Machine Dreams

cremation would be simple as well, but it was more difficult to arrange than you’d think. Not a usual practice then, not here. Some of her friends disapproved and tried to dissuade me. Maybe she’d made such a choice, they said, but she wasn’t herself. Legally, I had to get permission from the State and from each County whose lines we crossed in transporting the body. Then we took her ninety miles, my brother and sister and I, in a rented ambulance. The place was a plain one-story building with a cellar and no sign outside but THOMPSON BROTHERS. We arrived in the evening and were to come back for the ashes the next morning. The man who spoke with us was very kind. I wanted to know everything; he explained the whole process. He said the words “white heat” and showed me the crematorium, three long ovens built back into the wall. There was a strong steel mesh, very fine, with a sort of flat tray below, “so the ashes stay pure and are contained.” He seemed to want to reassure me about that.
    I knew it was only her body, and I hadn’t let myself open the casket except once. Still, it was strange to leave her there. Walking out of the building was physically hard, as though I were moving against a wind. That night in the hotel I didn’t sleep. Ican’t describe my feeling. The others slept, or seemed to, but I sat up and kept a light on. If I lay down or closed my eyes, I felt so far away, as though the bed rested on air. When we could afford a stone, she’d said to put simply her name, the years, and
It is over.
That phrase ran in my mind all night until it lost its meaning.
    We went for the ashes very early, seven A.M. When I saw them I felt a first easing, a release, handed me like a gift. They were more like sand than ashes. Irregular grains the color of ivory; soft and rough to the touch. So clean they smelled of nothing. I kept them all winter in a small brass box. One day in the spring, I scattered them in the garden at home. Must have been March. Jonquils had budded early and the wind moved across them in a swath.
    I thought my marriage would work. Maybe you always think that, you have to. Times had been so hard for everyone. When the war was over and when the thing with Mother was finished, all I wanted was to have a family. Not just for something to do, but because I knew what family meant.
    People had lost whatever was taken in those years and survived, and a lot of them married, had children, quickly. It was denying what had happened in a way, saying life had started again and you could trust it. For me that feeling was delayed, as if the war didn’t really stop until my mother died. She had first gotten sick in wartime; we had always struggled—with the sickness, with money, in the shadow of the war—and then suddenly the war was over and the men were home, but we were just starting the hardest part, that last six months. I married and Mitch moved in with us. His presence helped but he wasn’t directly involved; it wasn’t his job to be. Mother and I saw it through. Then I took a year, some time for myself, and I
wanted
my children; she had wanted them for me.
    And family wasn’t just who you were married to, not here. Late forties, the end of that decade, people were relieved. There were jobs and money and no more catastrophes. People knew each other, they helped each other. A lot of people around town were good to me, good to us. Family was more than blood relation.

    Your father and I lived with Gladys Curry while our own house was being built. We’d sold Mother’s place to get the money to buy land, and Gladys let us stay in her spare bedroom. What a pistol she was—still working at the dress shop then, hard as nails and took no truck from anyone. We weren’t paying rent and I did a lot of work around the house, or tried to: I could spend all morning scrubbing the kitchen floor; she’d come home, get down on her knees right in front of me, and do it over to suit herself.
    But she was a lot of fun and said outrageous things—especially considering she’d known me since I was a little girl, and her daughter, Jewel—her one child—had married my older brother. They’d lived with Gladys awhile too, before moving to Ohio, and we filled the space they’d left. Gladys was a widow, one of those women three times stronger than the man she married. She’d tell me that every woman should have a husband and a lover; it took at least two men to stay this side of the desert; no one man