Wally is dead. I’m too late. Soon, I promised her on the phone. I’ll fly there soon Cleveland. Then, like back then, we sit on the folding chairs in front of your garage, drink beer, kill mosquitoes, laugh, and you tell me whether you still think Trump is great. Spring came, summer went. I didn’t fly and Wally died. Now I’m here. A silver Toyota pickup truck sits in front of the veterans center in Mentor, a suburb of Cleveland. Wally’s daughter Laura carries cake trays inside. She blows me a kiss. It’s May. The heat shimmers on the asphalt. The sky stretches deep blue over the flat building. Made for the American flag.
Eighty or ninety guests are invited to the funeral service: relatives, friends, neighbors. Everyone brings their memories with them. Tables are moved, chairs are moved, plastic dishes are stacked. The air in the hall is ice cold. Laura tests the projector. Employees at the veterans center produce mountains of meat and pasta. Who is going to eat all this? It smells like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Pink icing on the donuts, finger-thick.
The last time I saw Wally, her wrists were too thin even for children’s bracelets. She wore leggings and slippers with a funny cartoon face. She walked with a walker. Smoked Pall Mall. Chain. She loved deviled eggs. She laughed harshly and said, “Darling, I am a free thinker!” I was blown away. Until then, I only knew the American branch of my family from the wild stories of my father, who had warned me: “Be careful, little daughter, the family is politically torn.” I’m glad my dad is there this time.
“Weapons are a man’s jewels”
The first guests arrive and shout “Hello”. A man with a cane and his wife, who is holding each other’s arms, stand next to me. “And who are you?” asks an older man with hair like cotton. He lived next door to Wally. “One time,” he says, “a couple moved onto our street and put a fence around their property. Wally freaked out, she hated that fence so much.” Yes, that suits her, freaking out about a fence. I want to hear anecdotes like that.
Then Wally’s grandson Tyler swings his slim body into the hall. I’m shocked, he’s so thin. “Hi!” He is a father now. His daughter was born almost a year ago. He found a piece of skin under his right eye for another tattoo. Cora is written there in red, curved letters. Coraline sits in a stroller like a Buddha. I pinch her calves, but she doesn’t even flinch her black eyelashes. “Has Wally been happy lately?” “Yeah,” Tyler says, looking past me.
He still lives with his brother Ryan in Wally’s house, one of those typical American suburban wooden houses. In the Gun Room, firearms hang on the wall like trophies, they lie on the table and scattered on the sofa. “Guns are a man’s jewels,” Tyler said at the time. I looked at the weapons for a long time. I aimed one at an imaginary target, strangely fascinated. “Is it true that Wally was happy,” I ask my father. “No,” he says, “she became increasingly frustrated.” Two people, two answers.
In the next room, the lights of the slot machines are flashing and there are American flags on the tables. A man drinks beer at the bar. He’s watching a football game on the screen behind the counter. There are dark half moons under his eyes. We start talking about high gas prices, Trump, the media he distrusts, and Tucker Carlson. He just laughs at his name. Tucker Carlson? A nothing. And the Iran War? “Trump had to do it, the mullahs want to wipe us out.” He nods towards the screen. “It’s like football. People stick with their team. No matter what happens.” Then he suddenly gets up and leaves.
What would Wally have said about the Iran War? She raved about Trump, but she vehemently rejected any new war. A poster hangs in the hallway next to the disinfectant dispenser: “Help Stop Veteran Suicide Until There’s None.” There is talk of a silent epidemic. Of twenty veterans who take their own lives every day.
Trump gave their longing a home
The projector throws an image of Wally onto the wall. Young, short hair, adventurous. Her parents had a property surrounded by meadows and near a lake. They called the house “the farm.” Amish lived in the neighborhood. If a child was born, they would come by in a carriage and show the newborn.
When Wally talked about old America, her eyes lit up. From rich America. About General Motors and the steel mills with their smoking chimneys. About men who bought a house at the age of twenty and had a job to support their family. When the cars rolled off the assembly line as if the whole world had to be motorized. She said, “Darling, Cleveland used to be something.”
Then she shook her head and took a deep drag. She remembered how the factories closed, the young people left, and the old people remained on the porches. Homeless people slept in front of the barricaded shops. When Donald Trump made “Make America Great Again” his rallying cry, Wally gained new hope for a return to the old America that seemed irretrievably lost. She believed Trump, that jobs would come back, that the factories would smoke again and that not everyone could just walk across the border. He gave their longing a home.
I never really tried to argue with Wally. I just listened to her. A mistake? My father says: “When Wally came over from Yugoslavia with her family, everyone was full of hope. Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and nobody really talked about politics.”
Ryan comes and clinks glasses with my father. They laugh. Gesturing with their beer bottles and putting their heads together. I don’t understand exactly what they’re talking about, but I know it’s not politics. My dad likes Ryan, but he’s just too weird for him. Sometimes I jokingly tell him what Ryan believes, then he punches me in the side and says, “Come on, stop it.”
Ryan works in a tattoo parlor. He is beautiful. Clear features, dark eyes, a full beard around a finely lined mouth. He has tattoos all over his body except for his face. Sitting Bull, Buddha, Jesus peacefully next to each other. His eyes are alert, as if he’s on guard. When we were playing basketball with his son in Wally’s backyard, he said, “Terrible things are coming to America very soon.” He predicted a deadly assassination attempt on Trump and that a civil war would break out. My dad says Ryan infected Wally with his conspiracy theories. But you also have to want to be infected.
Torn family
Ryan was certainly prepared. He had founded a group, the Erie Tribe. The refuge was a farm, a last bastion full of food, gasoline supplies, solar panels, grass and “tons of weapons.” He now believes in world domination by the Illuminati. He takes a sip of beer and says: “There will be a third world war.” “When?” “Soon.”
Wally’s life passes by on the wall. Wally with bright yellow glasses, smoking. With a gown and graduate hat, his father proudly stands next to him. In one picture she is cradling her daughter Karen in her arms. And there is always that laughter. The neighbors say: “She was an angel.” “She could be pretty stubborn. And she was funny. She was really funny.” “All the kids in the neighborhood were allowed to swim in their pool, and Neil Diamond was on the radio.”
Only Anna is missing. Anna is Wally’s sister-in-law, a warm woman with a worried look, as if there was a shadow over her eyes. She was not invited to the funeral service. When I visited Wally before Trump’s second election as president, I had a mission. She was bold. I wanted to reconcile Wally and Anna. Since Corona, the two have been separated by an icy silence. Two stubborn women who didn’t move a bit. Wally didn’t get vaccinated, so Anna didn’t visit her. Anna was also upset about the “gun slinging cousins” on Facebook. On the couch she whispered in my ear: “Trump is evil.”
For my sake, the family met for a barbecue. We had a barbecue in Karen and Jon’s garden, there were huge pieces of meat, crackers and beer. I observed a gentle rapprochement between Anna and Wally. They laughed. As Wally lit a cigarette, Anna touched her arm: “I haven’t smoked for so long, but I still love the smell.” I thought a little proudly: mission accomplished. But after that garden party they never saw each other again.
Jon, Tyler and Ryan’s father, was at the grill that day. He is broad-shouldered, wears a baseball cap and has a tousled goatee. He constantly tugs at it and creates order. Jon works in construction. He was a GI in the first Gulf War, but he doesn’t like to talk about the war. I actually only know him with a little smile on his face. Or gaming in front of the computer. He’s one of those guys who likes to hang out in a corner at parties, drink beer and make monosyllabic comments.
My father joins us. He smiles most of the time, too, but when he hears me asking Jon about the increased gas prices, he moves on as if he’s fallen into the wrong company. But Jon just smiles and says it’s good that money is flowing into the state’s coffers. The greedy oil companies are to blame, not Trump. “Trump keeps his promises.” I say, “But he promised America First. And that he wouldn’t fight any more wars.” “He’s doing the job that Biden and Obama should have done. If the mullahs drop a nuclear bomb on our country, we’ll have completely different problems than gasoline prices and inflation.”
The more I listen to Jon, the more I am amazed by the flexibility of his thinking. The broken promises, the many contradictions. He incorporates all of this into a new narrative with amazing ease.
How many Trump supporters think like Jon? The decades alternate on the wall. The sixties. The America that Wally loved. The cars had names like Chevrolet Bel Air and Pontiac Catalina. Shiny street cruisers with chrome strips and tail fins in turquoise and mustard yellow. Men with short sleeves and ties. Wally on a shopping trip.
The afternoon passes. The cake buffet is devastated like after a child’s birthday party. My father stands alone in the hall and bites into a donut. Most of the guests are gone and have taken their happiness with them. The music has stopped. Laura and Karen clean up and carry the empty metal sheets back to the car. Coraline is sleeping. When she grows up, her family will tell her about Wally, about that laid-back great-grandmother who smoked pot with her grandchildren and always put up one more chair. A final photo appears. Wally is young, she laughs. America shimmers in the background.
