| Excerpt from It Happened In South Beach . . .
It isn’t easy being Tilly Snapp. Not anymore.
Not all that long ago it wasn’t a problem. I’d wake up to each new day reasonably comfortable in my own skin. I’d look in the mirror and there I’d be: good old Tilly Snapp, twenty-six-year-old widow lady; a sensible, practical, professional individual living a safe, uncomplicated life.
For reasons known only to the fickle finger of fate, on an unseasonably hot day in early October, a day that dawned innocently enough, I answered the telephone and, much like Alice, tumbled into my very own rabbit hole. Alice stayed Alice, but I found myself on a bizarre journey toward becoming someone who was most assuredly not good old Tilly Snapp.
I am rarely at a loss for words. I make my living by them, after all, with my syndicated column, Hold that Thought! and freelance commercial writing projects, but I couldn’t find even one that begins to describe just how annoyed I was at this wholly unexpected development. I am not what you would call the adventurous sort. “Because it’s there” just doesn’t cut it with me as a reason to risk life and limb climbing Mt. Everest. The call of the wild is not music to my ears. Just why the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see has always been a mystery to me.
Be that as it may, there I was on Air Jamaica flight 222 en route from Montego Bay to Miami, on a trip that had, by my calculations, lasted about a week.
I huddled in mute misery in the center seat of five across with the garish gilt urn containing the cremated mortal remains of my Aunt Ginger braced between my ankles. I’d considered stowing the urn in the luggage compartment above my head, but an unbidden image of sudden turbulence and Aunt Ginger raining down on the heads of unsuspecting passengers made me think the better of it.
Two enormous Jamaican women occupied the seats to either side, their bulk overflowing their own allotted space into a good portion of mine; and chattered to one another across me nonstop in a bewildering patois of English and Jamaican slang. One smelled suspiciously of ganja and the other of coconut oil and jerk-goat rub, each aroma pleasing enough in its proper milieu, but not all that alluring when blended with the body odors of 243 passengers sharing the same stagnant air in a Boeing 757.
“What you got in dat pretty can, dearie, you holdin’ on to it so tight?” one of the women inquired as I struggled to stretch the seatbelt snugly around the urn and myself in the event that this particular plane was slated by the Almighty to make an unscheduled landing in the Bermuda Triangle. The word “eccentric” barely does justice to my late Aunt Ginger, but I loved her dearly. We’d go down together.
“My aunt.”
“You got ants in dere?”
“Just one.”
The woman frowned. “Aren’t you s’pose to put de animals in de cargo hold? We don’t want no ants here.”
Two days spent haggling with the funeral home director in Montego Bay, dodging the groping hands of the proprietor of the Happy Fields Crematorium, and facing down enough bureaucrats to populate every island in the Caribbean had left me in a decidedly surly frame of mind.
“They only put domestic pets, werewolves, and zombies in the cargo hold,” I informed her. “Insects under the age of three fly free as long as they don’t occupy a separate seat.”
The woman made a hasty sign of the cross, muttered what sounded like a voodoo incantation, and left me to my own dark thoughts.
These were dark thoughts indeed.
I scrunched lower in my seat and started looking for someone to blame. It wouldn’t be sporting to blame Aunt Ginger; she being dead and unable to speak to her own defense. The dry-as-dust lawyer, Mr. Wickerby, was my next candidate, but he had merely been the bearer of ill tidings. It really isn’t fair to kill the messenger, although I hadn’t dismissed the idea out of hand.
Halsey Wickerby, Esq., it was whose call that fateful autumn morning turned my safe, simple life upside down, inside out, and every which way but loose. He delivered the news of Aunt Ginger’s tragic death in appropriately somber tones, although I could have sworn I heard a smothered chuckle now and then. A long silence ensued when he had said his piece.
I warned myself not to ask. I didn’t want to know, really I didn’t.
Of course I just had to ask.
“She had on a bathing suit, right? I mean, she wasn’t...?”
I closed my eyes against the image of my fifty-year-old Aunt Ginger sailing bare-assed through the Jamaican moonlight.
A snigger, barely suppressed, crackled through the ether, but Mr. Wickerby recovered nicely with, “Your aunt was registered at Sin and Sand. It is, I understand, a resort devoted to the uninhibited pursuit of, er, unusual pleasures. Night parasailing in the nude is not to be wondered at.”
“That depends on who’s doing the wondering,” I shot back.
Not that I was all that surprised. Lorraine Louise Snapp -- known as Ginger Snapp from the day she dyed her hair fire-engine red at age sixteen and stormed out of her parents’ house for the last time -- had departed this life as dramatically as she had chosen to live it. She had taken a nosedive stark naked into the warm waters off Negril Beach in Jamaica in the middle of the night when the eighty-foot tow line that connected her harness to the powerboat snapped. I suspect it was an exit Aunt Ginger would have approved of had she been given the choice.
“Positively orgasmic,” Aunt Ginger seemed to whisper from the Great Beyond.
Since orgasms that required the participation of two individuals were not, sadly, in the realm of my personal experience at that point in my life, I wasn’t entirely sure an eighty-foot plunge would qualify as such. I resolutely pushed the image aside as Mr. Wickerby outlined what must be done to retrieve Aunt Ginger’s remains from the Dovecote Mortuary in Montego Bay and return them to Miami for burial at sea. He had already arranged for cremation, as stipulated in Aunt Ginger’s will. I should encounter no difficulty in bringing my loved one home to rest.
That wasn’t quite true, I thought in a brief moment of panic as the plane banked sharply to the right over the Everglades and the snoring woman to my left toppled toward me, threatening to crush the life from my body. She oozed back into her own space as the plane leveled off, and I returned to my brooding.
It was a given that I would be the one to go to Jamaica. Tilly would arrange a memorial service; Tilly would sort through and dispose of her aunt’s possessions. No one else was likely to step forward, certainly not my sister or brothers, all of whom regarded Aunt Ginger in much the same way they would a pterodactyl winging its way north amid a flock of robins. Certainly not my maternal grandmother Grammie Jones, who was shuffling through the remainder of her allotted span up and down halls of the Hope of Resurrection Home in Key Largo waiting for Humphrey Bogart to call.
The fact that Aunt Ginger had designated me her sole heir, with all the privileges and benefits thereof and in possession of her home, business, and worldly goods, cemented the deal. I was Aunt Ginger’s, and heaven help me, Aunt Ginger was mine.
So Tilly would do it, Tilly always did. Ever had it been since my parents set off to test their extreme-skiing skills against the notorious Tuckerman Ravine in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The ravine had won - by a landslide. The old joke was bearable now ten years after my siblings and I found ourselves in the custody of Grammie Jones. On hearing the news, that born-again Christian lady fell to her knees to thank Almighty God for delivering her grandchildren from the heathen, hippie life of her own daughter and “that awful Snapp person” she had married.
No one had ever had the heart to tell Grammie Jones that the union had been performed without benefit of sanctioned clergy by self-styled guru, Shri Bhuyari Baba Baba, a.k.a. Hiram Bronstein from the darkest reaches of Brooklyn, who, shortly after the ceremony, was escorted away by a phalanx of federal agents on the one-size-fits-all charge of being a threat to the American way of life. By then, of course, my parents had partaken of enough LSD to believe that God himself had descended from on high and performed the ceremony in person.
Grammie had done her best, really she had. Alas, demon rum brought her low despite the best efforts of her resurrectionist brethren. I had stepped in to steer my younger sister and three brothers through the rocky shoals of adolescence and send them out into the world to live safe, sensible lives. Lives in no way like those of our hippie parents, our Bible-thumping grammie, or the irrepressible Aunt Ginger.
“She got ants in dat can,” the woman to my right was complaining to a dismayingly perky flight attendant.
“We can’t have ants in the plane, ma’am,” the attendant admonished me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to dispose of them in the lavatory.”
“It’s just one,” I assured her. “And it’s not ant, a-n-t. It’s aunt, a-u-n-t. I have no intention of flushing my aunt down the toilet.”
The attendant straightened up, a bright, satisfied smile creasing her heavy make-up. “Oh, that’s all right then.”
“No, it don’t be all right,” my jerk-rubbed neighbor persisted. “I don’t want to be sittin’ by no dead people.”
“It’s only one dead person,” said I, my patience unraveling like the rope that sent Aunt Ginger into her orgasmic descent.
“Time to fasten your seat belts. We’re about to land,” the attendant interjected happily. I suspect she was profoundly relieved that the real contents of the urn had not been discovered sooner, thereby creating what was threatening to burgeon into an unpleasant fracas in a full plane with no empty seats to separate the combatants.
Twenty minutes later, as the plane taxied up to the gate, I had settled on Grammie Jones as the author of my present dilemma. Grammie, who had hounded my mother into wild rebellion, thereby delivering her into the arms of Samuel “Starman” Snapp, elder brother to Ginger. And by extension, Grammie’s grammie, and grammies back unto many generations until one came to a stumbling halt before the missing link, who must have had a grammie somewhere out there on the great savanna, although it would have been a chimpanzee, which probably doesn’t count. |
