After the Funeral · The Unlikely Son

FROM MYRA

It is like burying him all over again--putting him away piece by piece into cardboard boxes from the A & P and labeling them to be stored in the attic or to be sent off to the Goodwill to be picked over by strangers. I take his clothes out of the drawers, and I fold him away into compartments, depending on their newness, laying my grief out in this mock burial of my father. I unfold ****-white undershirts that once touched his skin, and I close my eyes pressing my face against the soft cotton -- only to fold them up again. I need to make his death real for me. I perform this sequence over and over until the hallway is crowded with cardboard boxes and black garbage bags that stretch under the weight of the clothes.

It's been several hours after the funeral, and I am locked away in his room while Maddie is downstairs leading her after the funeral ritual of having paisley old ladies back to the house for celestial seasonings tea in orange spice and gingersnap cookies all the way from England. The aroma of steeping tea is racing up between the floors.

n the sitting room, just below the bedroom, the crowd drinks tea and talks in quiet voices. Through the floorboards, I hear their muffled voices, and the clinking of fine china--like a ceremonial banging of teaspoons as they stir their tea. They stir as if they have nothing but time. Never mind that they are, mostly, seventy and eighty.

There are only little old ladies left on my father's side. At these things, there is always talk about what a nice little send off it was as if the dearly departed were going on some Mediterranean cruise with that Barry Mannilow song, Lola, playing in the background. I, on the other hand, never learned how to mourn properly. I can't cry on cue like Aunt Maddie does at funerals. I can’t shed big, quivery, and indistinguishable from weddings and happy occasion tears. My grief is like brown wrapping paper, concealed for my own private unraveling in the middle of the night.

On the table with the lilacs is the last picture of my father and me. It was taken five years ago at a book signing at the local bookstore. I am surprised that he had it framed. It is my first book of short stories, and my father has a tweed arm across my shoulders. We don't share any sort of resemblance except for the dark unruly, curly hair; mine shoulder and puffed out to the sides. My high cheekbones give away the exuberance of the moment while my father's English face tries to contain itself while trying to properly give the affect of the proud father. He looks as if he had tried on different faces for this picture in the mirror and was caught in between poses as the flash went off before he could make the proper face. The picture makes my father look ridiculous and buffoonish.

I pick up the picture and examine it more closely to look at my mother's pin in the folds of my scarf. I 'd hardly remembered that I had worn the pin that day. I set the picture down amidst the remnants of a life interrupted. Things were just as he had left them. These things -- the sum of Harper tricks me into thinking that I will go downstairs and find him in his Morris chair, bespectacled, but still squinting at his morning paper with a cup of Earl Grey tea on the table, its Old-World English aroma wafting through the air.

I can smell him everywhere in the house. Closing my eyes, and inhaling deeply, I can hold him in my head a little longer. The Lilacs, which used to be his favorite, are slowly dying, and no amount of water and sunlight will keep them from their fate, and though they are wilting, they give off a haunting, lingering smell that reminds me of a smoldering, long goodbye. With the afternoon breeze blowing just so between the Priscilla, his tobacco smell still lingers, and I can almost inhale him. I'm afraid that his tobacco smell will fade along with the lilacs when the breeze fades to little more than a whisper. And all that will be left is that familiar creaking of old man feet sliding across the bare floorboards.

Mementos, pieces long forgotten in back closets and shoe boxes--things uncovered here and there bring back memories. My life up to age fifteen is revealed, mostly, in black and white shots taken by my father, the amateur photographer who preferred the graininess of black and white pictures. In the desk drawer, I find more envelopes stuffed with pictures and flip through them hurriedly--half-forgotten memories flashing by in quick frames. The fading dog-eared snap shots, with the white borders, hold traces of my father.

As I thumb through the moments of his life, there is a picture of my mother than stuns me, and I sit back on my heels holding it up to the light bulb as if shining light on it would tell me about the reasons behind the picture. It is of my mother in a black and white summer dress that shows her thin freckled shoulders as she sits on a wooden and iron park bench in a courtyard overgrown with a variety of shrubs and ivy climbing the walls. I don't recognize the place. My mother is expressionless. She has always had one of those expressionless faces void of even a raised eyebrow or a curl of the lip. But it is more than my mother’s bland face that intrigues, it is the date on the back of the picture that leaves questions in my mind.

CRITIQUE

I like this, but it's cluttered and hindered in places with weak verbs, my personal bugaboo. Take this paragraph:

Now compare it to this:

There are only little old ladies left on my father's side. They always huddle and cluck at funerals about it being a nice "send off", as if wishing “bon voyage” to someone departing on a cruise. I never learned to mourn properly myself. I can't shed big, quivery tears on cue like Aunt Maddie. My grief comes in a brown paper wrapper, concealed for private consumption in the night.

You see how when you strip away the clutter, the emotion shines through? That's why I think this is primarily good writing, just cluttered. Clutter is superfluous verbiage. It doesn’t need to be there. You know how you padded school papers with BS and repetition to reach a certain number of pages? That’s clutter. Look at this sentence:

My life up to age fifteen is revealed, mostly, in black and white shots taken by my father, the amateur photographer who preferred the graininess of black and white pictures.

How about something more like this:

My father's grainy black and white photos documented most of my life up to age fifteen.

I also think you say things in a confusing way, but ridding it of clutter would probably remedy that as well. There's a few bad word choices, like "smoldering, long goodbye"; it smacks of sexual passion, which clashes against the misty, nostalgic images of your father that you paint. But clutter is the main problem, in my opinion.