88 - The Michigan DailyLiterary Magazine - Thursday, March 13, 1997 S 0 The Michigan Daily Lterary Magazine - Thursday, March 13, 1997 - 13B Short Story The Month o Dying By Jeremiah Chamberlin .hort &tory October has become a month of dying in my family. My great-grand- mother brought us this new season. She was not supposed to be the first to go, her husband Lowell with the thick hearing I was uil aids was to die - first. My par- relieved ents reminded my brother and no longer me with their eyes in the rear- kid who h view mirror during each trip been to a down to Midland that it would probably be the last time we saw our great-grandfather alive. We were expected to behave like adults, and though we tried to practice m Its rh KI to II sitting politely, we inescapably found each other's bodies with our fists. Our mother would turn and warn us that we had better work our childishness out of our systems before we ily reached the city limits. iat I was My family has never been good the only at predictions. Years passed and dn' t my great-grand- father only Fueraa retreated further into his brown polyester pants and his thin blue shirts. My parents talked loudly, asking him to tell the family stories that had all been told and retold. My brother and I lis- tened in our flowered chairs, learning the history of names and places, nod- ding and smiling at our cues. When our obligatory hour upstairs was finished we were excused to retreat to the base- ment. Our freedom was marked by the soft ring of sleigh bells, nailed on their dry leather strap to the back of the door of my great-grandfather's study. They were the bells that he had hung around the neck of his mare Gusty when he had courted my great-grandmother during the winter of 1919. I imagined them young, sitting in the sleigh while the snow fell, the newness of their hands meeting under the quilts draped over their laps. I had seen this same tenderness upstairs, perfected over a lifetime, as they sat close on the small tan couch, his hand resting lightly on her knee. Years later it was Lowell who woke up after seventy-five years of shared mornings, suddenly alone. When we drove down to Midland I was guiltily relieved that I was no longer the only kid in my high school who hadn't been to a funeral. I wore my tight-throated tie feeling not the fear of the unfamiliar, but the curious pull of the new. I want- ed to suck in age the way I sucked in whiskey and cigarettes at half-time in the school parking lot. My brother and I sat in the third-row of wood-backed pews with the hymnals at our feet, hands in our laps. We watched our first funeral running through its liturgy as if we were at a ?Fr ::i;: c r i C MARGARET MYERS/Daily SARA STILLMAN/Daily Saturday matinee. The church had seen my family's beginnings - baptisms and confirmations, my parents' wed- ding, and both my father's sisters'. Now the endings had begun, my great-grand- mother's coffin center stage, the priest's soliloquy rising and twisting, deftly side-stepping death in his praise to life and God. I stared over the second row of relatives buffering me from the front where the immediate family was ordered. My great-grandfather sat on C C U. C Mar.14 Lapdogs Mar. 21 Wally Pleasant Minefield Hopscotch U, U U the aisle, his translucent white hair thin over his skull. Beside him was my grandfather with his broad shoulders, my grandmother with her permed curls, and then my parents, uncomfortable in the front row, so close to the shiny cof- fin. A year to the day after my great- grandmother's death my great-grandfa- ther walked down the steep stairs to his study. The basement was always com- fortably cool even when the heat of August had baked the small backyard flat and brown. He apologized at each summer visit for the lawn, regretfully acknowledging that he no longer could keep it up and the neighborhood chil- dren who had once accepted crisp five- dollar bills to mow and weed had all grown up and away. He left a note that tenth day of October, though my grand- father never let anyone read it. This much the family knew: that my great- 'grandfather hefted the twelve-gauge shotgun with the ivy engraved stock and rested it snugly on his brass belt buckle. I could not imagine the way his thin body must have crumpled around the sharp crack of the barrel. Back in our third-row pew again my brother and I played our silent parts. The hymnals still slept at our feet and the hard- wood once again bit into our thighs and backs. The only change I could discern was the front row's shift. It was now my grandfather who sat at -the aisle in his father's seat. I felt a sweaty panic flush my face seeing that my own father was now only separated from the repetitive liturgy of the priest by his own parents. At that moment I felt that I too should be obligat- ed to take my place in the front row,-but I was suddenly afraid that if I moved, if I didn't stare straight ahead I might catch a glimpse of death coming down the aisle. It was the same fear I felt the time I drove my Volkswagen back to the end of my parents' property to sneak a few ciga- rettes. I had sat in the glow of the head- lights watching the smoke curl out See DYING, Page 20B It used to be that there were only two kinds of men in Chicago: those who were in love with Tillie Allweiss and those who hadn't met her yet. Uncle David decreed it, and he was studying to be a doctor, so he couldn't have been wrong, at least not in those days. Even poised Aunt Sophie claimed that she could never find a date until Tillie had gotten mar- ried, which was always about as believable as her geometry class stories of Tillie poking innocent Sophie with the point of a compass until she gave her all the answers. Then I found out that Tillie married one of Sophie's dates. Tillie was beautiful, especially at seventy-four, which is how I remember her. She seemed so tall - five-foot-five - well, she was five-foot-five until she turned forty and became pregnant with her third daughter. Then she grew to be five- six, and she stayed five-six until she was seventy-four. Maybe I just felt small. But her hands were her most strik- ing feature, tipped by her glossy nails But her I that stayed polished and perfect always, even in the old black-and- her most white picture of her, from Chicago. I used to hold one of those hands while ee we walked to the supermarket in h g'os 4 Sarasota, where she retired. I'd study the tips of my short little fingernails that sta that could barely peek out from the palm of her firm grip, until I was con- polished vinced that my hands would look like" hers when I grew up. Then we'd reach perfect a the intersection and I'd forget about fingernails and we'd search our san- dals for fire ants and sing songs about pretty things that I Mar. 13 A Song of Love By Coreen Duffy U Lisa Hunter Audrey Becker Mar. 20 Eric, Steve, & Co. Tom Vesbit Dan Shere -. schlonie -Li ro hs tl flew in from the bay and finished the Cheerios, and I did feel better. Tillie used to say that if she had had all the money in the world, she would have become a surgeon. Once I asked her why everything that .she did always turned out so perfectly, and she laughed and said that she painted Midas-touch nail polish on her fingernails. I laughed too, and I ate her challah and her sour dough bread, and I wore the Halloween cos- tumes that she sewed, and when we visited her, I slept in sheets that she'd ironed before smoothing them onto the mat- tress. And I'd stare at my hands and wonder when they'd grow up to be like hers. But I couldn't sew on a button without los- ing the thread and breaking the needle, and I kneaded all of the air out of my bread dough, until Grandma Tillie would laugh and say that I was baking matzo. And I do have all the money in the world, compared to Grandma Tillie back in Chicago, but ands were I'm not studying to be a surgeon, and I think that hospitals smell bad, and I striking odon't want to be like my Uncle David. ipped by Uncle David left Chicago for col- lege at the beginning of the y Depression, when he was five-foot- one, because he was a boy and he had a chance to become a surgeon and and earn all the money in the world. Tillie stayed in Chicago and operated the (Ways ... cookie counter of a bakery, and paid David's tuition with her leftover dough. But Tillie could type a hun- dred words a minute, and she was just as smart as David, only much more beautiful. When David came home to visit after his first semester, he was six feet tall, and Tillie was the boss's secretary on the ninth floor above the bakery. Once there was a riot on the street outside the bakery, but Tillie couldn't see what was going on from the ninth floor, so her boss made her climb out the window and report what was happening below and he held her by the ankles from his office on the ninth floor, because it was the Depression and he was her boss and he had all the money in the world. But then the Depression ended, and Tillie got a new job, and See TILLIE, Page 17B Check out our web sight at http://www.Isa.umich.edu/ecb/ If interested, contact Kay Keelor at kkeelors@umich.edu ENGL IS H C0WMP0SI II0 N B 04R D Would you enjoy working with fellow students face to face and on-line to help them with their writing? Then become an English Composition Board Peer Tutor! Are you an excellent writer with good people skills? I i8 I Lower level of the Michigan League 911 N. University Ann Arbor 48109-1265 For more information, please call 763-4652. Sponsored by Michigan League Programming: A Division of Student Affairs didn't understand. My mother insists that Grandma Tillie was tone-deaf, but I remember that her singing was sooth- ing. But maybe that's just because it was Grandma Tillie, and anything she did was beautiful. Once we were walking down a pebble path to the bay to feed Cheerios to the sea gulls, and I fell down on the stones and my knee was bleed- ing and the pain felt like the pebbles had shattered my knee- cap. Grandma Tillie said that it would feel much better with a Band-Aid. Then we sat down on a bench under some weeping willows, and I ate the Cheerios while she sang, Hi- lily, hi-lily, hi-lo, hi-lo, hi-lily, hi-lily, hi-lo, and the sea gulls