This is a Marge Piercy and Ira Wood assignment to write a dialogue that passes time, uses action and descriptive tags, and contains indirect as well as direct dialogue. I chose the moment in my life when I got Very Bad News.
Doug's Death
The phone's ring stirred me from a
half sleep in my cozy Williamsburg bedroom. I was tired and achy
from a day of digging over a new garden patch and plowing through
plagiarized research papers, seeking the good stems among the weeds.
Pulled by the phone, I wrapped a blanket around myself, scuffled to
the kitchen, jerked the phone off the wall and nearly barked my
hello.
"Hi, Susan. This is Tom calling
from Berkeley."
His familiar voice brought out my
smile. "Oh! Hi Tom. It's been a long time."
"Are you sitting down?"
"No. Barely standing. Do you
know what time it is? How's Debbie and Doug?"
"Susan, whoa. Sit down, OK?"
"OK ...?" I say, putting my
knee on a kitchen chair.
"Are you sitting?"
"Yes. Come on, friend, you're
scaring me."
"Doug is dead."
I sank onto the hard chair, heart
pounding so loud in my throat that I couldn't open my mouth.
"Susan?"
"No."
"Yes, Susan. Doug died tonight.
He had a massive heart attack and died before his friend Bob could
take two steps toward him."
"No."
A woman's voice wound through my
drumming. "Susan, are you alone? Is there someone you could
call?"
"Debbie, what's going on? This
isn't funny."
"I know."
Damn. She was crying. Matter-of-fact
Debbie was crying, I thought to the rhythm of the drum beat in my
ears.
"This can't be true, Debbie, this
can't ... it's been so long since he and I talked. He can't be
gone."
Pause. "He loved you, Susan,"
she said quietly.
"But he broke up with me seven
months ago! We haven't even talked!"
Pause. "What are you talking
about? Just yesterday we were all talking about how we missed you,
and Doug was saying how important you were to him..."
"He didn't tell you."
"No. He would've if it were
true."
"But it is! Because I wanted us
to marry. Because he said it would never happen. Over the phone,
Debbie."
"Doug is dead, Susan. We don't
know what to do, call his dad, arrange a burial, have a party. We
think Doug would want a party."
"Call his Dad and let him arrange
to .... Deb, Doug wanted his body to go to science. Can you tell
his Dad that?"
"Yes."
"I'll arrange something at the
college. Deb, I can be there within two days."
"Come home, Susan."
So I did.
Doug and I were both 46 years old. We
had been together since I became a student at UC BErkeley and cast
him in a play 8 years earlier. I needed to see his body to believe
he was gone.
His Dad arranged a viewing in the back
room of a funeral home where Doug's naked and refrigerated body
waited under a sheet. He had a look of surprise on his face that was
not un-peaceful. he had lipstick on his lips and eye shadow, just
like Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When the
funeral director handed me the bundle of black leather and piercing
rings that emergency workers had cut from his body, I believed he was
dead. Tom had walked with me into the back room while Debbie and Dad
waited out front. They wanted to remember him as he had been, not
how he was now.
"He would have liked this,"
Tom observed. "A rapid death in front of a Goth Club called the
Terminator, lots of drama. The viewing in back of a funeral parlor,
your readings over his corpse. Doug was nothing if not an actor."
I had to agree.
And now the tasks. Doug's Dad wanted
me to find the new car not yet paid for and return it to the dealer.
Left on the street for more than 24 hours, it had been towed to the
impound lot. A ransom would have to be paid to free it. By the time
time Tom and I found it within row after row of cars by the San
Francisco Bay, Tom had me laughing too. How Doug would have loved
this!
And then came the task of taking apart
his apartment. Debbie came with me. I unlocked the door to find
myself everywhere in pictures and opened letters mixed in with
marijuana and ecstasy and fen-fen, and then I cried thinking that
Doug had considered suicide--or at least an early death--when love
just might have been enough. I took only a small carpet Doug had
told me stories about and the coffee table he had designed and mocked
up, a manufacturing line in mind.
Tom sold all of Doug's woodworking
tools and saws and machines, and bought drugs and wine and snacks to
throw a huge party like an Irish Wake. Doug's body was not there,
but I had rented a car to fetch his father.
And then I left Tom and Debbie's house
to spend one last night at Doug's. I lit candles everywhere and
wrapped myself naked in our favorite quilt. I curled into his bed
and felt him there, alive and laughing, red hair standing up every
which way, and him refusing, as always, to coddle my excess emotion.
"It won't work," I heard him saying. "I'm gone,
Susan. Let me go. It was a good death. I loved you." And I
replied, "Doug, I love your restless experimental soul. But you
were right, I wouldn't have had your drugs in my home, and your
Gothic fantasies went further than I could go. I'm glad you felt
free before you died, baby. I will miss you. Go." I dried my eyes, and fell asleep
peacefully in his scent and warmth. In the morning I dressed in his jeans and favorite shirt.
Today I would fly back
to Virginia to resume my teaching duties in the theatre department at
the College of William in Mary. In a month, I would get my first
anti-depressants when I could not be in a rehearsal without crying.
In a year I would try to move on. I still look for him in the crowd
scenes of movies, I still use his coffee table, I still stand on his
rug, I still wear his jeans, but they are getting tight.
Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast
