The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville Page B

is shaped like an ear. He shrugs, will keep his vigil, and I wonder why I did not say more.
    Our grandmother, suddenly afraid that there might be something to religion and wanting him to be comfortable, her son, asks my aunt if we shouldn’t have a proper funeral. My aunt says no, a small gathering at the gravesite, maybe a psalm, and after that no dinner, no gathering. I overhear the middle cousin whispering to a friend. What is this called, what we’re doing? Is this a wake we are having? We have no names for tradition.
    I see my middle cousin, her hair the color, the cut of Jean Harlow’s. I show her where there are Cokes downstairs. We sit on a sofa and I ask her where she’s going to go to college when she is through with high school, what she’ll do after that. She shakes her hair, stretches her long legs in front of her, says that she plans to go into music, that she hopes to write a Broadway musical, an opera, a symphony. She says that she will keep her father’s name, that she will never change it for any other man. She tells me that she changed the spelling of her first name two years ago, from a “y” on the end to an “e.” She says she noticed that I spelled it the wrong way on all the Christmas cards I sent the family, but that I can keep spelling it that way because she is changing it back to “y.” I feel absurdly angry at this. I want to tell her, of course, that I should have known, that it was the same thing her older sister had done at her age, the same thing I had done, that it wasnot, as she felt, original. I want to tell her that she may not have the strength for that, that her talent may not be as great as she suspects. And because I hesitate before I wish her success and because I find, when I do say it, that I do not at that moment mean it, I suddenly am convinced—even though for me the idea of sin has little substance—that what I am feeling is somehow, inexorably, sinful. My cousin leaves and I wonder if everyone becomes this confused at funerals, and I remember a cousin of my mother’s who, at the death of their grandmother, seemingly bothered less by the presence of death than by the realization that she was, herself, fully alive, left her husband and children and became legendarily promiscuous for a time.
    Later, six or seven of my grandmother’s friends come in a group. They have been at a birthday party of the oldest one of their friends. They are all my grandmother’s height. They had walked together on the first day of grade school. They tell me these stories. The phone wires flame between them, every day, in different patterns. Each day they make a connection. Here I am surrounded by people who know each other well. Most of the people I have known keep friends for three or four years and then someone moves, or everyone moves. At first we write letters and then we stop. And if we run into each other a few years later, we are different people. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a friend for over sixty years, if I would begin to know what is the same about me from decade to decade, if I would have the depth that is necessary when you’re not always starting over. Two of my grandmother’s cousins are in the group. They have grown up together, gonethe same ways, belong to the same clubs and women’s groups. One would not join without the others.
    The time for visitation ends and two men in black suits clear the room of people and we are forced once again to stand by the casket. My aunt stands by her husband, looking like a girl, face flushed from the talk, excited. The muscles melt as one of the men from the funeral home puts a crank into the casket, waiting for us to take a last look at his handiwork before he lowers the lid, as nonchalant as if he’s offering us, please, one last chocolate. I remember that my uncle’s blood has been drained from him, that he has been denied even the comfort