And Lay as Though She Smiled

I died of cholera in the third grade. My best friend Alice Hathaway presided over my funeral.

Lying in the school soccer field, holding a bouquet of dandelions, my cheeks rubbed with pollen, yellow and sickly, I asked Alice to give my eulogy.

"What?"

Neither of us had ever gone to a funeral, but somehow I knew more.

"My eulogy. Say nice things about me. Since I'm dead."

She hesitated. "Elaine was really nice. I wish she hadn't died. And I hope she goes to Heaven."

I waited.

"Are you done?"

"Uhuh. Amen."

"Okay, now's when you bury me."

Alice ripped grass from the field and poured it over me. I smiled as it fell into my mouth.

"Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust," I chanted.

***

In kindergarten I learned about nothing. At recess, on the playground, if I concentrated long enough on nothing I began to see nothing. I began to hear nothing.

In the first grade I discovered nothing smelled exceedingly good. In attempting to describe that smell to my parents I always failed. No, not a sweet smell, not a tender smell, not a smell like the sea at dawn or the forest in the night, but a smell like nothing I had encountered anywhere else.

In the second grade I spent recess alone, sitting on the edge of the playground, breathing in that smell. I anticipated the taste of nothing the way I anticipated cookies baking in the oven. That smell – the house was soaked in it by the time the cookies were baked, cooled, and ready to eat.

It was in the second grade that the recess lady introduced me to Alice. Breathing in the nothing smell of the blacktop, the nothing smell of the tire swing, I leaned against an old pine tree one afternoon and traced its bark with my fingers until the plump shadow of Mrs. Gibson loomed over me.

"What are you doing, Elaine?" she asked.

"Nothing."

As though I had not just explained that I was otherwise occupied, Mrs. Gibson replied, "Well then, if you're not busy, I'd like to introduce you to someone."

Mrs. Gibson gestured to a pale, wiry girl fidgeting at her side.

"This is Alice Hathaway. She's new here – moved to town just last week. Her father is the pastor of the church down the street. Maybe you could give Alice a tour of the school, make her feel at home." She tossed us a limp smile before wandering away. Alice wrung her hands and stared at a dandelion near my feet.

I leaned forward. "Do you like dandelions? Mrs. Gibson says they're just weeds, but I think they're really pretty."

"Oh, these are dandelions?"

"What, you've never heard of them?"

"Well, we didn't have a garden at home. Nothing grew there. Mom says the dirt was dead." Alice knelt and bent forward, dipping her nose into the yellow blossom. "It smells like nothing I've ever smelled before!"

***

Alice invited me to dinner at her house that night, and for the next year I ate with the Hathways at least once every week. The Hathaways played a weird game before dinner. I didn't know its name, and no one ever taught me the rules. Alice and her family seemed to know them, though, so all I could do was pretend and try not to look stupid. I watched them, and did what they did.

Everybody put their hands together and said a poem. Most of the poems talked about something called Heaven, or sometimes a person called Jesus. Once we finished reciting the poem we could eat. Simple enough, I guess, but still something confused me. Alice and her dad put their hands flat, palm to palm, while her mom and little sister clasped their hands as if they were begging. I had to get the rules right, but I didn't know which way to hold my hands.

One evening, I made a compromise. At first I placed my hands palm-to-palm, but the next moment I switched so my hands were clasped, then palm-to-palm, then clasped, again and again. I rested my elbows on their dining table and wrung my hands as I sang along, "Thank you for the world so sweet. Thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you, God, for everything."

***

"Oh, cruel world, you have left me no choice. I must forsake this wretched existence, clinging only to the hope my next life will welcome me with open arms."

My breath escaped in a bark as I landed on my back in the sawdust. "Now you go," I called up to Alice, meaning it was her turn to give a pathetic speech and jump off the monkey bars to a certain and gruesome doom.

Alice looked at the ladder and swallowed, "You go again. I don't know what I should say."

"Don't worry. You can say what I said. I don't care."

"I don't think I should."

"Well, if you were going to jump off a building, what would you like your last words to be?"

Alice grimaced, "Nothing! I mean – what I mean is my dad says: 'Suicide is free admission to perdition.'"

I tugged on my braid and giggled. "To where? And it's free?!"

"Maybe we could take turns on who decides what to do at recess, Elaine," Alice said suddenly. "For fifteen minutes we'll do what you want, but for the rest of the time we can play my favorite game."

I jumped up from the ground, brushed off the sawdust, and agreed, "'K, first we can kill ourselves, and then we'll be puppies!"

***

Actually, Alice's favorite game happened to be lesbian Barbie sex. She didn't know this, though.  

Alice had an impressive Barbie collection consisting of 18 Barbies, 40 Barbie sweater sets, 32 Barbie mini-skirts, 21 pairs of Barbie high heels, three kid-sister Skippers, and one convertible. Alice did not own a Ken.

But Alice listened to the Backstreet Boys and had pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio taped to her ceiling. She knew that Barbie needed a man. So because her parents would not buy her Ken, Alice cut the hair off one of her Barbies. Despite the fact the doll still had massive hips, no waist, and a DD-cup size, the buzz cut made her a man.

Alice eventually decided that Barbie and Barbie needed to get married. The ceremony was unbearably dull, of course, but the wedding night came soon enough. Alice watched PG-13 movies at her other friends' houses, so she knew how sex worked.

When the Barbie clothes came off, however, the happy couple encountered an unanticipated difficulty.

It was the boobs – they were so large they got in the way. Alice and I shoved the dolls together, but there was no meaningful connection, only fumbling and the clacking of stiff plastic tits.

***

Mom threw out all my Barbies. They were dirty. Deformed and covered with slime.

I loved Barbie for her feet. House got boring pretty quick, but the feet of a Barbie were soft and chewy, and make believe was always easier when it stayed in my head. Sometimes Mom would leave me with my dolls and come back fifteen minutes later to find me grinning at the wall with a Barbie hanging upside down from my mouth.

Without my Barbies, there was nothing to do the next time Alice visited my house. Lying on her stomach, drawing row after row of hearts on my feet with a pink felt marker, Alice mumbled, "Mom says you should come to our church's youth group meetings."

When I asked Mom what "youth group" meant, she responded the same way she did when I asked about "Jesus" and "salvation" and "perdition."

"It's something the Christians made up," she said.

***

I accepted Alice's mom's invitation. That Sunday Alice and her parents stopped by my house in the afternoon to pick me up. When we parked in front of the church Alice looked to me in dismay and exclaimed, "Oh no! I forgot to tell you to bring a Bible!"

At first youth group was a lot like dinner at Alice's house, except it took place in the basement of a church with about 20 other children. We recited a lot of poems. I wrung my hands. We took turns reading stories, too. After an hour spent stumbling along in a borrowed Bible, I looked up when Mrs. Hathaway announced we were going to learn a new game.

We gathered in the church's tiny cafeteria. Mrs. Hathaway wrapped a dishtowel around my eyes and tied a length of twine to my wrist. I laughed with the other children as they wove the string through the cafeteria and the kitchen and the recreation room - under tables, over the couch, behind the furnace. It was here, behind the furnace, that they tied Alice to the other end. They did not blindfold her.

"Elaine, you're like a nonbeliever. That's why you're blindfolded," explained Mrs. Hathaway. "Now Alice, she's the voice of God. She'll call out to you, and you've got to do your best to find her and reach her. But, since you're all tangled up and can't see anything anymore, it will be really tough getting to her. This is what it's like to be an atheist facing death. When they can't find heaven they have nowhere to go."

Following Alice's voice, I managed to reach the kitchen, but got lost in a snarl of string soon after. As I walked into the kitchen sink only to back into the refrigerator, as the other children tittered behind me, I realized Christians weren't any fun.

***

"Did you make up that game?" I asked Mrs. Hathaway during the car ride home.

"Yes, I did."

"It was fun," I said. "Are you also the person who made up Jesus?"

I guess her parents finally gave up on me, because the next day at recess Alice began to play with a different group of children. Alone on the playground, I sat on the school steps and thought of nothing. I breathed slowly, as though fast asleep, and my heart coiled once again around the anticipation I had abandoned when I met Alice. After a year, the smell of nothing returned and crescendoed to a pitch so deafening that a new taste swelled in my eyes and rumbled in my throat like an earthquake. I wrung my hands and sang my own poem: "I wish I could climb pine trees. I wish I could swim through the Earth. I wish I could walk through the hills without shrinking into the distance."

A well-manicured finger poked me on the shoulder.

"What are you doing?" asked Mrs. Gibson.

I was doing nothing, but for Mrs. Gibson's sake I decided to be a little more specific. "Thinking," I said, wiping at my eyes.

"You sure think an awful lot, don't you?"

"Well, if I ever stopped thinking then I'd probably be dead."

"Oh, hush! Look at you, just sitting there by yourself, thinking. That's not good, a kid your age. You should be having fun."

"But – "

She pushed me toward the big toy.

"Go across the monkey bars."

She watched as I huffed my way across the bars. When she bustled to the other end of the field to yell at some sixth graders, I crawled under the slide.

After I spent half the recess period staring at sawdust and stray dandelions, Mrs. Gibson's head appeared in front of me.

"Are you hiding from me?"

"No."

"Go play."

She left. It was dark under the slide and after awhile I couldn't hear anything anymore. I couldn't see anything anymore. This was my favorite game.