Cemetery Street, John Zunski [read any book TXT] 📗

Thirteen years later, I would experience the same eerie conditions.
“Imagine…” Shannie whispered. We stood shoulder to shoulder facing a sandstone cenotaph. “…the thought that went into this, the symbolism, the choice of sandstone over granite. Exquisite.” At eye level rested a decaying sandstone coffin, the top half of its cover ajar, exposing the sculptured likeness of the deceased. Lower in the coffin, an angel rose from the heart.
“It’s over the top,” I whispered. Why are we whispering? I wondered.
“You can say that,” Shannie said.
“Nothing but a bunch of rich assholes trying to buy immortality,” I heard my father’s cynical tone in my voice.
“It’s decadence done right!” Her tone matched the grayness of the day. “James?” she asked.
“Shannie?” I answered.
“Nothing,” she sighed. Lines etched her forehead. Below us, laughter rang out. Diane led a pair wonks up a path. “I’m not in the mood for them.”
“I want to be alone,” she said. She headed towards the terrace overlooking the Schuylkill River. My eyes followed her until she disappeared over the crest of the hill.
“I’ve come into possession of one of the last plots,” Diane boasted. I slithered behind the monuments.
Shannie sat Indian style upon a bench on the terrace, not too far from Diane’s plot. Snowflakes speckled her hair. I crept from gravestone to gravestone, my eyes never leaving her. I imagined her gaze, staring across the river, past the rushing traffic into eternity. I thought I was finally successful when she said: “I don’t think they were trying to buy immortality. They’re celebrating life.”
I walked around the bench and sat next to her. “I’m going to die,” she announced.
“We’re all going to croak.”
“You have such a way with words,” Shannie said.
“Not the fortune cookie thing,” I protested.
“Yes the fortune cookie thing,” Shannie sighed. “What else does an empty fortune cookie mean?” Shannie’s eyes never relinquished their hold on destiny.


Chapter 9 Bumper Stickers

Shannie didn’t celebrate birthdays, she suffered them. “It sucks having a birthday during the holidays. You’re an afterthought - to everyone. Everyone’s too busy returning Christmas presents.”
“Or making plans for New Years,” I chided.
“Screw New Years!” Shannie cried. “Believe me Just James, there’s a world of difference between December twenty-ninth and January twenty-ninth,” Shannie was referring to my birthday. “Consider yourself lucky. Maybe, you compete with the super-bowl.”
“The super-bowl is bigger than Christmas and New Years combined,” I argued.
“Birthdays are a bummer,” Shannie claimed. The year my Grandfather visited Shannie believed her birthday fortunes were changing. Then Grandfather and my mother had their spat. “If Mary-the-horrid could keep her trap shut, Stan would have stayed and I would have had a decent birthday.”
He left without getting her a card. I practiced forging my Grandfather’s signature and spent my Christmas money on ‘Stan’s’ birthday gift for Shannie. I wanted to change her fortune.
The next year, Diane and I conspired to make Shannie’s fifteenth birthday festive - we almost pulled it off. Shannie loved Peking Duck. We took Shannie to Joe’s Duckhouse in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. We had a great time, until the arrival of our fortune cookies. I never imagined Shannie melting down over a fortune cookie – more accurately – a fortune-less cookie.
“What the Hell?” Shannie cried pounding one half her unfortunate cookie to smithereens. Diane and I sat speechless as Shannie threw the other half to the floor and stomped it; crushing it like a bug. “What ta mat ta?” Shannie mocked a staring waitress. “You neva see round eye go ba wis tic?”
Shannie was cranky the rest of the day. “I just want to go home,” Shannie sighed.
“I’m doomed,” Shannie later confided. “It’s my karma Just James. I should have never let Lucas talk me into moving that old lady.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “No harm – no foul. You called it - Lucas’s old man figured us out - he should have the karma problems.”
“He didn’t steal her,” Shannie replied.
“He probably did worse,” I said.
On the surface, Shannie’s birthday woes ended the following year - her sixteenth. She awoke the morning of December twenty-ninth, 1987 to find a black Volkswagen GTI sitting in the Ortolan’s driveway. I watched from my perch as she caught glimpse of her birthday present. Shannie popped open the front door to retrieve the morning paper.
I smiled when she noticed the GTI. She stared - her face in disbelieve. She shut the interior door and reopened it. “Yes!” her muffled shout rapped my window as she floated across the frosty ground. She circled the car twice, staring at it; afraid to touch it - as if it would dematerialize if she did. Diane smiled behind the storm door, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand.
Five minutes later, Shannie pounded on our front door. “Just James!” Shannie gushed as I answered the door. “You’re not going to believe it!” She cried - her cheeks flush in the brisk morning air.
“Happy birthday Bug,” I walked past her and placed my present on the rear bumper.
“My Karma ran over your Dogma,” she read the bumper sticker.
“I thought you might like it.” My frozen breath tumbled out of my mouth.
“You knew! You knew I was getting a car?” she said hopping up and down.
Just James just smiled.
“Excellent Eggs!” she said. Our eyes met. Then she kissed me. I mean, she really kissed me.

Shannie developed into a connoisseur of bumper stickers; although her car never sported more than one at a time. “I’m not trailer trash and I’m not going to look it! There’s no way my car will beshitted and bespeckled by fifty ratty bumper stickers.” True to her word, Shannie never let Saphix, her name for the GTI, suffer the indignity of a single worn bumper sticker. On the first Saturday of each month, Shannie would scrape off the old and apply the new. The only exception was during the Gulf War when Saphix sported “Support our troops” for the duration of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Even then, every first Saturday, Shannie replaced the worn sticker with a newer version. Saphix was socially aware, and never short on sarcasm. In retrospect, Shannie was advertising the state of her psyche. At the time, I didn’t know any better, I was curious who she would attack next.
If she couldn’t talk her way out of another speeding ticket, the next month’s bumper sticker would take a poke at the cops. Her personal favorite was, “D.A.R.E. to keep cops off donuts!” I was partial to, “Bad cop! No Donut!” We both felt, “Hey, who made 7-11 a police station?” was apropos.
Though she lampooned my father once, Shannie assured him he wasn’t the target when “Your kid may be an honor student; but you’re still an idiot!” made an appearance after I finally made the honor roll. I counted three bumperstickers in my mother’s honor: “All dumbs aren’t blonde; Worry about your own damn family,” and “ We’re not the brightest crayon in the box, are we?” When I asked why she insisted on still wasting effort on my mother, she quipped, “She’s probably still a bitch?” Her stab at my father was obvious: “Split wood, not atoms!”
Even Mr. Lightman, her self-proclaimed rent-a-dad, wasn’t immune. When he placed “If it ain’t country, it ain’t music,” on the powder fairy blue pickup truck, Shannie responded with, “Discourage Inbreeding, Ban Country Music!”
In the early 90’s, when Russell had a run in with a group of skinheads: “Racists eat pooh!” made an appearance - only Shannie toughened the language a bit. The obligatory: “Challenge Authority!” had its day. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Baltics were clamoring for independence, “Lithuania!” showed up.
The most telling, were the personal references. “Give me a coffee and no one gets hurt; Gravity gets me down; When I grow up I wanna be me!” Those showcasing Shannie’s humor: “Deja Moo - the feeling you heard this bullshit before; The Gene pool needs a little chlorine; Mean people are cool.” The more telling: “The Eve of Lilith; I found it and now my finger stinks; All I ever needed to know, I learned from porno; A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; Crack, at least it ain’t Marijuana; History doesn’t remember well-behaved women; Suicide is a way of telling God -You can’t fire me, I quit!”
“Spare me Just James,” she sighed when I questioned her about the suicide sticker. “For the fiftieth time - I’m not going to kill myself, I want to get do-gooders tits in a flutter.”
“You sure?” I questioned.
“Geezus Pete, you’re not going P.C.! If you have, help me find some rope. Okay?”
I dropped the issue.
My parent’s looked upon Shannie’s car with horror. They had to have known the scourge of pestering that was in store for them. Then again maybe they didn’t - that would have been par for the course. As my sixteenth birthday approached I dropped scores of hints. Most of my pleas were ignored. When I raised my voice; my father said: “Get a job, then we’ll talk about it.”
Hissy fits, usually very effective in my mother’s presence, drew blank stares. I found myself wishing for old times - secretly hoping she’d launch a glass and a bevy of curses in my direction. “Talk to your father. I have a lot on my mind.”
“He said talk to you,” I answered.
“I’m telling you talk to him!” She snapped. It was an education in bureaucratic run-a-rounds.
My mother stared blankly at the kitchen’s wallpaper. Her lawsuit against the Good Shepherd Non-denominational Church, the Reverend Mister Floyd Meaks, and the Krass Brother Funeral Parlor was scheduled for trial at the end of January.
“Look at it this way,” Shannie told me a week before my birthday. We were having coffee in the Ortolan’s kitchen. “You can’t lose. If your mother wins her case. Look at the money she’ll have. She’ll get you a car just to shut you up. I know I would.”
“Thanks,” I said stirring my coffee.
“Anything for you,” she whispered - I peered up from the cyclone in my coffee cup. “Anywho, if she loses. She’s out of your hair for a week or two. If you’re lucky, her plane will crash.”

I laid awake in my bed, listening to the wordless clatter of breakfast. I savored every chime of silverware, every clink of a coffee cup. With the silencing of the silverware came the shutting of the inner kitchen door, followed by the outer door, and car doors in quick succession. My father’s car briefly struggled before turning over in the bitter morning air. The gears ground into reverse and the engine whined as they pulled out of the driveway. I listened to the car disappear down Cemetery Street. The silence pressed me into the mattress. Tears welled as I watched the falling snow.
Over the following days, I thought nothing that my mother didn’t call. She was in the middle of a trial. I didn’t expect to hear from her. Though I missed her, Shannie was right - she was out of our hair. It was vacation like. The air inside our home was relaxed. My father no longer worked late. He was talkative. During that first week we talked more than we did since moving to Pennsylvania.
The Saturday before my birthday we spent the day looking at used cars. For my birthday, he did buy me a car - a ’68 mustang; a matchbox. Although disappointed I was glad to see his sense of humor resurface.
On my birthday, Diane invited my father and me to dinner. “What if Mom calls?” I asked.
“We have an answering machine,” my father quipped.
“It’s my birthday, I want to talk to her,” I plopped into a kitchen