MY DEAD NEW YORK NANNA and B.B. the dead French actress are having actually a whizbang good time processing their shit together in the bardo. They’ve conjured a limboland version of the Plaza Hotel, parked smackdab in the center of the Tuileries, where they sit at the sunniest table, drinking all the coffee, and eating all the best cheese, because there is no diarrhea in the bardo, and the recently deceased need not fear sunburn. For kicks, my Nanna and B.B. both wear giant hats—like women in Proust, or at the Kentucky Derby—and they wear muumuus, because muumuus are comfortable. Their post-mortem trajectories crossed when B.B. was walking her froufrou phantom dog down a Central Park inflection of the Champs-Élysées. Nanna charmed the late bombshell by addressing her dog instead of her, saying, Oh, my, don’t you look ferocious! B.B., in turn, pursed her famed lips to coo, Quel joli oiseau! at the great grey owl on Nanna’s shoulder, which my mother had seen land on a pine branch, loosing a snowfall premonition, just before the robot voice began answering Nanna’s landline with, We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Nanna and B.B. both entered the corporeal realm in 1934 (one in the 7th month, one in the 9th); Nanna broke her hip the same day B.B. made her French exit, and never walked again until, days later, she gave her Irish goodbye. In life, they both conserved their best love for cats and gardens—stylish broads, or selfish bitches, depending when you met them, and what kind of animal you were. The shit that Bardot’s in the bardo to sort through is mostly about men, and also about race—she maladapted to trauma by projecting past tormenters on a thousand innocent faces. She was—like so many victims—more trusting of furred, mute beasts. But who knows how many germs of human life were forced into (onto) B.B. Nanna, too, may well have punched her pregnant belly a few times behind a locked bathroom door. And I’m sure she’s in the bardo now because of whatever happened to make her tell me that a woman with daughters must never remarry, because Teenage girls are very seductive. Before we knew Nanna’s body was ash, my mother had a dream in which she saw Nanna’s sister—born later, dead sooner—on the opposite side of a busy street, and heard her call out, Everything’s fine, we’re good over here! Don’t come! I think the “over here” was the place just past the bardo, where Nanna and B.B. are now forgiving each other their trespasses, as they forgive those who trespassed against them; where they finally can laugh about it all, enjoy sunshine and coffee without worrying when the bill will come due. We did the best we could, eh? Nanna will say. And Bridgitte Bardot will say, Absolutment, chérie—no translation necessary, though Nanna never learned any language beyond working-class English. I very much doubt that either Nanna or Brigitte knew the Tibetan loan word for the liminal state between death and rebirth that sounds exactly like Brigitte’s last name, either—as puns go, top shelf. But hardly worth coming back to life for. •





Francesca Leader is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana, with deep connections to New York City (acquired at birth) and to Istanbul, Turkey (acquired through marriage). She lives in Virginia with her children and their tuxedo cat.

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