Party in the Funeral Home

It might have been 1977, or 78.  It doesn’t really matter.  I think the men wore polyester shirts.  We were at that party in the funeral home.  It wasn’t all that unusual.  We belonged to a woman’s club, actually a Junior Woman’s Club (younger than 35 was the criteria) and the club president that year was Phylis.  Her husband, cigar-chomping, mustachioed, paunchy, and ten years older than most of us, with a soft touch to a lady’s bottom when they left his home, owned the funeral home  in town.  Naturally, it was the finest, largest Victorian house on the main drag.  Soft yellow, with white trim, complete with shutters and turrets and a portico to drive under with your car. 

The rest of us lived in the rural surrounding areas of the town, in ranches, bi-levels, and capes.  Phylis and her husband and two little girls lived on the second floor over the funeral home.  Their apartment was larger than our homes, with high ceilings, carved moldings, and traditional, almost opulent furnishings.  It looked like the home of a much older couple, paisleyed and brocaded, tufted and traditional and, well, solid. They were solid.  

We, the gals, had been to her home before, for various meetings, quilting, and crafty projects.  Phylis was very crafty.  She sewed all the clothing for her two girls, made bread, candles, and potpourris.  She was a quilting maven, and we had worked on a large piece to be raffled off for funds to go a local charity that year.   We’d heard that she was being trained to arrange the hair of the customers.  Ew, we all thought.  But mostly, we didn’t think about it.

Anyway, a bunch of us were invited to a Halloween Party at their place that year.  We were all game; our immediate group of eight. Except for Frank.  Turned out Frank was a bit weirded out by the very fact of being in the funeral home.   We drove together that night to the party, he and Lisa, me and Max.  “I’m tellin’ you Lisa, if that weirdo brings up anything about goin’ downstairs, I am outta there!” announced Frank from the back seat.  We chuckled, as we drove up the circular driveway to the parking lot behind the home.

The party was in full swing when we got there. Thirty people at least, milling about the well-appointed living room. In the dining room, the food was being laid out on the long table, a lace tablecloth hanging gracefully to the floor.  The host was making strong drinks and copping a feel whenever his unknowing, bespectacled wife was not looking.  Music was jazzy, old stuff.  Frank asked “What, no Clapton?” and Lisa wandered off to drink a little too much, while the rest of us broke off into small groups.  The evening reached that point where some couples broke off to “get something from their coats” in the bedroom, women cackled on one side of the room, men grouped in the kitchen to shoot the breeze. Luc, our host ambled about quietly re-filling drinks with a heavy hand, the ever present cigar clamped in his teeth.   No one knew what the time was.  The party had reached the level of noise and the preponderance of bright eyes that signified a really good time.  Luc strode to the center of the living room, cigar in hand, amber scotch on rocks in the other, to issue the invitation. 

“Before we eat, who’s interested in taking a tour of the downstairs facility?”   The man was proud of his occupation, after all. 

I swiveled my head just in time to see Frank’s face pale ever so slightly as he hunkered down in the wing chair. “Hey, not this time bud”, Frank said, his eyes shifting around to find Lisa.  Before we knew it, a small group assembled around our host, looking casually eager to tour the premises below. 

It was then I remembered the small, saran and tissue-wrapped package in my purse.  One of my nephews had slipped it to me at a barbeque during the summer.  “Hide it, its good stuff, but don’t smoke it alone”, he’d told me.  Smoke it alone?  I’d never smoked one at all.  I’d hidden it deep in my underwear drawer for months, knowing that Max, who frowned on such things, would have a fit if he knew. 

The group started for the stairs. The “prep” room was in the basement in a separate wing.  We’d be able to slip downstairs to the ladies room, clear on the other side of the building.  No one would miss us.  They’d think we went with the tour.  I found Dee, my blonde partner in crime, and told her to come with me.  I was Peter Pan that night, and she had come as Alice in Wonderland, those darned crazy red striped socks skipping down the stairs to keep up with me.  The ladies room was all pink and white and softly silent, its stalls empty, its ladylike chairs covered in beige silk.  We were giddy with excitement and anticipation.  What to expect?  We had no idea.   We’d spent the sixties working and then had babies. Time to break out!  Time to get wild! Experiment! 

We lit it, we puffed and puffed, not feeling a thing, but pleased with ourselves for being so rebellious.  Oh well, we laughed, at least we tried.  By the time we got upstairs, the group had just come back from the tour, slightly subdued but abuzz with words like metal tables and drains and sinks and apparatus.  Ewww.  Our mates had been on the tour, thinking we were upstairs all the while.  What subterfuge!  We got on the line to get some food.  But, it happened just as we reached the dining room table laden with casseroles, hoagies, large plates of ziti, and pot luck dishes galore.  Oh my god!  It hit us right then!  And my world became…hilarious! 

I began to laugh and then laughed harder, I couldn’t stop.  It was a snorting, suppressed laugh, with shoulders shaking.  I looked up and caught sight of Dee, her pink cheeks about to burst; eyes wide open as though in shock.  I could not contain myself, though Max whispered harshly at my elbow “What is wrong with you?  “Nothing, nothing.” I muttered as I maneuvered my way around the table, and then walked behind him as he made his way to our chairs.  I was a quaking, doubled over Peter Pan, my green velvet shorts and tan top crumpling as I walked, balancing my plate, keeping an eye on my feet as I watched them walking, as though they belonged to someone else, the cute brown suede shorty boots gliding across the burgundy Persian rug. They looked rhythmical, elusive.  I was captivated.  

I reached my chair, my stomach hurting from the belly laughs, sure that my cute painted Peter freckles were now brown streaks marking my face.  Max was fuming and snarling “Pull yourself together!”

Just then, our friend, mild mannered Gary, spoke to me from across the tray table “Is that all you’re eating?”  I looked down at my plate.  There sat a small round of coleslaw, with a few olives rolling around the bare plate.  Where was all my food I wondered?  Oh where was all my food?

Then I howled, a loud, very loud, side-splitting howl …damn that was good stuff!

 

A Christmas Story on December 19th or...

How I learned to decorate for Christmas from my friend Bea.

This was written last year (I am not that caught up now) and because I spied the little gold angel in the corner of the china closet this weekend that Bea sent to me some years ago, and because this very week she will undergo a procedure that has her very bright smile a little worried ( which I can see even in her email from several states away), I dedicate this very fond memory to her.

I found myself uncharacteristically and eerily ahead that afternoon in the scheme of Christmas planning and executions.  The tree was up and decorated, mostly everything was wrapped, almost all the baking done and stored away, and even my cards, which gave me so much trouble, what with the thirteen steps it required, and oh the glitter….well, there they were, done, written and stamped.  How odd, I mused. I needed to do more, like expand the chores to fill the available time or something like that.

I mentioned that I was intending to climb out on the ledge, twelve feet over the living room, in order to string a garland intertwined with multi mini lights, across the span.  And maybe I would swag it as well. I was met with an affirmative for the decorating idea, and the offer of some help with a ladder from down below.  Okay, so we did it.  I then made my way into the bedroom where I could escape the roar and thunder of the football game and the accompanying cheering and yelling, and I could quietly watch Miracle on 34^th Street for the third time that week.

And why wouldn’t I begin to utilize the extra lights – twinkling whites, and the three foot gold, fold out tree, made from some twigs or something that my friend Lisa gave me years ago when I was running the craft gallery and she thought I might be able to use it in the window sometime, which I did.  But I could see that it would fit nicely on the flat part of the built in’s behind the bed.  He probably would complain that it was too near his head, but I would tell him it’s only for a few weeks, and he burrows down  towards the end of the bed anyway.  The box of small gold and silver ornaments – some with glitter – god I love glitter, were perfect for it, ditto the gilded thin garland thing with gold leaves.  My old angel, who is too small for our big tree now, fit perfectly on top, and the tiny crèche snugged up under it just right. 

This still left me with the special string of golden lights in the shape of pine cones, that I bought last year.  Hmm – where to put them.  Maybe the downstairs bathroom, I had not ventured there yet.  But no, the yellow room, or as my granddaughter calls it – her room.  She would definitely love the lights.

I digress.  I was inspired, or was it compelled, by a phone chat that afternoon with my friend Bea.  Bless her heart, this is all because of her, I must tell you.  Many, and I mean many years ago, when we were both young mothers and our kids were small, with warm, sticky hands and high pitched voices, my idea of decorating corresponded to what I knew from my mother.  You put the tree up and hung the wreath on the front door.  You’re done.  Oh sure, there might have been some weird aluminumy, papery folded bells on a ribbon or something that she would hang on the dining room mirror over the credenza.  The extent of her baking was chocolate chip cookies and a fruitcake.  You’re done. 

So, as a young mother, I was pretty proud of myself that I had painted some wooden ornaments for my first child’s first Christmas and I made at least two kinds of cookies, and then we put up the tree, decorated it, and hung the wreath on the door.  I’m done, right?  This is where Bea comes in.  The first Christmas that we knew each other, we’re chatting on the phone, as we did so many mornings, and she proclaimed “I’m almost done decorating the house” and I’m thinking did she say decorating the house?  And so I ask “what do you mean decorating the house?” Ha ha, she laughs heartily. “Well no, I like to have things in almost every room” No way! I say.  This was unheard of, I couldn’t wait to see it!   

Was that year she had small sprigs of baby’s breath in her tree, and I saw small velvet ribbons as well?  And pine cones here and there in baskets. And wreaths everywhere, and Santas and snowmen and pillows, oh my.  Even little somethings in her bathroom.  She loved to tell the story of how she first learned the mysteries of a septic tank problem.  “And there was my Ho Ho Ho toilet paper coming up in the yard and I yelled to Paulie – do something!”  We loved that story.