Charms for the Easy Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

me to ask how to undo what you have so stupidly done.”

F OR THREE DAYS in 1936, when I was twelve, I sprawled my body on our divan much in the manner of Oscar Wilde, who was still a favorite of my mother‘s, although his influence was considered no less corruptive than it had been during her years at Miss Nash’s School. I lay there refusing to budge until my father allowed me to attend the wake of my closest friend. Her name was Ida O’Shea, and she could, of all things, knit and crochet like a woman. She had been sick with a rampaging flu and had not been able to play with me all week. One Friday morning her alternately abusive and negligent mother had left her asleep at home with a spiking fever to go around and deliver the fine laundry she did weekly for town ladies, and when she returned she saw that the child had choked on her own vomit.
    My parents argued about my demand continuously. Although my father’s only justification was, “It will not be good for her,” he said it with such vehemence that I started to wonder what he might know that my mother and I didn’t. This lasted only until my mother screamed that his chief problem in life was his inability to look anything in the face, and this trait would not be passed along to me. Then they fought over what exactly he couldn’t face, the answer being his unfaithfulness, the way he lived his life fidgeting to get out of the house and meet some woman somewhere. I knew the fight wasn’t so much over my demand to attend the wake as it was an opportunity for them to fight over which one loved the other less. My mother finally won by reminding him that she had let him do as he pleased for years, that she had borne the strain of a life without his love and respect, that she was appalled that he could pronounce on my emotional well-being when he couldn’t keep up with my birthday. He left with the promise that he’d be back when he pleased, and this meant two or three days. It always had. I know he spent at least part of his time complaining of our intransigence to his girlfriend, who no doubt impressed him with her ability to listen, a trait a wayward husband looks for in a woman. Even if the woman was a lonelyheart who would’ve listened to anything for any amount of time, I’m sure he was able to convince both himself and her that my mother was a shrew. People like him thrive on fantasy in the manner of children and criminals.
    Once he was gone, my mother told me to bathe, and then dress in black. I remember feeling as if I had at last been given permission to go to the circus. If anything of the morbidity of what I was about to do passed through my mind, it was only that I was going to Ida’s house to play dead with her. My mother said that while I was dressing she would telephone my grandmother to see if she wanted to go. I became even more excited, knowing that my grandmother attended every wake within a twenty-mile radius of her house, having laid out most of the bodies herself. She called them big coffee-drinks. Grieving families were touched by her presence, never blaming her for deaths of loved ones; they understood that if their relatives could have been healed, she would have healed them.
    It was dusk when we got to my grandmother’s. She was waiting by the road, wearing the same mourning garb her mother had worn from the time of Sherman’s march until she died, when it had to be taken off so she could be buried in her wedding dress, according to her wishes. And yes, it did look worse for wear, but if someone had asked my grandmother whom she most resembled standing on the side of the road rearranging this black cobwebby dress around her body, she would’ve responded: Queen Victoria.
    Before the Depression, country deaths were the odor of camphor and chrysanthemums, yet in the worst of these times deaths were just the odor of camphor, flowers being too great an expense for mourners to bear. I could smell the camphor before we were in the door,