I'll Love You When You're More Like Me Read online

We were halfway to the top when I heard Tony Bennett’s voice singing the song about having left his heart in San Francisco.

  “Mama’s playing all her old tapes again,” I said.

  “Do you have any old Beatles tapes?” Wally asked.

  “We’re like Sam Goody’s record shop,” I said. “Do you ever go to Sam Goody’s?”

  “In New York?” Wally asked.

  “They’ve got everything,” I said.

  “We should have brought some beer,” Wally said.

  “We have beer,” I said. “What kind of a bar do you think we run?” I sounded a lot like Mama when people came by. Mama prided herself on having anything anyone asked for, from pink gin to Tia Maria. She said when she was a kid her father kept one bottle of blackberry brandy that would last practically an entire year. If a guest came, he’d pour a thimbleful into an old Kraft Olive Pimento jar, and never give anyone a refill.

  Charlie turned around at the top of the stairs.

  “Is the screen door locked?” I said.

  He started down.

  “Call Mama,” I said, “she’s probably out on the deck.”

  He put his hands on my shoulder and very firmly turned me around. “She’s not out on the deck,” he said.

  “Then she’s gone to bed,” I said, “and left the tape on.”

  “They’re in the living room,” Charlie said. “Let’s go for a walk on the beach.”

  We left our shoes up in the dunes and rolled up our pant legs. We walked all the way to the next town on the hardpacked sand by the surf. I don’t remember what exactly we talked about, but it wasn’t anything to do with Mama and Lamont. We didn’t mention that once.

  We were laughing and everything, but I couldn’t tell you what at. I had this knot beginning in my stomach that told me I’d be swallowing down liquid Maalox until the sun came up.

  I took deep breaths of the salt air and tried to remember everything I’d ever learned in a Yoga class I’d once taken, to calm me down. I kept repeating “Chee chee,” which was my own secret mantra from the Transcendental Meditation course Mama and I had paid seventy-five dollars apiece for, and I said to myself, “Damn you, Mama,” over and over, too, which made me feel better than anything.

  On the way back practically all the lights were out in the large mansions overlooking the Atlantic. We watched the ones in the little beach houses go off. We passed some kids lying on blankets in the sand, and sitting around a campfire drinking beer.

  “Hel-lo, Wally. Hel-lo, Charlie,” some girl called out.

  “Hello, Myra,” Wally said.

  “Why Myra Tuttle,” Charlie said, “I thought you were a nice girl.”

  “Oh tell me more!” she screeched.

  When the house Mama and I were renting came into view, there were a lot of lights on, including the outside ones. The wind was blowing up harder as we trudged up to the dunes to collect our shoes, whipping the sand against our faces.

  Charlie said, “Reluctant Admission.”

  “I hope it’s really gross,” Wally said.

  “I couldn’t have made out with Easy Ethel if she had stayed with me. That was just macho talk, that was just a phony lie.”

  “I don’t think you missed much,” Wally said.

  “Reluctant Admission,” I said. “Mama gave me that cuff bracelet. I’ve never even been on a date.”

  “Now that is gross,” Wally said.

  “Tonight’s my first night out. . . ever,” I said.

  “Welcome out,” Charlie said.

  “Oh all right,” Wally said. “Reluctant Admission. This is for you, Sabra.”

  “Don’t talk so fast,” I said, “I don’t want to miss this.”

  “Well?” Charlie said.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I lied when I said I didn’t know what I was going to be,” Wally said. “What I’m going to be is an undertaker.”

  “Oh that,” Charlie said.

  11. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

  Sunday my father had to drive to the Hauppauge morgue to pick up a new guest. That left Mr. Trumble and me to put the caskets back in the Selection Room. This is the room where relatives come to pick out the coffin and finalize the financial arrangements for a funeral.

  My father got the idea to do ours over because of an article in The Knell. That’s a monthly magazine published by The American Funeral Directors’ Association. According to the article, the Selection Room was the most important one in a mortuary. It could make the difference between a funeral selling for under a thousand dollars and one going for three thousand or more, depending on lighting, decor and ambiance. (On the front cover of The Knell, there is an hourglass with the sand running out.)

  Our Selection Room had just been newly wallpapered with violet fleurs-de-lys on a white background. While the interior decorating had been going on, the caskets were stacked in the garage. Mr. Trumble and I had to lug them back in and arrange them so that the expensive ones were in prominent positions under the lights.

  Mr. Trumble’s face was turning the color of the inside of a watermelon, and sweat was trickling down his forehead into his bushy white eyebrows.

  “I hear you been dating a movie star, Wally,” he said.

  “I haven’t been dating her,” I said. “She’s a television star, Mr. Trumble.”

  “You always had fancy notions, Wally.”

  “Don’t try to talk, Mr. Trumble,” I said. “Let’s get this stuff moved first.”

  “You afraid I’m going to slip my cable on you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You afraid I’ll get my sailing orders and leave you to fill my shoes?”

  “There’s no sense pushing your luck, Mr. Trumble,” I said.

  “You go from girl to girl like a grasshopper, Wally,” said Mr. Trumble. “Well, make hay while the sun shines.”

  That night I dreamed that Sabra St. Amour and I were flying high in the sky like two birds, floating, falling, touching. Then out of her mouth came Lauralei Rabinowitz’ voice: “Don’t touch my legs, Wally. I need a shave.”

  Monday morning Mrs. St. Amour called to ask if I knew where Sabra was. I answered the phone in our Memory Chapel. I was helping my mother prepare for a service the following evening. Our new guest was old Mrs. Wheatley, who’d been teaching history at Seaville High for twenty-five years, living with her mother until her mother became our guest last year. A.E. was searching for Gorilla, who’d been napping with Miss Wheatley until my mother walked into Slumber Room I and began screaming, “What are you doing in there, Gorilla! A.E., get your cat out of here!”

  Mr. Llewellyn, our organist, was practicing two pieces Miss Wheatley had requested for her memorial service: “High Hopes” and “Tell Mother I’ll Be There.” He was singing “High Hopes” when I took Mrs. St. Amour’s call. Every few seconds he’d trill “Whoops! There goes another rubber tree—Whoops! There goes another rubber tree plant!”

  “If you don’t know where she is, maybe your friend Charlie does,” said Mrs. St. Amour. “What’s Charlie’s last name?”

  “Gilhooley,” I said.

  “If you should see Sabra, tell her Lamont’s gone,” said Mrs. St. Amour. “Can you remember that?”

  My mother finally said to Mr. Llewellyn, “Matthew, are you supposed to sing, or simply play the tune?”

  “I’m supposed to sing, Miriam, according to her last wishes. She liked the words to the song.”

  “It’s a very inappropriate song for a memorial service, if you ask me,” my mother said.

  “Not for Miss Wheatley’s memorial service,” I said. “She always had RISE ABOVE IT written in large letters behind her, on the blackboard.”

  “Matthew,” said my mother, “would you mind practicing later this afternoon? I’d like to have some private words with my son.”

  Mr. Llewellyn nodded and gathered up his sheet music.

  “Why does Sabra St. Amour’s mother think you know where her daughter is?” my mother asked me. />
  “Charlie and I are the only ones Sabra knows out here,” I said.

  “And Charlie doesn’t count,” said my mother.

  “Why doesn’t he count? He counts,” I said.

  “Not when somebody’s looking for her daughter,” said my mother. “I hope you’re not getting into something, Wally.”

  “I’m sorry I mentioned anything at all about Sabra,” I said. “Now everyone in Seaville will know it after you go to the hairdresser this afternoon.”

  “I don’t gossip,” said my mother, who was second only to Mr. Jim of Mr. Jim’s Beauty Salon in the Seaville Gossip Department. “How long do you think your father would last in his profession if I was a gossip?”

  “Dead men tell no tales,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” said my mother. “Do this woman and her daughter plan to leave after Labor Day?”

  “The light over the lectern has burned out,” I said. “We’ll need a replacement.”

  “Not that I give a hoot about either one of them,” said my mother. “Even poor old Miss Wheatley was probably happier all her life than they’ve been for one month of theirs.”

  “Miss Wheatley was stuck in Seaville and she knew it,” I said.

  “Miss Wheatley taught you history. Period,” said my mother. “You knew nothing about her personal life.”

  “She didn’t have one,” I said. “Everybody in Seaville knew she didn’t have one, thanks to her mother.”

  “Then why would she request ‘Tell Mother I’ll Be There,’ ” said my mother.

  “Irony,” I said. “I think she was being ironical.”

  “Miss Wheatley?” my mother said.

  “Miss Wheatley,” I said.

  “Pffft!” my mother said. “Miss Wheatley ironical.”

  “Her whole message was to overcome, to strive,” I said. “Behind RISE ABOVE IT there were all sorts of other slogans. ‘He who limps is still walking.’ ‘Many strokes overthrow the tallest oaks.’ On and on.”

  My mother said, “I think you’re reading your own ideas into hers.”

  “I’m going into the kitchen to look for a bulb for the lectern,” I said.

  “Someday ask your new, famous friend how much security she has,” said my mother.

  “Security isn’t everything,” I said. “Convicts are secure, so are dogs tied to trees.”

  “I just hope you don’t talk that way around your father,” said my mother. “Where will we all be if he has a severe attack before you’re ready to take over for him?”

  “He knows how I feel already,” I said.

  “And he’s been very patient with you, Wally,” she said, “because he went through a period when he felt some reluctance, too, right after Albert skipped out.”

  “Some reluctance?” I said. “I don’t feel some reluctance. I feel a lot of reluctance! I feel one-hundred-percent reluctant!”

  “Tell me about it then. Don’t tell him about it!”

  “I’m telling you right now,” I said.

  “Why do you want to get on this subject this morning?” my mother said. “Don’t you realize I played bridge with Ruthie Wheatley? We sang in the choir together. She was like a sister to me.”

  “Mother, you hardly knew her.”

  “Don’t be heartless, Wally,” said my mother. “I have very strong feelings about nearly all of our guests. The tears were streaming down my cheeks when I worked on Ruthie. Your father can verify that.”

  “I give up,” I said, which was exactly what my mother wanted me to do.

  A.E. was giving Gorilla a lecture in the kitchen. “You’re going to wind up in the A.S.P.C.A., Gorilla,” she was telling the cat as she brushed her. “You won’t sleep on satin over there.”

  “Where are the light bulbs for the lectern?” I asked her.

  “They’re in the utility cabinet where they always are,” A.E. said. “There’s a letter for you on the bread box. It was hand-delivered a few minutes ago by Hector Hren.”

  I picked up the envelope with my name on it, in Harriet’s handwriting. Harriet made circles over her o’s with little faces inside them.

  “Love leaves me weak, I cannot speak,” said A.E. “Emily Dickinson wrote that. And if my words do leak, from pent-up heart, I start, I sneak, to say your name.”

  “Take mother a light bulb for the lectern, will you?” I said. “Please?”

  “What do you think of that poem?”

  “It’s fine,” I said, ripping open the envelope.

  “Do you really like it?”

  “I said it’s fine.”

  “Well Emily Dickinson didn’t write it,” A.E. said. “Your very own sister wrote it.”

  “Dear Wally,” Harriet’s letter began. “When I offered to loan you a hundred dollars ($100) toward the ring, you said nothing.”

  “If you say Emily Dickinson wrote it, or Sylvia Plath wrote it, or Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote it,” A.E. said, “everyone swoons over it. If you say you wrote it, you get screwed.”

  I said, “You better take the hand vacuum and touch up around Miss Wheatley. Visiting hours start in fifteen minutes.”

  “This is a business like any other business,” A.E. imitated my mother’s voice. Then she fell to the floor spread-eagled with her eyes staring straight ahead and her mouth hanging open.

  Gorilla jumped down from the kitchen stool she was perched on, walked over A.E.’s stomach, strolled down the ramp and headed back toward the Slumber Rooms.

  “Oh no you don’t!” A.E. was on her feet, scrambling after her.

  . . . You may think a ring old-fashioned but as the ads say a diamond is forever and why should I promise my self to you for nothing? My father has an old saying that goes “What we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly,” so think that one over, Wally. Another thing is the way you treated me when we got to Dunn’s Saturday night, as though the special one was the great afternoon actress and not yours truly. I would also be curious to know what you were doing walking on the beach with her much later, which you needn’t bother denying since Myra Tuttle saw you there with her own eyes. Oh sure Charlie was there too for your front! Sometimes I think you are really lower than a worm.

  I couldn’t read beyond the word “worm.” Every time I saw the word “worm” I remembered all the times I’d answered the phone and heard some kid singing, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they crawl up and down your dirty snout.” Then laughter and a click.

  Whenever A.E. got jokers like that on the telephone, she always sang back, “We’ll be seeing you, before you know it!”

  “Ann Elizabeth,” my mother would tell her, “if that happens again, simply say, ‘You are an ill person and you should see a doctor.’ ”

  One night A.E. told one of the jokers, “You are an ill person and you should see a doctor.” We were all sitting around the dining-room table while A.E. took the call, and my mother had this pleased expression on her face, because A.E. for once, seemed to be carrying out my mother’s instructions. Then A.E. said, “And after you die from your illness, we’ll be seeing you!”

  When I got to Current Events that afternoon, Martha was chewing out the lending-library man because all the novels he’d supplies were years old.

  “I’m a laughingstock,” Martha told him. “Who’s going to pay fifteen cents a day to take out old books like Jaws and Once Is Not Enough?”

  “Monty told me to concentrate on nonfiction,” said the man.

  “Monty’s an ass!” Martha shouted. “Are you the last one in Suffolk County to find out Monty’s an ass?” Then she began to cry and the lending-library man put his arm around her and said the humidity was getting to everyone, they should go somewhere for a cool drink.

  “You’ll mind the store, won’t you, kid?” he asked me.

  Martha said, “There’s just one shirt order, Wally. It’s pinned on the bulletin board next to a message from Charlie Gilhooley.”

  Martha got her bag from behind the counter and they started out the do
or. “I’m only doing this work because I was laid off from my regular job,” the lending-library man was saying. “What I am is a lathe operator down near Commack.”

  I unpinned the shirt order and the message from Charlie. Someone named Sussman wanted a shirt with “Wink if you want a sex change” printed on it. Charlie’s message was Please buy me an inexpensive backgammon game and show up at my house around four. S. is coming.

  12. Sabra St. Amour

  Saturday night when I got back from my walk on the beach, Mama’s bedroom door was closed. Lamont was washing brandy snifters in the kitchen. He had a dish towel stuck in the V of his baby blue cashmere sweater to protect it, and another one stuck in his belt to protect the front of his white linen trousers.

  “Did you have a good time?” he said, as I walked in carrying my shoes. He smiled over his shoulder at me as though nothing had happened.

  “We had a dynamite time, Lamont, particularly when we came back here about an hour ago.”

  “Don’t give your mother a bad time about that, Sabra,” he said. “We both had too much to drink.”

  “Don’t tell me how to handle Mama,” I said. I lit the first cigarette I’d had since I met Wally. “Why are you hanging around here?”

  “I didn’t know I needed a reservation at The Seaville Inn. They’re full.”

  “I bet you didn’t know you needed a reservation,” I said.

  “You’ve got to accept the fact your mother’s an attractive woman,” he said. “She was intended to be something more in life than your personal slave.”

  “Was she intended to be your personal bankroll?” I said. “You’re saving yourself forty-five dollars a night staying here, and I bet Mama bought all the drinks at The Surf Club.”

  “It’s none of your business who bought the drinks,” he said. “Nobody has to answer to you, Sabra.”

  “You’re never going to get near a storyline of mine,” I said. “I’ll never say a word you write!” I was actually hissing through my teeth at him.

  Then I went into the bathroom and got sick.

  When I came out, the door to the guest room was shut and Mama’s door was open. She was standing there in her bright orange robe with the white boa fringe, holding her head with one hand, blinking at me. “Are you all right, honey?”