Title.

The Eulogy 


      It’s disconcerting being back in my old bedroom. I was sure that the day I left it would become a weight room or an office or something. Instead, it’s exactly the same, down to the pin-up teen-dream posters. Dad had told me a thousand times to stop putting holes in the walls, which just made me want to pin up more junk. Almost every surface of the wall was covered with articles and collages, cork boards and posters. The walls were so full of holes I probably damaged the structural integrity of the house or something. You’d think so, from all the grief Dad gave me over it.

      I tapped my mechanical pencil deliberately against the yellow pad of paper that was riding against my knees. The pad has been scavenged from my father’s desk, but the pencil is my own. My father despised mechanical pencils and retractable pens. Anything that could be clicked repeatedly was something he had determined was put on this earth to annoy him. I personally enjoy mechanical pencils. They’re always sharp. It makes them good for drawing. Not that I draw. I doodle, occasionally. My father used to say that doodling is a sign of an idle mind. He said the same thing about clicking pens. Or mechanical pencils.

      I stared idly out the window, and considered adding spots to my doodle of a puppy in the corner of the page. I squinted at it. It looked more like a pig with floppy ears than a dog. I propped my feet on the corner of the desk and leaned back in my chair to give myself a more stable writing surface.

      Enough procrastinating. I wrote a few words to get a flow going.

      My father was a wonderful man who would do anything for his family. He loved his wife and daughters more than anything else in his life. I remember countless family dinners in which he would preside at the head of the table like a benevolent king, and I was his Queenie. His loss has left a void within my heart which can never be fully replaced…

      I curled my lip at the saccharine sweetness and erased that. My father hated schmaltz, and he despised lies. It wasn’t the most promising start to his eulogy to use both within the first two sentences. The only true thing in the entire paragraph was that my father had called me Queenie, after Queen Elizabeth. He thought the name Elizabeth was too old fashioned. Of all the nicknames for Elizabeth, of which there must be an even dozen, he had to pick one which couldn’t have been more anomalous to my personality.

      That’s what you get when you never bother to spend any time with your daughter.

      I rubbed my index finger against the scar that cleaved my eyebrow in half. It was an old habit of mine which I firmly believed stimulated my brain function. Of all the small nicks and blemishes that I’ve gathered over the course of my life, this was the only one that I thought made me look tough. I couldn’t recall where I’d gotten it, so sometimes I imagined it was from a bolt that I had put through my eyebrow, or a war wound from a bar fight. Something to make my life a little more interesting.

      I studied my pad ruefully.

      Okay, once again, with less schmaltz.

      My father was rarely home. He did not enjoy his job, but I suppose he found it preferable to being home with his family. Of course, he never did know what to do with women. We are too delicate for a man who has never learned to be gentle, and who doesn’t know the meaning of praise or gentle encouragement. Perhaps it was just that other human beings were too delicate for his abrasive personality.

      I looked at that for a moment. More true, certainly, but perhaps less appropriate for a funeral. I read it again and winced. And more than a little bitter. I scrubbed furiously at my head, fluffing my short hair and brushing it over my face to think. I looked at the paragraph I had written through the curtain of my hair, before sighing and erasing it. The top half of the page was pretty uselessly smudged, so I moved down the page a little for the third try. It’s the charm, isn’t it?

      My father was not the most demonstrative man. He did what he could for our family, because he wanted my sister and me to have all the things that he never did. This meant that he wasn’t around as much as we would have liked him to be…

      Perhaps it was more politically correct, but even I couldn’t condone a whopper like that last sentence. I had relished in the freedom of a father who worked all the time. When he was home, I did my best to not enter his line of sight, because there was apparently an endless list of things that were wrong with me at any given moment when I was a teenager that my father was compelled to fill me in on.

      I remember walking into the house with a brand-new thirty dollar hair cut, rock-star inspired, short and shaggy. I paid for it with my first paycheck from my summer job, and I thought I was the coolest thing. Not my parents style at all, but I was so proud of it Mom was willing to let it pass with nothing more than a shake of her head. Until my father saw me, and immediately decided that if I wasn’t competent to get a “real hair cut” he was going to have to go with me next time to make sure that I obtained one. He succeeded in making me feel like a moron and a five-year-old in one fell swoop.

      I erased vigorously, nearly tearing my poor abused eraser right off the top of the pencil. I breathed in the scent of burning rubber. My paper was littered with nasty little remnants of leftover graphite-stained eraser bits. I rolled a few of them around the paper with the tip of my index finger, mopping up the faded echoes of my writing that I had missed on the first pass.

      Thoughtfully, I pressed the tip of my fingernail into one of the little balls of rubber, to see the little crescent moon impression. Pleased by my aesthetic improvement, I carefully pierced the poor, sad little nub with the sharp tip of my mechanical pencil. It hung precariously, a tiny fish on a primitive spear. I clicked my worn eraser until the lead stopped coming, before carefully pushing it back in to start the process again.

      Truth was, my father was the only man in a house full of women, and he had no idea how to interact with any of them, and me in particular. He was a solitary man, a bachelor by disposition, a husband because people in his generation were expected to get married. He picked for his wife a woman whose manner was compatible with his. Our mother was a quietly thoughtful, self-assured woman who wasn’t afraid to do things herself, which meant she wasn’t bothering him with every little thing, and it suited both of them just fine.

      And then they had kids, which is another thing that he wasn’t truly inclined to. Two girls, a year apart, and had he known what he was getting into with me, he would have stopped at one.

      My sister Katie was at least academic. She and Dad did crosswords together. That was their thing and Katie was fiercely protective of it, as though I wanted in on some crossword action. I got him a crossword puzzle book for Christmas one year and Katie got all uptight about it, going on and on about how that was their thing, her and Dad, and couldn’t I let her just have that one thing? I told her that she was the one who always had Dad’s attention. She got really upset and wouldn’t talk to me for days after that.

      If Dad and Katie were intellectual, I was emotional and physical. Dad was a quiet, brooding man, moody like an artist without any of the creative genius, and I wanted to blast loud music and have all-night slumber parties. He got along better with Katie, who was elegantly pretty and pleasantly acquiescent to him. She also looks more like our mother, whom our father did love, I suppose, in his own, awkward, silent way. Katie was his special pet, even before our mother died. And afterwards, Katie stepped up, filled that role, getting dinner ready and keeping up the house, so anxious to keep him happy.

      Idly, I drew a tight little spiral in the corner, trying to keep an even amount of space between one layer and the next. I got to about the fifth layer in before it started to fall apart.

      I clicked my eraser furiously, every so often stopping to push the lead back into the pencil, until I heard a harsher clicking. It was Katie’s heels on the hardwood stairs, coming to fetch me.

      “Elizabeth,” she said, precise and a little shrill. Katie is big on preciseness. “Elizabeth. We cannot be late to our own father’s wake.” Katie likes to say my name like it’s really something nasty. She appeared in my doorway, dressed in a shapeless black dress, matronly black shoes, black tights, black hair pulled back from her pale pointed features. They turn slightly paler when she sees me. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

      Oh, that comment had Dad written all over it. It was the exact same passive-aggressive criticism that he always liked to employ.

      I looked down the length of my body. Black slacks and a black sweater. My shoes were square toed lace-ups, also black. It’s a nice enough outfit. I checked my feet. The shoes were tied. My socks matched. Whatever it was that was making Katie look so horrified, I didn’t see it. No mustard stains, no ripped jeans. My hair is even combed for the occasion. I looked back at Katie. “Yep.”

      Her eyes zeroed in on my pad. “Is that your speech?” I could practically hear her screaming in her head, the unheard addendum, “You’re writing it now?” Again, I could hear the echoes of our father in her voice. Katie is so much like him it’s scary. I’m not sure if it’s her natural personality or if she simply idolized him so much that she felt that she had to synchronize his habits and mannerisms in order to please him.

      I looked down at my totally blank pad. “Nope.” I smiled endearingly at her. It’s the technical truth.

      She’s not fooled in the least. “You’ve had three days, Elizabeth.”

      You had a week to study, Queenie. Your sister manages to keep her clothing clean and in one piece. If you think that’s good enough, then sure, pass it in.

      I could have had a millennium and I still would have left it to the last minute, and she knows it. “Yep,” I acknowledged. I could make an effort to be less glib. I know that Katie actually has been under a lot of pressure the last few days, planning the funeral. She only gives me menial little tasks that she doesn’t think even I am capable of screwing up. She wants everything to be perfect for Dad.

      He’s not here to give you approval anymore, Katie, I want to tell her. You can stop looking for it.

      Katie’s bloodless lips thin into a little white line slashing across the bottom half of her face. “You could have put on something a little nicer.”

      I rub my eyebrow, feeling the slight gap in the hairs caused by the scar. “I don’t own a black dress.” Or any dress.

      “Yes, and I’m sure that it would have killed you to go out and buy one for such a mundane occasion. Don’t worry, Elizabeth, I’m sure that there will be other moments to show your respect and admiration for our father by wearing proper attire. Oh, wait.” Katie’s voice became just slightly sharper, “No, there won’t be.”

       “Calm down, Katie. I’m in black, that’s all anyone will expect, all right?” After all, I’m the rebel screw-up daughter who ran off to New York after high school to pursue a music career, which quickly turned into a career in waitressing.

      “I have asked you repeatedly to call me by my full name. Diminutives are acceptable for children, but we are not children anymore, are we, Queenie?”

      Ah, and here come the unsubtle emotional attacks. And she was just so smug about it, so sure that she scored some kind of hit with Dad’s stupid little nickname. It was not news that I was never fond of it, but it was hardly an emotional landmine for me.

      No, not for me.

      “Don’t take it out on me just because Dad had a nickname for me, but not for his precious favorite girl, Katherine. I guess he didn’t even care enough to use the one that everyone used.”

      Katie turned paler, her nostrils flaring, and her lip trembled just the slightest bit before it curled. I lifted my chin, not turning away. Katie spun on her heel and stalked out.

      No, my nickname wasn’t my emotional landmine.

      I scribbled on my notebook paper. My father was a bastard most of the time. He never said a word to me that wasn’t a criticism. He never even gave a compliment to Katie, who worshipped the ground he walked on and that made me angrier than anything he ever said to me. I never hated him. I never wished he would die, and I’m sorry that he’s gone.

      I loved him, but I didn’t much like him, and the feeling was mutual.

      I sighed. Truest thing ever written. I sighed again, rubbing my scar tiredly. I would give a eulogy that wouldn’t actually cause Katie to stop talking to me for the rest of my life. I’d give Katie her puerile little fairytale version of our lives, because even if my father were still around to disapprove of the dishonesty, I never was much for meeting his expectations.

      I tore off the page, crumpling it beneath my palm, without erasing the words. It didn’t matter. Even if you erase the truth on paper, it’s still there. It’s been released now, into the ether, and nothing can call it back. I lean back in my chair, closing my eyes against a sting in my eyes that may or may not have been tears.  


      The car ride was stony and silent, Katie behind the wheel, grim and gloomy. My one attempt at tuning in the radio was met with singularly frosty reception. Drumming on my thighs and tapping my fingers had a similar reception.

      “Can’t you sit still for five minutes?” she snapped, reaching out to physically restrain my fingers, tapping a light rhythm on the center console. Her fingers were cold, and her grip was tight around my hand, as though she could squeeze the anxiousness from them.

      “Calm down, would you? Have a cigarette or something.” I wrenched my hand from hers and examined it for imagined damage.

      “I don’t smoke,” she replied stiffly, and more than a little defensively. I ruthlessly suppressed my urge to raise a disbelieving eyebrow. She doesn’t smoke in her car maybe.

      I gave a soft little, “Ha!” and Katie took the next corner a bit more sharply than was advisable, sending me scrabbling for the handle above my window. Katie always speeds when she’s annoyed. Not the most advisable thing to do over New Hampshire frost heaves, as it turns out, which we learned as the front of Katie’s little car slammed against the pavement, bottoming out and causing a horrible scraping sound to resound from the underside of the front end of the car.

      Katie’s face twisted into a pained grimace, sucking in air between her teeth, and even I cringed at the sound. Almost immediately, a grinding sound started emanating from the car.

      “Shit!” Katie shouted, pounding the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Shit, shit, shit!” Each exclamation was louder than the last. I looked out the window, more than a little shocked. Katie rarely swears.

      She pulled over sharply, slamming the car into park. She scrambled to undo her seatbelt and slammed the door on her way out to assess the damage. I stayed staring out the window, as Katie looked at the front of the car and burst out into new, more creative curses. She kicked the front of her car with her sensible black shoes, giving a short scream through her teeth with each kick.

      She did this for a long time before she tired, leaning forward, splaying her hands on the hood, hanging her head. She looked up at me, stealing glances at her then looking back to the window. Her face was red, and there was sweat on her forehead and tears on her cheeks. She came around to her door and slid back into the seat.

      “Wheel’s loose,” she muttered. She dug in her purse, first for her cell phone, which had no signal, then for her cigarettes, shooting me a look that dared me to say anything. I’m not suicidal, so I didn’t.

      “I worked really hard on my speech, too,” she said, voice cracking.

      Nothing that Katie wrote is likely to have any basis in reality. It’s probably more along the lines of my first draft, with the “loving fathers” and “devoted husbands”. But she’s not doing it to fool people, or to lie. That’s just how Katie actually sees things, because it’s hard to admit that your hero had flaws. Katie’s eulogy will probably be much more appropriate, if less true, than mine.

      “I’m sure that Dad would have loved it,” I sigh, tilting my head, hooking it over the top of my seat.

      Katie puffed furiously on her cigarette. “Please. Like he would have noticed the speech that I spent hours agonizing over when you’d be there, reading off something you scribbled down five minutes beforehand.”

      “What are you talking about? You were always Dad’s favorite.”

      “Me?” Katie exploded. “Me? You think I was his favorite? You could do no wrong!”

      “What are you talking about? I did everything wrong!” I ticked them off on my fingers. “He hated the way I dressed, my music, my friends, my hair…I could go on.”

      “Of course he hated it, he’s a Dad. He’s supposed to disapprove of that stuff.”

      “He didn’t with you.”

      “Because I had to be perfect to compete with you! You were all he talked about. You were all he cared about. I can’t count the number of times my stuff got dropped because you were having one minor crisis or another.”

      I scoffed, genuinely flabbergasted. “Name one time!”

      She floundered for a moment, before she straightened and pointed accusingly at my face, jabbing a finger too close to my eye for comfort. “That scar you’re always rubbing!” she said triumphantly.

      My hand shot up to cover it self-consciously. “What about it?”

      It was Katie’s turn to scoff. “Of course you wouldn’t remember. We were supposed to be going to my piano recital, but no, you had to pull some bone-head move on your bike and crack your skull open. And suddenly it was like I didn’t even exist. All that mattered was that you were bleeding.”

      I remembered that now. Dad had skipped Katie’s recital, and sent her on with Mom. I had been about as pleased with the idea as Katie seemed right now.

      “Yeah, and I also recall that I spent the whole day being lectured to, and that I had gotten my bike taken away for two weeks.”

      “He was worried about you! He was always worried about you. You disappear off to New York, and you never write, you never call – it just about killed him. And I was there, I was taking care of him, and he didn’t even notice me. You weren’t even there and you were taking all of his attention! And you don’t even have the decency to put any thought at all into his eulogy.” She turned blazing eyes to me. “His eulogy, Elizabeth!”

      I saw my sister, for what felt like the first time in a long time. Her face was blotchy, and her perfect sensible shoes were scuffed and dirty. A cigarette dangled carelessly from her fingers, held loosely despite the tension in the rest of her frame. Her face was twisted with pain and grief and an emotion that I’d never placed before – jealousy. Of me. Her voice was raw with emotion and tears that she’d swallowed and choked on. “I wrote a really good speech,” she whispered, agonized.

      She looked so desperate, so bereft, I felt a surge of unexpected kinship with a girl I’ve never really recognized as my sister, but merely someone with whom I happened to share genetics. “You can read it to me,” I offered. She looked at me. “If you want,” I conceded awkwardly.

      She looked at me. I don’t know what she saw. The enemy. The competition. Her sister. But eventually she nodded.

      It was a lot of pretty words, and a lot of bullshit, but Katie’s having a bad day so for once in my life, I don’t call her on it.