For Love To Waken In His Face

179 For Love To Waken In His Face Haven Kimmel My husband’s got wood. And he wouldn’t mind my saying so; he cannot lie, is immune to nuances, sarcasm, puns, love. At night, lying as close to him as I can, unable to make my legs stop moving, as if I’m performing a slow underwater dance, I whisper to him, Tell me you love me. He moves his head back and forth twice, no. He cannot. I tell him I want to have children with him. He is completely still: he has no idea what the words mean and so he’s unable to formulate a gesture or reply. I say, Parents? We could be parents. Who were your father and mother? I already know the answer but there’s something about the confidence with which he answers me (he knows this one, and he’s repeated it many times), something so close to manhood, that I ask every night. My father was the chisel, he says, and my mother sandpaper stretched over a block of wood. My eyes fill with tears. I pretend I feel for him—that he has been robbed of something and the robbery reaches me—but in truth I’m crying because he is my husband and I’m so brutalized by desire I can no longer control anything my body does. I climb atop him, I say low and almost choked, Don’t move, and he stares at me. I move him where I want him. I cry; he stares. At the funeral home where we both work, Merriman and Sons Mortuary, I sit in the office answering the phones and taking care of accounts and generally functioning as office manager, which means I do everything. This includes my going down to the Prep Room to help when there’s a problem, and also attending many funerals where there are dead children , or when the emotions of the grief-stricken are wildly out of control and I have to put myself between them and their Loved One, Who Has Passed. Take for instance the Romanian woman—how she ended up in Parchment, Indiana, I will never know—whose beautiful twenty-oneyear -old daughter had, for no reason anyone could discern, come home 180 Ecotone: reimagining place from a party, locked herself in the family garage, and gassed herself to death. The coroner (who is my boss) ruled it a cut-and-dry suicide, no accident. The girl, Elena, was sober, had no drugs of any kind in her body. She was a champion swimmer at the local college; she was loved by everyone. She was tall and thin and fine-boned and funny and then she was dead. So the mother, Nadia, who could not account for this death, tried climbing into the open casket. This is strictly forbidden. We do not allow cohabitation in the caskets. Nadia also insisted on rubbing the back of Elena’s hand: again, no. She rubbed the thick, pancake makeup off, leaving a spot of black where the girl had decayed before being found. Nadia sang Romanian folk songs which were frankly nonsensical to all of us, and then began kissing Elena on the lips, tears hitting the face of the Deceased; oh, all of that is very, very bad. For one thing, she kissed away the Vaseline-like adhesive that holds the lips together, revealing the crude black stitches holding the lips shut. Who wants to see a mouth filled with cotton gauze? I didn’t want to say these things to the poor, foreign woman, but then her tears began to do equally awful things to Elena’s facial cosmetizing. At the moment the mother tried to actually hoist her daughter out of the casket I was called in and this is what I said. I said, “Mrs. Petrovasklaskilis, this must cease and cease now. Because you are not doing your precious daughter any favors with your behavior which is frankly self-indulgent and lacking in dignity. You put the Deceased back in her casket, which raises and lowers for the comfort of the Remains, and you allow us to continue this service...