Read Online Putting Makeup on Dead People by Jen Violi - Free Book Online

to say.”
    “ ‘Thank you’?”
    “Oh, yeah, thank you.”
    “Happy funeral home,” she says.
    I run my fingertip over Maurice’s smooth skull and tap my fingernail against it. Click. Click. “Hey, um, you and Patty seemed to be getting along today.”
    “Her bark is worse than her bite.” Liz leans back on her hands and pulls at the carpet. “She’s not so bad when she’s not worried about what everyone else thinks.” I’d never thought about Patty as anything other than the Evil Twin. I guess Patty worries too, like me.
    Liz shrugs. “But I guess everyone can’t be like us.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We know who we are.”
    I want to say, We do? Then tell me, who am I? But instead I pick up Maurice by his base and watch his arm and leg bones swing at the joints. “Yeah.”
    On Friday, Liz tells me she’s going for a long weekend trip to Pittsburgh to visit CMU with her parents, since seniors have Monday off as a college prep day. “I’d ask you to come,” she says, “but I know you’ve got birthday plans with your family.”
    “I could cancel them.”
    “I don’t think your mom would like that.”
    “It’s my birthday,” I say. “But you’re right.”
    After school, I say a quick hi to Mom and tell her I’m going to my room to take a nap and do some studying, which I hope she knows means, leave me alone. I really just want to start working on my application.
    “Dinner at six. So be up by then. Are you feeling all right?”
    “Yep,” I say. “I’ll see you for dinner.”
    In the basement, I read the catalog again and imagine myself using paintbrushes in restorative art. Maybe restoring bodies is like restoring frescoes from the Renaissance, uncovering some kind of beauty. Understanding Grief sounds interesting, and Cemetery Issues sounds good too.
    I like cemeteries. When I was maybe eight, we all went walking in Woodland Cemetery so Dad could show us the Wright brothers’ graves. Dad made himself into an airplane and took off down the path until Mom declared him too sacrilegious for words. Then he stood in front of Mom and said, “I’m ready for my penance now, Sister Martha,” looking so actually penitent that Mom eventually giggled.
    I liked reading everyone’s names on the gravestones, wondering what those people were like when they were alive. And I liked the spot way up high in the cemetery where you could look out over the whole city.
    In the center of Chapman’s catalog, I find the application. I fold the perforation and carefully tear out two pages. I fill out my name and address and high school, feeling very accomplished. I turn it over and look at the last page, which lists three essay questions: Why do you want to study mortuary science? What do you think makes a good funeral director? What makes you think you’ll be a good funeral director? I think question number three sounds a little aggressive, and I wonder if Patty helped write it.
    I pull out the last new composition notebook I got for Christmas, the one with the picture of the ocean on the cover, which I’d been saving for something good. The one I’ve been using to write about funeral stuff, as Mr. Brighton suggested. Dad used to carry a little notebook with him. One summer, when I was eight or nine, we were sitting on a blanket on the lawn at Fraze Pavilion, waiting for a concert to start, and Dad pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and quickly scribbled something.
    I asked him what it was, and he said, “I guess it’s like a journal. Things I don’t want to forget. Things I liked or didn’t like.”
    B offered to help Dad set up a daily journal he could keep on the computer so he wouldn’t lose it, and Dad said, “Hell, no. A person should know what his own handwriting looks like.”
    I don’t think B ever took to the notebook writing, but I never forgot. The notebook Dad used was too little for me, but I think he’d approve of my ocean notebook and that I know very clearly what my own