A dead body, big secrets, and not letting go when you should. Julia Croft shares a different kind of love story.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
I wanted to tell you a story about secrets. But the details of this story are a secret. This makes it tricky. So we have to imagine and invent. And inevitably all we can use to fill the gap between the known and unknown is ourselves.
Because this is an event about secrets, and all my secrets are simultaneously too personal and too boring, I found this one. Because this story has been sitting in my head for three years, popping up at random intervals, and I think maybe it needs to come out.
It is about a dead body. But it is also clearly about me. Otherwise why would it have been sitting in some little corner of my brain for so long? I imagine it has been living somewhere behind my left earlobe, creeping into my head every time I indulge in the social vertigo of Facebook stalking. Or real life stalking. That has happened too. A long time ago mind. Happens to the best of us I am sure.
Who among us can honestly say they have never spent entire days at the Pt Chev supermarket, wandering aimlessly back and forth among the aisles, because you can narrow a person down to a suburb and not an address and the supermarket seems the logical place to accidentally bump into them. Right? Just me?
Some days that gap between then and now mostly doesn’t exist.
But I digress and the real story is imagined, and because her name is a secret and his name is also a secret and this cracked and ripped map has to be filled in with what I imagine. And what I imagine is both poetic and mundane and deeply affected by too many viewings of The Notebook.
They dated and fell in love. They wooed each other with NASCAR and Budweiser. He told her she was beautiful. And she picked up the takeout. He moved in. She felt safe. They were happy.
I imagine a dirty kitchen with dishes piled high in the sink. I imagine takeaway containers and empty buckets of chicken. I imagine flimsy curtains that have worn through from years of sunlight and no longer block anything out, but that means it just isn’t worth the bother of opening them.
This is a love story.
This story begins like all good stories do... with an article in the Herald. The few facts we have are from that small article in the World section sometime in 2012: There was a woman and a man. I will never know their names. They lived in Southern Michigan. He was her boyfriend. Then he died.
And this where we begin to invent: We invent that this was a later-life relationship for both of them. They got together when they were both in their 50s. He was a customer in the shop she worked in and had loved her for years. She was in another relationship, so he had to do his loving from afar. He would invent excuses to come into the shop every day, so consequently huge piles of unneeded and unused toothpastes, cans of tomatoes and key chains littered his small kitchen.
He had no family and nothing else to fill his time. Once, years ago, he had a daughter but she had died in a car accident when she was a toddler, the marriage broke up not long after and he had got accustomed to being alone. With his secrets. Which were probably many. He was lonely.
She had a partner who was a mean man. He drank. They fought. He was cruel. And violent. One day she left him. Our woman was sad. Our man was delighted. He plucked up the strength to ask her out. He put on his best jacket, combed his hair. Like a gentleman. Because she was a lady. He took her to the pub to watch a football game between their home team and someone else. He bought her fries and beer. They barely watched the game. He kept complimenting her and there was too much to say. They stayed there until closing time.
See, because it is imagined, it becomes a movie in my head. One of my secrets is that often every memory I have, real or imagined, becomes some riff on Dirty Dancing or Titanic or both.
They dated and fell in love. They wooed each other with NASCAR and Budweiser. He told her she was beautiful. And she picked up the takeout. He moved in. She felt safe. They were happy.
Then one day he had an ominous feeling that something was coming. He had a sense that he didn’t fit right in his clothes, that he was itchy for something, but he didn’t know what and his shoes seemed to bruise the ground in a strange way. His heart wrestled around in his ribcage and finally slammed to halt in the bathroom one afternoon. He died right there on the floor.
A whole year and a half, unable to let go, unable to say goodbye, keeping a dead man hidden in the lounge. It is strange, but it is also love. I get it.
Now here is one thing we do know from the infinite wisdom of the Herald. The point of the story: she kept him. For a year and a half she kept the man she loved in an armchair in the living room. A whole year and a half, unable to let go, keeping a dead man hidden in the lounge. It is strange, but it is also love. I get it.
She found him. She didn’t call for help as perhaps she should have, she didn’t call the hospital or the morgue. She kept him near her.
This is where we invent: she didn’t mean to keep him for that long. At first she thought she would just keep him with her for a few hours. Just to say the things she could never say to him when he was alive. She thought she would just spend one more hour with him. Then it seemed too hard to say goodbye and she thought 'just one night, no harm in that', then it wasn’t any easier to leave him the next day so she thought 'just one night more'. And it kept on like that. Until too much time had passed to call anyone. They would ask questions and she would be in trouble. And besides, she enjoyed the company.
I get that. Not letting go when you should. That’s the secret.
Even if that means a year and a half with a dead man in your lounge. The all-knowing Herald had one quote from our woman, who said “It’s not that I’m heartless... I didn’t want to be alone. He was the only guy who was ever nice to me.”
Let’s think about the nice things he did for her.
He looked at her from a doorway and said, “There are three words I want to say to you” and maybe she knew exactly what he meant. He left a card for her on her pillow with a drawing, just to make her happy. He would cook her bacon and eggs and make them into a smiley face on her plate, which she thought was hilarious.
Let’s think about a body in a chair.
Let’s think about how much love you would have to have.
I have some questions, they are as follows: Did she wash him? Did she dress him? What did she say to him? Secrets? Did he smell? What did he look like near the end? Did she have guests round and hide him by throwing a rug over him?
I imagine a normal day: she would get up, make a coffee and put on the TV. She would sit in her chair while he was still in his. She would comment on the stories on Fox News and ask his opinions.
Sometimes the secrets we carry in our bodies can be a burden sure, but sometimes, in some moments they can be such a great, great comfort.
At first, the silence that followed her questions was filled with the weight of a full stop. But over time she imagined his answers and comments and laughter so vividly that they felt like they were in the room too. Nothing had changed. It was still the same.
She would leave the TV on for him all day. She would go to work and come home with takeaways. They would watch NASCAR. They would watch football. She would start to doze off and force herself to get up in the TV's half-light and wander off to bed. She would kiss him on the forehead and whisper goodnight, and tell him that she loved him.
This is not letting go.
These are ghosts.
This is living with your past around your neck.
This is a secret in the form of a six-foot dead man in his 70s who, even as his body would have started to disintegrate into his chair, was still loved and needed.
I remember everything. I remember it was winter. I remember too many cigarettes. I don’t remember where I bought this jacket. I remember my mother's perfume when I was a kid.
I wonder what happened to her after they took him away. Did she get in trouble? Were people shocked? Was it a relief when he was finally taken away from her? When she was forced to let go? Forced to move on? Or does she still miss him?
I think about her a lot. I hope she is ok.
I could have invented the ending. But I didn’t. I didn’t want the stuff that follows. I wanted to leave her sitting with him, in his and hers arm chairs. Watching America's Funniest Home Videos. Laughing. Happy. Even if it wasn’t as simple as I am making it out to be. Because sometimes the secrets we carry in our bodies can be a burden sure, but sometimes, in some moments they can be such a great, great comfort.
I hope he was a comfort to her.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held in Auckland and Wellington. If you have a story to tell email or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Nicola Edwards
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