Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw

Author:Michael Mewshaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - General, Psychological fiction, Humorous, Family Life, Black humor (Literature), Fiction, Literary, Psychological, Adult children of dysfunctional families, Domestic fiction
ISBN: 9781590513187
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-05T07:00:00+00:00

Quinn

Unsteady on my pins, I stroll from the lobby to the bar at the Hilton. Neither spot looks inviting. The public areas of the hotel are penitentially bright and deserted except for sleepy employees. At eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, regardless of the weather, people in London roister through the streets, just getting started. Here in Maryland they’re ready to call it a day.

With nothing better to do, I retreat to my room. The wine-induced euphoria that helped get me through dinner en famille has diminished to a dull throb behind my eyes. I open the minibar and collect a few Chivas Regal miniatures. Headache or not, I splash Scotch into a toothbrush glass and top it off with club soda.

Although a maid has turned down the bed, the curtains remain open on the room’s only window. Maybe the hotel management is proud of the view—a baleful stretch of interstate. Snowflakes spool yellow gauze around streetlights that look as lethal as surgical instruments. Thirty-six hours after my homecoming, and already I feel a yoke settling on my shoulders, the familiar weight of childhood. Back then I had no choice of roles. There was just the part I was fated to play. Now I want to believe I’m free to choose my character; I can even change my lines.

I shut the drapes. It’s not that easy to drop the curtain on tonight. I feel awful about Candy, so fragile and eager to please. What she asks is simple—a late shot, a last shot, at happiness. How can I begrudge her and Lawrence that? Why couldn’t I get out of my own way and grant them what they need? Pay attention and listen—that’s all they expected.

Instead, I talked a blue streak, I talked bollocks. Here I am hoping to play Greek tragedy, yet when I hit my mark, I act like a sad tramp trapped in theater of the absurd. Uncertain whether the stage directions call for laughter or tears, I shamble around like a baggy-pants vaudevillian. To Lawrence and Candy I must have sounded as bad as a moron hogging the mike at a comedy club on amateur night. If for some reason I felt compelled to talk about my fuckup at the funeral, I might at least have been honest. It hurt. It wasn’t funny.

Before her death I had crossed paths with my paternal grandmother a grand total of two times. What I recalled of her was a hornet’s nest of black hair restrained by barrettes. So my first shock at her wake was to see a wizened white-tressed woman in the casket.

Then came the second shock of encountering relatives who presumed to know me when I didn’t recognize a single one of them. I can only compare the experience to traveling in a foreign country and running into fans who’ve never seen me except on a movie screen, and who’ve never heard my voice except dubbed into the local language. These people don’t know me. At such moments I barely know myself.

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