Alligator - Lisa Moore [22]
I’m still intact, she’d said.
David was dead but she would apply mascara.
At the funeral home she gripped the hands of visitors and held them. Colleen watched her squeeze each hand for emphasis when she was recounting some memory. Madeleine stood beside Beverly throughout, directing friends toward the casket, bringing cups of tea, sometimes holding her arm above the elbow as if to keep her on her feet.
Late, on the last afternoon of the wake, Colleen had followed her mother into the bathroom of the funeral home and saw her leaning on the sink, her arms straight, her knuckles white, her head hanging down. The water was running in the sink and she might have just thrown up. Finally, she tossed her hair back and they stood like that, mother and daughter, looking at each other in the mirror.
They were absolutely still and they didn’t look away from each other, nor did they touch each other or speak. Colleen became aware of the ticking of her mother’s watch over the running water, and the thrum of a heater and the murmuring of guests in the rooms over their heads.
There were five separate rooms in the funeral home for separate wakes and each room had a slotted board near the door with the dead person’s name in movable white letters that slid into the slots. What sounded like voices might have been steam in the pipes running under the floor.
The lights pulsed slightly, a surge of electricity that caused them to buzz, and still Colleen and her mother stood there not moving until her mother closed her eyes and drew a deep breath through her nose and exhaled with a shudder.
She rubbed one of her eyes hard with a knuckle and there was the wet sound of the knuckle and eyelid and eyeball, a watery, interior, extremely private noise. Colleen’s mother yawned deeply and Colleen yawned too. She saw herself yawning in the mirror and she could not stop yawning. They might have fallen asleep on their feet; they might have been generating the same dream.
David’s body in his charcoal suit with his wedding ring and white rose, his hands, and the creamy ruffled lining in the casket and all the old women and men who had come to visit might have been something from a deep, deep sleep. The way part of a particularly exhausting dream floats back throughout the following day, overtaking the dreamer, portentous and absorbing.
Then her mother shattered the gathering quiet.
I think a trip to Florida after the funeral, Beverly had said. She closed her purse, which was beside her on the sink, with a hard little snap. She turned off the water.
In the evening, after the funeral, they drove home without talking and when they pulled into the driveway Beverly turned off the car and they just sat there. All the lights were off in the house.
Let’s go in, Beverly said. But neither of them moved.
Finally, Colleen’s feet were so cold she got out of the car and her boots broke through the thin glossy crust on the banks of snow. Each step she took toward the house made a loud crunching noise.
When she got inside she went to the bathroom and when she lifted the toilet lid she saw the thin nest of her mother’s hair, pulled from the hairbrush earlier that morning, floating on the top of the water in the toilet.
The hair in the toilet was floating in an idle circle and there was, in that subtle movement, something sinister.
It struck Colleen her mother had aged with David’s death. She became instantly ancient. She had always been older than all the other mothers who wore jeans and got on the toboggans with their kids and knew, instinctively, the right kinds of junk to put in loot bags. But now she was ancient.
Colleen stared at the hair and thought that her mother had been hurtled into a remote solitude, far away from Colleen or anyone