We Are All Such Humans Here

Francis flew out for the funeral, which was scheduled for the Thursday between Christmas and the New Year’s hullabaloo. She had ditched her husband, their seven kids, four cats, three dogs, and the assortment of wrecked wrapping paper under the tree in order to tend my tender feelings and pay her respects to an aunt and uncle she loved but hadn’t seen in twenty years.

She walked out of the security tunnel in a down jacket and a cashmere sweater set and a small leather carry-on. “Man,” she said when she saw me, “this place never changes, does it?”

I glanced around at the Fresno terminal with its kitschy tableau of the Sequoia redwoods. “You could at least give me a hug before you start rendering judgments,” I said. “We are the world’s breadbasket, you know. You don’t complain about eating our almonds and raisins. There’s a reason our airport code is FAT. There was a move at one time to change it to Fresno Yosemite International or FYI, but you can imagine how the FAA laughed.”

“Raisins-schmazins,” she said. “Time to go look for the bag that’s inevitably lost.”

But she was wrong about that as well; her paisley four-wheeler was first down the ramp and onto the carousel, and we were on our way into the December darkness. My parents’ neighborhood was post-Christmas quiet but illuminated yet with Christmas lights and inflatable Santas, Rudolphs complete with elves, and here and there a Grinch. One neighbor, two doors down from the Greenhavens, had a Frosty with a saxophone and a jazzy soundtrack that played “Jingle Bells” on a continuous dystopian loop that disturbed the otherwise still air; one could only escape by going inside and making sure all the doors were shut and the dual panes locked.

Francis stood for a moment in my parents’ driveway and sniffed the tang of outlawed wood smoke. She listened to the third-verse-same-as-the-first and said, “How can you stand it?”

“I’ve lived here for years,” I said, “then my parents moved here to be closer, and I still wonder how it happened.”

“You got married,” she said. “You were homeowners.”

“And then divorced,” I reminded her, “and the house disappeared.” We had sold the house, so we could settle our debts and have a minimal income. So that Ellen could move back to the back woods of Oregon with the rest of her dysfunctional family, their camouflage wardrobe, and their right-wing orders from above. So that I could find a no-frills apartment. So no-frills that I was back to laundromat life. So no-frills that I couldn’t even ask Frannie to stay there, so we were left with my parents’ house and its odors of dust and skin cells as the only option. “Not too ghoulish,” I said, “to be staying in the death house?”

“Not until you said it.”

We walked into the foyer, and I caught her sniffing once again, this time the indoor as opposed to the outdoor air.

“That’s the smell of age,” I said, “which no amount of disinfectant can erase.”

“So, this,” she said, standing in the kitchen, “is where you found them.”

I pulled out my phone and showed her the half-dozen pictures I’d taken. “In case you don’t believe me.”

“Fish,” she said. “Fish.” In her voice was a note of both disapproval as well as sympathy. “I can’t believe you took their pictures right after they died.”

“I thought there might need to be a record. You know. In case there were questions.”

“About what?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“It wouldn’t have been the first time, would it?” she said. And without another word she started to go over my recent failures: losing Ellen the way that I did, I mean, really, how could her family be preferable to me? And then my lack of any observable compassion for my parents. She was angry, and she let me have it.

“I don’t understand it, Fish. I mean really, how could you drive such a sweet woman away?” She pointed to my phone. “And how could you be so heartless? You’re not a bad person at heart, I know that much. But I don’t understand you: your parents die and you call me while you frame the pictures. As if the art mattered at a time like that.”

“Oh, Frannie,” I said, “you’re preaching to the hard of heart. I’m living in the worst of two worlds. I know I should feel things, I know it, but I never do. Not with Ellen, not with my parents. I can cry at Pepsi commercials, but give me an honest-to-God tragedy, and I turn to stone. I don’t know. And I don’t know that there’s anything to be done. It’s not something I can manufacture, just because I know it’s the ‘right’ way to feel. I’d cry, but I don’t feel it, and I don’t feel like pretending that I do. That’s the long and short of it. I don’t feel anything at all.” “All right, my wannabe sociopath,” she said. “We’ll have to set that aside for now. I suppose you’ll just have to live with the uncertainty of it.”

“‘Such certainty is beautiful, / but uncertainty is more beautiful still,’” I recited.

Szymborska, hah! One more of the poems that I’d sent to my lovely Ellen in our salad days. Take that, I thought. Go ahead, Frannie, look it up if you have a mind.

“What?” Frannie squinted and scrunched up her nose. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” I said, “nothing so important.”