Grief

by Evan Levin

Gail Kraft’s mother died giving birth to her. Gail never really knew her so she didn’t really miss her. In fact her childhood years were quite happy ones.

This was because of her father. He was a large, good-natured man with thick merry eyebrows like Groucho Marx, given to poker, more poker, pro football, beer, and a huge Midwestern laugh that could bend thin walls outward. He was kind and generous and lively. He bought Gail endless presents, took her to animal farms and amusement parks, rode roller coasters and bumper cars with her, and in general loved her greatly and was greatly loved by her in return.

One day, a week after her tenth birthday, he died. It was a heart attack. He was laughing his usual loud laugh, and all at once stopped and looked around puzzled, as though he had just overheard something truly unexpected and startling. Then he fell over and was dead.

Gail was devastated. She screamed, she broke things, she wept wretchedly for weeks and sank into depression for months – in some ways, forever.

Her father’s property, and Gail herself, went to her father’s cousin in Syracuse. The cousin and his wife appreciated the property, but Gail less so. Living with that shocked stricken little face proved too much. They packed her off to the cheapest girl’s orphanage they could locate as soon as possible, a Southern hovel where Gail was nagged by bitter teachers and terrorized and beaten up repeatedly by girl-gang members.

Gail ran away at twelve and was caught and beaten. She ran away again at fourteen, hitchhiking along Route 66, and was picked up, raped, dumped, and returned to the orphanage. She ran away once more, successfully, packing a knife this time, and floated through Missouri, lying about her age and waitressing nights.

Briefly she worked as a stripper, a dishwasher, a drill-press operator, counter girl. At nineteen she discovered alcohol. By twenty-one, she was a self-described alcoholic, and remained one for the rest of her days.

Between part-time jobs she drifted in and out of semi-prostitution. It was purely professional. Men laying serious siege invariably came to see her as frigid. They were correct. Sex did not really appeal to her, and to use the term ‘love’ with regard to the sorts of men she encountered was a poor joke. The only person Gail ever loved was the only one who had ever loved her: her father. And rarely did the week go by that Gail, in the depths of a bottle of Jack Daniels, did not address her father’s shade in ragged sobs, and weep, rage, curse life and God, and cry herself asleep. Misery pervaded her. She did not struggle with depression. Depression had won hands down, and was a full-scale occupying force. She was institutionalized after a particularly severe bout, and twice for attempted sucicide.

Miserable young women sometimes exercise a certain attraction. Miserable middle-aged women do not. As Gail passed into her thirties and beyond, and the drinking took its toll, her breasts sagged, her teeth yellowed, chips and Schlitz and junk food culminated in cellulite and stretch marks and a beer belly. She sat in bars, waving like seaweed to truly shitty Country Music, trying to get picked up. Drunk or not, men more and more shoved her aside.

After one especially long and barren stretch she made the one good decision of her life: she applied for a janitorial civil service position with the Office of the Judiciary in Taos, New Mexico, and got it.

Quickly unionized and so impossible to fire, she staggered for seventeen years through the corridors of justice, from john to john, sneaking Chesterfields and sipping at the nipple of her concealed flask.

And one evening as the end of her seventeenth year there approached, Gail -- fat, wrinkled, hair white and patchy, increasingly blind in one eye, looking twenty years older than she was -- stared at a close-up of Oprah's huge teeth laughing on Cable one day and decided that she'd had enough.

First she tried to slash her wrists, but all she had to work with was a cheap serrated kitchen knife blade from Wal-Mart and it hurt, so she stopped.

Then she thought of jumping off a building, but the doors to the roofs of the two buildings she tried were locked, and anyway she was afraid of heights.

She crossed the street one bright Wednesday morning quite drunk, trying to think of how to die painlessly, when a 1978 Ford Pick-Up driven by someone even drunker than she, rounded the corner, hit her head on, and dragged her body three-quarters of a block before stopping at a red light.

A passerby on the sidewalk strolled over and knocked on the driver’s window and informed him of the gnarled and bloody mess dangling from his muffler.

“Nah,” said the driver, blinking. “ -- Really?”

Gail hung on at the hospital for a surprising forty-seven days and might have made it, but a doctor decided that she was simply getting to be too much of a drain on public funds and opted to ‘release her from her suffering’, quietly disposing of the needle that dispatched the illegal injection with the true aplomb of a certified professional.

Gail was cremated. It was cheaper than burial.

But then something interesting happened.

As Gail Kraft’s body burst into flames and the roast flesh blackened and crackled, her spirit flew upwards out of her haggard flesh and floated above it.

She looked down, blinking, through transparent ectoplasmic hands at her body, smoking and afire below, and her hands were not the heavy, veined, age-spotted claws with which she had pawed beer cans a few bare months ago, but young, slim, white, gleaming -- a girl’s hands; an angel’s hands.

And she felt herself rising, rising up to the ceiling, and then rising through the ceiling, pulled by a sensation in her shoulder blades, accompanied by flapping sounds. She understood in an instant: wings. Wings!

Gail, now a beautiful ten-year-old child again, white-robed, white-winged, rose high into the blue sky, then higher, into the blue-black stratosphere, and then everything swirled and swam and suddenly she was in a sea of clouds. Downy milk-colored softness, soft as a lambs’ ears, extended everywhere. She looked around and saw white-robed people in various groups, talking to one another, strolling, picnicking, laughing. And she heard – a voice.

“Papa!” she screamed, and began to run, stumbling and falling, toward a table around which a group of men in white were sitting playing cards.

“Three of a kind beats two pair, Elmo! Hah! ” said her father with swagger, plopping down his cards and breaking out in his enormous laugh.

“Papa…,” said Gail, breathless. “Papa!”

Her father looked up. He broke into the familiar wide smile. “Hey, baby! So you made it here at last, eh? That’s great. I knew you’d make it. Nice place, isn’t it? -- Give me three cards, Elmo. And make ‘em Aces again, OK?” He chuckled.

“… Papa…” she said

“Yeah, hon?”

“Papa. It’s me.”

“I know it’s you, honeybunch. You never did much look like J. Edgar Hoover, hon.”

“Is that... is that all you’ve got to say?”

“Aw, c’mon honey, I got an important hand here! You know how much there is in the pot? Besides, we’ve got Eternity. Relax. Have a look around. Get some lemonade or something.”

“I haven’t seen you for forty-seven years! And all you can say is ‘get some lemonade’?”

“Time don’t mean all that much here, honeybunch. You’ll see. Besides. It’s good lemonade. Two cards, Elmo.”

“I spent my whole life, crying my eyes out because of you!”

“You did?” said her father, frowning at a card in his hand and shifting it around.

“They put me in an institution because of you. I cut my wrists because of you. I ruined my entire life because of you!”

“Really?” said her father, looking up at her. “Gosh. That was mighty stupid of you, wasn’t it? -- Say, get me a lemonade too, hon, OK?”

The End