February Funeral

          The snow that lay on the fields grew thicker—the left-hand pages of a novel—as we drove north. The highway was a shoelace. The radio was silent.
          A storm was coming from the south, and we just had time to drive up, proceed with the small service, and get home before the juggernaut. The ultramarine was withdrawing from the sky like a refugee. Salt blotched the macadam.
          In town, the funeral home sat aloof from the corner of a busy intersection, its boxy additions and hasty portico all but obscuring a fine old manse somewhere in the center of the expansion. Only the gingerbread dormers were visible, peering out as if above a lid.
          I slipped on invisible ice and—abandoning my fear of people—embraced the opportunity to tell the greeter. She asked me to show her precisely which spot—here? or here?—and we busied ourselves in a lively, polite exchange as I admired her slender, Neiman Marcus triumph over age.
          Thus I delayed going into the room with all the lights. I held back, waiting for Gary to burst like a pierced golf ball, to surrender his civility—his amiable, efficient, sportsmanlike thing—into the arms of someone deeper in his history than me.

          I sidled in, finally, as if standing up at the prom. I recognized the grimace—a posture of frozen irritation—the dead have. As if, universally, our last emotion was disdain, our final task a critical one: This is not the soup I ordered. The eyes close—indignant, disappointed, a little huffy.
          I had seen his mother only eight weeks before, picking the wrapping paper off a gift box with better eyesight than mine, occupying the center of the universe as only parents can. Locked in dementia, she seemed to thrive in her private reality—powdered, lightly coiffed, fully the queen of it. Her eyes reflected the rapidly changing atmosphere within: the passing clouds of a ghostly abandonment—mercilessly recurring—by parents and siblings long dead, then suddenly the brilliant sunlight of a remembered kiss or the re-rediscovery of eye drops within her handbag.
          With time now so precious, life had become a one-act play of limited action and repetitive monologues, but no less powerful for its brevity. She spoke from an earlier time, the words coming directly from memory—undiluted by the need to survive, by the droll habit of existence.
          Her roommate with the sprawling Ethan Allen pieces and the swath of framed photos never appeared in the room.
          Now, in the automobile cortege to the village cemetery at the top of the hill, our blinkers clicking like a metronome, I tried to recall someone else's childhood and early life. As usual, I resorted to imagination, passing the schools and developments mitered by snow—the curious tendency of the familiar always to become unfamiliar, the past slippery as a trout in the mind's eye: old flagstone walkways, old buildings and alleys, old liaisons—cruelly modified. Only the present remains tamable, is safe.
          Who were this mother and son, then? I had never paid attention, really, always too self-involved or obtuse to join the family at the dining room table in Pictionary, or Trivial Pursuit Genus. In bed, I ask questions, but the stories that come are always slack and factual. Yet in the months since our sudden late-life wedding, and after the usual coalition of wine and vodka, a few times something very simple, non-adjectival, pushed itself violently into our pillows—the mute, powerful memory of loving kindness, of patient attentiveness, a tender exclusivity, a maternal job well done. 
          It was the picture of a much younger woman than I had known, and her youth seemed—as I listened to Gary's sobbed phrases—almost integral: the entire relationship indivisible from its different fashions, its long-disappeared living room furniture, its peculiar dinners and after-school chores.
          The town had passed by the car windows and now we were turning into the frozen cemetery. Everything was white or brown except the spray of yellow rosebuds, which seemed to contract—like a bouquet of Venus flytraps—back onto themselves for warmth. I almost slipped and fell on the packed-down snow as we carried the casket, my leather soles like toboggans.
          The day itself, which we had both begun with such apprehension, was ending. The storm still hadn't hit, and we were home and having wine before the night sky suddenly brightened under the falling snow, the countless flakes coming on swiftly—a diagonal army—mounding up on the back porch steps with an icy quiet, crystalline music.