GOODNIGHT NURSE

I was nineteen. On the drive to the funeral home, my father asked me how long Dorothy had been lying face down on the pile of laundry. 

I said that I didn’t know.

“A few hours, I guess. Her face was purple.”

I was certain my mother was dead as soon as I saw her. She lay on the daybed in our basement. She’d passed out there before, often on her clean nurse’s uniforms that were waiting to be starched. An upright piano no one played anymore was steps away. It had become Dorothy’s hiding place for vodka and Scope, the mouthwash she’d bribed me to buy on Sundays. 

I studied the colour of her face, creased like the laundry she lay on. I’d been playing records on the stereo in the same room and would come out from my bedroom to flip the LP. Each time I walked by her I thought, she’s gone. A few hours before, she’d told me she was going away. Now I knew what it really meant – she’d killed herself. 

“And you just let her lie there?” my father said. 

He took his eyes off the road to stare at me. I knew what he was thinking. I could feel him gaining the full measure of me. We pulled into the parking lot of the funeral home.  

Years before, when I was almost eight, I would watch Dorothy doing the laundry. I pretended to play with my medieval fort on the floor near her while she washed, hung and ironed. I wanted to learn. I was a bed-wetter. The doctors said it was a lingering effect of the car crash two years before that had killed my natural parents and put my brother and me in hospital for months. Dorothy was my dead mother’s twin sister. With the signing of adoption papers, my aunt and uncle became our parents. 

My new father showed little patience for wet sheets, though he did devise a system to reward me on dry mornings – a gold star was stuck to the good days on the small calendar next to my bed. But after running up a streak of eight stars, I broke things. I was terrified of what my father would say. I got up, stripped the soiled linen, and made my way on tiptoes to the basement to load the washer just as I’d seen Dorothy do it. 

I felt cold and lost struggling to get the pile of sheets up and into the washer. I was worried I’d forget the procedure, but I found the right button and the machine came alive. I waited on the daybed in pajama bottoms soaked through. I wanted to cry, but was afraid to make more noise. I heard the spin cycle wind down and got up to load the clean wet sheets into the dryer. 

Inside the funeral home a man greeted us, and my father went with him into an office. I waited in a reception area hung with oil paintings. I got up to examine one – a prairie scene at harvest time. In the middle distance a family of little figures stacked sheaves. On the far horizon grain elevators watched them, long boxes standing on end. After fifteen minutes the undertaker led my father out and asked if I’d like to join them to select a casket. 

“Yes.”

We proceeded to a large room, rather like a gloomy museum wing. 

“I’ll leave you two in here,” the undertaker said. “Take your time, choose something suitable. I’m just down the hall if you have questions.” 

He gave the smallest of bows and withdrew. The room smelled of table wax, that lemon scent which reminded me of my first mother and the elbow grease she used to attack a table. 

Several caskets were on display. There was a very small silver one. Why so small, I thought. Why this little orphan among the big boxes? Was it for a child, the one Dorothy herself could not have? After the car crash, everyone had said what a blessing for her to be able to adopt. 

For a time her new family had brought her happiness. But always she returned to the basement and her drinking. Once, following months in rehab, I found Dorothy sitting in the dark on the edge of the daybed. 

“I want you to come here,” she had said. 

I could see the telltale glow of her cigarette. She gestured for me to join her. 

“What is it?”

“It’s about Dad.”

I sat beside her and noticed a clothes tree in the corner that held some of my father’s shirts. In the darkness it looked like some version of him, or perhaps my two fathers combined, standing there. 

“Dad didn’t want you kids to know,” she began. “Didn’t want you to worry. When I was away he went for a check-up and they found his cancer is back. This time, his lungs.” 

“What do you mean back? He had cancer before?”

“That’s why they removed his kidney years ago.”

I turned to my mother, my eyes searching in the dark, past the clothes tree of my fathers, and imagined him saying the thing he said to Dorothy when he was exasperated – goodnight, nurse. 

“I know about the kidney. I punched him on the scar. He fell down crying, remember? No one said cancer.” 

“We didn’t want to scare you.”

“It wouldn’t have scared me. You don’t keep secrets like that.” 

But they had kept them, driven by some notion of shielding their children in a home where hidden mouthwash bottles and plates crashing into walls and midnight visits by police had become normal occurrences. 

And now, here at the funeral home, I could see the reflection of myself in the sheen of this child’s casket. The tiny box, I realized, contained childhood itself, the kind of childhood others enjoy. 

My father and I wandered around the showroom like car buyers in a dealer’s showroom. My two fathers had once joked about opening one together. My first father had been a regional manager for General Motors. He knew the game. We’ll do it, he had said, let’s make some real money and call the shots for once! 

Now my father and I were kicking the tires of a wooden box. I paused at a massive model made of polished rosewood. I could imagine my first mother bent over it, with a can of wax. Its lid was curved like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral and was open to reveal satin upholstery. It had gold-coloured handles and must have weighed six-hundred pounds. 

I motioned my father over.

“This one,” I said.

He glanced at it and went straight to the price card.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“What?”

“Ten-thousand dollars.”

The undertaker appeared in the room like a phantom.
“Is everything all right, gentlemen?” he said. I’d never been called a gentleman, did not think of myself as a man. “Oh, the Arcadian – our very best.” 

I felt a twinge of pride. 

My father breathed in measured tones. Here was a man dying of cancer shopping for a casket for his dead wife. He was involved in that complicated struggle between mourning and making practical decisions. And what I have come to learn is that grief dissipates in time like mist being burned off by the sun. This is truest for children, who are resilient. I remember a doctor saying, you can throw their broken bones into a room and come back the next day and they’ll be healed. 

“We were thinking of something modest,” my father said, and he pointed to a plain box in the corner. It was covered in blue flock velvet. 

“What’s the name of that one,” I said, trying to be helpful. 

“It doesn’t have a name,” said the undertaker. 

Poor Dorothy, I thought. 

The lid was dead flat, like the prairies around us. Dorothy used to tell me that the prairies were so flat you could see into the middle of next week. I imagined, with optimism, how this box might give Dorothy clear sight to something better. 

During the previous year she had withdrawn to the sofa in the living room, sitting in the dark, smoking, talking in a whisper to herself. She would ask herself questions and then answer them, and then affirm those answers by saying yeah, yeah with a sharp intake of breath. 

“You’re drunk,” I said. “Just look at you.” Just-look-at-you was something I’d picked up from my father. 

“Am I?”

“You sicken me.”

“Do I?”

Dorothy did not say these things as questions. She said them like accusations.

The day after she died, I heard my father on the phone telling Dorothy’s sisters what had happened. After the last call his sobs became stifled and then stopped. I got out of bed and climbed the stairs. Dad was seated at the kitchen table. He looked small and old, much older than his fifty-one years. The hair along the sides of his bald head stood out like broken wings. I wanted to laugh. 

At the funeral the simple box that held Dorothy rested on a stand in the church by the altar. We arrived at the front doors and were led through the nave, past the pews filled with a hundred nurses in their starched white caps and uniforms, to the first row. We settled in, not six feet from the cheapest casket in town. 

The service was standard United Church, straight off the shelf. A few hymns and two prayers. No one from the family spoke. No poem or anecdote shared. The only tribute came in the form of a stilted speech by someone on Dorothy’s staff. We might as well have been sending off a stranger.  

I stole a look at my father, who sat by the aisle. He was composed, though shaking his head from side to side. 

I had questions for Dorothy still. They were the questions I’d had on the day she killed herself. 

“Why are you all dressed up?” I had said to her. “Why are you putting on make-up?” 

“I just am.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“Away.”

Away, I thought, what did that mean?

Dorothy paused to assess the lipstick she’d just applied. She never turned away from the mirror to look at me.

“I don’t know. Just away.”

In the church I watched my father shaking his head, trying to understand. Or perhaps I was the one who tried to make sense of things. I stared into the flat blue box, blue like Dorothy’s dead face, blue as the sky over a prairie vanishing into next week, and all I could think to say was, “Goodnight, nurse.”