volume 7
Sunday Morning
by Nathalie Vidlak
I’m standing at the church my Grandmother attended for 23 years. There are fifteen of us Vidlaks in our best Sunday dress, hands in pockets, aimlessly wandering in small steps. I fiddle with my mom’s cell phone, which rests deep in the pocket of a grey skirt I love to wear. I love the way it feels when I stroke the fabric in downward sweeps along my upper thighs. It’s smooth like satin with an organic edge. It sounds like muffled sheet metal moving against any solid stretch of space. I love the way it coerces me to stand a little more straightly. This day, I love that I have something to do with my hands.
Today is cold and crisp, December 17th to be exact. It is Heather and Dave’s anniversary. Dave will have been my brother-in-law for 12 years. They have three young children who love to play Ghost in the Grave Yard with me and Ginene and Al’s three children each summer we gather at my parent’s house. Al will have been my brother-in-law for nearly 20 years. I knew him before I was truly considered a Vidlak; before they took me from my schizophrenic mother; before they decided a home in the country with three square meals a day and five siblings was a good thing. He was my sister’s boyfriend. He was the big brother I’d never had and sometimes, at six years old, never wanted. He was there when my sister, Rachel, drove off of a bridge one cold and crisp morning. He was there when we buried her the day after Thanksgiving.
Eight days before Christmas, fifteen of us stand at the church thinking about the seven Vidlaks who will never have the chance to be here on this day. I think about the eleven others that would be here if only this morning there hadn’t been a drastic change of plans. I look around the room remembering the last time I was in this place. Cheap red carpet and breezy windows look out on a snow-clouded town of 650 people. The town looks the same today as id did fifteen years ago when these same breezy windows looked out onto summer. I was ten years old and there were cookies and small plastic cups filled with orange juice. The townspeople were mingling daftly in the shadow of a lukewarm pulpit. They would now soon be pouring in and whispering softly as if not to wake the dead. That is, in fact, how people behave when standing near a casket at any visitation whether they know the deceased closely or not. I’ve been to ten prior to this; all of them family.
We stand glancing at each other, each of us thinking how it seems we’ve gathered more times under circumstances such as these than out of any sure-footed kind of pleasure. It isn’t true. Our memories serve us less well than we’d like. Or perhaps memory serves us too well, all of us a bit ashamed that we haven’t made the best of it thus far. After all, isn’t it death that brings family closer? Or is it death that shows you who your true family is? We’ve had eleven now, at 10:30 on a crisp, cold December morning.
My aunt walks up to me, in the absence of words, and asks, "How is your eye? Your mother tells me that you’re having trouble with it." I think to myself how ridiculous this all is. How my eye will be okay even if I can’t see out of it now. I think how mountains are made of mole hills in such times as these; of how nobody knows this sort of thing happens to me on a regular basis. Strange things appear and disappear, and I’ve learned doctors don’t really know that much about the body. They may be medicine men and women slinging pharmaceuticals at the scratch of their pen and saving lives daily like so many mayflies caught in mid-air; however, through the nearly decade of preparation to be such, they are only required to spend 96 hours learning how to maintain this machine that allows us to go on living and loving without consequence.
"Yeah," I say, pulling the cell phone out of my pocket. "I’m going for a CAT scan on Tuesday downtown. I’m sure it’ll just fix itself though." She nods with disinterest.
Bruce, the funeral director, gathers us together to make his ceremonial speech. "Let’s gather in prayer shall we?" he says with his lengthy arms stretched wide. Like children we all step forward about an inch and a half and bow our heads. "Heavenly Father, we come before you today as Leota joins you at your side. I ask that you be with these family members left behind. Comfort them. Lord we also ask that you keep close at hand as another loved one is unable to be with us today. Be with him and this family as we pray for healing…" Bruce has been our family funeral director much like the family car mechanic. We love him. We trust him. And maybe one day we’ll get a discount. He continues with words of wisdom as my Dad walks over to me.
"Natty, call Dave up and find out if he’s heard anything."
"Okay," I say as I walk away from the crowd toward one chill window. "Give me light," I think to myself. I dial the numbers with the very tip of my index finger so as not to press many numbers at once. Cell phones are far too ridiculously small. It rings; a small triumph on my part.
"Hello," Dave answers. "Hey Dave, it’s Nat. Have you heard anything about Al?" I ask, thinking of all of the ways someone might simplify the complexities of triumphing over a code blue heart attack and subsequently how he might interpret what my mom would have told him over the phone. I picture my mom sitting with Ginene going over hospital papers and how the formalities of being discharged will be handled. I see my sister, Carol, being driven over to Ginene and Al’s house to reassure the kids while Heather, in her best Sunday dress, goes back home to tell Dave in detail how it was miraculously worked out. After all, Al is only 36. His dad has had several bypass surgeries by the ripe old age of fifty-something.
"I’m sorry Nat, he didn’t make it," Dave says.
"Oh……okay," I say as if I were taking a message for someone who’s out of the office.
"I’m sorry," he says again.
"No, that’s okay," I reassure him.
"Bye, Nat," he says.
I pause, "Bye," in a wispy phone voice. I hate that phone voice. I pull the phone away from my ear and search for the power button. My dad stands to my left waiting for me to relay the message. I can only guess what he’s thinking, probably the same thing I was before those three words came sliding out of Dave’s mouth, "he…didn’t…makeit." I fumble with the phone. I can’t find the power button. I must find the power button. If I don’t turn it off the battery will go dead. Where’s that stupid power button? I just had it. There’s "Clear." There’s "Talk." Where’s the power button?
"Natty, what did Dave have to say?" Dad looks at me inquisitively. I turn to him, still looking at the phone, not quite sure which is more important.
My eyes scour the keypad as I mumble, "He didn’t make it."
"What?" he says, not hearing me; turning a close ear closer and squinting, his eyes watch my lips just like any time I talk too quickly and too softly. I look up at him, fold the phone closed, and hold it out for him to take as if it were his. I look him in the eyes, suddenly realizing what I have to do. There is no way around it. There is no escape. I am on the far end of a room with 14 people between myself and the door. I am the only one who knows, and if I could get to that door it would all be different. I could walk out and walk back in and the phone would still be in my pocket. Thirty miles away a miracle would be happening and my brother-in-law of 20 years and three children would be fighting a winning battle. His wife would be outside the hospital room with my other sisters and my mother, and the doctors would be talking about a textbook triumph of skill. My fifteen-year-old nephews would be lying on the couches watching Sunday morning cartoons, eating Aldi-flavored fruit loops while my niece waited for her daddy to come home. It was almost 11:00 a.m. and he would be late for a game affectionately referred to as "Sunday morning fights."
"He didn’t make it, Dad," I say, with a tone that only mean I don’t understand, but he understands clearly. He understands so clearly he darts for the door, leaving me in a room full of people where, once again, I am the only one who knows. They watch him go. They watch me stay, fiddling with a phone that isn’t there. I watch myself wishing any of my sisters were here, but Apryl is on her way, and she doesn’t know either. I watch the door…all the way over there. How many steps does it take to walk through concrete? I’ll never know.