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By Root 746 0

lips as I rounded the bend into the vestibule. The casket was before us, the white casket with gold trim around the edges, as if it had come with a little girl’s vanity and canopy bed set. It was the size of the box Emma’s coaster wagon had come in. A person couldn’t take it in at once but had to adjust, by degrees, to what amounted to a terrible glare. Lizzy had been laid inside, propped up by the white satin pillows. Her dress had puffed pink sleeves with bows on the seams and a yoke with bows across the chest, and a pinafore with lace stripes sewn to the eyelet. They had shut the lower half of the casket. She had been so swollen in the hospital and they probably hadn’t been able to get shoes on her feet, or tights. She looked larger than she had in life and yet there was something almost two-dimensional about her form. The outfit, the silver headband in her hair with five pink roses in a row along the top—all of it made her look like a wedding cake. She would never have stood for it! She would have screamed and thrashed, yanked at the bows, thrown off the headband. I pulled at Howard’s sleeve trying to find his hand so we could run and run. We had to get away, couldn’t stand the heat and the pressure from the crowd to move forward.

“Howard,” I screamed under my breath. He was staring at the body. The tears running down his cheeks were soaking into his stiff white collar.

“My Lord, Theresa looked awful yesterday when I saw her. I made her sit down and tell me all about it.” The voice from behind us had a high buzzing quality, like a dentist’s drill. I couldn’t keep from turning, to see back around the corner. She was a monstrous old bag with innumerable moles on her face, underneath the powder and the deep pink rouge, a color not found in nature. She had come from a meeting, some happy gathering which required a “Hello! My name is——” sticker. It was beginning to peel and curl along the edges. She was, according to her tag, Mrs. M. L. Glevitch, and she had as good as seized me: I could not take my eyes off of her. The makeup stopped abruptly at her neck. She was wearing a blue polyester long-sleeved dress that probably had all the comfort of a garbage bag, and thick, dark brown stockings and heavy oxblood red shoes—brogans, I thought must be the word for shoes of such weight. She took her large, dark blue handbag and mashed a bug on her arm with it. She and her friend must have cut in line, because they hadn’t been there before. “You will not believe this.” Mrs. Glevitch lowered her voice. “Theresa insisted that the undertakers put a diaper on Lizzy.” She looked at her friend next to her, tucking a corner of her bottom lip into her mouth, widening her eyes, and nodding her head just once. “Theresa got hysterical when the Swanson brothers requested underpants. That sweet girl screamed. I was there to pick up Lois Wright’s death certificate for Otis. I heard Theresa with my own ears. I heard her scream”—she lowered her voice still further to a forced whisper—“ ‘Lizzy’s not even toilet trained.’ ”

The friend shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth.

“And then Chas Swanson, he took Theresa by the elbow and led her into his office, put his arm around her, said anything she wanted would be fine—”

“There she is,” the friend said, pushing against me to see around the corner to the bier.

“Chas Swanson,” Mrs. Glevitch went on, ignoring her friend, “sees death two-three times a week at least, and he was crying himself. I saw him wiping his eyes with his handkerchief after Theresa left.”

I turned to look at Lizzy again. Her short brown hair was dull and kempt. On her chest, her strange flat hands molded around it, was her bear. It had been pink when she was born, but it was gray now and the nose had been bitten off. In a circle around the bier were her things: the Sesame Street pop-up toy, the jack-in-the-box, four rag dolls, a Cabbage Patch preemie named Spencer, a cobbler’s bench with one of the pegs missing, and a Fisher-Price barn with the fence, the silo, and the animals set up at their troughs.

I groped