Reflection's Edge

A Daughter's Gift

by Margaret Mendel

Once I’d made up my mind that I was going to attend my mother’s funeral, the rest was easy. I bought the swankiest red velvet dress I could afford - after all, it was Christmas Eve - and I’d even given myself a facial that morning.

Though I must admit I did hesitate as I approached the entrance to the Ebert Funeral Home, where my mother was being received, as they say, when an image of her standing over my bed struck me full in the chest. Nightmares have always been a part of my sleep. I wake up in a sweat several times a month, afraid that she’s watching me, the way she used to when I was a little girl. And I wondered if I had the guts do it. I had to. This would be the last chance I’d get, and I had to see for myself that she was really dead.

My mother was a high-line lawyer who had lived for the past twenty years in the fanciest apartment buildings on the Upper East Side of New York City. She moved every five years, upping the ante in status and increasing her carrying charges. The last I’d heard she had relocated into a building where she had a terrace that overlooked Central Park, with enough square footage in which to drive a semi-truck around inside her living room.

So I wasn’t surprised when her lawyer told me her funeral would be held at the posh Ebert Funeral Home, a place with so much glitz and make-believe luxury for the dead it was a joke. They advertise in the New Yorker and boast of an ambiance that’s fit for royalty. I imagined heirs moaning with every cent wasted on a funeral with 14 carat gold-dipped candles, imported mints, and embossed mementos of sayings that the departed had been famous for. Me, I didn’t care what they did with my mother, or her money.

Two, maybe three hundred people must have been milling about in the huge entrance way when I arrived at the funeral home. I didn’t recognize any of them, except for a few of mother’s greedy relatives who were not sure how to approach me. The uncles had all gone quite bald. But my mother’s sisters probably thought that they hadn’t changed, with all the money they’d spent on plastic surgery. No amount of cutting would ever remove the mean glint they’d inherited from their mother. The three of them sat sour faced, dabbing at fake tears that they’d never let fall upon cheekbones that had been injected with so much silicone that their faces had been stretched ridiculously out of proportion.

None of my father’s relatives were there. He’s been dead more than thirty years. A most unfortunate accident was what the inquest had decided.

No death in our house was an accident.

A few people were probably startled to see me, and I kind of got off on that. People who liked my mother thought she had been overly sentimental, and I’m sure there were pictures of me around the house. That would have been her style, to tell everyone about her fallen daughter. It would have been just like her to milk all the sympathy she could from her rich friends; like the pair of snooty women who stood in the doorway, dressed in designer suits, and wearing dark frothy chiffon hats that sat on their heads like black halos. They eyed me suspiciously as I passed. One woman leaned over and whispered something to her companion. I walked right past them, gave them a nod of my head, but they wouldn’t get a smile out of me, nor a tear. I sent them a look that was as hard as the rocks I now carried in my handbag.

I saw mother’s bleached ash wood coffin perched on a platform several steps above the floor on the far side of the room. The area looked like an altar to me. How appropriate, I thought, because this would be the last place where my mother would be the center of attention. Small stage lights reflected onto the ceiling casting shadows of the immense potted palms that flanked her coffin, while gigantic crystal chandeliers draped the room in a romantic soft glow. Garish, gilded wallpaper covered the walls and I kept catching my high heels in the ankle-deep pile of the carpeting. Cherubs with sympathetic pudgy faces smiled down on us from the ceiling, looking more like children who had just come back from a makeover at Saks Fifth Avenue than angels from heaven.

An uneasy quiet settled over the room. I had the strangest feeling that along with the taffeta and silk bunting that lined my mothers coffin that the din of our voices and the sappy, sweet organ music that played in this great hall was all being recorded so that Mommy could listen to her last day above ground for an eternity. Any minute, I expected to see doves flying over the platform. An arch of red roses, like a bloody rainbow, hung suspended above my mother’s coffin. I wondered if the person who had sent it was having a good laugh. Possibly the roses were someone's last dig at my mother. I wanted desperately to know who had sent it.

The closer I got to the coffin, the more I felt drowned in the fragrance of the floral arrangements that filled the room: mums, roses, lilies, and even orchids - all white, except for the red rose arch that was suspended above my mother. The sweet sickening smell of the blooms reminded me of all the funerals I had attended as a little girl and a flurry of memories came rushing back.

I recalled my father’s only brother, a wealthy bachelor who had doted on me. He had died mysteriously in his sleep in our guest room. I remembered all of my pets that had died in their sleep, or had drowned in the swimming pool. We had funerals to bury all of them. Now, death had my mother, and I wanted death to never let go of her. I wanted her to rot the way she had taught me all dead things rotted.

I stiffened my back and continued to walk. As I neared her coffin, I began to feel a light-headed excitement. For the first time ever, I felt something other than dread regarding my mother.

I stretched out this sensation by slowly ascending the three steps up the platform that led to her coffin. I had no need to hurry. Where was she going? I wanted her to wait. I wanted her to anticipate what I might do to her.

"Here I am, Mommy," I whispered.

She lay serene, almost angelic, in the coffin, dressed in a white raw-silk frock trimmed with seed pearls at the neckline. The outfit was truly fit to ascend to heaven in. How typical, I thought. One of her office lackeys must have picked this one out. And I was sure the cosmetician hadn’t found my mother easy to make look as angelic as she did. I had to hand it to the person who had done the work; the job was fantastic. I saw through the make-up, though. No one could hide from me what she really looked like, even after all these years. Her smile though, got to me, the way it slipped down the side of her empty skull. That smile had haunted me for years. It would always come at me from an angle I hadn’t prepared for. She’d cock her head and smile just before she’d strike at me like a snake.

The one good thing about being the estranged daughter at your mother’s funeral, no one comes up to you to see how you’re doing. I was allowed to have this private time with dear old dead mom.

Her lawyer said she had died of a heart attack, but I doubted she ever had a heart. I had never heard anything beat underneath her breastbone. Not that I’d ever received a hug; and over the years I’ve wondered if this was her way to keep me from finding out that her heart was missing. And when I got older, I thought how macabre it was that she used to carry my dead pets so near her bosom. We lived in the suburbs then and she’d bring the dead pets out to the backyard herself where she had instructed the gardener to dig a hole for them near a tree, or in the rose garden. Once, she insisted on burying Skittles, a beautiful and friendly Labrador, along the hedge that overlooked a roadway where he had frequently watched for cars.

"I brought you something," I said, imitating her voice. For a moment I thought I saw her eyelids flicker. But it was only the pancake make-up stuck in the creases of her face that settled slightly. I put my handbag in front of me, between me and the coffin.

I leaned closer and opened my purse. The eulogy was to take place in half an hour. That gave me plenty of time to do what I had to do. I looked into my mother’s painted face and one by one I took out the rocks that I had gathered up at a construction site. They were the meanest, most jagged, coal-black rocks I could find. My mother had only worn white clothes; the furniture in our home had all been white; and even the car she had driven was white. She saw this as representing her purity. She said it would demonstrate to her clients that she was the person to get them through whatever crisis had brought them to trial. She had even bleached her hair snow white. I, too, her only child, was dressed only in white in those days. We had not a speck of color in our house, nor in my life; my mother made sure of that. These black rocks were perfect for what I needed to do.

I carefully lifted my mother’s hands, hands that were classically clasped together on her breast, and I placed a couple of the rocks under her grasping, phony, praying hands. I patted her cold flesh and said, "No, Mother I’m not married now. I’ve had three husbands. Though, unlike you, I’ve never murdered any of them."

I went back into my handbag and gathered up another fistful of rocks and eased them as far under her back as I could manage. "You have no grandchildren, Mother. Pity, isn’t it. You would have loved to brag about them."

My mother’s coffin had a lid like that of a Dutch door, leaving her head and upper torso exposed to the viewing public, as if she were allowed to say hello, or maybe wave goodbye one last time, while the lower portion of her body rested under the closed section of the coffin’s lid.

"Do you think I’ve changed much, Mother?" I asked, as I stealthily eased a handful of rocks under the closed portion of the coffin and onto the skirt of her dress. It was so much easier than I had thought it would be.

Then I gave my mother a sharp rock directly under her back for each pet that she had killed, one for every kitten that never woke up in the morning; a rock for the puppy that had drowned in the pool; a rock for Skittles, found dead on the bathroom mat on New Year’s Day morning; and I gave my mother a big fistful of sharp, cutting rocks under her back for my father and his brother.

I closed my handbag. It was empty. I had done what I had set out to do. After all the years of nightmares, I had handed my mother over to the Devil. I had weighted her coffin down and I knew she’d suffer in this closed box of hers for an eternity.

As I turned to leave, a man in the most sincere tone said to me, "We’re about to start the service. Please take a seat."

I looked down at my mother. A few crumbs of dirt from the rocks had fallen onto her dress. "You really do have to be more careful," I told the man. He watched me brush the dirt specks from my mother’s dress, leaving vague streaks of sooty smudges on her bodice.

I stepped off of the platform. As I walked away I looked back over my shoulder, and spoke to my mother for the last time. "Merry Christmas, Mommy. Did you like the chocolates that I sent you?"

Margaret Mendel lives in the Bronx with her husband and two cats in one of the oldest coops in the Country. She has written a weekly food column and other articles for a local newspaper. Several of her short stories and the first chapter of a novel in progress have won awards from the Bronx Council on the Arts. A long time member of the Mystery Writers in America and Sisters in Crime, Margaret is presently hard at work finishing the last revision of a mystery novel. She is a quilting enthusiast and can bake a mean apple crumb pie.



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