It wasn’t Mrs. Utemeyer. It was something else. But it was Mrs. Utemeyer too. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the gleaming gold rings on her fingers.
“Mother,” Mr. Utemeyer said, “I brought the little girl you called Natalie.”
Lindsey and I both admitted later that we expected Mrs. Utemeyer to speak and that we had decided, individually, that if she did we were going to grab the other one and run like hell.
An excruciating second or two and it was over and we were released back to our mother and father.
I wasn’t very surprised when I first saw Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer in my heaven, nor was I shocked when Holly and I found her walking hand in hand with a small blond girl she introduced as her daughter, Natalie.
The morning of my memorial Lindsey stayed in her room for as long as she could. She didn’t want my mother to see the still-applied makeup until it would be too late to make her wash it off. She had also told herself it would be okay to take a dress from my closet. That I wouldn’t mind.
But it was weird to watch.
She opened the door to my room, a vault that by February was being disturbed more and more, though no one, not my mother or father, nor Buckley or Lindsey, confessed to entering, nor to taking things that they didn’t plan on returning. They were blind to the clues that each of them came and visited me there. Any disturbance, even if it could not possibly be blamed on Holiday, was blamed on him.
Lindsey wanted to look nice for Samuel. She opened the double doors to my closet and reviewed the mess. I hadn’t been exactly orderly, so every time my mother told us to clean up, I’d shoved whatever was on the floor or bed into my closet.
Lindsey had always wanted the clothes I owned first-run but had gotten them all as hand-me-downs.
“Gosh,” she said, whispering into the darkness of my closet. She realized with guilt and glee that everything she saw before her was hers now.
“Hello? Knock-knock,” said Grandma Lynn.
Lindsey jumped.
“Sorry to disturb you, hon,” she said. “I thought I heard you in here.”
My grandmother stood in what my mother called one of her Jackie Kennedy dresses. She had never understood why unlike the rest of us her mother had no hips – she could slide into a straight-cut dress and fill it out just enough, even at sixty-two, to look perfect in it.
“What are you doing in here?” Lindsey asked.
“I need help with this zipper.” Grandma Lynn turned, and Lindsey could see what she had never seen on our own mother. The back of Grandma Lynn’s black bra, the top of her half-slip. She walked the step or two over to our grandmother and, trying not to touch anything but the zipper tab, zipped her up.
“How about that hook and eye up there,” said Grandma Lynn. “Can you get that?”
There were powdery smells and Chanel No. 5 sprinkled all around our grandmother’s neck.
“It’s one of the reasons for a man – you can’t do this stuff yourself.”
Lindsey was as tall as our grandmother and still growing. As he took the hook and eye in either hand, she saw the fine wisps of dyed blond hair at the base of my grandmother’s skull. She saw the downy gray hair trailing along her back and neck. She hooked the dress and then stood there.
“I’ve forgotten what she looked like,” Lindsey said.
“What?” Grandma Lynn turned.
“I can’t remember,” Lindsey said. “I mean her neck, you know, did I ever look at it?”
“Oh honey,” Grandma Lynn said, “come here.” She opened up her arms, but Lindsey turned into the closet.
“I need to look pretty,” she said.
“You are pretty,” Grandma Lynn said.
Lindsey couldn’t get her breath. One thing Grandma Lynn never did was dole out compliments. When they came, they were unexpected gold.
“We’ll find you a nice outfit in here,” Grandma Lynn said and strode toward my clothes. No one could shop a rack like Grandma Lynn. On the rare occasions that she visited near the start of the school year she would take the two of us out. We marveled at her as we watched her nimble fingers play the hangers like so many keys. Suddenly, hesitating only for a moment, she would pull out a dress or shirt and hold it up to us. “What do you think?” she’d ask. It was always perfect.
