My mother dressed me for my father's funeral. She put extra pomade in my hair and parted it in the middle, sculpted a cleft atop my head. She put a shit-brown blazer on my back. She tucked an orange handkerchief in the blazer's breast pocket. This was Pittsburgh, 1989, Sunday at noon, and everyone knew Cleveland would be pushing the Steelers around in about an hour's time. On that overcast day the church's tall evergreens looked like closed umbrellas. My mother and I sat at pew's edge, right up front, the closet ones to the casket, my right leg stretched across the aisle's maroon carpet in case anyone wanted to challenge that.
You've got to try to understand these people. I know that I've tried for thirty eight years now. At the burial, a total of 18 heads altogether, pomade cleft included, I heard my aunt talking about my mother. She wore a funeral hat with a wide lace veil, and when she regained her composure, she’d half-whisper terrible things to her husband, who'd shush her, though she added clauses every time he did. "She just married him for his money anyway, when he had it, before he met her." Eleven years later, just after I turned legal drinking age, I eulogized my mother, started off by calling her the gold-hearted Clevelander, but as my wife said, by the end, I'd eulogized my father more than her.
My clearest memory of Mom, honestly? Her behavior after Dad's fall. The doctors said that he felt nothing. His heart just stopped, he toppled over the scaffold's railing one-hundred-odd yards in the sky and plummeted to the city streets. He washed skyscraper windows for a living. He didn't drop all the way down to the pavement. His safety rope prevented that. He used to joke that he got paid to fix his hair in mirrored windows all day. Of course, hanging midair from that rope, he looked over at himself, downtown behind him, all those buildings huddled together, skyscrapers, waiting for the next person to come wash them.
The Sunday following his funeral, the Browns weren't in town. Our grass needed mowing. I refused my mother this chore. She mowed. She knew I would watch from my bedroom window. She was six-two and she preferred hunching over the handle a little. The engine would putter out like it always did. She kept the cord in her hand, yanked it without stopping her legs, and in one fluid motion her back would straighten, and for just a second, before she resumed her hunch, she didn't seem like she was part of a grass-spitting machine, but a just woman pushing a somewhat-useless mower.
Sometimes, I still wonder about the exact nature of feeling nothing while dying. Does it mean losing sensation and control, like the blood-deprived limb not responding when you wake in the middle of the night? Or do doctors mean that consciousness sputters and fades, like a city at night losing power, blacking out one building at a time. Because if it’s the latter, I think that there are all sorts of people in the world who walk around dead. Sometimes, I’d say they're everywhere you look.
The morning after the funeral, my mother woke me early. We had to be waiting outside of the mall before JC Penny's doors opened that Monday. I stretched and yawned and my mother passed me a mug of room-temperature coffee and I took some swallows, got out of bed, and took down the brown blazer and accompanying pants from where they hung on the door's peg. I went downstairs and walked outside through the long, green grass to the Oldsmobile my father had been fixing since I was in diapers, and inside, on the garment peg in the backseat, I hung the blazer, smoothed out the wrinkles on the bag so there’d be no reason for my mother to complain.
But ten minutes later, she was pounding the Oldsmobile's dashboard with her palm, bobbing her head, she was cursing so vehemently at the traffic light dangling right above us. The engine had just puttered out. She'd cranked the ignition twice, but then gave up. The light turned green and people behind us began to merge into the neighboring lanes, directing their angry faces at us as they passed.
We had three miles to walk. We had to get to JC Penny before the employees had their morning coffee, while their minds were still soft from the weekend. My mother had bought the blazer and the pants on Saturday. On the refrigerator, she'd kept the receipt tucked under a magnet of Jim Brown dragging two Colts into the end zone. No one cares whether you've just buried the only working person in your home, she'd told me enough times for me to believe her. Now, the sun already cast heat to rival her rising temper. The Oldsmobile wasn't even a hundred yards behind us. Her fingers sunk into my shoulder and I stopped.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
The blazer and pants were draped over my back just as she'd placed them, but my arm had begun tingling so I'd switched the hanger into my other hand and the bag had folded in on itself against my shoulder blade. Cars honked where the Oldsmobile had stalled behind us. She took the blazer off of my back and she tore the white bag apart. The ripping plastic sounded like flames catching in a hearth, and a driver passing with all of his windows down yelled something about my mother looking good enough to eat. She told me to extend one arm. She pulled the blazer’s sleeve over it. She did the same with my other arm, taking my wrist in her soft hand much more gently than I'd expected, letting her fingers linger even after both of my arms hung at my sides.
"I don't want to wear this," I said.
"What do you mean? You look famous."
"It's too hot."
"Very soon, you'll never see it again. Just do me this favor so we can make sure that happens."
It was only a little past nine, but after fifteen minutes of walking briskly, especially in that blazer, sweat glued my t-shirt to my chest and back. I told my mother that the blazer would stink with sweat, but she said just one word. "Walk." A group of men and women standing near a bus-stop bench all glared at us passing, the brown pants still folded over the hanger and draped on my arm. We walked a few more yards and a white convertible pulled alongside us at the curb. The driver had a thick gray mane combed to the side, which my mother would later tell me was a wig, and mirrored sunglasses that seemed too large for his face.
"I can help if you're all headed somewhere ahead," the man said, one index finger toward the road.
My mother checked her dull Seiko and then patted at the blazer's back collar where a little sweat had begun to stain through.
I sat in the back right behind her seat so I could watch the stranger. Growing up in the Reagan era, I had lessons in hysteria, and in his pink Polo and blue-check shorts, this guy looked as though he'd just walked off the Just-say-no set.
"Where are you all headed?" the man asked.
My mother told him. "Was that your car back there, that green piece of shit?"
My mother said yes.
"You have the ring. Where's your husband?"
"He's a phone call away from kicking your ass, but how are his whereabouts any business of yours?"
The man accelerated to pass through a yellow light and a Coors bottle rolled out from under the seat, then another. Their glass didn't quite touch. I tapped one with my Ked and they clanked together. The man looked back at me. In his lenses, I saw twin reflections of how brown and small I looked. He nodded toward the bottles and said that they were from yesterday, not today. He looked at my mother again and then he looked back at the road. I couldn't help but think; this man had been driving around and drinking beer as my aunt's lace veil moved with her every word, and later, as my father's casket lowered, this stranger drove, mortality the least of his concerns.
"We'll just get out at the next light," my mother said.
"Well, don't do that," the man said. "We'll be there in no time now."
We drove a few blocks further. He apologized, claiming that he was only trying to make good conversation.
"Just to answer your question," my mother said. "My husband's at a charity golf event. He used to play linebacker for the Steelers."
"What was his name? Maybe I've heard of him."
"Franco Harris."
After this, neither the man nor my mother spoke. Maybe he knew Franco Harris played running back. Maybe he didn't. Maybe she meant to make the mistake, her mea culpa for fibbing about her husband's life the day after we buried him. She never told me.
We reached the mall. Monday morning, the lot nearly empty, just a few cars in back that probably belonged to those people who my mother would be appealing to very shortly. The man stopped the car twenty yards away from the entrance, cutting across a row of empty parking spaces, letting the engine idle. No one moved for several seconds and then my mother screamed. She opened the door. She pulled the passenger-side seat forward, grabbed my arm. Her nails would have dug into my skin if not for the blazer. She tried to pull me out, but I sat there. I wanted to see what had made her react like that. The man fumbled with something in his lap and then he turned to me.
"Get out of here, kid. Go with your mom."
I closed the door and the man drove off, not fast, but leisurely. My mother apologized. The convertible honked and disappeared behind the edge of Sears.
"Are you okay?" my mother asked.
"I think so."
Her face pale as Ivory soap, she told me that she’d walked too far too fast in too much heat. We walked slowly to JC Penny's doors. Her hands patted the air near her hips as though two invisible children walked there to support her, and I went to her side in case she needed that. She held on to my shoulder and rapped the glass door as hard as she could. No one answered. Every time a car passed behind us, its spectral shape reflected in the glass, I turned, hoping it wouldn't be the convertible, but also a little disappointed when it wasn't. Eventually, a JC Penny employee came, a woman near my mother's age wearing a blouse the color of egg yolk and a heavy-looking silver necklace. My mother told the woman that it was an emergency. I waited for her to explain the car, the man, and what he'd done to us, but she only said that she needed to use the restroom. The woman stared at her and then looked down at me. My suit, I realized, I was wearing half of my suit. She ushered my mother in, and my mother told me to wait in the store, but I waited outside. The woman nodded and left the door propped open, but then sprinted down a glossy aisle to finish whatever chore we'd interrupted. I pulled the door closed, and if I felt the sting of abandonment, it wasn't as sharp as I'd expected.
I wasn't surprised when the convertible came back. The man saw me standing alone and his eyebrows appeared over the rims of his glasses. He asked where my mother went. I told him that he'd made her sick.
"I’m sorry to hear that, bud, but I can tell you that we have that effect on women sometimes."
"My father died yesterday."
"Hell, I'm sorry," he said, taking off his glasses. His eyes were already bloodshot, but he dabbed their corners with his knuckles, the sunglass's arm still in his fingers. He told me not to worry, that he was an optometrist with an eye condition whose wife was leaving him because he'd fucked up. He told me never to fuck up. He went on and on for minutes. I kept waiting for my mother to come out.
"You probably aren't going to follow any advice that I give you, so I'll offer the opposite of a sound suggestion," he said. "Make all of your sports coats glass." "It's a blazer." "Same thing, kid. You'll see."
And I would. I would see. Years later, on my first day of high school, a senior threw a glass bottle at a column in the courtyard and a shard scathed my eye. I would spend two weeks at home. My mother told me a lot then. We spoke more than we ever had before, more than we ever would after, too. She told me that meeting my father was like having a net full of butterflies set loose in her stomach and she told me how his death convinced her during those first few months she looked for work that meeting him wasn't for the best, although once she began waitressing at the local diner she knew this wasn't true. Despite her patting my shoulder just after telling me this, my head throbbed as though that glass shard had dug its way to the middle of my brain. Then she told me how she hadn't really been chatting with the silver-chained woman in the department store that day, which she’d originally led me to believe had caused her delay and the opportunity for the man in the convertible to make a second appearance. She'd really fainted, she revealed, but then she awoke five minutes later and it was all she could do to convince the JC Penny people not to call an ambulance. She told them that I was her son and that she'd bought the blazer on my back and that we had planned to return it despite my wearing it.
I listened to her, a swath of bandage taped over my right eye, bulging from where the cotton lay lumped. I'd always thought the silver-chained woman seeing me in the blazer had ruined our chances, and walking home that Monday morning, the stained blazer draped over my arm with the pants, Mom had said this was probably the case.
"And now I really know," I said, and then she told me that I'd have to change my bandage soon.
After my mother's confession, we got to talking about everything else that had happened, the broken-down car which was never fixed, and of course the man in the convertible, the man with a wig, the man who'd told me to make all of my sports coats glass. My mother paused here, asked me what he had said. She asked me what it meant. She asked me if I knew, and from her perch on the couch she leaned forward a little, as though all words from perverts' mouths can be mined for rich meaning. I told her that the man said I should take his advice word-for-word. I really should wear sports coats made of glass. And my mother, she just leaned back and nodded as though this made perfect sense. The following week, I was back at school, the bandages still on, and I tried not to hear kids calling me Cyclops, the bullies calling me Mummy.