The End of the World as We Know It Read Online Free PDF Page B

champagne, rolling the smoke around in her mouth, then sucking it deep into her lungs and exhaling with a long, smooth sigh through her mouth and her nose.
    Then we just sat in silence, looking at the stars. She smelled like Yardley Lavender, as my grandmother always had, and she was as familiar to me as dirt and it was nice.
    Then Dodo moved a little closer to me. Then she moved a little closer. Our hips were touching. She laid her left arm casually across my thin shoulders, and we sat and looked at the stars. It was starting to turn creepy. Dodo said softly, still looking at the stars, “Kiss me.” I turned and kissed her on the cheek.
    Suddenly her strong deformed arm tightened on my shoulders and I was pulled toward her, into her breasts, into the sweat and the lavender and the musk of this child, and she whispered softly in my ear even as her arm tightened in an unbreakable grip, “No. I mean
really
kiss me.” Like in the movies. The way Frank kissed Ava. The way grownups kissed in the parking lot at the country club.
    I writhed out of her grasp and went inside, leaving her alone on the porch. When she came in the house, some minutes later, she didn’t mention it, we just sat and watched television until my parents and aunt and uncle came home. I never told anyone.
    I almost never saw Dodo again. She went to live with my aunt, who used Dodo’s inheritance to put an addition on her house, an upstairs, so Dodo would have someplace to live.
    My aunt made her stop drinking—that was hard—and thenshe made her stop smoking—which was harder. I guess Dodo went on loving Frank Sinatra, or fell in love with somebody new like Hoss Cartwright, but I don’t remember ever seeing her again. Not after the night when she so badly wanted me to kiss her.
    She lived for a long time. I don’t know how long—I never knew how old Dodo was—and I lost track, but it was after my mother died and before my father died that Dodo herself died.
    My father was too worn down to go to the funeral, and my sister had a sick child, and my brother, well, he lived in Atlanta, and I felt it was only right that somebody from my side of the family go down there and go to her funeral.
    I took the shuttle to National and rented a car. Tom Brokaw was standing in front of me in line. I showed up at my aunt’s an hour before the funeral. It was cold, late winter, and I was wearing a black cashmere overcoat, trying to look happy and successful, but my aunt took one look at me and said disapprovingly, “You’ve put on weight.” Gaining weight in my family was as startling and reprehensible as murder in the general population. Her house was filled with silver and pictures and the painted teacups, all from my grandmother’s house, in some rooms practically floor to ceiling. We sat around, drinking sherry, waiting for the time to go to the cemetery.
    Then we drove down there, to this cemetery where Dodo was to be buried, filled with Civil War generals and some of the best families, the most distinguished in the state. It’s a state where that kind of thing matters. It had rained in the night, a downpour, and the rain had caused Dodo’s grave to cave in, so wherethere was supposed to be a crisp hole there was only sludge. Her coffin was set up on a bier in the middle of the cemetery, beneath a marquee. The undertaker took one look at my black overcoat and my black scarf and suit, and concluded immediately that I must be a rival undertaker, come to steal away his business. He finally asked Warren, who told him I was the dead woman’s nephew.
    Tom Faulkner had stepped out of retirement to do the ceremony. He had been a minister to my family for a long time, and had done our weddings and funerals and christenings since Jesus was a baby. He must have been eighty, but he looked pretty spruce in his cassock and cotta, standing there rosy-cheeked in the cold.
    Dodo’s coffin was not small.