she’ll join him soon, she will not approach the bedroom until she is sure she hears him snoring. Conversely, if Gilbert goes out bowling with the guys, or if he is working on a project in the basement, she goes to bed early, and if she is not actually asleep when her husband comes to bed, she has learned how to seem asleep. Gilbert now goes off to the bedroom without saying anything more. She is ashamed that she has at times gone even further with her deception, every now and then pretending to have a yeast infection, drawing out the bogus malady for a week or two to avoid sexual contact.
At first, in the months after Kyle’s death, she figured her loss of desire was probably caused by grief. Then, when her doctor put her on an anti-depressant, he told SueAnn that sometimes antidepressants suppressed the libido. Gilbert pressed for sex the first few months of her loss of desire, followed by insults about menopausal women. The situation has plateaued so that now she has to deal with sexual issues only if she and Gilbert happen to go to bed at the same time—assuming he is not in a snit about the grief support group, in which case he turns his back to her.
SueAnn has considered that Gilbert could be correct—that the erotic time of her life has come and gone and she is now a dried-up crone. She has also entertained the thought that the antidepressant really has damped down her desire. But how to explain, then, the surge of heat she feels in her pelvis when she watches that Dr. McDreamy on TV or sees a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix before he went mental.
Suicide wreaks holy havoc on a survivor’s sexual life. SueAnn has not brought up “the problem” in her therapy group, even though Dave has been very upfront about his erectile dysfunction since his father died, and Holly has confessed to erotic cravings for her fiancé that have ghoulishly persisted beyond the grave. Clay just shakes his head grimly when asked about sex and will say nothing. For a while a twenty-two-year-old girl in the group, whose boyfriend had killed himself, was acting out sexually: going to the bars every night and finding herself in a strange bed nearly every morning. Once she even woke up in an alley behind a bar, barefooted and with her expensive cowboy boots missing. The girl quit the group after only three weeks.
Maybe, SueAnn tells herself, she will want Gilbert again, someday. Or maybe not, and then she will have to decide what to do about their marriage. She and Gilbert have been married for twenty-five years, and up until now he has always been someone she could lean on. Though his ripping up of Kyle’s suicide note wounded SueAnn, the fact is that he also made sure she did not have to see Kyle’s broken body, their son’s neck askew like the neck of a strangled chicken in her daddy’s barnyard. Gilbert had shut the garage door and shepherded SueAnn into the house, and while they waited for the emergency responders, Gilbert sat close to her on the davenport, his arm tight around her trembling shoulders.
She knows this particular memory shouldn’t be something she compares to Kyle’s death, but SueAnn still recalls when her cow dog, Louie, was run over in the road and killed. Gilbert buried him in a handmade box in the orchard behind their house and hammered a little wooden cross into the ground on Louie’s grave. She still loves her husband for that. Poor Gilbert: Kyle’s suicide has ravaged Gil’s life just as much as hers. The only difference is, he is still unaware that their former life is exactly that. The snoring starts; she can now go to bed.
The traffic in downtown Tulsa is heavy, and SueAnn hopes she does not rear-end someone’s car as she watches for street signs that will direct her to the turnpike back to Hope Springs. She is not accustomed to driving in the metro area, and she feels embarrassed to be driving a truck, as the folks in Tulsa seem mostly to be driving SUVs or tank-size sedans. She is making her way home after an afternoon visit to a plastic surgeon—something that is not available in Hope Springs. SueAnn was surprised, when she asked her family doctor about the torn earlobes, to be referred to the plastic surgeon. Turns out, the holes in her lobes could not just be sewn up. They had to first be reamed out, made even larger, followed by a stitching up of the new wound, which should heal over the original slits. If she wants to continue to wear ear wires, she will have to be re-pierced. There was no pain during the procedure, nor do her earlobes hurt now. But the surgeon taped square white bandages on each ear, and SueAnn now resembles her next door neighbor’s Great Dane after he had his ears docked. She does not look forward to the stares that will come her way tomorrow at the Dollar Thrift-O.
As she turns onto the road leading to the turnpike, she glances inside a car driving parallel to her truck, in the next lane over. A woman drives the sedan, and in the back sits a young-teen couple. The boy has his arm around the girl, who sits right next to him. A little date, SueAnn thinks, and the boy is too young to drive, so Mom takes them out. Gosh, she had forgotten about the time she chauffeured Kyle and a girl on a date—Kyle’s first and only date, as far as she knows. It was a school dance during Kyle’s last year of middle school, and the thirteen-year-old Kyle had asked one of his classmates to be his date, a friendly strawberry-blond girl SueAnn saw again at Kyle’s funeral.
So when had Kyle decided he was gay? Did he have “dates” with boys that she was unaware of? Maybe an older boy who drove them somewhere. She cannot imagine such a thing. She has read about adolescent boys having mutual masturbation sessions—could there have been something like that?
Kyle and his date wanted to have dinner before the dance, so SueAnn had driven them to Siesta Sancho’s, where she took a table alone, a good distance away from the kids’ table for two. She was able to watch them as they studied their menus, talked, laughed, ate soft tacos and drank Cokes, and afterward she drove them to the school gymnasium and dropped them off for the dance.
Well, I’ll always have that. I was part of Kyle’s first date, and it was perfectly normal and very sweet—no signs of burgeoning homosexuality. Had he been having doubts that early? She will never know. SueAnn reaches into the truck’s cup holder, scooping up quarters for the road toll. Her earlobes have begun to throb painfully, and she feels them swelling up, as if two ripe peaches hang from her head.
SueAnn is first to arrive at the grief support group tonight, even before Dr. Jane. She sits down next to the chair where Clay usually sits; maybe he is stuck in traffic on his way from Ponca. Dave comes in a few moments later and sits across from SueAnn.
“Whoa! What the hell happened to you?” Dave says, pointing to the oblong tape covering the lobes of SueAnn’s ears.
“I had a procedure,” she responds, hoping Dave will leave things at that. She cannot help but feel as if she were wearing a dunce cap. At that moment Holly comes into the room. She glances at SueAnn’s bandaged ears and then looks politely away, saying hello before she sits down.
“Clay and Dr. Jane aren’t here yet?” Holly says. “The Suicide Club can’t go ahead without them.”
SueAnn says nothing, not wanting to draw further attention to her throbbing earlobes.
“How did you come up with the name Suicide Club, anyway?” Holly says.
“I didn’t invent the name,” Dave says. “There was a group in San Francisco called the Suicide Club.”
SueAnn is so astonished that she forgets her shyness about her Great Dane ears. “Are you joking?” she says.
“Oh no, no joke,” he says. “It started in the seventies out at San Francisco State. My best friend, Phil Shapiro, was one of the founding members. Actually, nowadays they call it the Cacophony Society—they changed the name.”
Holly says, “It’s a grief support group?”
“No no,” Dave says. “Nothing like that. It was a sort of guerilla-theater-type thing, if you’re old enough to remember Julian Beck. A bunch of artists who did capers and photographed them—sort of a cross between goofing off and performance art.” He adds, “There’s something similar now in New York. They call it Improv Everywhere.”
SueAnn is not sure she understands, exactly, but she can go on Google later. Holly nods, and at that moment Dr. Jane comes into the room, greeting them and taking her usual chair.
“Clay isn’t here?” Jane says.
“Not yet,” Dave says. “While we’re waiting, we’ve been talking about a group of artists in San Francisco—they called their association the Suicide Club.” He seems to recall that Jane is from San Francisco, and adds, “Do you remember them?”
Dr. Jane frowns and crosses her ankles, shakes her head no.
Dave turns again to Holly and SueAnn. “The odd thing is—and maybe this is one of the reasons they changed the name to Cacophony Society—Phil Shapiro actually did commit suicide, in the eighties, more than ten years after he was a grad student at S.F. State.”
No one says anything, but all SueAnn can think is, poor Dave. His best friend and his father both killed themselves. What kind of dark shadow follows him around? She has lived in Oklahoma long enough not to be surprised when lightning strikes more than once in the same place. And she has heard about something called the suicide spell, when people who have been exposed to suicide end up later doing the same thing themselves. SueAnn’s high school English teacher said the writer Ernest Hemingway’s father killed himself before Hemingway did, and after that a number of other members of the Hemingway family, about half a dozen, including his granddaughter, decades later. Clay enters the room, apologizing for being late, and SueAnn finds herself letting out a breath of what must be relief. Clay has not become another suicide statistic, is alive and well, even if tonight he looks a little gray around the gills.
“No, I’m not going—it’s a waste of time,” Gilbert says, turning up the volume on the Rangers game on the TV. “The thing will be all messed up, rusted out. No vehicle underground fifty years can survive.”
“I’ve been reading a lot about this in the paper,” SueAnn says. “The car’s in a vault—like a bank vault or an Egyptian tomb—it’s completely watertight.”
“Nothing is completely watertight,” Gilbert says. “And especially not something built in Tulsa fifty years ago. Why do you think they bury people above ground in New Orleans? Because bodies come floating up out of the ‘watertight vaults’ if they’re put underground.”
SueAnn wants to point out that Oklahoma is not below sea level like New Orleans. She does not care to argue at all about the Belvedere—she knows the car will be unharmed, gleaming gold, even now seeming futuristic in its aerodynamic design. If Gilbert will not go with her, she will simply take up Holly on the offer to drive to Tulsa for the unearthing ceremony. The fact is, she and Holly and Dave have begun to fraternize outside the group. Just this Wednesday they went to Sancho’s after group, drinking margaritas and sharing nachos, and it was then that Holly offered to drive. In one sense, it’s sad that now her only friends are fellow suicide victims, bound together by the worst sort of grief.
This Friday is the day of the Belvedere’s exhumation. She goes to the back of the house and into what used to be Kyle’s bedroom and calls Holly to confirm the trip to Tulsa.
Holly’s voice on her answering machine says drolly, “This is Holly. If you leave a message, maybe I’ll call you back.” At first SueAnn is taken aback, but then she realizes she prefers this message to the “You have a blessed day, now” that she so often hears on other answering machines in Hope Springs.
SueAnn leaves a message, then logs on to what used to be Kyle’s computer. Gil purged the hard disk long before, switched to broadband, and set up a new e-mail account. Nothing remains of their son save a discolored spot on the screen where Kyle had once stuck a Slayer sticker that Gil scraped off.
An impulse causes her to google the Suicide Club San Francisco, wondering if anything will pop up. The first site she clicks on displays a photo of what appears to be a membership card.
The Bearer
has agreed to get all worldly affairs in order,
to enter into the world of Chaos, cacophony & dark saturnalia,
to live each day as if it were the last,
and is a member in good standing of the
Suicide Club
She is surprised when numerous entries pop up. There is of course that whacked-out death cult in Japan, but what interests her is that the organization in San Francisco had nothing whatever to do with suicide. She reads that the group was formed in the late seventies by a guy named Gary Warne and two other guys who had a predilection for lighthearted practical jokes, though there is no mention of Dave’s friend Shapiro. The club developed into a group of people who performed street theater. Examples given include riding a cable car en masse, entirely naked. Another time they set up a small table in an elevator in a San Francisco business-district high rise, quickly setting a formal dinner service—complete with white linen and a floral centerpiece—and sitting down to dine on plates of garden salad accompanied by glasses of wine. When the elevator opened on the ground floor of the building, a gaggle of stone-faced lawyers and stockbrokers stood stock still and staring.
She scrolls downward, reading a blurb by one of the founding members: “Have you ever explored a subterranean sewer at night with forty other people; climbed three storeys on a swinging rope ladder to dine on the roof of a condemned building; shared the surreal experience of being in a group of people scaling the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog?”
Another posting declares: “You may already be a member. Are you a: squeak in the door of normalcy; a dada clown rewiring the neural circuits of the community; a happy dog rolling on the carcass of preconceptions?” Maybe not, SueAnn thinks, but maybe I might have been, if I’d been born somewhere else. Heat sears her chest, along with a grim realization, something she has never before considered: Kyle would not have killed himself if he had been born in a place like San Francisco, a place of infinite possibility. She prints out the membership card and slips it into the pocket of her sweater.
She reads that the core of the group’s philosophy was inspired by the writer William Blake’s statement “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
“Have you heard about that new diet pill called Alli?” Holly says.
“I’ve seen it at Walmart,” SueAnn responds.
SueAnn sits in the passenger seat of Holly’s vintage Mustang convertible. They are driving to the metro to see the gold Belvedere dug up. There have been media reports that earlier this week during the digging process, workers made note of significant water leakage into the vault, and no one is sure how the Plymouth may have fared. Some surmise that the car will be barely blemished, while others predict little but a degraded hull. SueAnn is among the former group, believing that the Plymouth Belvedere will be as intact and golden as the day it was buried, whereas Holly is a glass-is-empty gal and has expressed her doubts.
“I want to lose five pounds,” Holly continues, “so I picked up a box of Alli and started reading the label.”
SueAnn is astonished. Holly appears to weigh no more than 110 pounds. Why would she go on a diet? She guesses it’s a California thing—they all seem so body conscious on the Coast. She nods at Holly, listening.
“Do you know about the diarrhea issue?” Holly says.
“No, I …” SueAnn is embarrassed and heat rises from her neck to her face. She feels the way she does when Gilbert’s bowling buddies make jokes about flatulence.
Holly continues, “Well, the warning on the label says the stuff can cause what they call ‘anal seepage,’ and they suggest you wear dark clothing! Can you imagine?”
While Holly laughs to beat the band, SueAnn thinks: What I never could have imagined has nothing to do with pooping my pants. I would never in a trillion and two years have imagined that I would be driving along the Arkansas River in a convertible with the top down, with a hip, educated woman like Holly, a bookstore owner who talks about Faulkner and Nietzsche and Proust as if they’re pals—a woman from California. Though SueAnn and Holly have become friendly, SueAnn feels like a rube around her and has even had to wonder why Holly wants to be friends. Maybe it’s as simple as that Holly often wants to talk about her dead boyfriend and SueAnn is always willing to listen.
“God!” Holly says. “How great would it be if I’m wrong and the Belvedere really is hauled up in nearly all its former glory? Cars were so glamorous in the fifties, you know?” She laughs again, clearly euphoric, and SueAnn recalls Holly mentioned upping the dosage on her antidepressant. Holly is probably a bit intoxicated by the medication.
“I’ve seen those cars in movies,” SueAnn says. “Like in Giant. And I’ve seen them on a 60 Minutes show about Cuba. They all drive 1950s cars down there.”
Holly snaps on the car’s CD player and out blasts Ike Turner singing “Rocket 88.” She says, “To set the tone,” then adds, “Most people don’t know this, but Ike’s version came out years before Bill Haley and the Comets’.” Holly sings along, straying from Turner’s lyrics, “She has a V-8 engine, honey—it’s gold and it’s fine.”
Holly, concerned about car thieves, parks her convertible in a pricey indoor parking structure, and SueAnn and she hoof it the several blocks to the excavation site at Denver and 7th. Before they catch sight of the dig, they see television vans and reporters with microphones. The public has been herded behind a chain link fence erected for the event, and SueAnn and Holly wormhole their way from the back of the crowd, inching as close to the fence as possible.
“They’re lifting the lid already,” Holly says, grabbing SueAnn’s elbow and pulling her along, slithering their way to the second row of people thronging against the fence.
A group of hard-hatted workers lifts the heavy lid of the vault, setting it aside. The mood of the crowd grows even more buoyant, and hoots of excitement speckle the air. After what seems like a long time, equipment-tethered ropes begin to elevate the car itself, though there may be help from a hydraulic device below. When she and Gilbert went to Las Vegas, they saw David Copperfield appear onstage by rising from the floor, slowly, as if ascending from the netherworld. When SueAnn stands on tiptoes, she can see the car rising slowly from the muck, a muddy shroud still clinging to the Belvedere, and her spine actually tingles as the whistling and shouting of the crowd grow louder and more fevered.
“Oh, Christ—she’s a doner,” a man behind them says, and SueAnn cranes her neck to the side. The tarpaulin has begun to fall away from the car, and what is clear to everyone is that the Plymouth is no longer gold but is a rusted-out hull. In spots the vehicle is mottled the color of mustard, the shade of a jar of Gulden’s Spicy Brown.
The Bible says if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will have the conviction to say to a mountain, “Move over there.” When she went to the Internet after Kyle’s death and looked up the parable of the mustard seed, she discovered the Buddhists possess more wisdom on the topic. The Buddha told the story of the grieving mother and the mustard seed. When a mother lost her only son, she took his corpse to the Buddha, seeking a cure. The Buddha asked her to bring a handful of mustard seeds from a family that had never lost a child, husband, parent, or friend. When the mother was unable to find such a house in her village, she realized that death is common to all, and she could not be selfish in her grief. But I can—I can be very selfish in my grief.
At Kyle’s funeral, after the Twenty-Third Psalm and all the rest of what SueAnn now thinks of as standard bereavement clichés, Pastor Russ read from the book of John. She heard his theatrical voice, though she did not see him, her eyes too swollen to view anything clearly through the dark glasses Gil had begged her not to wear.
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah,” quoted Pastor Russ, “is born of God. And everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.” She was struck then and there, as if a bowling ball had dropped from the chapel ceiling and bashed her in the brainpan. At that moment in the chapel, she felt spite burn through her body like cascading lava, cauterizing her pain and transforming it into rage so potent she could actually smell it. The heavy sweetness of the floral tributes in the Hope Springs Cornerstone Baptist Church chapel in that instant were replaced in SueAnn’s nostrils by a malodorous foulness, a smell not unlike the eggish fumes she encountered when her parents took her to the hot sulphur springs in Montana one summer when she was a child.
SueAnn stares at the Belvedere, blinking against the sun. She hears ragged weeping somewhere behind her among the onlookers. In the blinding glare of the Tulsa sun she stands riveted, the Plymouth, twisting beneath its rope tethers, shrouded and defunct. She fumbles in her sweater pocket for her dark glasses, the very same pair she wore at Kyle’s funeral, but what she feels instead is the Suicide Club membership card she printed the other evening. She fingers the paper in her pocket and seems able to read it without looking, as if some sort of sorcery has raised the letters like Braille: The bearer has agreed to enter into the world of chaos and cacophony and is a member in good standing of the Suicide Club.