Eggshell in the Crematorium

I wasn’t crying and didn’t intend to, but if I didn’t seem like I was on the verge of tears, that bitch Tali was going to get all the attention. Other than Hyacinth. It was her funeral, after all. The portrait sitting at the end of the bar in the shitty dive where our dirt-cheap wake followed a barebones funeral in a park was designed to get me going. Noumen, who had to miss the funeral for a double shift, painted her perfectly: locks of fuchsia hair surging past her shoulders, nervous lips-shut smile, lively eyes looking just past the viewer.

When I met her, she was all angles and beard stubble, nothing like the round-cheeked cherub pumped full of formaldehyde in the coffin. I was the new, scandalously trans, girl in the office, and within a year Hyacinth confessed that I’d shown her the way to be alive. How I did that while barely dragging myself in each day was a mystery. Neither of us lasted long there.

“Fiona?” 

Andrea snuck up on me. At a funeral you need to be aware of everyone’s position so you know who can see you and from what angle, but I’d been lost in thought. She had giraffe-long legs, and when her feet touched the ground, they barely even made a tap. Even with that huge bump on the bridge of her nose, no one would ever mistake her for a man because there’s no masculine way to glide across the room. Unless you’re in a ballet, but people usually aren’t. “Hey.” I dabbed my eye with a tissue to create an excuse for my total lack of tears. “How are you holding up?”

“Oh, you know. Weird not to see her around. I was at Dina’s party last night, and I felt like I could see the spot against the counter where she’d be leaning. You know?”

“Of course.” I offered one of those half-hearted grabs on the elbow. Not enough to do any real comforting, but enough to say I showed up. “I-”

Tali’s sobs were somehow louder than everyone else in the bar. She’d gotten the call a few nights ago. I-can’t-take-this-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-done-goodbye-this-is-goodbye. Harrowing, to be sure. When she looked at that picture, I’m sure she heard Hyacinth’s shattered voice. The sound of being too late. Me, I saw the girl who thanked me for making her a girl. Maybe that was the first step that got her here. I said, “I bet Hyacinth would’ve ended up crying in the bathroom by then. Remember her birthday party? An hour and a half.”

“But then she was so happy when she realized that Amha hadn’t stood her up.” A few tears breached Andrea’s mascara and tracked down her wobbly eyeliner. “The rest of the night she was bouncing off the walls.”

I strengthened my elbow grab, but didn’t push it much further. To comfort and to be comforted is zero-sum.  “You know. Hyacinth said I was the one who inspired her to be a girl.”

“You cracked her egg?”

I winced. Egg imagery implied hen imagery– too matronly for me to endure. But if I wanted to get it across, I had to submit to the parlance. “Yeah, I did.” I tried to summon a gloss of tears by thinking back to the night she told me. She was six months in, combining the best-she-could-do-so-far punky short hair and fishnets below tiny black jean shorts– probably chasing the shadow of a Hot Topic cashier she saw a decade ago. Not everyone goes through every developmental stage, and not everyone recognizes that a stage is just a cliche. Psychoanalysis fails because it doesn’t tell little boys that desiring your mother and wanting to kill your father is played out, that they need to try something fresh. 

Still, I was out in public with her. I’d gotten a frantic text message, but by the time I got to Armand’s she was laughing in the back booth, trading her favorite classic rock songs with the bald guy in the Harley Davidson t-shirt in the next booth. Like anyone gave a damn about The Eagles. The empty tumbler and half-empty pint glass explained how her mood turned, but portended a rough night. She celebrated my presence and we drank more, and we sat perplexed while we watched someone try to order a fish sandwich from the bar. It was on the menu, but no one ever wanted one, and when the bartender made eye contact with me, I just shrugged. I didn’t know anything he didn’t. 

Later the tears returned when the subject of her father came up. She accused him of rolling his eyes every time he said her name. Like there were air quotes around it.

I said, “There are quotes around everything we say.”

That wasn’t what she meant. She was afraid he was just humoring her.

“Is that so bad? Understanding is a myth. It all goes on faith,” I said.

Hyacinth disagreed that faith and humoring someone were the same thing. Sincerity was supposed to make up the difference. And then she called me “Fi”. I didn’t care much for the nickname, but it would’ve been too much friction to shake it off.

I said, “Faith is just humoring God.” Some nights with Hyacinth ended on the highs, others ended on the lows. That was a low night. I helped her stagger home, and maybe it was the booze, maybe it was because she’d devoted both lungs to wailing, but either way she couldn’t walk a straight line.

None of this brought me the sadness I needed, instead I was just annoyed with her again. I blinked away the tears I hadn’t found, and hoped Andrea wasn’t paying close enough attention. She rubbed my shoulder– a weak form of support, like the homeopathic distillation of a hug. Somehow she was stupid enough not to understand the chain which connected the event of Hyacinth’s coming out to this dismal moment in the bar, but smart enough to know that people were watching to see who was being comforted. I wanted to push the issue, outflank her with some really good sobs, but Tali was suddenly on the move behind me. Some muttered platitudes sufficed to break off from Andrea, but they took too long, and Tali got ensnared by a trio of girls mostly known for how terrible their harsh noise music was. All three of them were wearing leather collars; to their credit, it was black leather.

The bell at the door rang and clacks followed. It had to be stilettos, and there’s only one girl I knew who had to be the tallest bitch before death’s empty gaze. The last time I saw her, I was with Hyacinth. The two of us were in one of those thrift stores so cramped it felt like we’d been swallowed by a snake– raising further questions about all the snakeskin on the racks– and we’d been poring through the clothes for an hour. Both of us were striking out: me, because I have very high standards, Hyacinth because finding something to fit those shoulders was hell. At least, wherever the afterlife takes her, she didn’t have to worry about clothes anymore.

Malady walked in with eyeliner way too heavy for a Saturday afternoon, and immediately picked out this sheer black top with stars dotting it. She waved it at us to taunt us with it. Hyacinth greeted her; there’s a kind of graciousness that gets smuggled into persistent indignity that I’ll never have, and the two of them gossiped for a bit. Mal loves to talk about who’s fucking who and who stopped, and Hyacinth ate it up because she liked to imagine a world where she was having exciting sex with lots of people instead of the magnanimous dick I gave her once every week or two. Mal’s the only one who ever figured it out, and even that was probably a lucky guess: if two dolls spend time together consistently and you guess they’re fucking, you’ll be right nine out of ten times. 

Hyacinth broke up Mal’s litany of scandal to ask if she was seeing anyone. Poor, stupid Hyacinth. She always assumed that people wanted to be asked about. She took the golden rule to mean she should be nice, rather than treating everyone else the way they treated her. But Mal likes to be a secret, and said only that she sees many people, all day. 

I said, “Sure, but how many of them have their tits out?” Hyacinth laughed, and Mal didn’t. It wasn’t a very good joke, and it reflected poorly on Hyacinth to enjoy it.

After that, Mal brushed us off and left without trying on her new top. It’d fit her perfectly anyway, why pretend it wouldn’t? Hyacinth and I found some clothes that were worth trying on, but once we were in the dressing room– no doors, just red curtains criss-crossing and dangling from various pipes on the ceiling– she was desperate for some physical reaffirmation. Maybe she realized that the conversation with Mal had gone poorly, and so was trying to shore up her self-esteem by having sex with me. Ridiculous, but I let her do it, and only afterward did we notice the rustle of someone else passing through a curtain to leave.

The stilettos tapped right to my side and there was Malady, in that very same sheer top. Without a bra underneath, without even waiting for her new fake tits to settle into a more natural spot on her chest. God she was shameless. But everyone was looking at her, and she looked devastated enough that no one would be mad. “Poor Hyacinth,” she choked out. “I’m sorry, I know you and her were very… close.”

“Us? No. I just cracked her egg.” I said loudly, hoping to siphon off some of the attention from all the people staring at Mal’s lively little nipples.

Mal smiled with her eyes, though her mourner’s frown stayed perfectly genuine. “I adored her. She was so lively, made so many interesting choices. You never knew what was going to happen. Until… this.”

“Yeah. I feel guilty, cracking her egg. She never got on her feet after that.”

But Mal wasn’t paying attention. She was arching her back and staring at Hyacinth’s portrait. I would just be another prop if I stayed where I was, so I walked away.

Once again my awareness failed me, and I almost bumped into Tali. Her big wet eyes stared into mine, and the waver of her tears above those deep blue irises made me a little seasick.

“How are you holding up?” 

“I just… I keep remembering her voice, Fi.” Why couldn’t it have died with her?

“I’m sure. That’s so tough. It’s not your fault, you know. There’s nothing you could have done.” I chanced a clasp of her hand. We were the stars of a show no one could get caught looking at directly. Obviously I was the comforter in this dynamic, at this moment. No one was getting more heat from this funeral than Tali. I just needed to steal a little bit of it. This time I needed to cry, and I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to get a memory of Hyacinth to do it. I summoned the image of my childhood dog after he got hit by a car. His blood gleamed black on the asphalt, and an eye hung unsocketed out of his shattered skull. It made him look surprised that anything would be as unkind to him as that car was. A few tears gathered in my eyes but none escaped the rim of my eyelashes. This was my moment. “I just wonder. I’m the one who cracked her egg. What if this is my fault?”

I wrung a couple dry sobs from the bone fragments we had to pick out of the street. No matter what Tali’s position was, this much guilt required at least a half-hug to soothe. 

So I thought. Instead of any kind of comfort, an even louder sob greeted mine. “How can you say that? She would’ve died sooner if she stayed a boy. You did something great for her.” She wandered away to find some shoulder to cry on. Obviously I wouldn’t give her mine.

Of course she’d deny me my moment. Tali held a grudge against me because she and I went on two dates and then I ghosted her. Even after we started seeing each other more often because of Hyacinth, she was never content to pretend like nothing had happened. Two dates, a lifelong grudge. How she still had friends with that kind of hair trigger mystified me, but maybe it was all these well-executed ploys for pity and affection. Maybe Hyacinth didn’t even call her that night, and she made it all up. After all, why would she call Tali and not me? The two of them were close, maybe even dating for all I knew, but I’d gotten that call before and expected to get it every time. Mal would know if the two of them were more seriously involved, but I didn’t want to ask her. If they’d actually been in any kind of relationship, Hyacinth would’ve told me. She always told me everything that happened to her.

Fake or real, the room believed Tali about the call. I’d played all my cards, and at best maybe I’d be a footnote in people’s recollection of this grief. People would talk about Tali, about Mal, even the harsh noise girls. I slumped into a nearby booth and stared again at Hyacinth’s portrait. Her eyes evaded me in particular. All of the effort she’d spent to place me in a position of gravity in the story of her life, and it was all just for her. She’d taken it to the void, leaving me nothing to show for all that trouble. 

Not that she was satisfied with so little. One time Hyacinth begged me to please, please, please come over. She was spiraling, she was on the brink of something, and she didn’t know if it was the light of deliverance or the darkness of the pit. And, fool that I am, I went over there. She greeted me with mascara smudged around her eyes, a complaint about how it never runs like you see in movies, and an oversized tank top that always exposed one breast no matter which way she pulled it. This was what seduction looked like when it came from her, but when she leaned in for a kiss the momentum took her into despair, and I spent the rest of the night rubbing her back while she cried hard enough to puke.

That’s what the funeral was missing. With its wreath of flowers and the serene expression on her face in the portrait–spectacular artistry to whip that one up out of the ether– it was all too steeped in dignity. Hyacinth lived a life of continuous humiliation and self-flagellation. Her funeral should have been a line of people taking their turn to stand before the corpse, hoisted from the rafters like a puppet, and cringe upon seeing the over-wrought eyeshadow and the drawn-on heart right beneath her eyelid. Rather than a somber descent into the earth, a Rube Goldberg machine should have sent her tumbling into the hole.

If she was alive, though, she’d get up and laugh or get up and cry, and then set herself right back on top of that machine again to be spun into the next humiliation. Every single time, she put herself in harm’s way. Stupidly, constantly. As if she couldn’t get hurt, even if she always got hurt. I never figured out why she wouldn’t just defend herself, a little. But every day she put her heart right against the metal, and every time got whatever she got with the highest possible intensity. She always tried to involve me because I was the one who set her on this path. But why me? I didn’t do anything to deserve all the love she tried to give me, and pushed it away because I wanted to be a good role model for her. This is how you survive. 

Hyacinth should have listened to me. She should have tamped down all that intensity and listened to me, but that would have been a death too. I stared at that portrait and imagined her face like mine, all smirks and neutral glances, imagined her shrugging her shoulders at the news that someone loved her or hated her, imagined her calmly putting on a bra that day she noticed her tits had come in big instead of bouncing around for fun even though it hurt, imagined pressed-thin lips instead of that just-barely-snaggletooth smile that took over her entire face whenever she heard good news. That smile would’ve been alive all day, activated by how much I hated everyone at her funeral, because even though she loved them all, she loved me too. 

I noticed, too late and long after everyone else, that my cheeks were wet.