The Ballad of Eleanor Rigby
Phoebe Pineda
(after Michael Ondaatje’s “7 or 8 Things I Know About Her (A Stolen Biography)”)
Revolver (1966, Liverpool)
Her dad’s favorite album. Growing up he found it a funny coincidence that Lennon and McCartney’s Eleanor was a Rigby just like him, and he always thought it would be a nice name for a daughter. Her mom was less eager, worried they’d consign their child to the fate of picking up rice after people’s weddings, watching from the wings, no one to mourn her.
The lunch date
There’s a small 19th-century burial plot in the parking lot of a strip mall near her school, sandwiched between a Denny’s and a Lowes. The names on the stones are lost to moss and time save for one Annie Mills, aged 19, beloved daughter and friend. In Annie’s day people ate lunch with their dead, showed up to the cemetery armed with blankets and baskets of food to enjoy tea with a long-gone uncle, a child lost to cholera. On Sundays Ellie parks her car against the plot’s stone wall with her salad and kettle chips and raises a soda-fountain cup in tribute, imagines Annie perched on her headstone with a glass of whiskey in hand, heels kicking against the granite.
Revolver (2009, San Francisco)
Her dad bought one for the hell of it, but he’s never fired it.
The one that got away
“So it’s over?”
Keira’s head hangs upside-down off the edge of the bed, box braids tied back and adorned with a wide pink ribbon. Ellie carves a divot in the wood grain of the bedframe with her thumbnail, drags the line out to the edge, and shrugs.
“I mean, if he finds someone over there, I’m not gonna stop him.”
The polish on her thumbnail is chipping, red where the other nails are black. Thomas had painted his to match. She wonders if he’ll wipe it off or let it chip away, bit by bit.
The accomplice
With Thomas abroad, Caleb is the only person who will go grave-crawling with her. On minimum days they argue journalism and legal ethics over falafel and she wonders how long it’ll take him to wind up with either a black eye from an annoyed bystander or hummus on his shirt.
Caleb is also the only person she knows who wears bowties to school. She has a vivid memory of him chasing her down sophomore year, trying to get an interview with her parents about some murder trial or other for the school paper, wearing a suit of periwinkle blue.
“I have a boyfriend,” she told him.
He frowned at her. His eyes were unnervingly large. “Okay. What about my interview?”
(Now that she thinks about it, she might’ve imagined the suit.)
Gratitude
Most of her photos are of Thomas: inspecting the memorial bench of two lovers, sitting on the steps of a hilltop mausoleum and admiring the view, buying flowers from a vendor. He always insisted on getting flowers. “To thank them, you know?” he said, gesturing to the tombstones. “They’re giving us their stories. It’s only fair.”
He would purchase a bouquet at every cemetery they went to and leave a flower at each grave. Somehow, he always ended up with an extra one for Ellie. She never did figure out where he got the money.
The dinner guest
“It’s always lovely to have you over, Keira. You were, what, five the first time we did this?”
“Six, I think.”
“Gosh, how time flies,” says Ellie’s mom, shaking her head. “I’m impressed the two of you have managed to stay friends for so long.”
Keira twirls spaghetti around her fork with the grace of a ballerina. Ellie rips out a chunk of garlic bread with her teeth.
“You don’t think it’s weird that she breaks into graveyards for fun?”
“Dad,” Ellie groans. “That was one time. I hopped the fence one time.”
“Okay, fine, you don’t habitually break and enter, but you do spend an awful lot of time around dead people, kiddo.”
“Dad—”
“No, I think it’s great,” Keira says. “I think we all could use a healthy awareness of our own mortality.”
“You say that,” Ellie points out, stabbing a vegan meatball with her fork, “yet you still won’t grave-crawl with me.”
“Some of us prefer to appreciate our mortality from a distance,” says Keira, sipping her water.
Tableaux
Ellie and Caleb in the shade of a large oak on the hill, jotting down notes — Ellie in a flannel, Caleb in suspenders. Spare pen tucked behind his ear, windblown hair in her eyes. (Not pictured: Keira shivering behind the camera, partly because she forgot her jacket and partly because the fenced-in grave of a small child lies not three feet from where she’s standing.)
The namesake
Thomas texts her a picture from the churchyard of St. Peter’s in Woolton, Liverpool. A crowded headstone: the patriarch John sharing space with his wife Frances and their two daughters; Eleanor, the granddaughter, squeezed in with her husband. In lieu of copying it all down in her notebook she prints out the photo and sticks it on a page somewhere in the middle, scrawls the date at the bottom. Among the bouquets left in offering lies a single carnation. Thomas’s fingers edge into frame, no red to be seen.
Revolver (2018, San Francisco)
The morning Thomas left, her dad found her sprawled on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. On the record player, McCartney sang about love over a strummed guitar and a simple beat as John, George, and Ringo crooned gently, lilting harmonies in the background. Her dad crouched beside her, his eyes nearly level with hers.
“Guess it’s too late for the gun, huh?”
Ellie snorted. One time when she was ten she walked in on her dad with the revolver hooked on his thumb, hands on hips, sneering at himself in the mirror. If he really wanted to scare Thomas he’d stick him in the witness stand, read him questions from a list, watch the color drain from his face until someone yelled Objection! from across the room. Ellie’s pretty sure most dads don’t actually have the time or guts to chase their daughter’s wayward boyfriend down at the airport, let alone hop a flight to Heathrow.
(Annie’s dad, though. He might have tried.)
Offerings
She drives down to Colma the weekend before graduation and stops by the florist’s, eyeing wreaths on display stands, lavish rows of bouquets that cost more than her wallet can handle. The old Filipino woman working the counter recognizes her, points at the keychain photo of her and Thomas from winter formal still dangling from Ellie’s knapsack.
“Such a nice young man. Very handsome. A smile like that can get you many discounts.” She holds out a single carnation, places it in Ellie’s hand. “I gave him these for free.”
On the way home, the flower bounces on the passenger seat where Thomas used to ride shotgun, tap his fingers on the dashboard along with the radio. Ellie thinks about putting it on her desk the way she did the others, forgetting to water it, watching it wilt.
A phone call
“Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“You saw the names, right? Her husband’s name was Thomas.”
Caleb would call that evidence. Keira would call it a sign. Ellie squints at her naked thumbnail and wonders whether she should go ahead and repaint it.
Parting words
“It’s a stone, genius.” –Eleanor Jane Rigby, beloved daughter and friend, footnote to no one.