WHY I EAT DESSERT FIRST

I guess it was a morning pretty much like any other. Except this particular morning I was tying a tie, which is something I hardly ever do. I somehow feel like I never quite got it right, the art of tying a tie, that is. Somehow the finished product always seems to come out a bit lopsided, and I’m lucky if the tie doesn’t end up hanging out four inches below my belt, or halfway up my shirt, like an Oliver Hardy impersonator. That morning, I was standing there in the mirror, tying this tie, but I was actually looking at my face in the mirror instead of whatever my hands were doing. I was looking at all the little lines around my eyes and around my mouth, and how there’s hair in my ears and how I look so old. Not that it really bothers me or anything, but every once in a while you notice how much it all sneaks up on you.

Anyway, I finished tying the tie and it only looked slightly cockeyed, and my gaze focused on the mirror itself, and the room in the reflection behind me. It was an old mirror, really old. It had come with the house and almost all the silvering had come off around the edges, and I liked to let my imagination run wild sometimes and imagine all the faces and all the things that have been reflected in this very mirror. I thought to myself how much I loved this little house and about how life had brought me here in the first place.

I had been living in a little town in Pennsylvania called Hazleton, which is where I had always lived. I guess Hazleton is a nice enough place, except for the fact that there’s nothing there. Well, I suppose there is something in Hazleton, if you consider a Sonic, a Store 24 and a Residence Inn to be “something.” I worked at the Residence Inn.

I had been working there for about six years or so, and I guess it was a pretty decent job. We had good benefits and insurance, and the pay wasn’t bad, although you had to be good at budgeting your money because we only got paid twice a month. After six years I had worked my way up to Supervisor, which really didn’t mean very much beyond the fact that I was a desk clerk who had to monitor when the housekeepers went on break and once in a while had to fill in for a shift manager when they went on vacation. That and like 25¢ more an hour. I could conceivably have stayed on with Residence Inn for the rest of my life, working my way up through the hierarchy and retiring with a nice Buick Regal and a nice 401(k). For the most part, I was OK with that, especially considering that I had just barely squeaked by in community college and there weren’t all that many prospects in Hazleton. But a part of me was also alarmed at the potential of a lifetime career of wearing a brass name tag and a phony smile.
Then, my father died.

My mom had died when I was only four, and in all honesty, I have no memory of her at all. On my dresser I have one of those sort of idealized, soft-focus Olan Mills portraits of her and my dad from before I was born, so I try to imagine that face, looking down at me and singing lullabies and stuff, but it ends up looking more like one of those JibJab memes that people post on Facebook sometimes. Although, sometimes I think I do remember her when I’m dreaming, and sometimes in the morning before the cobwebs clear, I think I come the closest to remembering what she was like.

My dad took good care of me, we got along pretty well and he always made sure I was fed and clothed and got to school on time. I suppose that’s really about all a child can ask from a parent, in the end. But, Dad had his life and I had mine, and when we sat down together alone, we just never seemed to have that much to say to one another. So, when I turned 21 and I had finished at community college, I got my own apartment in Hazleton and moved out of the house. I moved out during the afternoon, when my dad was at work, so we never had that moment when we had to say goodbye to one another and then sort of awkwardly decide if we were going to hug or just sort of let it go.

So, six years or so, we had only really talked a few times a year. I would go over on Thanksgiving and on Christmas. I took him out for dinner a couple of times for his birthday, and he’d call me every so often to tell me that so-and-so from the office had just “croaked”, as he put it, or that the doctor had changed his Coumadin dose again. I had my job at the hotel and he had his poker buddies, and somehow I think it was easier for both of us to just not call rather than try to fill all the pregnant silences.

But then the phone rang one morning and it was the Luzerne County Medical Examiner’s Office telling me that they regretted to inform me that my father had “passed away”.

“You mean ‘croaked’,” I said to the voice on the phone.

“Excuse me, sir?” she said.

“Never mind,” I said. “Inside joke.”

Anyway, fast-forward ahead a couple of weeks. Past the funeral, past the signatures and the estate appraisals and the Billable Hours and all of that, and I found myself on the other side with a $450,000 inheritance from my old man.
For a while I just carried on like usual, going to work at the hotel, finding a kind of comfort in the numbness of the ordinary.

Then, I ordered Chinese take-out from the Golden Dragon one night. I was watching a movie on cable, some dystopian epic about the enslavement of the masses. When I had finished my Peking dumplings, which were delicious, by the way, the Golden Dragon always did a nice job; I cracked open the fortune cookie. The fortune inside read “Time for a change. Lucky numbers 3-17-23-46”

I looked up at the television, and at that very moment, a gray-clad, joyless army of identically miserable workers were being marched off to the factories on the screen.

Now, I have always been a believer of signs and portents, ever since one day when I was about eight, and while we driving through the countryside in Hanover County, my dad told me that if the cows were lying down, that meant it was going to rain. Five minutes later, it started to rain like hell.

There’s this moment in Twin Peaks when Kyle MacLachlan’s character is sitting in the Double R Diner enjoying some fine pie, and he says “Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.” Well, at that very moment, I felt like the “object of inquiry” was my life, my future. So, at that very moment I decided to pay strict attention to that fortune cookie.

Long story short, I ended up moving here to New Sisily.

New Sisily is a tiny little town covering barely more than a square mile in the middle of Cape Cod. You’ll never find it on a map, though. Technically it’s not even a town at all, but a giant parcel of privately owned real estate, allowed to exist because of some creative legislation in the 1780s which nobody ever saw much point in amending. It was founded, so the legend goes, by a small group of people who broke away from the Mayflower Pilgrims and rejected their joyless, Puritan ways. They named it after the Italian island of Sicily, which to the 17th-century English mind was as exotic and faraway as Bali Ha’i.

It has since been the home of a few souls, currently about 450, mostly the type of people who have left somewhere else and come here to be left alone and live their lives in peace; like me, I guess. There is really not much here, a lot of old houses and one church-shaped building which was never consecrated. Nevertheless, everyone still calls it the church and nowadays people mostly use it for birthday parties and sometimes a cookout on July Fourth. Just behind the church is a huge, forty acre cemetery which was willed to the town by one of its founding fathers. Even after more than 300 years of history, only a tiny fraction of the land in the cemetery is actually inhabited, as it were, by the town’s dead.

I came across New Sisily by way of a real estate agent who was showing me this little house on Cemetery Road. Cemetery Road is a tiny little offshoot on the far side of the cemetery, more or less removed from the rest of the town; a sort of Victorian cul-de-sac.

The little road started as a single cottage, dedicated to the sexton, whose duty it was to look after the cemetery. It seems that at some point during the 1850s, the current sexton had converted to Mormonism, promptly adopted the practice of plural marriage, and built eight small, identical homes for each of his eight wives. I’ve been told that my house was originally built for wife #4, someone with the rather melodic but unfortunate name of Prudence Apostrophe Motherwell.

As soon as I laid eyes on the house, I knew that this was where I was going to live. It was a typical Cape Cod, 1850s four-by-four, but it looked as if it had been built by a master model-maker at ¾-scale. I had enough money to buy the place outright, with no mortgage, and still live for a few years without really having to work or worry about money too much.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I work now and then, odd jobs or a fill-in when someone needs help at their shop or what-not. But for the most part I sleep in, write a little bit, read a lot, and go for walks. Plus, like anybody else, a good portion of the day is devoted to stuff like cooking and eating, and making sure the house is clean and that sort of thing.
There was this woman who lived across the street from me, where wife #3 lived originally, I guess, whose name was Mrs. Chandler. On her mailbox, though, which sat slightly askew at the end of her walkway, the letter “C” was worn off long ago, so in my mind I always thought her name was Mrs. Handler. Even now, when I know better, I still think of her that way sometimes.

Anyway, Mrs. Chandler was a bit of an odd person, perhaps a bit of a recluse, but who isn’t, in New Sisily? I know I could say the same about myself. People told crazy stories about her, that she had poisoned a few husbands down in Texas, that she had taken one too many Peyote trips back in the sixties, that she was a Holocaust survivor and was haunted by the things she’d seen. I watched her, though, when she left her house, to get her mail or make a trip into town for something. She looked old, but she looked strong. Her eyes looked clear and she always kept her hair neatly done in a long, thick grey braid down the middle of her back. I noticed that her curtains were always closed, and the cynic in me suspected that she was a hoarder, and that inside her house she could be hiding all kinds of ugly and unsanitary secrets. But she always kept her yard and her little flower beds nice, so in the end I decided that she was probably just old and misunderstood.

Then, one morning, May 13, five years ago, to be exact, I was going for a walk. It was one of those mornings at the time of year when all of spring’s promises had finally been fulfilled. The Easter-egg colors of April had given way to the serious shouts and screams of the reds, oranges, and greens of summer, and the air smelled like cut grass and dandelions. I was walking through the cemetery when I saw her, Mrs. Chandler, dancing.

She had on a beautiful dress, the sort of dress you would expect a woman of her age to wear to a niece’s wedding or a good friend’s funeral, but her feet were bare. A few feet away from her sat a small piece of cloth, upon which sat a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, two glasses, and a small radio. I could hear bits and pieces of a Glenn Miller tune being blown to me on the breeze, and she danced, her back to me, her old body swaying gently as she shifted her weight from foot to foot, looking, from my vantage point, as if she were entranced. Then, she spun around and I saw that her eyes were closed, well for a few seconds anyway, until she opened them and seemed startled to see me standing there. She let out a nervous little laugh and I remember feeling surprised because it sounded like the laugh of a young girl, not an old woman.

“Oh, hello young man,” she said. She was blushing and smiling and I couldn’t help smiling back.

“Hello,” I said.

“Would you like to dance?” she asked me.

Signs and portents.

“Umm, OK, sure. Why not?” I said, and I stepped onto the grass with her.

Sometimes, it’s hard to let go of ourselves. We can sing like Pavarotti in the shower but wouldn’t dare sing out loud in the subway. We can write stories of epic bravery and be scared senseless of enclosed spaces. It’s hard to “dance like nobody’s watching”, as the song says. And so it was that day, as I stepped up to dance in a graveyard with a barefoot old woman who may or may not have poisoned her husband or husbands in Texas. For a few seconds it felt really awkward, really weird, and I was thinking to myself, “what the hell am I doing here..?” But then I did manage to let go of myself. I listened to Glenn Miller and I held that lady in my arms, and we did dance like nobody was watching, because nobody was. And then the song ended, and we both laughed and then the awkwardness came back, but only for a second.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Seems fair,” she answered, pouring us both a glass of champagne.

“What, exactly, are you doing out here?” I asked her.

“I’m dancing,” she said. “I’m dancing on my own grave.”

“Umm, OK,” I said.

Then I said, “Why?”

Her eyes flashed and she laughed again, like a little girl. “Because I can, young man. Because I can! Here,” she said, handing me a glass, “have a seat. Would you like to hear a story?”

“Yeah, OK,” I said.

We both sat down on the grass, on what I suppose would one day be Mrs. Chandler’s final resting place. “What is your name, young man?” she said.

“Victor,” I said. “Victor Wallace.”

“Well, Victor,” she said, “have you ever heard of Evansville, Indiana?”

In a way, I felt bad that I hadn’t. “Well, no,” I said, “I can’t say that I have.”

“Figures,” she said. “Nobody ever has. Third-largest city in the state of Indiana and nobody has ever heard of it.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, well. That’s where I used to live, before I moved here to New Sisily. Evansville, Indiana.”

She began to talk, and we sipped that fine French champagne at 8:30 in the morning, and I listened. She had been married to a guy she really loved, a guy she met the summer after graduating high school. They never had any kids, and he loved his Marlboros so much that he dropped dead of a heart attack when they were both only 43. She never remarried, and her family had all died off, and she was living her life pretty much as a solitary entity. That part of her story sounded pretty familiar. She was down to one good friend, she told me, a woman named Bernice May.

“No matter what,” she told me, “No matter what sh*t, pardon my French, had hit the fan that particular year, Bernice and I would take each other out to eat on each others’ birthdays. Oh, how I used to look forward to those days!” she said, clasping her hands and looking off into the distance for a moment, remembering. “Then,” she said, “came my 60th birthday. 1992.”

Her face clouded over for an instant and she took a big swallow of champagne.

“Bernice had called me the night before. “We’ll have to make it for breakfast, Miriam,” she told me. “I finally got in to see that sonofabi**h doctor over in Henderson.”

So, we made a date for JoJo’s, a little place attached to the Drury Inn in Evansville.

Oh, the breakfast was lovely,” she said. “I had a nice cheese omelet with some nice bacon and all the coffee I could drink.

When I had finished my omelet, I grabbed the menu from behind the napkin dispenser on the table. I was looking at the ice cream sundaes, and the cakes and things, even though it was only about nine o’clock in the morning.
I looked across the table at Bernice, and I said to her, “Bernice, I know it’s early but I do believe I’m going to have dessert!”

And that was when the world came to an end.”

Mrs. Chandler went on to tell me the story of how a C-130 Hercules military aircraft crashed at that very moment into JoJo’s restaurant in Evansville, Indiana. Glass, noise, fire, dust, confusion, and the next thing she knew, she was still sitting there holding that menu, alive and unscathed, but her last remaining friend had just been vaporized before her eyes.

I was dumbstruck. I struggled to find something to say, but couldn’t.

“Can you imagine?” she said.

“Umm, no. No I can’t,” I answered her.

“Not long after that, I moved out here,” she said. “And not long after that, I bought this here little plot of land. I mean, Jesus,” she said, “if I’ve learned anything at all from all this, it’s that you never know when you’re number is going to be up. A plane, a goddam plane, can fall out of the clear blue sky at any moment and obliterate you, or me.
And now, every year, on my birthday, which is also the day I cheated Death, I come out here and dance on my own grave. It’s my little tradition.”

“And that’s today,” I said.

“Yes, that’s today,” she said.

“Why two champagne glasses?” I asked her.

“I always brought a glass for Bernice, for Tommy, maybe for Death himself. Maybe we have a standing date for today. But, they’re not here, you are. So today, I brought it for you.”

So, I sat there, and took my shoes off too. We finished the champagne, talked a bit and got to know one another just a little. She was a nice lady, I thought; I was right, she was just misunderstood. Then I put my shoes back on, stood up and said goodbye. I felt like she might need some time alone with Bernice and Tommy and whatever other ghosts she was visiting.

The next year, on May 13, I couldn’t help but go there again. And there she was again, in her Sunday best with a fine bottle of wine. We danced. She laughed in that little-girl way of hers. We drank wine and we talked.

And then the next year, I got dressed up too, and I brought some crusty French bread and some cheese and purple grapes. The year after that it rained, but we danced anyway in the rain in our best clothes, we danced to life and we danced with Death, and then we ran back to her house to drink the Veuve Clicquot.

I had never been inside her house before. A tiny part of me still half-expected to find a scary mess, but I was relieved to learn the real reason why she never opened her curtains. It was art. Tons of it, on every available wall or flat surface. And it was beautiful. I don’t know much about what’s valuable or what isn’t when it comes to art, but I know something beautiful when I see it. She had filled her tiny little ¾-scale home with splendor, moments frozen, unalterable, immune from unforeseen disaster. Her curtains were drawn to protect them from the sun.

The next year, last year, I put on my suit and a brand new shirt and tie which I had bought especially for Mrs. Chandler’s birthday. I walked to the cemetery shortly before nine, which was the time when the airplane had fallen out of the sky in Indiana. She was not there.

I walked over to her little plot of land and waited for a while. I sat for a while, listening to the persistent buzz of the late spring insects, and I kept expecting to see her walking around the curve in the pathway with her bottle of wine and her transistor radio, but she never came.

I walked over to her house, and I knocked on the front door.

“Mrs. Chandler?” I said. “Miriam?”

No answer.

I walked around the back and tried the back door. It was unlocked. I opened the door and knocked on it at the same time. “Hello? Mrs. Chandler? Anybody home?” Nothing.

I smelled coffee. On the table sat a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and two glasses, a small blanket folded neatly, and a radio. A cup of coffee sat half empty, still steaming slightly.

I walked into the living room. She sat there, on the couch, in a lovely dress that I had not seen before. She was not breathing. On the coffee table in front of her sat an old, scorched menu from JoJo’s restaurant in Evansville, Indiana. She looked OK. She had kept her standing date.

A few days later, only the funeral director and I stood on Mrs. Chandler’s little plot of land in the cemetery.

After a few minutes, he turned to me. “You know,” he said, “she took care of everything beforehand. All the arrangements.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Except for one thing. An epitaph,” he said.

“An epitaph?”

“Yeah, an epitaph. Do you think she would have wanted one?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah. I do think she would have liked one.”

The funeral director’s face brightened. “Really? That’s fantastic. Would you mind writing it down for me? Right here-”
He handed me an official-looking form and pointed at a blank space. I wrote down the epitaph and handed it back to him.

Anyway, I finished tying my tie and grabbed the Veuve Clicquot out of the fridge, although only a split this time and just one glass.

I walked into the cemetery and over to where Mrs. Chandler was buried, where her granite headstone stood, new and proud and ready to face the ages. I opened the champagne, put my phone on speaker and found the Glenn Miller song I had downloaded specially from iTunes. I took off my shoes and I danced. I remembered Miriam and my dad, and Bernice May and the mom whose face I can’t picture. And I reminded myself that an airplane, a goddam airplane could fall out of the sky at any moment.

When the song ended, I sat down in front of Mrs. Chandler’s headstone. “Thanks,” I said, “for reminding me.”

Then I wiped some morning dew from the words carved into the granite.
“I know it’s early,” they read, “but I do believe I’m going to have dessert.”

a short-ish story based on actual events

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