ETIQUETTE FOR A PANDEMIC: Protocols

 

Six Feet Apart

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Because the synecdoche syndicate on Pennsylvania Avenue has

washed metaphorical hands of this thing, this Asian monster, this your-

favorite-beer with an acidic citrus twist atop--but will not wash

its literal unclean hands, we are shaking hands with death, 

that anonymous stranger sporting tennis shoes, wobbling high heels,

wearing riding boots, hoisting a backpack, carrying a briefcase who

 

touched an escalator rail, rode the commuter train in any dismal

inner-city Howtown, its Dan Pardo voice pronouncing “Ladies

and Gentlemen, this is Grand.” We scat-wipe the scummy seat

and take our cue to exit. If we want to take dinner out, reservations

are easy. A table of 12 had an emergency cancellation, something

about garden seating elsewhere and a kiss of death in the clean fresh air.

 

We wander into the Osco not too far from Lincoln Park where the union

stocker refills the vodka and thinks to himself he’s lucky to have

this much before he goes to his night shift peddling Whoppers through

windows and thinks it’s so fortunate his wife’s job became a self-scan

because somebody has to watch the kids all day since there’s no school

and this is not a drill. He checks his email, reads a few internet trolls,

 

writes a Facebook feces-bomb @ the “Establishment” little old black

ladies taking melonballs to the church fellowship hour, wearing their

gospel parasol Sunday hats, delivering the social lozenges of casseroles

to people with the sugar worse than they have, or the swole feet, or

on the oxygen after years working the plants that closed back in the ‘80s

that a con man said were coming back to Allentown, to your town, to any

unpretty Howtown, to Appalachia, to Adirondack, to Alabama’s

Pittsburgh of the South. He hits “send,” to us all, completing the “Social

 

Distancing”

 

sequence.

 

Six Feet Deep

 

The funeral director or some funeral-director sibling

in the wrong place in the short line of succession to 

Natural State Funeral Home and Crematory is our

Wal-Mart greeter when we go to select Walt’s casket. 

(That is all we have to select, since, being a prudent sort, 

Cora long ago made pre-need arrangements for interment 

in the actual plot). I look around and realize that the funerary

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nom de plume is not Natural State for any reason related to 

Job, replay the King James in my head: “Naked came I 

out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I depart,” 

but is because they realized, at a desk staffed by Bill Clinton’s

tourism guy, that “Land of Opportunity” billboards, license plates 

made folks snicker even if they were from Blytheville, 

Braggadoccio, MO, or a place called Hope. 

 

This space is pure Arkansas, as we see in the many offerings

for “themed” arrangements: Granny’s skillets, “Hog” hats, 

red and white jerseys, Ozark knick-knacks you could cull

from a bait & tackle by the Cashe River. We can get a pre-selected  

red and white floral spray our Crimson Tide Dad would like

because the Razorback colors are close enough to sell us. Roll!

 

The little man with the clipboard asks about the obituary 

and I’m nominated because I have “a way with words,” and

I see my journalism major sister’s saggy frown, but even she

knows the Pinteresque subtext: they want me because I won’t 

“fall all to pieces” with it. I toy with the idea of cause of death 

for an 83-year-old man. I think it is technically “cessation of birthdays.” 

 

The sycophant with the clipboard voices his ruddy-cheeked praise

for Cora’s pre-need foresight about the two spaces, because it’s 

so costly to be unprepared, a fact I doubt since my least favorite ex 

who, I swear to God, looked like freaking Morticia Addams in her cloak

sold pre-need “packages” to black customers. She peddled sealed vaults 

called The Lincoln, The Dr. King, The General Sherman, which were

just a little more expensive than the pine under the bronze-encased memorial

plaque because the Emancipation line of eternal sleeping bags would keep them 

from, she said, “floating around in that soupy gunk, make you well-preserved

like Dr. King” in his sealed, seep-resistant coffin. We do not splurge on the super 

gunk-resistant body carriage to ferry Dad downward. Maybe we’ll settle 

for the Robert E. Lee, the Sterling Price, the Stonewall Jackson. The little man 

with the clipboard he grips in chubby bratwurst fingers needs to know 

whether Cora wants Walt’s headstone on the left or the right. 

 

She looks at him funny. 

 

“Which way did you stand at the altar?” Her hands signal confusion, because

it was a city hall window, and the reception was in the house they’d just bought

to move their combined brats into—in hopes of a “Brady Bunch” but winding up with

more of a Manson family, Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please Release Me” playing on

the massive 60s stereo console in the den, without a trace of irony in their intentions.

He prompts her: “Did your husband sleep to the left or the right of you in bed?” 

We all are about to take umbrage at his indelicacy so he auto-corrects. 

“You see, left is traditional for the husband. He’s buried there so when the 

Rapture comes, you both will rise from the earth just the way you were married 

at the altar and slept in bed.” Now she understands. “We are very traditional.”  

She repeats, “Very traditional. Let’s do it that way.”

 

“So it’s settled,” he says.

 

Six Feet Deep, Right Side

 

It was settled when we lowered her into the ground a fortnight later, 

the earth reclaiming her, she reclaiming her rightful space on the bed, 

waiting for the Rapture. The Bible promised it. Walt promised it, too.

The Rapture is waiting for them, waiting for all of us, preserving 

our preordained spaces, at Natural State Funeral and Crematory. 

An homage to the clipboard guy, I scrawled on a beige takeout napkin:

 

The Rapture, when it occurs, will not come to us in Ezekiel’s verse 

or fall from Corinthian skies in rich pleather. Rather, The Rapture, 

when and if it occurs, will feature two faces: yours and mine, and

possibly the quill of a porcupine. The Rapture, if and when it comes

to divide us by idioms of chance, to subdivide this universe we share, 

will take a lawn chair and observe our quiet, slow-moving, big black hearse.

 

That’s settled, then.

 

I heard in a youth-group Revelation lock-in at Missionary Baptist Tabernacle

when I was 13 that failing to plan ahead could be very costly at the Rapture.

 

.06 Acre, Fenced

 

Selling the house is not a sentimental business, not something that will 

“send you to pieces.” The house is not invested with the poetry of anyone’s 

childhood. This is just a place where everyone saw the moon’s pock-

marked indifferent serial-killer face peering through the bedroom window

at night, parting a canopy of trees to take in the peep-show of our turgid 

dreaming. It’s a listing, like it was when my brother-in-law bought it from/for them

to gift Walt and Cora the dignity of a forgiving landlord. I read the real estate ad

and think of Dad’s obituary I wrote, making showrooms seem like temples

of his devotion to the sleek steel American gods Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile.

 

I should have written obituaries like real estate or used car ads, airing 

in the hyperbolic chamber: “Pre-loved, gently used. All records retained, almost;

under 90 years on it, immaculately kept, taken only to church and back,” 

from suspect christening to a restful setting, as clean and sanitary as that last

hospital; which is to say, “We have taken every measure to conceal the thinly

coated veneer of fecal matter in the interior. Limited warranty applies to major systems.

Sometimes a slight rattle in the dash, could use cosmetic help, and occasionally,

in winter, tends to idle a little high without starting right away. Previous damage

to passenger upholstery from car-sickness, but residue sterilized. Dependable.”

 

I make a note to myself to write one of those “My Father as an Automobile”

poems by wraiths with names suggesting they should be evanescing on the moors

of Heathcliff’s longing somewhere. All the best journals are publishing them.

 

The man bearing the Ryder Deck Tarot 6 suggests that I am carrying stones 

in my pocket to protect me from the beloved dead, to keep them in their places. 

6 they call the card of departure, its arcana card The Lovers. The Lovers have left

the building, leaving for me a stash of Elvis LPs. They have flipped the script, are now

depicted in the shade of the Tree of Knowledge, with the surly snake smother-humping

its trunk, an angel circling above. This gives me the idea for a no-exit strategy:

If I pray, and I never say Amen, will God stay on the line and never leave me again?

 

On International Day of Prayer, my associative disorder returns with a vengeance

and I puncture the cyberbubble with the needles I share with my relapsed news junkie.

In the Rotunda and on the Ten Dooms of Alfred the Great as interpreted by Glen Beck

and that Presidential Medal of Freedom ruminating-and-purging spigot of bigotry, Rush—

little men in cheap suits line up nowhere near the sterile, polite space recommended.

They Bogart the mic, resurrecting the science fiction of Walt & Cora’s epoch--Soylent Green,

Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, all those grisly movies about the scourge that is

and always was New York to us down here, we disciples of a pinch between your cheek 

and gum but yet butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths, our sluggish Southern tongues

licking pruriently at the flames of Yankee ruin. The man in the cheap suit, 

with the cheap evangelical haircut I call Jesus’ combover, fiddles with the mic and

 

recites a Whereas:

 

that somewhere between apocrypha and apocalypse God will help us but maybe some

sacrifices will have to be made by the Walts and Coras and Greatest Generationers

and maybe just anybody over 55 because the plants that used to churn Walt’s bread

and butter chrome and steel, leather-upholstered, Landau-roofed Cutlass Supremes the

broad-shouldered but furtively low Deuce and a Quarters slinking dark Detroit streets

the pure crepuscular rush of those Dodge Chargers that died in the 1980s while Walt

was still selling them, were resurrected after the banks failed in 2007 but are dying again—

and more importantly, shareholder and CEO stock portfolios are itching their palms 

 

Therefore be it HIGHLY RESOLVED:

 

that newer properties of man have more worth; and that reappraisal of aunts and uncles

from Walt’s inordinately large litter is perhaps warranted. Now we may all have to admit 

Dad was in need of a little reupholstering, a rollback of the sluggish odometer 

to make him more marketable. A little trick of the light, pinch of sugar in the engine, a

good vacuuming of the lungs. Now that you mention it, “President Trump’s Guidelines

for America” in bold letters on cheap cardstock, the CDC logo hunkering (such a

coward!) sheepishly underneath, makes me wonder whether they all could use a

little reupholstery tacking. Maybe at first we notice just the bedbugs or redbugs

burning patches into the headrests and into our necks after we’d leaned on them—

 

Remember how Dad always said we treated them all like pieces of furniture?

 

Maybe they’re all memory-infested La-Z-Boys sponging retirement on threadbare

Herculon ottomans we’d store in the basement if we didn’t have to sell the house.

He could stay there with the sentimental OK Boomer Antiques Roadshow emcee

and later, if we needed the money, we could patch him up, let the resale dealer lay

faith-healing hands on his worn arms, rub beeswax across the wooden face,

add a dab of glue for the mortice joints. Meanwhile we can preserve stasis by finding

hidden trinkets in cushions: third mortgages, holographic wills excluding a son

as though there were anything of value for Walt to leave. Our inheritance, bereavement.

 

6 Joaquin Valley Lane

 

Walt and Cora did not like old things, were not ancestor-worshippers, 

but they were polite. They respected their elders and the natural order of things.

 

So when Cora’s mother started putting coasters in ovens and freezing oven mitts 

because she thought that was a talisman over her custard recipe (which she had brought 

from Brasfield all the way to Little Rock where she and Charlie moved 

after the sawmill burned for the second time, in 1936—had been rebuilt just in time 

for Mr. Hoover’s Depression), she came to live with us at 6 Joaquin Valley Lane, 

which my parents chose over a slutty but alluring limestone hulk with tennis courts 

tucked into long-driveway-land off Cantrell. Already a snob, I was disappointed.

 

Grandma Potter brought her convex-frame photo of her terrifying parents 

when she moved into Cora’s new, nontraditional horseshoe-shaped behemoth 

with a “courtyard” plagued by cactus set into “polished river rock” that was maybe

one sedimentary layer removed from the fluff in Taco Bell’s rock garden. 

Walt could have sold pea gravel as polished river rock and say he’d done you a favor,

just like when he introduced Bill Clinton as a man who could pee your leg and call it rain.

We all knew that Mary Potter, she of the blurred, crestfallen stockings, 

she of the cloved cling peaches, she who folded Reynolds Wrap 

into Palmolive-blessed squares for further use, who crocheted doilies and starched them 

into Victorian ruff collars for smoky-blue glass table lamps spotlighting plastic grapes—

was five Vienna sausages short of a can at the end, but we respected our elders.

 

Walt and Cora moved into that neighborhood of decent people who regularly changed

their oil and anointed the engines Walt maybe sold them, who knew that Good People

took down the Christmas tree by Epiphany and every daylight savings change checked

their attitudes and the batteries in the smoke alarms, raked their leaves, edged curtilage,

glazed their eyes and their windows. They voted in every election as though each one

were an inflection point that could tip all the mashed potatoes on all the white plates

straight into the GE garbage disposal of every American household if you slipped up.

 

They knew all the Commandments and kept their mouths and their gums clean

and had well-scrubbed kids who were acceptably middle linebackers or cheerleaders.

All the neighbors were decent modern people just watching the news, just passing time

waiting rapturously for the cable-box feelies, for the late-night comedy monologues.

 

Still, I wished they had bought the house off Cantrell, where I could picture myself

looking through a French door at Cora, the moon’s face framed by a canopy of oaks

on a fine old macadam street, where the neighbors were way-high-up-the-drive socially

distant but politically promiscuous. This, of course, is exactly why Walt couldn’t

settle there, among people with four or five names apiece, stored up against hard times,  

socially immune. Some people really could just walk down Cantrell Avenue and shoot

a resident of The Natural State with impunity, right in front of the film crew.