I—the funeral director, really—chose the soft yellow gown in which she was dressed when the women of our block and I saw her for the last time. I told the makeup artist that she always liked loose but neat fabrics that could drape, but not billow, on or away from her skin, depending on whether she’d been lying down or standing up. The crepe de chine fabric was finer and softer than anything I’d ever seen her wear. But I don’t think it would’ve upset her, if she could’ve known she was dressed in it.
But the color was—perfect! Though the woman who dressed and made my mother up was probably my age or younger. But looking at the way my mother was dressed and made up, I’d’ve thought the stylist/hairdresser had accompanied the girl who’d become my mother when, for the first time, my mother bought a dress: a soft, drapey frock in the color of August afternoon light or sunflowers. Mom’d saved her allowance—literally, what she was allowed to keep after she handed her mother the pay envelope from the shoe factory where she worked in the office. Having to save and wait frustrated her, she said, but it turned out for the best: the dress fit her perfectly, she said, for she’d grown two inches and hadn’t gained any weight.
But I can only imagine that color on my mother. Hardly anybody looks good in any shade of yellow and I, no matter how I’ve changed, couldn’t help but to look like fruit that’d over-ripened in the cindery haze of a malarial swamp. Mother’s skin, a bit earthier than mine, and her brown eyes coulldn’t’ve done that hue any more than justice than it could’ve done for her. But in the one photograph I ever saw—in black and white—of her in that lovely dress, there was a tension miising that she seemed to carry even as a very young girl. Could’ve been something about that dress, I guess. I don’t know, I’ll never know, about that color, though.
I’d never seen that color–I’d known it only from my mother’s descriptions—until I saw her in repose. That tension, gone again—before the other women of our block. I hadn’t seen that color, that look, certainly not on her, until then; haven’t seen it since. And it was the only time I saw her in a gown. She didn’t have photographs, at least none that I know of, of her wedding or any other formal occasion. Since she didn’t graduate from high school, or even junior high, I doubt she went to a prom.
In fact, the only occasion of her life marked by any ritual, besides her death, was her birth. I guess she wore a gown then, as I did. (She showed me the photos.) But then again, who knows: She entered this world in her mother’s house, only two and a half street blocks—forty-one doors—from the funeral parlor. Down the street, turn right, go four avenue blocks and there’s the window I peeked out of the night they pulled Adam out of the house across the street from ours, his head out of the oven. They wrapped a gown around him in the hospital, just as they did the one and only time I had to stay. A gown at the time of my birth, and then, in that room, as sterile and odorless as the funeral parlor, but colder.
That gown, which barely covered my crotch, was made, it seemed, for an eleven-year-old girl. I still don’t know how long they made my mother’s final dressing gown: The casket’d been open only down to her breasts; below that, the linen-colored silk lining dissolved into a shadow. Somehow I get the feeling Adam’d never been covered quite enough until the medics pulled the sheet over his head as he lay stretched on the gurney on which he made the trip from the hospital to the morgue.
Maybe some people never get to be gowned; they don’t get the chance to have their bodies covered but not confined: protected from the cold, but not prevented from gathering the shadows of trees together to allow light to pass through. Some people may get to wear such a gown when they are named; others—only women—when they take on someone else’s name; and a few people, like my mother, at the end of their lives. A garment under which their energies—their echoes and reflections—are gathered. But one which still allows the arms and legs to move, even when the newborn, the enjoined, the recently-deceased, cannot or do not want to touch anyone.
Besides mother, the only other person on this block I’ve seen in a gown was Mrs. Littington. And hers wasn’t like any of the others: only slightly too long to be a cape or poncho but too short and not bulky enough to be a kaftan, only the caps of sleeves circled her forearms. As a kid, I thought it was some French costume they didn’t tell us about in social studies class; now, as far as I know, she might’ve made it or had it made.
Sometimes some other woman—who wasn’t at the funeral—would appear at Mrs. Littington’s front door or by one of the windows. She was the only person I’d ever seen who shared Mrs. Littington’s facial shape: all angles and refractions of olive bark and chestnuts baked by centuries of sun and wind. But the other woman’s—I was never sure of her relation to anyone, or role in that house—basic, earthy tones and sturdy shape hadn’t transmuted, as Mrs. Littington’s had, into a statue of shadows, each in her own reflection, or rather, refraction through time. But this is not to say she was timeless.
That is to say Mrs. Littington, before any of us met her, was not the person we knew, and she changed again after she left this block. She was just like that. On the hand, the other woman was always that, wherever she went, which is to say, wherever the Littingtons lived. She wasn’t of this block, but she was of its equivalent, in Toulon or some other place. Wherever it was, it was this block.
Which, of course, is the reason no one made any attempt to speak to her. The only one less trustworthy, or worthy in any other way, than someone who leaves this block is someone who comes from its mirror image in some other town, some other country, some other world. They’re always too dark, too coarse, too uppity, too something. So they survive they way anyone else does in the moment they’re about to enter after that uncertain and hostile moment they’ll always think of as the present—protected or at least covered up. We enter, or exit, in a gown, and don’t trust anyone who hasn’t entered our lives in that way.
Memories And Those Who Stayed 