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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS
THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE
THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES
THESIS TITLE ---------"In~A,_,C""ae!.Cve~m!L__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
AUTHOR:
Mollie E. Tammone
DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE:
April 28, 2006
THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL
FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN
LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES.
Dr. Lance Newman
THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR
Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes
THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER
Dr. Mark Wallace
THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER
~~
DATE
tfk/o6
DATE
1!(8-.r/o(
DATE
Tammone, Mollie. "In A Cavern." 2006
The text is a blend of multiple genres: poetry, commentary, memoir, and
fiction combine to collapse the borders between research and mainstream rhetoric in
order to advance the voice of the incest victim. The memoir traces the author's
multiple experiences of loss and subsequent fragmentation of Self resulting from
years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. The stories of fictional characters
irrupt within the memoir. Their stories do not follow a traditional chronologie
sequence; generation, location and familial connection elude placement within
specific time. The author negotiates and maneuvers within a multiplicity of subject
positions-daughter, victim, narrator, narratee, creator, man/woman/childextending the text beyond the conventions of the dominant autobiographical
paradigm. The subjectivities of fictional characters, of the author and her family
members are historicized, their identities presented in flux, shattering the foundations
supporting the myth of a unified subject-the position commonly presented to
mainstream society. Existing throughout the text is the ambiguity of authorship; the
interplay of subjectivities resists categorization and traditional labels of duality,
giving birth to a weave of murky contradictions residing in the author's physical,
psychological and sexual borderlands.
Keywords: multiple genres; incest; memoir; autobiography;
Tammone 1
Mollie Tammone
Professor Newman
LTWR Thesis
9 April2006
InA Cavern
Gathering the fragments of a divided, repressed body and reaching out
to the Other does not necessarily imply a lack or a deficiency. In writing
themselves, women have attempted to render noisy and audible all that had
been silenced in phallocentric discourse ... writing myself into existence also
means emptying myself of all that I can empty out-all that constitutes Old
Spontaneous/Premeditated Me-without ceasing from being (Minh-ha 37).
I write myself in order to take out and dust off the pictures, hold them up to the light
and leave them out for all eyes. I have attempted to" render[ ed] noisy and audible" a
life spent in caverns, constructed by a discourse designed to keep me from "being."
For three centuries now, traditional autobiography and biography have ...
reproduced and consolidated the West's notion of the self... generic clothes
have made the man ... Making men in specific ways, these practices
reinforce dominant ideologies, official histories and founding mythologies
of the subject. In effect, the white, male bourgeois, heterosexual human
being becomes representative man, the universal human subject ... the life
stories of many people whose history differs from that of the universal human
Tammone2
subject because of race, class and gender identifications go unwritten, or if
written, misread or unread (Smith 393-4).
What is never read cannot be misread; the obvious becomes the core of the dilemma I
faced with the presentation of this work. Writing beyond the conventions of the
dominant autobiographical paradigm, writing as Sidonie Smith states in her work Self
Subject and Resistance: Marginalities and Twentieth-Century Autobiographical
Practice, "beyond the ending" of the traditional autobiography requires negotiating
and maneuvering within a multiplicity of subject positions-daughter, victim, female
body, narrator, narratee, creator. The dilemma is to present such a work for all eyes,
not only the eyes of the academic community, to bring new awareness to an age old
crisis.
Within this work, I shift between what Smith labels "competing marginalities
and centerings" writing myself, my parents and grandparents, and fictional characters
that embody the shifting subjectivities of the "real characters."
However, the fact that this personal narrative, the autobiographical piece of the
work, follows some of the conventional representations of the paradigmatic
autobiography might be considered problematic.
The structure is largely chronological-purposefully echoing the voice of the
white, male domain of ''the old notion of an Enlightenment self---autonomous, rational
and unified ... " (393). The ruptures occur when my story /subject position is inserted
between the telling of other family members, positioning the rational and unified in
opposition to the chaos of the abuse.
Tammone3
Within the biographies of family members, I sought to historicize their
subjectivities by writing "identities in a constant state of flux," shattering the
foundations supporting ''the mythology of the unified subject" each member presented
to society (395).
Embedded within that process, is the creation of voice, choice of
episode and detailing of some circumstances that occurred without my personal,
physical witness. However, through family members' acts of storytelling, I heard and
then wrote the biographical narratives of women lacking heroic speech or deed. Smith,
in her research of personal narratives, explores the strategy recognized in feminist
biography, which is to "take the life of a woman who rebels against the feminine
subjectivity culturally provided to women and to provide her with a narrative that
affirms her extraordinary achievement" (394). At risk, according to Smith, is the
possibility of"dehistoricizing her as the exceptional woman in control of her own
destiny", echoing the ideology of the "normative bourgeois subjectivity that
marginalized women ... " Therefore the voices of my mother and grandmothers,
contribute to the story of the girl/ woman marginalized by the white, male prerogative,
and the voices of my brother, father and grandfathers contribute to the voice of the
boy/man initially empowered, then compromised by the same prerogative.
For example, the silence of my mother, seemingly a tacit consent to the sexual
abuse of her daughter, is a scenario commonly cast by the male prerogative to shift the
blame for the abuse from the male perpetrator to the silent wife/mother. By inserting
my mother's episode of the abuse suffered at the voice of her father, she avoids the
hypostatizing label of a marginalized victim and the stigma of complicit partner to the
Tammone4
dominant power structure that has silently sanctioned the perpetuation of the abuse of
the daughter for millennia.
Christine Froula in her work The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and
Literary History, recounts a speech by Virginia Woolf before the London/National
Society for Women's Service in 1931. Woolflikens the woman novelist of her age to a
fisherwoman who, when letting down the hook of her imagination into the world of her
submerged unconscious being, feels a violent jerk at the end ofher line and so yanks
her imagination back to the surface. Furious at the interruption, the imagination
castigates the fisherwoman for her interference. But the fisherwoman defends her
action because "Men would be shocked" to hear of women's bodies, repression,
violence "this very queer knowledge that you are ready to bring me ... " (Froula 622).
Unlike the fisherwoman of seventy-five years ago, the autobiographical
narrative bubbled, unbidden and unhooked to the surface. The fictional narratives as
well, were not creations I had to cast my line toward. What Froula refers to as the
"hysterical cultural script: the cultural script that dictates to males and females alike the
necessity of silencing women's speech when it threatens the father's power ... to
make[s] culture and history in his own image" has been undermined due to "the
breaking of women's forbidden stories into literary history ... " (623).
I did not have to go fishing.
The traditional structure of the autobiographical piece is fractured by the
insertion of the fiction, granting an equality of status to the fiction while undermining
the chronological structure representative of a universal human subject.
Tammone5
Melanie, the central figure in Legacy, acts throughout each story as a subliminal
force, creating pressure, then rupture and ultimately exposure. Unlike the
autobiographical piece where children are victims within a white male domain that
sanctions the intrusion of ego and/or penis, Melanie inhabits a space "through which to
insert/assert her own agency" (Smith 13).
Melanie appears to reside only in the margins of the "hegemonic space of a
white, male territory ofselfhood" (11): the kitchen; her dreamworld; mother; wife;
silenced daughter; victim. The shadows of a "dominating, authoritarian father [and] an
absent ... complicitous mother" work to create the essentialized victim, ... "a daughter
who, prohibited by her father from speaking about the abuse is unable to sort out her
contradictory feelings of love for her father and terror of him, of desire to end the abuse
and fear that if she speaks she will destroy the family structure that is her only security"
(Froula 623 ). Ultimately and ironically, it is her lack of speech brought upon by the
fracturing of her Self, which destroys the family, freeing her from the grip of white,
male territory. Her husband will not stay nor will she fight for him; the bonds of
motherhood, the role of wife will no longer hold her in and to traditional roles, a stage
upon which she was forced by the division and fragmenting of her victimized and
repressed body.
Christine Froula, in her work, The Daughter's Seduction, explores the "earliest
conversation between man and woman in our literary tradition, Helen and Priam's
dialogue in the lliad, book 3." She writes "the llliad suggests that women's silence in
Tammone6
culture is neither a natural nor an accidental phenomenon but a cultural achievement,
indeed, a constitutive accomplishment of male culture" (625).
The patriarchal culture which silenced and paralyzed Melanie, is shattered by
that silence and paralysis. Sedonie Smith quotes Francoise Lionner in her article
Who's Talking, Who's Talking Back-"If discourses of race as well as gender serve to
essentialize identities and hierarchize differences, then oppressed subjects can either
comply with these discursive pressures or maneuver through them in search of points
of resistance" (Smith 406). That point of resistance irrupts as the death of Melanie's
child, a point of resistance that avoids casting Melanie within "an innate category of
marginality" (Smith 16) wherein marginality becomes romanticized or worse, a mark
ofhaecceity.
In Dear Gail, Pat's silence and suicide mirrors Freud's dismissal of his
seduction theory as a result of condemnation from the Vienna psychiatric
establishment-"a scientific fairy tale" said Krafft-Ebing and "because he was unable
to come to terms with what he was the first to discover: the crucial role played in
neurosis by the abuse of paternal power" (Froula 627-8). Pat "discovers" the sexual
abuse of his sister in his home; the dominant culture's strict regulation of the code of
conduct governing father-daughter incest-don't ask, don't tell- prevails and so Pat is
marked.
Beau, "the good man" in An Exchange of Information, survives in the
"intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories
collapse into each other" (Smith 406). He is not a member of Melanie's nuclear family,
Tammone7
but does not escape becoming a victim of its oppression. He loses his son-and with
that loss, loses his footing within white male territory; the boundaries begin to blur.
His savior, Willa, is at once young/old, the bathing beauty/wise crone; he cannot place
her in rational, unified space. Manichean categories collapse as a result of their
dialogue; Beau's fragile Self fragments under the pressure of shifting subjectivities
induced by the death of his son and the presence and voice of the Other/Willa
Willa returns to a "room ofher own."
Gloria Anzaldua in her work Borderlands La Frontera, created tension,
unapologetic tension, by the positioning of her native speech parallel to English
without providing translation. I positioned the fiction between the "real" to create
tension as I become at once, object and agent, silenced yet writing. The ambiguity of
authorship blurs traditional borders. 1/Melanie/Pat/Beau:
biographer/autobiographer/omniscient narrator:
1/brother/Father/mother/grandmother/grandfather: the interplay of subjectivities resists
categorization and traditional labels of duality, giving birth to this weave of murky
contradictions residing in my physical, psychological and sexual borderlands.
Tammone8
"You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go" (Nabakov, Lolita).
Tammone9
Works Cited
Froula, Christine. "The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History."
Signs. Vol11. No.4 (Summer, 1986), pp. 621-644.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native. Other. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Smith, Sedonie. "Self, Subject and Resistance: Marginalities and Twentieth-Century
Autobiographical Practice." Tulsa Studies in Women 's Literature, Vol 9, No. 1,
Women Writing Autobiography. (Spring, 1990), pp. 11-24.
Smith, Sedonie. "Review: Who's Talking/Who's Talking Back? The Subject of
Personal Narrative." Signs, Vol18, No
Tammone 10
Prologue
Freud dressed
the dragonin silk
he spun
silver tonguedHe dulled
its fangs
with a fresh
false file-Sweetened
brimstone breath
with false
envySpoonfed eternal
truth
Seared-in
small soul
Slit dreams.
He stilled
the foamWhite rage of
rouge rivers
bearing
soft screams
the deaf
enjoy-He
would not
slay the
dragon.
She squinted up into the bright sunlight. Balmy, thick spring breezes caused the
hedge leaning against the white picket fence to stir and bounce. Her white t-shirt
sagged in brilliant contrast against the elastic waistband of red cotton shorts. Two
kittens, swatting at invisible gnats sent spiraling into the air from the carpet of grass
Tarnmone 11
disturbed by their antics, played under a swing set. The kittens came as a result of a
promise to her father and mother to be a good girl; they were solace after the death of
Lucy, a black and white pet rat. Her brother killed Lucy in a fit of rage one day, tearing
her from the cage, flinging her down to the concrete garage floor but sparing
Templeton, his own rat and Lucy's husband. Before Lucy's death, three litters of
naked pink grub-like creatures were born. Offspring with lives that went no farther than
the hole dug by the children's father in moist, dark soil hidden beneath the hedge.
Surveying her backyard kingdom, the child stood between the v-shaped bars of
a jungle gym watching colorful spots dance before her eyes in front of the blue
backdrop of the sky. She felt rhythm in the air. Her lithe brown frame pumped to it.
The spots before her eyes danced to it; her house, square and off-white, with a cracked
cement porch stair leading to the back door of the kitchen, seemed to bob up and down
to it. The Tide-clean curtains swayed to join in the fun; a butterfly vanished between
the folds. A symphony of spring air swirled and the red cotton shorts billowed in
response over tanned sturdy thighs. The shine of her chin-length brown hair captured
geometric patches of light that flashed off and on with each toss of her head.
The bangs, cut high and inexpertly, formed a slightly crooked frame for
deep-set green eyes, a round nose and full mouth displaying a gap where two bottom
teeth used to be. Her hands, chubby yet child-strong, gripped the metal bars of the
jungle gym as she responded to the rhythms of the day.
Then, shutting her eyes against the light, her right hand's index fmger began
crooking ... up and down, up and down, up and down. Her finger kept time as her right
Tammone 12
hand, a passenger of that finger's determination, let go of the bar to find just the right
place. Slow and easy. A few quick turns on the spot behind her right ear. Two inches
northeast. Slowly. Again. The selected strands wound in unison around her finger.
That fmger felt the squeeze from the hug of the shortening hairs. She felt the purple her
fmger was turning. She pulled. With one, quick (delightful) smooth-wrenching tug,
the roots let go and gave way. For her and to her. After one close look at the white tips
of the roots, she released the hairs into the thick breeze. Smiling, watching hair unravel
until her finger was empty-squinting up-as the hair danced in its sky-blue ballroom,
she felt for more and the pleasure began again. Mesmerized by the dancers. Many,
many more twists of her finger until the moment she heard the car's motor die. The
creak-whump of the car door closing. "Mommy!" she called. "Mommy-look.
Daddy's home." And she pointed with that fmger still wrapped in her hair.
Jacqueline
That day he came home in the rain. She watched him through a small
rectangular window, a decorative colored pane set to the right of the front door.
Bounding from the driveway. Jumping the small ragged hedge to land on the uneven
pavers. Leaping up the front stoop with a smile at the comer of his lips, his coat
flapping around his knees. Most people did not smile in the rain. His hat grazed the
crease at the comer of his left eye. He never carried an umbrella. It wouldn't suit him,
she thought. The air trapped underneath too somber. The front door flew open; the old
Tammone 13
screen door groused. He stood dripping on the mat, stamping and shaking like a
shaggy dog. Drops of water and fresh air fell around him. He smiled at his daughter.
"There's a rainbow over Dad's head!" Jacqueline's mother, standing in the
kitchen over her bowls of flour and sugar, butter and eggs, glanced over her shoulder.
Her lips pursed, her brow knit.
"It was there. He's all Irish. So it can happen." Her mother needed to know so
she could look happier and talk to Dad when he came home. Did she ever listen?
My mother, Jacqueline, had small experience with other lives. Her parents,
Jack and Roberta worried when she left the house, but on certain occasions she was
allowed to spend time with a girl friend from school whose parents were willing to pick
her up and bring her home. In her girlfriend's home, Jacqueline delighted in the quick
embraces and kisses, the exchange of news and especially the laughter that came in the
door each day with her friend's father. Her own mother and father exchanged silence
or the language of utility. "Did you pick up the eggs? Pay the gas bill?"
I have seen a few photographs of my grandfather Jack at that age. Almost six
feet tall with small blue eyes twinkling through the grainy finish of the pictures, the
beginnings of a double chin, his thinning graying hair neatly swept back from his
forehead, each hair visible in its own sheath of Brill Creme. His lips, nicely shaped
with some flesh to them. In those pictures, he always wore a bow tie, a white shirt, the
outline of his pressed undershirt barely visible. His cheeks revealed the beginnings of
the thickness that would become jowls in his seventies, but in his forties, reflected a
prosperity he would never realize.
Tammone 14
His daughter, my mother Jacqueline, he called "Jackson," his playful name for
her. One rainy Oregon afternoon he told her about his affair with a woman from his
office. My mother was fifteen years old. She told me he took her downstairs to the
basement where her father's white work shirts hung from coat hangers; towels waiting
for Roberta's steam iron lay bundled in comers. The smell of bleach and disinfectant
mixed with the smell of the furnace. The desk her father used to write out the bills,
catch up on paperwork or support the weight of his world when he sat there with his
head in his hands, were all locked into the memory.
She told me about it one day when I was eighteen, maybe nineteen.
"He said he was in love with a secretary in his office. I don't know how much I
remember hearing after that. I know he held onto my hands; he looked up at me from
his desk chair and I stood in front of him. Frozen. But I remember so clearly. He
wanted me to be happy for him! Excited for him. As if we were supposed to share this
special moment of triumph together. And I hated him! Hated him for telling me.
How could he have thought for one minute I would understand and accept what he was
telling me? I don't remember what I said or did exactly, except cry and maybe I did say
I hated him because I remember him saying, 'Don't. I'll end it. It's over now. I'm
sorry.' I think he did end it; he told me he did and we never talked about it again. But
I never looked at him the same way again. Nothing ever sounded the same. I didn't like
being home much any more after that"
I wonder. Was he expecting her understanding? Her acceptance. Approval.
Complicity? Perhaps anticipating a co-conspirator. Support for the cause.
Tammone 15
She was a sheltered beautiful bookwonn forced to be his most unwilling
partner in crime, no longer his daughter. She told me she fell down the rabbit hole that
day. Up was down. Wrong was right. Home was ... gone. Her father a lover of another
woman, a sexual being. A traitor.
Jack and Roberta
Jack Greene's childhood had been grey and hard. His own father, a man no one
else in the family would know, brought the family over from Ireland during the fourth
or fifth potato famine. My grandfather didn't talk about those days to us, but my
mother told me she could tell from the little he revealed that his father had been a
humorless, drinking man. A brutal man married to a thin hard woman with the life
washed out of her.
My grandfather Jack ran away when he turned fifteen. "Financially,
emotionally and spiritually," he later told my mother, "it was the smart move. The only
move." Because the views of northern Manitoba, bleak, flat, monotonous as they were,
did not compare in misery to the daily presentation of his mother and sister. He could
no longer stand to look at them. Ground down by the brutality of the land and his father,
they became as so much dust-irritants in his eyes. "May God have mercy on my
soul," Jack remembered his father groaning one day, standing in the doorway of the
hovel they occupied, "I must be bein' punished for me past misdeeds and misbegotten
ways, old woman. The only work to be had was diggin' out the cellar of a Protestant
church!"
Tammone 16
Jack's father was a desperate man with a family and no education, blessed with
little imagination and a capacity for large quantities of cheap ale. It was a toxic brew,
a smooth poison flowing unimpeded through the bleak streets of their neighborhood.
Jack raged in the face of the frequent beatings and in the face of the cowed compliance
of his mother and sister.
He ran before the taint could take fast root. He turned his back with forever in
mind, nurturing no visions of returning with salvation in his pockets.
But he took with him the stories of leprechauns, pots of gold, fairies and kings.
He became a master storyteller with a gift for voices.
My mother never met these grandparents nor any relatives from her father's
side. My grandfather turned his back on them all when he ran away to the United States
at fifteen.
When he married my grandmother Roberta, it was because she would have him
and she needed to leave home. Her father died while only in his forties in an
automobile accident, speeding down a hill with a bit more than a drop in him. A
rakishly handsome man with a handlebar mustache, he left little behind for a large
family. It would be best for Roberta to marry. To leave. One less mouth.
Highly skilled in everything domestic, in this century she would have been
encouraged to train as a chef or a clothing designer. At the turn of the last century, with
little money and little vision behind her, she married my grandfather. Even I could see
when I visited as a child, theirs was a marriage built upon a foundation of toleration. I
hope they had their moments of joy. I hope they had some fun before the Depression.
Tammone 17
Before the babies. Before his own drinking. I found out later that he too used to drink
heavily. He was never physical when he was drunk, but his tongue twisted and spat,
acting as a lethal weapon against his wife. He stopped drinking when she told him she
would leave with the children if he didn't stop. He never missed work and he never
missed a beat. Just stopped. And when his daughter told him to stop the affair, he said
he would. She believes he did.
I do know that he served some time in the army during the First World War,
where he learned to type, evidently picking it up so quickly that he was spared a trip to
North Africa with the rest of his unit. He was spared death as well, hearing soon after
their deployment that every last man had been killed. His typing skills saved him
another time, allowing him to keep his job with Union Oil during the Depression.
Employed at a lower-level sales position, he could also do a stenographer's work saving
the company a few dollars.
A
fa~ade
of material comfort, woven by my grandparents, bestowed upon my
mother an air of gentility which allowed her to take a place among wealthier daughters,
her classmates, at a private school. But it was a gossamer work. Roberta was a gifted
seamstress and cook. She made my grandfather's suits and shirts, designed and sewed
my mother's wardrobe, made her own mayonnaise and conjured roasts, cakes, cookies
and pies unsurpassed, to my taste, to this day. She had time for little else so her
daughter, my mother, a dark-haired, almost voluptuous girl and voracious reader, had
little time for her. Jacqueline talked to her father, the Irish immigrant and runaway-a
man with quick wit and a way with words.
Tammone 18
Perhaps he loved my grandmother when he met her. Neither spoke to
my mother of such things though she remembers little, if any joy between them. Their
greetings were terse and perfunctory though he was a lively storyteller for his two
children, my mother and her older brother, Bobby. He told us, his grandchildren, the
same stories. But I but do not recall seeing much interaction between him and my
grandmother. I remember all this as I struggle to understand why he would tell my
mother, a fifteen year old girl, about his love-lust for another woman. My mother
skipped two grades of elementary school and was seventeen when she graduated from
high school. Sheltered, spoiled and beautiful. Naive~ lonely and now angry in her own
home. That was the suitcase she packed for college.
Do I direct my anger at the third or fourth Irish potato famine? The poverty?
The alcohol that runs sluggishly, like determined mercury through most branches of the
family tree. All of it and a woman's place. The Depression. A man with too much to
offer in too small a space. All of it made my mother. The outcome of a recipe thickened
or diluted without much consultation.
She was seventeen when she met my father at a small, private college in
Washington. She had bolted like a skittish colt. This young girl thinking that babies
were made when a man and a woman slept naked next to each other while little black
comma-shaped specks leapt from his body, skittered across the bed sheets and wormed
their way into the woman. This was the girl-woman who met my father on the steps of
that college in Washington. He was four years older and his friends were the
Tarnmone 19
boys-now-men returning :from WWII, anxious to cash in on the GI bill. Horny, hungry
and handsome. Light years ahead of her game.
When Johnny came marching home, my father joined their ranks. He had not
gone to war. His father and grandfather knew some influential people who tugged some
influential strings, allowing him to attend college without the lingering sting and blast
of war memories scarring the souls of his :friends.
**
Perhaps-that was why I was only taken to the beauty parlor and not a therapist
or psychiatrist after pulling out enough hair that spring day to form a crater the size and
shape of a silver dollar pancake. I remember seeing it in the mirror. I spun the chair in
the beauty parlor, around and around, watching the patch flash by in three separate
mirrors. A few limp strands splayed across the nubbly surface; and I thought that it
looked just like the underside of a piece of orange peel. Creamy. Pithy. My mother
told the lady to give me a permanent. A permanent at six. When nothing should be
permanent.
Perhaps-much as my mother ran :from her father's house and to a college a
state away at the age of seventeen and to a young husband's arms at nineteen. Perhaps
she ran again. Not from the house, not from her husband, but :from me, her six year old
daughter, a living portrait of the betrayals around every bend in her Man's world.
Tammone20
Perhaps-she ran from his house
To her young husband's arms
Perhaps-from his arms
No--from me andEvery bend
In herMan's World
Leaving me
SomewhereInbetween
One bend.
and
the next.
**
I have always sought out animals, finding solace in their sounds and smells.
After the death Lucy, I still had my calico cat.
There was a spot in our backyard behind the jungle gym, a spot hidden by the
dense hedges next to the fence backing up to the neighbor's yard. I was at peace there,
well-hidden and the neighbor's dogs stuck their long, wet noses under the fence for me
to pet. She raised Dachshunds; their noses did not have to travel far to accommodate
my searching hand. Our meeting had become something of a ritual and had gone on
long enough to create a smooth hollow under the fence, dug by eager noses looking for
small comfort. Their cold black snouts poked into my hand and never failed to quiet
my rage--after sessions with my father or when my brother tormented me--it was as if
with each little inhalation, their noses took in slices of the storm howling inside me,
allowing me to begin breathing in sync with the breezes instead of shivering and
gulping at the air-trying to drown me.
Tammone21
I had to take a note to my first grade teacher the day after my permanent. The
curls barely covered the crater on my head. My mother said the note was to tell the
teacher that I pulled my hair out and to keep an eye on me. I waited until school was
over to deliver that note. I gave it to her, turned and ran off down the hallway as fast as
I could.
Soon after the delivery of the note, I saw my father walking toward me across
the playground of my elementary school. He looked very small in the distance but I
saw him gesturing and waving. I know he didn't belong there. I ran over and saw that
he had parked his car behind a slight rise making it nearly invisible from the
playground. I remember sitting in the passenger seat. My feet stuck out in front of me.
My focal points. He said I had to go to an office the next day and talk to some men.
These men would ask me about Sylvia and about taking our clothes off. He told me
what I should say. I wanted to go back to my school.
"If you tell them what happened with Sylvia, you can't stay with Mommy
anymore. She'llleave and you'll stay with me. Did you hear me? Your mother will
leave."
The office was brown; the men's suits and hair-brown and the chair I sat in
with my feet stuck out in front of me, brown. I stared at my feet when I answered their
questions. "I don't know why we did it. We just did." I faced an enormous square desk.
The men took turns asking me questions. I think the man behind the desk wore a robe;
I'm not sure now. The brown suits took turns asking me questions about the night I
went to the movies with Sylvia. I noticed that the chair I sat in was so large my feet
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barely reached the edge. I watched my feet.
''So," one of the brown suits said, "you do remember taking your clothes off but
you don't remember why? Is that it?"
I kept watching my feet as I answered. "We were playing and then we thought it
would be funny to run around with our clothes off."
"What did your daddy do when he saw you girls had your clothes off?
"He told us to get dressed and get ready to see the movie and we did. " I don't
remember raising my eyes.
"Did your father ever take off his clothes?" asked the man behind the desk. He
had grey hair that swirled back from the front in a wave, reminding me of our trips to
the coast. I would bet my brother that I would see the ocean first. The smells were the
strongest memory--of salt and fish and shells drying out on the porch of the beach
house. It was the only time I could stand touching my father, when we would walk into
the waves and he would lift us high with an "Up we go!" when the waves threatened to
swallow, toss and turn us under the green water.
''No. He never did that. Just me and Sylvia. Because we thought it was fun."
I talked to no one else that day. No counselors. No psychologists.
I had been told over and over not to talk to strangers, not to take candy from
men in cars. But nobody had told me not to give my father a blow job when he said I
must.
My father got away with it that time and was smart enough after that to involve
no other children--that I know of-except his own.
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The Mafia would applaudMe
On the stand.
Six years old
I beatThe Machine.
Legacy
Melanie stood at the sink slicing carrots. The baby Clare sat in a high chair,
behind her, gulping spoonfuls of strained peaches poked into her mouth at carefully
timed intervals. One bite. Three slices. Every piece, one-eighth of an inch in width.
Before quartering the slices, she pressed the blade lightly into each one at cross angles
to create a template. Satisfied-she pressed with the heel of her palm against each
delicate imprint. Finished. She corralled the pieces with the blunt edge of the knife and
swept them into the colander for a final rinse. Out of the comer of her eye, Melanie
spied an errant, unquartered slice flipping into the air. She let it go.
She had the dream again last night. It always began with her on the sidewalk.
In a town like Disneyland's Main Street USA. Always too much white. A white that
wouldn't welcome. Milky, runny storefronts-signs with words she couldn't readquivering, shimmering along the sidewalk giving way like a sponge beneath her feet.
She walked. The idling from a car's engine swelled from behind. Grew louder with
each one of her steps. Then came the feeling and the smell-heavy and
sour-troublesome to describe. This dream smell. The feeling she could describe. It
fell on her. Like the blanket her brother used when they were children. To trap her.
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Leaving her no room to move. No air to breathe. Then the liquid came. A thick pale
surge down the tilted street. A sluggish flow that moved with purpose-a sense of
direction-honed to sniff the spongy street for her. The rumbling grew louder. The
street felt spongier. And the town tilted a little more, to the left a little more. Swells of
white lava rose and spun towards her. Swirled and mounted the curb. If it touched her,
she'd die.
Then the dream air descended, coating her limbs like slow setting gelatin.
Melanie glanced at the kitchen clock, a silly piece her husband picked up at a
garage sale, shaped like a cat, its eyes rocked back and forth in sync with the ticking
and the swish of its striped, plastic tail. Clare would sit, sometimes for minutes at a
time, entranced with the motion of that tail, lifting her chubby hand, her fmgers splayed,
reaching up, longing to touch. He should be home soon. Most days, Jared drove to the
beach for a surf after work. Sometimes Melanie asked if he caught any waves. Most
days he would answer, "I always get my share."
When he came home, he would creep up behind her, breathing through his
mouth, to cup her round bottom or slip his hand between her thighs.
"Cantaloupe will work with dinner." She spoke out loud, rolling the melon
towards her.
The thought that she struggled to fill her days while Jared was filled with his,
bounced, like an echo off the lemon yellow walls of the kitchen.
Before the birth of Clare, Melanie drove three miles for two classes at the local
community college. Psychology 150 and Poli Sci 100. She dropped out three units shy
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of the munber she needed to transfer to the state university. She thought about going
back. But rarely spoke of it. If Jared asked, her frustration fused with her anger. He
would begin to fade. Lose a dimension. An actor on a flickering screen.
Finding a sitter, catalogues, registration, parking, books. Like fireflies released
from a jar, her thoughts would spark, criss-cross and scatter.
Routine was a comfort.
Jared didn't or wouldn't understand.
"Every night I come home and you're vacuuming. This house isn't very big. I
don't think it gets that dirty in one day. Why don't you play with Clare or read to
her ... "
He'd wave his hands in the air, "or something!"
"I did." She'd answer him. ~'I try. But she's too little. She grabs the book or
bats it away. She cries." Those conversations and Clare's crying. The vastness of the
supermarket parking lot. The mail. Vacuuming the comers, pushing and pulling,
pushing and pulling. Scraping and sucking out the dirt. It didn't hurt the carpet. And
how many times had she told him. She hated it when he slipped up from behind to
touch her that way.
"But you're my wife."
Clare whimpered.
Tired of her confinement in the high chair, she pressed her pudgy hands against
the tray, her face growing pinker with each push. Her back arched. It was clear she was
gearing up for a mighty wail. Melanie sighed.
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She set the knife on the cutting board, rested the cantaloupe against the flour
canister to keep it from rolling onto the floor, and wiped her hands on the apron with
the scalloped edge, the one her mother gave her last Easter. Clare's face and hands
were filthy. The yellow ducklings waddling across the front of her jumper smeared
with a palette of pureed peaches and mashed peas. The same stuff formed a crust in the
wispy curls around her ears.
"It seems like the only thing I do is wipe your hands and face."
Washcloth in hand, she snatched the baby's fingers between the folds and
rubbed, back and forth, back and forth with a vigorous motion before applying the
same force to the comers of the baby's puckered lips. Before Clare could release her
pent up squeal, she was pulled from the chair and plopped down on the kitchen floor.
Her eyes widened; she looked ready to make some noise, but instead, picked up a
wooden spoon to whack the aluminum pots Melanie kept on the floor as a permanent
diversionary tactic.
Melanie chose a large metal spoon.
She began scooping out the seeds from the center of the cantaloupe. There was
something about the sound of the metal against the flesh of the melon. Dig and scrape.
Shovel. Every seed, every fleshy string clinging to the center had to be scraped clean
and into the wastebasket under the sink.
"Ow!" The wooden spoon missed its target, landing with smarting precision
against Melanie's right ankle. She grabbed the spoon. Rapped the baby's chubby hand.
"There. See how you like it."
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Clare's bottom lip quivered; she scowled and kicked the wooden spoon with
her pink stocking foot. Any further display of outrage was cut short by the sight of
Russell, their portly orange tabby, strolling into the family room. He leapt onto the
coffee table stretched out and rolled over. He waved his paws at the dust motes swirling
in a ray of sunshine splayed across the table's smooth, highly polished surface. His tail
twitching, darting and dangling over the table's edge.
Had she finished with the cantaloupe? No. There was the other half-though
they may not need that much. She'd clean it anyway.
As she worked, she watched the birds.
One of the reasons they bought this house was Melanie's insistence on a bay
window, and the small one behind the kitchen sink, she'd said, was perfect. Set on the
wide sill and dusted everyday were her favorite knick knacks and keepsakes. Among
them a miniature cup and saucer-the only surviving pieces from her old willowware
tea set- her grandmother's miniature sculpture of a Scottie, and a picture of herself as
a baby in a tarnished silver frame, inset with the time and date of her birth. Jared had
asked about housing his shot glass collection in the comers.
"You'll have plenty of room for all that other stuff. I only want the comers."
Giving in was something Melanie knew, but not this time.
"No shot glasses. And besides, there's no theme to them. Look. That one's
from the Irish pub around the comer. And that one," she said, jabbing her finger at a
glass sporting a topless hula dancer with "Kamanawannalei U" embossed underneath,
"is from your trip to Hawaii. This one's from your father's VFW hall and ... no!" Her
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eyes were tight at the comers, her hands balled to fists at her sides. "They can 't be
here." Jared shook his head and sucked at his bottom lip.
"Theme. Now I need a
theme.''
A bird had built her nest in the shrub directly outside the bay window. Tucked
and wedged deep inside the shiny leaves, it was close enough for Melanie to watch.
The fuzzy necks of the three nestlings looked stretched to their limits. The tiny beaks
vibrated in anticipation of their feasting. Melanie watched as the mother bird wriggled
her way through the leaves and onto the nest. She'd never seen them feed before.
Mesmerized, she put her spoon down and stared.
Three babies. The thought raised an involuntary shudder.
The mother bird dove gently, beak-first, into the mouth of one anxious chick,
planting a regurgitated roly-poly or worm into the scrawny throat that swelled like a
tiny balloon to accept the offering. "No muss, no fuss and she's gone most of the day."
Melanie arranged the slices of cantaloupe in a porcelain bowl, the rim decorated
with a circle of red grapes. Another gift from her mother. Christmas, she remembered.
That Christmas-the year she got the porcelain bowl--that was the Christmas
her father died. Or rather, the Christmas they heard he had died. After everyone sat
down, her mother came to the table. Melanie and Jared-Clare wasn't born yet-her
sister Denise and her brother Pat, his wife Gail, and their son, Aaron.
She hesitated before sitting down, smoothed the pleats in her skirt, then set a
piece of paper, an official looking piece of paper, next to her plate.
Melanie's memory of the food was vivid. Like a still life painting. Perhaps
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because her mother stared at the table for what seemed minutes, as if taking inventory,
before speaking. Roast beef, a slick layer of fat reflecting the light from the antique
chandelier. Sweet potatoes capped with snowy white marshmallows, spinach and a
mound of mashed potatoes; the butter had melted and pooled in the comers of the
serving dish.
"Your father's dead." It was her news. Not a jolting shock because he had left
them long ago. It had been maybe ten years.
"I'm only telling you now because I've got you altogether. That doesn't
happen much anymore."
When he left them, those many years ago, no one had been really sorry to see
him leave.
Yet his spirit continued to flourish in the misery he'd spread so equitably
over the years.
That Christmas, after their mother pronounced him dead, Melanie remembered,
Pat was the first to speak.
"Well, you have to admit, he went out in a big way." Fire crews had
discovered his body, singed and blistered among the ruins of a burnt-out building, the
remains of a run-down complex that featured dingy studios and efficiency units. In
Spokane. The police report, the one her mother clutched, had arrived Christmas Eve by
registered mail. In the box under "Cause of Death," was the word "Homicide" written
boldly with an upward left-leaning slant.
"Somebody set that fire." Pat lifted his eyebrows. "Evidently-we weren't the
only ones who knew him well."
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Her mother kept the report next to her. While eating, she would from time to
time, pat the document as if to make sure it wasn't going to burst into flames. Melanie
remembered her mother mentioning between bites that the social security benefits
would be a "blessing."
Mother bird must have flown away. Melanie hadn't seen her leave. What else
were they having for dinner? She took lamb chops out of the refrigerator; they would
be at room temperature when Jared threw them on the grill.
Her father had been a quiet, almost severely quiet man. Conservative in his
dress and speech, he rarely kissed his wife in their children's' presence. He was stiff in
his dealings with all members of his family.
The town respected the insurance firm where he worked. His no-nonsense
approach, his no dilly-dallying with claims and straight forward talk gained him an
equal respect. His suit jacket was always buttoned. His ties were chosen to match.
Melanie couldn't remember a time when her father played with his children, but he did
volunteer as an assistant Little League coach after Pat was too old to play. Sometimes
he called Melanie "Mother's Little Helper."
He left her mother for another woman. With two daughters. That woman,
soon after, left her father. Then he left the town. She hadn't cared to know the details.
She never saw him again.
Folding her arms, pulling herself in tight. Clenching her legs and buttocks. Why
was she thinking about all this? Whenever she did, he came back. Always behind her,
breathing through his mouth. Tongue pressed against his bottom teeth.
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She turned her head and stared at the swirls in the dark wood paneling. She
played connect the dots with the stains in the wood. She heard the rustle of blankets in
the next room; her mother turned over in her sleep. When it stopped, she slept and
found the dream. Always faithful.
"She was so close! In the next room. I don't ... why didn't she do something?
How could she not hear?''
After a pat on the arm, a squeeze of his shoulder, or a nod of the head, those
who had come to mourn melted away-slowly at first, then more quickly, backing
away-fading into the background like images on a strip of time-lapse photography,
leaving him alone, his head in his hands, sitting with his back to the tiny casket, white
and gold, nestled among a bower of rosebuds.
She lay under a diminutive glass dome, her cheeks lightly rouged, her lips dyed
a shade darker to disguise a stain of lingering blue. No wisps of hair escaped. The
dress she wore an unwelcome white with red velvet trim on the collar. It would have
been her First Christmas dress.
After, Jared asked her again. "Why didn't you do something?" And she
repeated her answer. The same one. Again. And again. Still he gripped her shoulders,
squeezed and dug his nails in deep, shook her until she thought her neck would snap.
"I couldn't move."
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The tombstone, adorned with one angel, bore only her name. As did a label
affixed to a small plastic bag stored inside the drawer of a metal filing cabinet. Tucked
inside the bag was one slice of a carrot. Almost one-eighth of an inch in width.
**
If authorities had wanted to look for proof they would have found none. When
I read accounts of people accused of child sexual abuse, physical evidence is often cited
as a reason why charges have been dropped. That and the persistent fallacy alive and
perpetuated in our society that children are liars and make up these incidents when in
reality, the lying is more commonly committed to protect the abuser, and not because
of some perverted attachment and/or desire for the abuse to continue.
My father was not an unappealing man physically, but I knew too much
of him and he became a caricature of a man, a cartoon figure. He had a dark
complexion with a distinct reddish cast, setting off his most prominent feature-a
pronounced widow's peak-a dark 'V' of coarse and curly, almost black hair pointing
the rest of his face. His eyes, deep-set and green under full dark brows fit his
heart-shaped face as did his nose, slightly hooked and hovering over slim lips. His
chest and waist were broad together to the hips, there being no distinct indentations to
separate the three sections-unlike the bugs I collected in jars with their pinched-off
body parts neatly divided-but like some of these bugs, his legs were slightly bowed,
looking not quite the right size to support his dimensions and weight. He wore suits to
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work and sometimes a hat. His beard grew quickly so his five o'clock shadow was
rough, smudged when he came home.
He would call for my mother, call her by a nickname. Grebe. A pet
name he had given her before they married. A flock of birds had landed near the spot of
one of their beach picnics. The birds' funny quirky motions, caused by partly webbed
feet and legs set far back on plump oval bodies, with faces sporting beaks that
resembled small cones, struck my father as humorous. They were grebes and its
closeness to the sound of my mother's maiden name--Greene-caused the name to
stick. But my mother is not birdlike in her movements; she does not hunt and peck or
flutter about. Her motion is deliberately smooth, born of a desire to continually rise in
her and others' estimation.
She is not tall, barely 5' 4". When I was a child, she wore
her dark, glossy hair cut short, in the Italian movie-star style popular in the 1950's.
And she was pretty. Deep-set blue eyes, creamy skin, with a soft seductive front and
firm, swaying back. I can see my parents nuzzling, kissing and hugging.
But he wasn't a real father. Real fathers kiss their children. Goodnight.
**
It was only a few days after my interrogation; I heard Rufus and Blackie, my
dachshund friends. But their usual yip of a bark had been replaced by the sounds of
snarling and choking as though lather filled their throats. I sprinted towards the hollow
under the hedge, stopping in my tracks at the sound of a piercing, thin yowl.
"Back away! Rufus! Blackie! Back away!" Our neighbor, a waddling-round
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jowly woman with large raised moles on her tomato red face was flapping a dishtowel
at the dogs, kicking them aside as she waded into the midst of their frenzy. When the
dogs were quiet, I saw her stoop--her knees creaked-and brush away dirt. I heard the
latch of the gate being lifted. I never knew this was a gate, so overgrown with foliage
and streaked with dirt. The neighbor grunted as she pushed against the rotting boards.
My mother was already there.
" ... so sorry. I guess the cat thought it was safe, not seeing the dogs right off.
She musta crawled under the fence. Used that little holla' in the dirt here." When she
pointed, doughy fat swayed under her arm.
My mother knelt in front of a patch of calico-orange and white. Her hands went
to her face and her shoulders bent slightly forward as she swayed back and forth like
the daisies I liked to watch on a breezy day. I walked a little closer and saw the fur of
my cat, stretched out and sunk into the soft green lawn. Her right hind leg was pulled
out to the side at a grotesque angle. The neighbor had brought over and laid down both
the cat and the mangled limb. Then, because she possessed a sense of what a child
could take in, she arranged the leg under my cat in an attempt to create an impression of
wholeness. Most of the blood had been wiped away by the faded grey dishcloth she
held in her hand. I knew my cat was dead; yet my grief didn't take hold. It was the
sight of my mother, rocking and swaying, covering her eyes with her tear-dampened
hands that held my emotions hostage. I had never seen her so upset. I had never seen
her tears. For the slightest of seconds. I wished. I was the cat.
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My Father
As a team, my great-grandparents arrived at the scene to cover this latest
transgression of their grandson's. My great-grandmother had been the force behind the
formation of the scheme; her husband, the creator. Geraldine and Charles, their
grandson's parents, merely the audience.
This time, the boy had committed a misdeed far more serious than the previous
"scrapes" as his indiscretions had been labeled over the years. Shame on one side,
sacrifice and distance on the other had taken care of "that problem" over two summers
ago. However, the boy had now trespassed and transgressed so openly. The liquor
store was in the center of a town boasting two main streets running almost parallel to
each other. These were strolling streets in the 1940's; really the only place to go after a
day riding herd on thousands of acres of apples and pears. Owners, brokers, retailers
and some of the laborers walked the streets before dark on a summer evening, some
with their families. The town was somewhat isolated, parked almost squarely in the
middle of the state. Seattle lay over 200 miles to the north west. Perhaps people in the
small orchard town, recognizing their solitude in the center, felt a pull towards their
modest town streets of an evening to share words and thoughts with others in the
community. Whatever the force, the family knew the force and knew it would draw
people's minds towards the circumstances of the robbery.
The owner had caught the boy, Charles-my future father, named after his
father-and his two friends. Unfortunately for Charles, he was the first one seen,
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hoisting a case of beer out to his accomplices through the shattered back window of the
small store. The owner had returned late in the evening to collect his ledger, meaning
to clear up some accounts. He hadn't heard the smash of the window, but he saw the
bobbing light of the flashlights. And he heard the muffled, high-pitched laughter. He
yelled out loud before thinking that might not be the smartest tactic. He undoubtedly
reacted as many other merchants in town, with surprise and interest rather than fear or
caution, break-ins being as common in the area as a bevy of belly dancers making their
way down the main street on a peaceful summer's evening.
"Now what in all that blazes is going on here?''
Charles did not run away. His friends did. He stood, holding the case, the
mischievous grin on his face deadened by a reptilian slant to the eyes.
"Guess you got me." That was all he said. He put the case down and walked
straight toward him. Never losing that grin. Never widening his gaze.
"See you in the funny papers." And Charles put his hands in his pockets and
strolled by the middle-aged merchant, still frozen in a state of high interest.
I know my grandparents and my grandparents put their heads together to save
my father. I heard the story from my mother.
"There is a decent way to fix this." My great-grandmother made
pronouncements. Even in her eighties when I remember her. She would have been
really something in her sixties. She was a powerful suggester, and I am sure for this
confrontation her body language suggested a full-frontal assault.
"It might be time for the boy to fix things himself," said Charles, her son, my
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grandfather and father of the Charles now the topic of discussion. His eyes would
hover for an instant in front of his mother's gaze before turning aside to stare at a
framed relative frowning down from the wall.
"Fix things himself. Certainly. I think he has already fixed things. We have too
many friends, too many business acquaintances in this town and I, for one, do not feel
the need for a round of explanations. What the boy did was not right. Certainly not
right. But it was not the worst to be done either."
"Well, for heaven's sake. Of course it wasn't," broke in Geraldine. ''No one
knows what the worst thing ever done was and we know it doesn't compare to breaking
into the liquor mart. But that doesn't change the fact that he did it, got caught doing it
and the owner needs to report it. We're fortunate he came here first and we're even
more fortunate we talked him into waiting until morning to report it. I don't see how
we're going to avoid the trouble. I really don't."
She locked eyes with her mother-in-law.
"And while you have been doing this wondering Geri, Henry and I have been
doing some thinking. Tell them what will work, Henry."
The following morning, the owner of the store arrived at my great-grandfather
Henry's fruit brokerage offices; anger had begun to take precedence over awe.
"Now Henry, you and I are friends and I don't want that to change, but you
know... you know it ain't now just a case of making good on the damages."
"I do know that. My son and I both know that the boy has to be punished and
we are aware of the difficulties you could encounter trying to keep this episode under
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wraps."
I can see my great-grandfather, stretching his tall frame out of the velvety
leather of his high-backed chair, wearing a warm smile of complicity. I imagine the
store owner's discomfort; its sources coming from several directions at once; I doubt he
was the sort of man to have worked them all out before walking into my
great-grandfather's offices. Anger, at the knowledge of the violations he suffered,
would have started out as the dominant emotion, having successfully nudged out
surprise and interest at first light. But now, in those offices, surrounded by the sheen of
polished wood-paneled walls, the spectacle of back-lit dust articles cavorting in the
rays that sliced through to the floor from the narrow window behind my
great-grandfather's oversized mahogany desk, he might feel as if he was on the wrong
side of an invisible partition of guilt. Shouldn't these people, this father and son, be
bobbing their heads and scuffing their thick-toed shoes at the Oriental carpet, reduced
to lowered eyes and gestures of defeat at the actions of their grandson and son? They
should be and were not. Why was he? Because they were part of this small town's big
shots, wearing just enough aloof, endowed with just enough intelligence and charm so
that most townsfolk courted their presence and opinions.
"...thought Mohammed Mustafa sounded like the foreign-sounding name we
were after.. .identify him as a drifter looking for orchard work. We think it sounds
pretty good." I can imagine the store owner looking like a child caught napping in
school as he listened to the drama hatching before his eyes.
"Go ahead and admit to the attempted robbery. Tell the police you caught the
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rascal in the act last night. The only change in detail comes with the identification.
After explaining how you came on the back of the shop that night, you tell how you saw
a man, a dark man with his hat pulled down around his ears and a big mustache. Say
you shouted out and the man turned and because you caught him, he put down the case
and ran by you. Then... " my great-grandfather stepped from behind his desk, his round
eyes popping and his hands held in front of him like cleavers.
"You say how you rushed after him but he was too fast and was gone,
lickety-split, into the night. Of course, now you being concerned with your property,
you dash over to the broken window. You climb in. You're real concerned now about
the damage and what could be missing."
My grandfather emerged from the comer of the room.
"You're looking up and down the shelves, up and down taking mental notes of
your inventory because everybody in town knows you know every bottle, every drop
that sits on those shelves without having to consult an inventory."
The man nodded vigorously with a hint of shy pride at the nuanced compliment.
"Then your foot slides against something, something on the floor and you look
to see what it is. You bend down, but you can't see because it's so dark. So you light a
match! That's when you see it."
"See what for God's sake?" Visibly agitated and engrossed with his imaginary
fmd, his eyes widened.
"A wallet. It's a wallet."
"What's in it? Money?"
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"No. "said my grandfather. "There's something much more important. There's
a card, just a faded, thin old card with a name." He paused for the effect his words
produced.
"Mohammed Mustafa. The foreigner, the dark man with the Arabian Nights
mustache. Gone into the night as mysteriously as he arrived."
(What must he have thought?)
"But I have no wallet and no card. The police would ask for those things. At
least." They had him.
"But I do have the wallet and the card. Right here." And my great-grandfather
picked up off the mahogany desk, a worn, decrepit piece of leather that on further
inspection turned out to be the remnants of a man's wallet. Inside was a small scrap of
dirty white paper.
"See here. Right here. Mohammed Mustafa's wallet. Doesn't matter where we
got it. Now take it. Because you're right. The police will want to see this."
He let his hand close over the leather pressed into his left hand. Feeling the bills
through the thin grain.
"You can tell how much we appreciate this. Why I was telling my wife just the
other day that I don't even remember when we didn't do business together."
Both father and son stretched out their hands. He slowly shook one. Then the
other.
The story made the papers and old ladies wondered over their bridge games and
backyard laundry if the Arab would come back and rob them while they slept in their
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beds.
**
By the time I came into the picture, was old enough to know my
great-grandparents, they were close to dying. But I remember his sparkling blue eyes,
enormous hands and long legs. And I remember her piercing brown eyes, black hats
with short veils and endless supply of golden animal-print dresses.
When we all went out to dinner, it was all my great-grandfather could do to
keep his wife civil. She treated the waitresses as she would servants, pointing and
gesturing. No please and no thank you. "Get me this or that" and "This water is warm.
Take it back!" I liked to watch and was too young to understand the mortification she
was causing my young mother.
Between my grandparents and great-grandparents, my father was a pet to be
spoiled and catered to. My grandparents were avid travelers. They loved parties.
Vibrant cogs in their social circles. My father was left with the help or with his
grandmother a great deal of the time. Perhaps they coddled and catered to make up for
the absences. And I think my grandmother continued to enjoy her gin martinis even
when she was pregnant with my father.
Triple threat smart boy
So charming, small conscience boy
Take what you see boy
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There had been another scandal, one which precipitated the family's move from
Oak Park, Illinois to the orchards of Washington, eventually placing my father in the
liquor mart's back alley. My mother spoke about it briefly one afternoon when she
struggled to explain why my father might be the way he was. To her that meant
irresponsible, alcoholic and self-centered. I could have added to the list.
When the family lived in Oak Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, my father had
been accused of "something" by a family in the neighborhood. Whatever it was
involved their daughter. From the pictures I remember seeing as a child, it seemed the
Great Depression took a detour when it reached Oak Park, Illinois. Men twisting
frayed, stained caps between gnarled hands, mumbling with downcast eyes about "any
kind of work" would not have been part of that landscape. Houses verging on mansions
and true mansions lined streets turned into soft-rustling green tunnels by the oaks that
touched and bent to each other from opposite sides of the streets. Lawns were
expansive, moss green and thick. There is a picture I recall of my father, about fourteen,
a dark complected boy with black hair skimming his eyebrows, dressed in white linen
shorts and shirt, sitting on the front lawn. He looks bored or preoccupied. He doesn't
look at the camera.
My great-grandmother played the large hand in that one. Soft threats, hard cash
and my great-grandmother's petrified resolve paid everyone off. I don't like to imagine
this scenario. I know somewhere, back then, in that place, a young girl was hurt.
Denied. Then silenced. She might be dead; she might be here and still remember. I am
sorry. I apologize for him.
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Ina Cavern
The most common question asked or unasked, of a person who is a victim of a
prolonged period of sexual abuse is "Why?" Why didn't you tell someone? To a child,
"why" questions regarding behavior trigger a self-defense response. "Why didn't you
tell me you broke the vase? Why did you hit your sister? Why didn't you do your
homework?" Commonly, when confronted with the "whys" of their behavior, children
respond with "I don't know" or a lie. "Why" to a child is trouble-a no-win situation.
The answer to why admits fault and failure. What child will say, "I broke the vase
because I threw a ball in the house and I know I'm not supposed to do that but I just
didn't care." They do care but don't have the words yet to describe impulse,
opportunity and the thrill of reckless abandon that can engulf consideration of the
moment. "Why" begs for an admission of complicit guilt; imagine the weight of guilt
carried by a child who is a victim of sexual abuse.
Children do not possess the language necessary to deal with the magnitude of
the offense. White, middle-class American society in the 1950's and 1960's couched
sexual language in euphemism, innuendo or buried it altogether. Children learned
early on that certain parts of their bodies must not be mentioned and must be covered.
(To this day, saying "vaginal" in my doctor's office takes some deliberate momentum
on my part). Therefore when an adult brings a child's nudity front and center, uses the
language of sex with them, kisses, fondles, and fucks them--dresses them, shushes
them and sends them out to play-it doesn't take much more than a whispered
admonition to "not tell" to get the job done.
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I believed his threats because I saw the way he looked at me. Nowhere in that
look was there any recognition of me as a person, let alone a daughter and child. I
remember hiccupping, turning red, my eyes swelling because I cried so hard. Begging.
"Stop. Don't. Please." He liked me to face the mirror so I remember my face and I
still see his face-floating above my contorted, tear-stained one-his eyes glistening
with his lust, wearing that open-lipped smile.
**
My older brother was born in January and I in December off the same year.
Irish twins some say. He was a passive and peaceful child, content to sit in a playpen
for hours. The usual circumstance triggering his ire was any delay with his food. Born
with small wrists and ankles for his frame, he did not walk until he was fifteen months
old. Slow to master the physical challenges routinely faced in childhood, first his
tricycle, then his bicycle, seemed to sense a bitter caution--much like horses sniffing
out fear in their riders. These toys appeared to act independently of his frenzied
attempts at balance. It was as if he sensed their scheming right through the metal and
rubber so he viewed the gleaming frames and tires not as cohorts in play, but as
malevolent adversaries. He kicked the wheels and threw them all down to the cracked
cement driveway in his mounting frustration. To add to the insult, I consorted well and
regularly with his enemies. I rode a bike months before he could.
I was punished for it. He knew my ground-into-the pores fear of being
covered up, enveloped. His tried and true revenge against my physical superiority lay
stored and folded in the calm darkness of our family linen closet. Blankets. Soft
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prisons tossed over my head as I sat preoccupied watching Walt Disney's
Mouseketeers. Pinning my arms to my sides, holding me close, listening to the muffled
screams filling my mouth. He spoke in gentle, mocking tones. "What's the matter?
Why are you screaming? You like it in there ... you know you like it in there." I did not
want to hate my brother, but his teasing was not playful, nurtured by a simple and
fractious sibling rivalry. This was rivalry nourished in darker comers, in a soil perhaps
tainted by lineage, or the new disease. Any suspicions or inquiries as to origin were
beyond my fresh thoughts, but I sensed it, quivered to its ominous possibilities and
learned to stand guard.
Unfortunately my brother's retributions were not tied to mundane repetition.
Once he actually peed on me. Sitting cross-legged and preoccupied in front of the
television one afternoon, I sensed his presence. Fearing the worst, I stood up quickly to
avoid the inevitable box or blanket descending over my head so I was facing him when
he released, then unleashed the newest weapon in his arsenal. Forced to pull up the end
of the living room carpet to act as a shield, I remember shrieking as much in dismay as
in disgust. Mrs. Abbott was babysitting that day. Her disgust and disbelief,
undisguised and written plainly over a face unused to symptoms of invisible disease,
congenital or original in eight year old boys, was reassuring to me as I wailed under the
worn, green living room rug.
*
Now I have the 20/20 insights and hindsight that come with age and experience.
In psychological jargon, he was "acting out" what he was living. My father, always
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safe in his constructed reality, was not always discreet with me in front of my brother.
My weaker older brother tried-once--to slay the dragon.
*
I remember the black paten-leather shoes my friend Sylvia and I wore that
Sunday afternoon. Those shoes and my father's large scuffed brown loafers skipped in
a circle over our worn green living room carpet as he held our hands, dancing us around
and around. That day being a special day and a Sunday gave us occasion enough to
wear our Sunday dresses with the stiff, flower-trimmed petticoats
underneath--petticoats that lifted our dresses in spinning twirl after twirl.
My brother watched the merriment with disinterest until the laughing and
shrieking growing louder with each go-round was too loud to ignore and he asked if he
could play, too. In answer, my father grabbed his hand and lifted him, now joining in
the laughter, high off the ground.
"I know! I know!," shouted my father. "Let's play Follow the Leader! Sylvia,
you are the special guest so you can go first." He made a big to-do out of pointing and
then bowing to my new friend. Sylvia, as white and soft as I was brown and sturdy, had
wavy blonde hair to her shoulders in stark contrast to my chin-length straight and
dark-brown bob. The memory brings to mind a masterpiece of childhood, formed of
motion and color and laughter.
Sylvia took her turn as the leader of our procession. Through the living room,
under the arched entrance to the diminutive dining room and on into the square kitchen
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where much was made of having to tum around, jump up and down, and touch toes
before being allowed to continue. We took turns leading the game, taking alternate
routes through the short hallway, into our bedroom at the end of the hall, and once into
the bathroom where we pretended to get stuck in between the porcelain fixtures. We
could have gone on and on. There is nothing that beats the times to be had when adults,
especially parents who seem to rarely have time for such things, put on their clown
suits and remember how to play.
But my father announced that the time had come for dinner. I remember we
washed our hands at the same time in the bathroom sink, flicking water at each other by
pressing our small fists together in a rapid-fire squeeze. A little damp, but still
laughing, we sat down at the kitchen table for a hot dog. Two apples cutup and placed
on a white china dish set in the middle of the table was the monument to my mother's
insistence on a well-balanced meal. My father, his fingers tapping against the counter
to a phantom calypso tune, seemed to pant, slightly, with his tongue pressed against his
bottom teeth. His right foot tapped in rhythm to the tune in his head and his eyes lost
their fix on the present.
"It's my tum now," he said suddenly. We stopped in mid-giggle and chew to
turn our heads.
"Your turn for what?" asked my brother. "For dinner?"
"No. It's my tum to be leader. I never got a turn! And we're going to play 'girls
first,' and then boys. Or 'boy' rather. You finish eating and you girls follow me." He
pushed away from the counter and jumped to the space under the archway.
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"But what about our dessert? We didn't get dessert and I promised Sylvia we'd
have ice cream. Chocolate. I picked it out," I said, the beginnings of a whine revving
up.
"I promise. We'll have ice cream and treats at the movie, but I want my turn
first." My father crept to a level he had no right to frequent, becoming at once child and
scheming adult. A note of urgency in his voice caught my attention. "Otherwise it's not
fair... offwe go! Follow me!"
My father jumped straight up where he stood. He hopped on one foot; he
switched to the other, and then turning his head and still hopping, noticed our
half-hearted attempts. We wanted ice cream and were ready to stop the game. But my
father had taken a firm hold at our level and was quick to suggest just the right thing.
Just the ticket.
"Hey! Look at me!" he called out, springing like a cat to the back of the sofa to
begin his march across the top of our few pieces of furniture. Making a big show out of
the possibility of losing his balance, he mimicked a tightrope walker as he advanced
across the top of the back of the sofa, across the two wing chairs and onto the coffee
table.
We were thrilled to the core with this new adult spectacle. Daddy was walking
on the furniture.
"You're going to get in trouble," we yelled with unrestrained glee.
"Daddies don't get in trouble and ifl say it's okay, then you can do it too. Come
on!" His smile widened; his eyes narrowed as he watched us leap onto forbidden
----
·--------------
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territory.
From the tops of the furniture, my father led us into his bedroom, shutting the
door on my brother who stood, as I am sure he always did when uncertain or frustrated,
with his hands hanging down by his sides, flapping like dying fish. I wonder what he
could hear. My father's voice had dropped to a throaty whisper.
He stood in front of us. Naked. His back to the large gilt edged mirror hung
over the dresser. The room was bathed in twilight darkness. My father turned on the
small lamp set on the bedside stand.
"You girls are the best jumpers I ever saw! Now let's do some more jumping.
But this time, let's be silly and do it without our clothes on! Hurry! You have to hurry
or we'll run out of time!" He was smiling but I thought he looked mad at us. "Hurry so
we don't miss the fun." His eyes were slits; his breath escaped in brief husky pants.
"She's my new first-grade friend," I thought. I watched my father unfasten the
tiny pearl buttons running down the back of Sylvia's white frilly Sunday best dress.
**
Many years later my mother told me that when the police came, two plain
clothes detectives, to question my father, my brother had been listening. I don't know
where I was; I think sent out of the house to a friend's home. Sylvia had spoken and the
police were sent to our home. My mother told me that after they left, and after my
father had left to go back to work, my brother came to her and told her that what the
police had asked about was true. My father had of course denied everything. I can see
him; his thick eyebrows rising over wide-eyed innocence and disbelief. He'd had years
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of practice.
My brother told her "Daddy lied" and what happened was real. She grabbed
her small son close, hugged him. Hard. "No, no, no. It didn't happen. You didn't see
that." Over and over and over again. Rocking and repeating.
These memories are like the cuttings on the floor of a film editing room. Not for
display or discussion. My parents took the shears to them to be scattered and trampled
underfoot. But they play back unbidden-the scenes of my father with Sylvia and me.
After he was finished, he took us all to the movies to see The Time Machine. I was
terrified and fascinated by the white-haired, blue-skinned cannibals living underground,
stealing their prey to live in their caverns as slaves, worked to death. Then eaten.
Funny. What stays with us.
Ina cavern.
Ina canyon.
Excavated for a mine
Dwelt a minerAnd his daughterOh my darlin'
Oh my darlin'
You are lost.
Gone foreverDreadful.
Sorry.
(From "Clementine" an American folk song).
While researching the lyrics and the author I discovered the following under the
heading "later verses." This is the last verse.
How I missed her, how I missed her,
How I missed my Clementine,
Til I kissed her little sister,
And forgot my Clementine.
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Folk songs are a reflection of a society's culture, morals and mores. My sixth grade
choir teacher informed the class.
*
My older brother lives in housing provided by the state. He recently applied for
and received his permanent disability status so he will receive a modest income for the
rest of his life He suffers from depression and is mildly obsessive/compulsive.
His life was a masquerade, lived as a chronic liar, schemer, manipulator and
body-builder. A unique but hardly practical resume. He spent time in jail in Montana
for gambling fraud and credit card theft. He went to jail in California for credit card
fraud. And he didn't spare the family. An equal opportunity swindler, he stole one of
my credit cards as well.
He had a girlfriend once. So many years ago but she left him. He has been a
one man band since. He watches sports, movies, and he eats and takes handfuls of pills.
Every day. Rockin' and repeating. I don't know what else he does. I think he wants to
do nothing. He no longer works out. That, coupled with the quantity and variety of
medications he consumes on a daily basis have caused an alarming distention of his
stomach. It protrudes like the belly of a very pregnant woman; he rests his arms upon it
when he sits. He is vacant and vague. I don't think he lies, cheats and steals anymore.
He was very bright in school and loved history. He wanted to excel at sports
but was not athletic. He learned the statistics and could recite them like a machine. He
lied to people who didn't know him growing up and in those lies, he was the high
school football star. He wanted to be a radio broadcaster. He has the voice for it. But
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he never focused on anything as much as he did on his deceptions. I think he just wants
to be taken care of.
Forever.
Dear Gail,
I discovered I have a lot more underwear than I thought. And spoons. And
tacks. But I can't find those things you use to hang pictures. I never hung the pictures.
I thought they would be with the tacks. Funny. What we find out.
lfi could find them, this day would be a lot easier. I stumbled across a picture of
Aaron this morning. His fourth grade school picture. I think it's one that should've
been hung up. I found it on the bottom shelf of the hallway cabinet, not the cabinet for
sheets and towels, but the other one. It's not his best picture. Aaron has a tooth missing,
a vacant look about the eyes, and he looks, well, he looks-not bright. I think most
parents would have to admit, there is somewhere, shoved in the back of a drawer or
buried under old Halloween decorations, a school picture of their kid looking if not
stupid, then at the very least, unattractive.
Maybe people believe that the pictures they hang on the wall help smooth out
the rough edges of living. It seems everyone these days has a portrait, not a simple
picture, but a portrait of the family at the beach. Everyone dressed in jeans and white
shirts. Sleeves rolled up, a few buttons undone--a hint of Mom's cleavage but that's
okay because her head is tipped back. The coy thing. Her mouth is open, just a little,
because she's laughing at something wry and clever. Something in the moment only
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her family would get. Mom, Dad and the kids.
All barefoot to add that touch of
"we're just folks" but the whole stupid setup scene screams at you-"We do things
together! We love nature! We are better than you! We match!!"
So I'm thinking. What if families had another wall? A secret, sort of Twilight
Zone wall hung with the pictures of, for instance, Dad smacking Mom. Of Dad-or
Mom-falling down drunk. Pictures of the kids wetting the bed. Pulling the wings off
flies. Snapshots of the family not talking while they ate dinner. A little documentation
of the not so pretty might go a long way ... especially when you're searching for reasons
why you're alone.
I noticed all the boxers after you left, leaving so many empty drawers behind.
I don't think I've worn most of them. There may be virgins in the comers. You left one
sock behind. Interesting because you used to match all your socks, then fold them
together using the 'quick inside-out flip into a ball' technique. Mine, you'd lay on top
of each other. Like you expected them to fuck or fuse.
It's been two months. I'm walking around in mismatched socks and unstained
boxers looking for picture hangers. I have a reason. For the hangers. Aaron's a good
kid. Kid. He lives a thousand miles away, has a mortgage, a sexy wife. April is
sexy--even you have to admit that. And he has a job that pays for all of it. With
enough leftover for savings.
We don't talk much.
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I think it might be different when they have a kid.
I'll be a grandfather. I can
call-I can say-to talk to my grandson or granddaughter. While April is looking for
my grandchild, we--Aaron and me--we'll talk.
I want a beer but with that thought comes the reminder that my beer drinking
was an issue. The way you said it sounded like a sneeze. In italics. I never did-still
don't drink much. But you work out four to five times a week, have one or two glasses
of wine only on the weekends. You said if I didn't have one or two beers every night, I
might feel the difference and that difference, well that difference! I guess it could make
all the difference! That's about all the sense I got out of it. But you look great and I
lookI'm walking around looking for picture-hanging tacks so I can put up a
photograph of our son looking stupid. And I'm not drinking a beer.
I wonder what you're doing.
I don't think I ever told you all of this. When I was eighteen, my father left my
mother for another woman. Waited until I was "an adult" he'd said. The only thing I
told you was that they divorced. I did and didn't hate him for it. I hated him when I
caught my mother crying which was only once. She acted like she was the one who'd
screwed up. For crying. Because what he did-it was one of those things men do. She
wasn't supposed to have much of a say or even get that upset. She still went to church.
Her club meetings. I noticed at one of the church socials-one of one that I went to
because she asked me to and I was feeling sorry for her because Dad left. She talked to
only two other women, the same women she sat with at one of about a dozen folding
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card tables. It was in the back of the room, next to the kitchen and it was covered with
a slick plastic tablecloth. I still remember that. Anyway, that afternoon, nobody
approached their table. Not one person. My mother had known these women for years.
That afternoon, my mother didn't move from her chair. That was not her. At parties,
any sort of occasion, my mother worked a room like a hummingbird. I can see her.
Always in some kind of bright flowery dress, high heels and this nuclear red lipstick,
darting from person to person. She'd be passing trays covered with puffy triangles
filled with something or water chestnuts wrapped in bacon. I remember those because I
hated them. They always made it into our lunch boxes the next day if there were
leftovers. Explain that one to a bunch of eighth grade pricks at the lunch table.
Anyway, that day she sat with her spine pressed into the chair back, her eyes glued to
the chicken croquettes and Waldorf salad. Her feet together under the table. I don't
think she ever crossed her legs. Even at home. Her fork kept moving unless she was
nodding or murmuring something to the women sitting with her.
I didn't think about
it until I got out of there but the other women at the table, Mrs. DuFresne and Mrs.
Hall-! still remember their names-their husbands had left them too. Maybe this
exile by folding table was the church social's version of suttee without the matches.
My father's dead. You know that. Mom's doing well. It's good to see after the
bad time she went through when Clare died. A lot of people thought she took her death
much harder than Melanie. I don't think people can call something like that. We all
deal with stuff differently. But I guess for Mom, time has worked some magic. She
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came by the other day with pictures from her Caribbean cruise. My father would never
have done that.
"The wonders of the world are in your own back yard. Remember that son." If
he really believed that, why did he feel the need to troll the secretarial pool for a new
wife? If I found their secret wall, I think I'd :find a picture of them sitting in a diner.
Late at night at separate tables. I'd see their faces in shadow, bent over their food. I'm
thinking of that famous painting of the diner at night. You know the one. It's them. I
didn't know there was another woman when he left. Their fights were held in private,
behind closed doors when I wasn't home. I know now because I asked her why I hadn't
seen it coming.
"You didn't need to hear any of it. We went into the bedroom and locked the
door. After you'd left the house."
I appreciate her concern but going from "Leave It to Beaver" to "Divorce
Court" that fast knocked me around pretty good. And their divorce happened when
people did not talk casually about a person's private life. It was "Man Business."
Semi-sacred.
She, the other woman, was younger than Dad and had two little girls. A really
good looking woman. Dad wasn't a bad looking guy. Had sort of a stuffed shirt way
about him. His cuffs and collars were white and starched. He wore tie clips and cuff
links. Had quite the collection. I used to like playing with them when I was little. I
could see myself in one of his suits. I'd decide what cufflinks to wear and then pretend
to splash on aftershave. I can smell it still. But I think the only after shave around then
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was Old Spice. That's what he smelled like. And ironically, that's what he became.
His young good looking wife dumped him after two years for a wealthy-and
younger-businessman from Toledo.
I haven't thought about that in a long time. I
saw her, his second wife, only once. After she and Dad split up. I left for college before
they got married. I didn't come home for a visit until after she'd left. At the time I
didn't think it was on purpose. Anyway, the time I did see her I was with some friend,
standing in line for the movies. We were goofing around when he suddenly dug his
elbow into my chest.
"Hey Pat. There's your old man's ex." He thought I knew who she was. I
didn't say anything. I let him talk. I found out that Toledo and her second husband's
litter from two previous marriages hadn't agreed with her. The fact that he knew this
and I didn't still amazes me.
But I can tell you-now-something that no one knows. I was maybe fifteen.
One night, I saw my dad go into Melanie's room. That wasn't strange in itself, but it
was the way he did it. I had opened my door a crack because I was checking to see if I
could sneak downstairs for more dessert. And I saw him, his hand on the doorknob,
looking up and down the hallway. Listening. He looked like a safecracker. He slipped
in the door and shut it behind him. I tiptoed as softly as I could down the hall, stopped,
and knelt down. I bent my ear closer to the floor, by the crack under the door. I can't
forget what I heard.
"A knight without armor in a savage land.. ." I've been humming that song all
morning. You know the one. From Palladin ... Paladdin? However you spell it. That
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old TV western about the bounty hunter. ''A knight without armor in his
underwear ... "
The picture hanger things should be with the goddamn tacks!
You used to laugh at me because I didn't swear "like a man." I remember the
first time I did. I was a kid. Maybe about eight or nine. I didn't know my mother was
behind me. I heard her moan. I thought she was choking. I turned around and saw what
I'd done. Her face-all red and blotchy. Scorched with my shame. I started to cry. I
wanted to hide so I buried my head in her apron. I remember. It had daffodils all over
it.
I found your Masters diploma. You framed it but you never hung it up. You
graduated Magna Cum Laude. Why didn't you take it with you? It's a relatively new
achievement. Maybe you meant to get it later-along with the box you marked My
Things-the one set next to four other boxes you've yet to take out of here. Those
boxes aren't labeled. I think the "My" got to me. And the bold italics. Did you think I
was going to ransack your belongings-sniff and dig like a starved wolf? That I would
accuse you of running off with one of my things? I'm not like that. You know that.
I'm easy going. Whipped, according to some people. I'm not whipped. I'm easy.
I have nothing to do tonight. Most nights. I was thinking about calling
somebody. You did that all the time. Since before we were married, you've been close
to that same group. Every year, for maybe twenty years now, you left for what you still
call "Girls Camping Weekend." I remember. Those trips kicked in once most of the
kids hit two. When you all figured your husbands could be trusted to "parent" alone for
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a weekend. You called them "NFK" weekends. . I got to know most of our friends
through you.
I remember one weekend. It was my turn to have everybody over. Five guys
and seven little kids. Michael had tossed Ryan down on the floor, getting ready to
change him and at the same time, Tommy sort of squat down so he could change
Melissa. They looked at each other. The next thing I knew four men and four babies
were lined up across the living room floor. They looked to me for the signal. I
whipped my invisible flag through the air. Baby wipes flew and butts flashed. Hairy
fingers, quick as greased lightening worked those tapes. It looked close. "Done!!"
Michael smacked the floor with one hand and dangled Ryan by his feet from the other!
Baby Changing Smack-Down. I wish I had a picture of that kid hanging upside down
like that.
Smack down. I heard that from Aaron. He loved all sports. Still does. I never
got that interested in sports. But you know. I went to every one ofhis games and a hell
of a lot of practices.
"Dad! Did you see the way I tackled that guy? Did you see that play, the
reverse? The one where we scored the last touchdown? That was my idea!!" I had no
clue what a reverse was but that didn't matter. His goofy smile, his boy voice, even his
musty grass smell after those games sent me crazy. I loved him so much.
The diaper derby. I remember I laughed. Tears ran down my face. I got in
trouble when you got home though. But not for that. The neighbors told you they saw
me hosing off Aaron in the back yard. It could've been the canned chili we gave the
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kids. I had taken his training pants off, told him to assume the position and hosed him
down-along with the training pants. Seemed like a pretty efficient system to me. One
allowing for minimal contact. My top priority during that stage. It's not like I used a
fire hose on him.
I don't feel right calling someone and asking if they want to do something. I'd
go to the movies but there's that buffer zone thing. Do we sit next to each other or leave
an empty seat between us? Complications.
You got together with friends all the time. I'm sure you still do. Besides the
weekends you still affectionately refer to as NFK, you went to plays, concerts, dinners.
You'd stay up and drink wine in the Jacuzzi or the dining room with a friend.
Sometimes I'd leave the bedroom door open to hear you.
No hangers yet but the house is giving up more. I found some old belts. Those
big ass belts I wore when I was twenty pounds or more overweight. They were coiled
in the bottom of a sack I had promised to take to the Goodwill maybe six months ago. I
thought I'd better take another look in there in case I had gone temporarily insane and
given away something I still wanted.
A while back, before you left, you told me to go through my closets and get rid
of anything I hadn't worn in a year. That was the key, you said, cleaning out closets. I
can still hear you. "Cramped, stuffed closets reveal cramped, stuffed lives." I said you
sounded like Oprah Winfrey. I tried. I filled about half an extra large garbage bag.
Now that bag is stuffed. You went through the closet and finished the job. Evidently
you know best what constipates my life.
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Where are the goddammed picture hangers? I can swear all I fucking please
now because my mother isn't around to blanch and you're not around to applaud.
I'll have to use some Windex on this picture. The sweat from my palm is
printed on the glass. I read somewhere that my sweaty palm problem is actually a
condition. It has a name and a medicine. I read somewhere that the Japanese are really
prone to this and that's why they bow instead of shaking hands. I'm back in the
hallway. Where should I put it? I guess-next to his other pictures. Maybe under our
wedding picture because it makes sense, logically. Aesthetically.
I remember our wedding day. Just about every detail. I remember picking up
the invitations and feeling the raised print. When I saw the tables, all laid out for the
reception, I remember smiling till my damn face hurt. The tablecloths and the china.
White roses and antheriums in the center pieces.
Almonds wrapped and tied with
straw.
I know what antheriums look like. I love you and our son. Being home on
cold nights. Slow cooking! love you and your ambition and your endless supply of friends-including
that new batch you picked up in grad school.
Isn't it enough to love it all? Isn't that the important work?
My real job, the other work. It more than pays the bills. I have a degree in
business administration. I sell asphalt. I know. I could do more. Asphalt is not
environmentally friendly, pleasing to the eye. Permanent. But it does what it's
supposed to do and when the weeds poke through, when it cracks, splits or puckers, it's
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easy to make it look good again. A roller and some hot seal coat. And it leaves me
alone so I can be home, loving my family as hard and as well as any man on this planet.
I didn't do anything. I left no marks.
So there's nothing to fix.
I hung his picture.
I positioned the chair
to face the wall.
And by the way,
In the end-I
Settled.
For a nail.
All My Love,
Pat
The Beat Goes On
When my mother fell asleep, he would come to my room late at night and reach
under the covers. Small opportunities. When my mother was not home-it was show
time. Occasionally, she went on weekend religious retreats with a group from her
church. I would beg her not to go; she would laugh and look at me and say, "I won't be
gone that long." And she would say to my father, "Even when they get older, they still
miss their mothers."
She got religion. I went to hell.
My father held a variety of jobs as we grew up. He worked in the fruit
brokerage business for quite awhile because that's what his father and grandfather did.
Later, he drifted to and from a steady variety of jobs; between those jobs an air of
uncomfortable mystery wafted through the house. Eventually he was hired as a car
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salesman and discovered he was pretty good at it. The irony was lost on me then. He
came with a different car every week-Corvettes and Jaguars. He became part owner
of the business along with my Uncle Bob, my mother's brother. The financial help
from his parents and my uncle's business acumen proved a winning combination; the
lot began to turn a profit. To promote the business, they purchased time on a local
television station. In between showings of"Buckets of Blood" and "The Tingler," a
mane-sprouting lion cub would slink and prowl around the studio set while the
announcer pushed the specials of the week and "Alley Cat" played on the sound track.
During his tenure as a car-hawking totem, the lion lived at my uncle's house;
during the summer, my brothers and sisters and cousins would eat barbecued hot dogs,
potato chips and swim in their kidney-shaped pool. The pool's shallow end sported a
naked mermaid, complete with protruding tits that my brother dove down to fondle
when he thought no one was looking.
Our lion swam with us, his razor sharp nails slicing through the water; sun
spattered drops of water clung to his whiskers as he pedaled smoothly from one end to
the other. He swam with us, sunned with us and cleaned himself, and occasionally a
child with his impossibly rough, sandpaper tongue. While he preened or slept, I would
bury my face in his neck, listening to the snuffling in his throat. A pulsating interior
jungle. At peace with the king of the cats.
Eventually, he was sold to a wild animal park. The week before the sale we had
been over for a swim and a barbecue. My younger brother, a toddler then, with more
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bounce than grace in his stride had captured our lion's attention; he settled into a
crouch.
"Bob!" I remember my mother shouting as she grabbed my brother. "That lion
has got to go!" Nature was speaking up; my mother recognized the call in the eat's
body language.
She held my brother close until my uncle put the collar on and
fastened the chain.
But when my father said he was taking just me on a trip to visit my grandparents
in Washington, she nodded and sai~ "That should be fun."
I told her I did not want to go; I told her I wanted my brothers and sisters to
come.
"Don't be silly!" he said. You are going to love it. We'll stay in a hotel one
night and you can go swimming. Your Nana and Papa will take us to the country club.
And ... " he paused, "when we get back you can tell your mother what a very good time
you had."
Two days later I was in the backseat of the car. I told him I wasn't riding up
front. I kept thinking that nothing would happen; maybe he changed. Maybe it had all
changed. Children want to believe in their parents as much or more than they want to
believe in Santa Claus. Children with their small hands held over gas flames; children
with bruises and fractures caused by the slam of a fist as big as their head; children used
as a rag for their father's semen, still want to believe that everything-now-will be all
right. As a family we had made the 300 mile trip several times, straight through, easily
in a day.
There was no reason to stay in a hotel.
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He let me sit in the backseat without an argument. He bought me French fries
and an ice-cream sundae at the Dairy Queen and said I might be getting that dog I
always wanted. Then, that's all I could talk about: what to name him, what to feed him,
the walks we would go on. Smiling, nodding, and paying close attention he
unknowingly gave me a gift during that drive. He wrapped up and presented me with
the notion that everything had changed.
We made one stop before the hotel.
I still see the fat man's arms, flabby and mottled with freckles. His white
undershirt, stained gray and yellow with age failed to cover his chest hair, sprouting
and spilling in thick dark tufts marked with droppings of grey. Matted and slick with
his sweat. An old plantation style fan, spun slowly above a coffee-colored counter,
pitted and chipped through layers of yellowing wax; its blades cut the dense air with a
"shhft, shhft ... " He smiled at me through cigarette smoke-handed my father a brown
paper bag and rang up the sale.
Then we went to the hotel.
It was a bad night; my mantras were running at 78. "Please stop; let me sleep;
please stop; let me sleep." Through eyes burning with tears, yet dry as fire with
exhaustion, he made me look at the pictures in the magazine he bought from the
sweat-stained man. All little girls, all naked. Smiling into the camera.
He pulled wads of cash from his pockets-showered the thin bedspread with a
layer of one dollar bills, yanked off my clothes and threw me on top of the money. The
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bills were new and crackled under my weight. When I tried to get up, some shifted and
slipped, floated down to the floor.
All forme
he saidbeing so good.
In the morning,
he told metake a bath.
Nota tracehe wanted.
No trouble.
To this day, when I travel by plane, I look down at the houses, see though the
walls and find one of the little girls in the magazine. I hear her soft, feeble cries. Feel
the shooting stars of her pain and misery. ''Now." I think. "Right now. It's happening
right now. Down there she hides from herself and her thoughts. Ifl could, I would
make him dust so you could pucker up. Blow him away."
*
Our lion or rather the revenue he helped to generate was the launching pad for
my father and Uncle Bob's big dream. Both families would move to Hawaii and open
a car lot. One year before the idea was even a seed, my parents, having gone several
years and five children's worth of time without a vacation, used a portion of the profits
from the business to take a week long trip to Maui. It took less than the seven day trip
for my father to fall in love with Hawaii's bounty of aromas, teeming greens, reds and
yellows and the feel of the "hang loose" island lifestyle.
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Hanging loose on the beach, hanging even looser in the bars, the recipient of
white smiles on brown faces wearing aloha-wearing love--overcome by the sound of
waves lapping, his senses were captured and he became prisoner to the belief, like
many before him, that nothing could go wrong in this place. Very few, succumbing to
whispers slipped into the soul by the trade winds, venture to live a real life in the tropics,
unless born there. Those who attempt real life and succeed, share a resilience my father
never owned, would never have recognized.
My uncle died before his part of the dream came true; he woke up in the middle
of the night, told his wife he felt sick, laid back down and died of a massive cerebral
hemorrhage. He was forty~two. He could have made it all work; his timing and
business sense, an unbeatable combination. His need for a partner in the car lot was not
manufactured, but I am sure he took on my father with reservations. My uncle, unlike
my father, could work with and develop practicalities while simultaneously exploring
all the possibilities of a business vision; and he could do it with a martini in one hand, a
cigarette in the other and not spill a drop. While my father, the sloppy dreamer and
drinker, had only managed to keep his business f~ade in working order using his
charm and his parents' accessible checkbook.
I would watch the two of them, working out the details of the big move while I
sat at the kitchen table doing my homework. My father and uncle, their papers strewn
across the dining room table, talking in low tones punctuated at intervals by the high
blast of my uncle's laugh. His brow would be furrowed, and I believed in those
furrows-deep and trustworthy. I would look at my father, sitting at the same table,
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engaged in the same discussion, looking at the same figures and I could not believe in
those furrows-formed by the raise of his eyes instead of the downward pull of brows
caused by intense concentration. His gaze was immature, like the expression of a child
awaiting his next delight.
As I grew older, he developed new tricks. He took to sidling up to my younger
sisters wearing a deliberate, smeared on smile meant to warn me that he could touch
them too; he believed-! could sense it-that his pulpy smile made me jealous, that the
looks of fiery, silent hatred I flung across the room were rooted not in rage, but in desire.
The looks were meant to tell him to leave them alone or all bets were off, but I could tell
he kept the looks, twisted them inside out to turn them into a jealousy born of sick
fantasy.
Once my youngest sister was bom-I was eleven-he did not come to my room
as often. Babies turned my mother into a light sleeper. But ifl leaned over a table to
place a napkin or reach for a schoolbook, he would, like a snake, slither up from behind
and slip his hand between my legs. When I spun around, he would have his back to me,
a victory sway in his stride. I think by this time, no matter how much he pretended
otherwise, no matter how much he drank, he did know how the extent of my hatred and
disgust. Every look, laugh, raise of his eyebrows, tap of his toes or snap of his fingers,
I hated-he might have known his time was almost up.
Once in junior high, my athleticism, brains and any other hard-hitting qualities
that promoted my success in grade school didn't make the cut. I tried to fit in with the
groups that form in those years, groups whose main function was distributing
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insecurities directed at my body, hair and clothes. I was not a cheerleader, princess or
prom queen; school became an emotional battlefield instead of a refuge. And I felt my
dirty secrets showed through, their smudge and stain visible.
On the last day of seventh grade, I began to menstruate and though I knew
better intellectually, I felt if my father touched me now, the touch would pollute me
with a malignancy I could not cleanse.
He reached for me under the covers late one night. I recoiled with a snap, and
said-loudly-No! His hand drew back and he left the room. I felt no delight, no joy
of victory. Was that all it took? I was thirteen.
Tropical Storms
Two years later, just stepping off that plane in Hawaii did something to me, my
body. I felt a sense of ripening in the air's warm embrace, temporarily relieving the
sense of unease and unreality hovering over us. The entire preamble to oui move was
so inexplicable and disjointed. I knew enough to be asking myself, "What are we doing
here?'' Did my father believe he was going to suddenly turn to a life ofunsodden
delight in this place-so heavy with smells? Scarcely six months had passed since his
release from a three-storied, green shuttered, Victorian-style alcohol rehab center
where he shared a room with one man who constantly pulled at his hair because he saw
snakes sprouting from his scalp, and another who downed a urine sample because it
looked like grenadine. The tropics were not a place to dry out-a wringing wet place
with slow movement, things bursting ...
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A different English, spoken with the soft swirl of the trade winds behind it,
with inflections that traveled down and towards the sands, became another language to
learn. I found myself leaning forward, my head down to catch the words. The words
were fluttery soft, spoken in dialects that captured through the centuries, the
idiosyncrasies and commonalities of the languages that landed here, stored in the
tongues of those who came to fmd work in the pineapple and sugar cane fields.
Tagalog from the steamy Philippines, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese plus a
polyglot of Polynesian tongues melted into the language of the white masters and
became Pidgin English. "Da kine" talk- truncated, spoken rapid fire and sotto voce.
"You like?" "We go." "Try wait." Wat you t'ink" "He no stay.'' "Bodda you?"
It took time for my ear to bend around that beat.
*
There are tales of ducklings following the first face they see and making
that face "mother." The technical term is "imprinting." Stamped indelibly into my
sexuality was an imprint cast from coercion, fear, threats, humiliation and rage.
I learned to retreat into caverns when he touched me, undressed me, forced me
down upon him. I crawled into a dark space, wrapped my arms tightly around my
knees and squeezed my eyes shut. Only here, could I get bear it. Get through it.
The
response became as automatic as a baby bird opening its beak upon its mother's
approach.
When the brown boy approached me at the dance, I trembled inside. I did not
want a white boy, a boy who looked like the mainland. Not here in Hawaii where
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brown was like cocoa butter, smooth and sweet smelling. I had made some new friends
at school. One day they invited me to a dance at the local university. High school
students could attend if they had identification.
The room was hot, dark and crowded. My friend, Jasmine, was already dancing.
She was a creamy combination of bloods-Portuguese, Hawaiian, Chinese and haole
(white). Everything burst out of her. Breasts, lips, thighs and bottom, altogether one
thrilling evocative thrust of movement-even when she stood still. Her hair was thick
and brown, wavy smooth, growing past her thighs. Her eyes were large tilted almonds
that laughed right along with the warmth of her impossibly wide smile. Born and
spoon fed on Hawaii, Jasmine was "local." She talked "da kine" talk.
"Black Magic Woman" was playing when he asked me to dance. I felt ill at
ease and awkward trying to move with the languid Latin beat. He had no trouble,
swaying back and forth in a stationary samba. He was a beautiful brown, with hair
blacker than the belt he wore around his slim, undulating hips. His teeth were pearls
within the cocoa tan of his face. His nose was broad. When he asked me to step outside,
I knew nothing else but 'yes.'
I heard Jasmine's voice. "Hey! Where you fink you going?" Before I could
answer, he did.
"Hey. Howzit. Just outside. Too hot in here. She's ok." He flashed a smile,
tipping his chin up with a casual jerk that indicated direction and assurance
simultaneously. Jasmine went back to her dance.
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He sat down on a low wall outside; I stood in front of him. His hands, holding
ftrm to the smooth flesh north of my knees, were insistent and steady-as if fttting into
already familiar crevices along a cliff face. My dress felt too short, though I had
deliberately made it that way. He told me he liked me and wanted to see me, while his
ftngers did a little dancing climb up the back of my legs. Too close, I thought. He's too
close. I crept into the cavern and he continued to tease, to touch.
I was sixteen. He was nineteen. He came from a prominent Filipino family, his
father a member of the city council. He had three more brothers. My father was now
close to perpetually drunk. If my mother threw the liquor out, he drank Nyquil.
I tried to talk to my mother before all the fucking started. Whenever this new
boyfriend took me out, he had his hands on me and in me. It was as if he wanted us to be
seen. After one night, when he pushed me into a comer on the university campus and
backed me against a wall, all ftngers and mouth, I decided to talk to my mother.
"I think he wants to ... " I couldn't ftnish the sentence. I stood by the
sink, picking at my thumbnail. "He wants to do things and I don't ... "
My mother interrupted. "You mean he wants to have sex?" She kept on
stirring the gravy and checking the rice. Then the conversation was over. She
mumbled something like, "Well, you don't want to do that," and left me by the stove to
call everyone in for dinner. I think I wanted her to forbid me to see him anymore. I
didn't know how to stop seeing him. I had no words. No power. I was always hiding.
First his ftngers, scraping and prodding while he sucked too hard at my breasts,
leaving angry red circles around the nipples. I had no involvement; I wanted it over. I
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closed my eyes until he was finished so I could eat my food and watch the rest of the
drive-in movie. Shortly after the conversation with my mother, he drove me to
Hanauma Bay, a stunning half-moon pool of shallow blue-green water where families
gathered to picnic and snorkel. Reaching the bay required a five or six minute walk
down an asphalt walkway carved into the cliffside. Families with beach mats, coolers
and snorkeling gear hurried down the path in their eagerness to reach the shimmering
turquoise water. But that day, he led me in a different direction.
We turned from the walkway and towards the leeward side of the parking lot.
He turned up a small dirt path and into the hillside scrub where he told me to lie down;
he placed a ratty and torn towel down on the dirt. I remember I wore a dress I made,
white with vibrant splashes of color in the shape of Hibiscus flowers and tiny snap
closures down the front. He pulled roughly at the material and I was laid bare except
for panties. He knelt down and told me to take them off. He stripped off his pants and
I did what I was told, staring past his left ear. He put the condom on in front of me and
pushed into me. When I cried out, he told me it was supposed to hurt. "You won't get
pregnant this time, the first time. Girls never do the first time you know, but why take
any chances?"
I rolled off the towel and saw the small blotch of blood. I glanced towards a
rustling sound in the leaves; my eyes followed the darting movement of a gecko roused
from his torpor by our movements.
I remember the quiet. The gecko. The stain.
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The next day was the fourth of July. My sisters, younger brother and I sat with
some friends outside in the yard. My father stumbled out from around the comer of the
fence holding a lit sparkler in each hand. The next thing we knew he was in the middle
of a really spectacular belly flop fall right into the ice plant. He landed face
down-planted-with the sparklers meant for my little brother and sisters still clutched
in his fists, showering bright sparks of light over and onto his head. Our lawn
decoration for the holidays.
Whenever and wherever my new brown boyfriend could fuck me, he did. If his
mother was out for the day, he would tell me to leave school and meet him across the
street. We would go to his house and fuck there. Or at the drive-in or the park. I
remember hating it but he wanted it. He had started to hit me. When I wasn't looking,
he would send a stinging slap to the side of my face or push me down and laugh when I
sprawled in front of him. I didn't tell anyone.
All of that fucking finally produced a pregnancy. I pretended not to notice the
calendar or feel the changes or notice the difference in the shape and size of my breasts.
One month went by. Then two. I was sixteen.
He took me to a Filipino doctor he knew. The uniform was blinding white next
to the brown of his skin and glistening oily black of his hair. He told me I was pregnant.
He asked what I wanted to do. I wanted an abortion.
That same year, Hawaii had become the first state to pass laws allowing for
abortion based upon the woman's request. With my parent's permission, I could have
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one too. Pounding my belly as hard as I could with my fist hadn't worked. Trying to
fall hadn't worked either.
His family told me to have the baby; they would adopt it. I was horrified at the
thought of giving birth to a child stamped with his sickness, and equally horrified at the
thought of handing a child over to people who had raised a monster
I felt it inside-eating me alive.
My father was too drunk to get what happened; my mother-! will never
forget-held my head in her hands and told me through tears, now sorry she was. For
me. I still feel her hands.
The doctor gave me a pill to take before the scheduled abortion. He told my
mother what to do.
"Have her into the admitting area no later than 7:00 a.m. tomorrow. Check her
in and wait. She is not to eat anything after 5:00 tonight and then can only drink water.
And, like I told her, she may have some cramping with this medication but it helps
prepare her body, yeah?"
My blood was all over the floor. When I stood up, it had gushed out of me,
heavy and warm, slick under my bare feet. The knots in my belly had been untied. The
agonizing, searing and fire~hot pain stopped when the blood splattered against the
beige linoleum in my bedroom. For a moment, I looked for shapes in the
blood-gnomes and flowers. But there was too much to work with so I cried out for
my mother.
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Perhaps the doctor had wanted to punish me with his pill; he was a close friend
of my boyfriend's family; he would have heard how this tramp-haole girl refused to
give them this baby. Refused to give them this baby so you could raise him to push,
shove and slap his girlfriends. Raise him to fuck, tear and scrape them when he
pleases.
After the abortion, he still wasn't ready to let me go. He came over one
afternoon and asked me to take a walk with him down to the break wall, little more than
a collection of stones, rounded and smoothed by the waves. Not quite two feet high in
most places, I liked to stand on the top and look out at the horizon.
That day he began to berate me about not getting home fast enough after my
summer babysitting job. "So you think I'm kidding or what? You think it's ok to come
home from babysitting those brats whenevah you want?" He was circling me, his thigh
muscles rock-hard under his board shorts.
"What do you expect me to do!" I lashed back. Leave the kids alone because
their mother is a few minutes late?"
"I expect you to think that I want you back by noon and not later. That I want
you back when I say you should be back and you don't have to think about anything
else ... "and the bare heel ofhis right foot slammed into my rib cage. I thought I was
dying. I couldn't get air.
After I gasped out my promise not to tell anyone, he took me to the emergency
room.
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When the doctor in the emergency center asked me what happened, I told him I
fell. His eyes told me he didn't believe me, but he said nothing.
For a month, I walked bent over at the waist, like the elderly Japanese women
I saw who had spent their lives stooped over in the fields.
Later, when he came to my house, it was simple.
"I don't what to see your or hear you or talk to you. Ever." I started to slam the
door and he held it with the flat of his hand.
"You might think I'm gone, yeah? But then, sometime you gon' look and
ssssss ... he whipped his head back and forth like a snake caught under a forked stick.
"I'll always be behind you, you know. Count on it."
I slammed the door in his face and looked down at the curve of my belly,
flattened now by the scraping of the Filipino doctor's stainless steel tools.
An Exchange of Information
Beau Halsey watched his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. He listened
to the tick of his watch.
It won 't look good ifyou're late. He heard the whispers pressed through the lips
of friends and strangers. Should he be the first one there? Why did they call it St.
Mark's Catholic Community? How fucking millennium was that. It's a church. It's a
building. Not a goddamn community. He had to stop this obscenity thought parade.
Holy, holy, holy. Lord have mercy on his soul.
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I have to get dressed. He watched his hands crawl across his shirt-like starfish,
he thought. Their pieces grow back. His right hand dropped, grazing the razor-sharp
crease of his good dress pants.
I have the blues. No good going there now. He loved the classics. The really
old country songs with their picks and twangs that sounded like Shep on the porch, bare
crusty feet and moonshine in jelly jars. "For God's sake Beau," his friends always said,
"do you really like that shit?"
I have to get dressed. His hands drifted.
One last look. Take it all in. Find your eyes. Damn it! Hold your goddamn
shoulders back. Find your eyes! Hold them steady. Make them dry as an old nun's
cunt. Straight and tall and against the wall. Now move. From fifteen years past, his old
drill sergeant's voice echoed. Straight and tall. Balls against the wall. Straight and tall.
Straight and tall. He was dressed. His shoes were tied. The jacket could wait until he
got out of the car. At St. Mark's goddamn Catholic Church. Lord have mercy on my
soul.
Driving felt good. He knew he was getting close. He'd already passed the mini
gas-mart. And the chink place.
Why did I think that? I don't use words like that-chink. I like to eat there. The
owners are friendly. That old couple. Faces like wrinkledfruit. Two more lights. A
left turn at the last light-/'ll be one block away from St. Mark's. I'll call it St. Mark's
and not worry about the rest.
The first light was red.
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He didn't hear anything. There must have been a noise. He didn't remember
getting out of the car. But here he was. Staring at the crumpling and twisting that had
once been the back of his 1967 Ford Mustang convertible, baby-blue with black
interior, previously owned and driven only to church (St. Mark's?) by an agoraphobic
widow.
He heard an old woman's voice.
"I am sorry. It was my fault. I have insurance. Could I have your name and the
name of your insurance company? There is no question but that this is entirely my
fault."
Who was talking? I don't remember getting ... here. Wait. The chink place. The
mini gas-mart. There's been an accident. This old lady hit my car.
"Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?" Her face. Longer than the lunar
faces of the Chinese couple. It reminded him of the petals scattered beneath his
mother's untended rose bushes. Losing luster. Still beautiful.
I have to be someplace. "I'm in a hurry and I don't have--"
Don't think about what you don't have.
He got back in the car and shut the door. He saw her lips move. He had already
pulled away from the curb. He sped to the light and caught the green arrow for his left
turn.
She watched the car and worried that his odd behavior might be her fault.
Maybe he hit his head. She appreciated cars. That Mustang was fussed over and
thought about as it cooled in the garage after a Sunday drive. The man's behavior was
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inexplicable. That's what it was. At my age, she thought, I can barge into a situation
and get away with it. If he doesn't get too far ahead, I'll find him. That car is a
stand-out even without the mess I've made of its rear end. He is not happy. Wherever
he's going, he's not happy. Of course, that could be the consequence of being bashed
about by a ridiculous old woman.
She pulled into the street and kept to a crawling twenty miles per hour so she
wouldn't miss his car. Behind her, an infuriated teenager gunned his motor, lurched to
the left, shaking his fist as he passed.
I'd save all that, ifI were you. You'll wear out your parts.
There was the Mustang, one of a long line of cars parked in front of a church.
Which one was this, she wondered. There were a slew of them along the boulevard:
Latter Day Saints, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses.
He's parked in front ofSt. Mark's, the Catholic church. I was here for a
wedding once. Was this a wedding? No. Everyone's walking directly into the church.
Not stopping to chat. Their eyes clutch the sidewalk and they're wearing pigeon
colors. Afuneral perhaps. Was it his wife 'sfuneral? He was alone in the car. Had he
worn a wedding ring?
She didn't remember. He looked married.
I need to find him. It is my responsibility to take care ofthe damage. Funerals.
Catholic funerals. They're expensive. Flowers and masses. The priest's time and the
rental ofthe place. Though I doubt they call it a rental.
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Once everyone was inside, she stepped out of the car and walked with small
steps towards the entrance to St. Marks.
He'd be close to the body- nodding to people, gathering his strengthdamming the tears while the eyes of.friends, neighbors and busybodies bored inside.
Inspecting his guts. I'll go in. I'll sit at the back. I'll wait until most ofthem leave, then
I'll talk to him. It's been ages since I've been in a church.
She glanced at the sky, half expecting a sudden celestial fusion of soot-colored
clouds to fire needle-thin shards of lightning at her white head. What nonsense, she
thought.
There he is. In an alcove. Next to the casket. Now he's turning away.
Someone has him by the elbow. He's taking him to the holy water holder. There is
more than likely another name for that.
His companion brushed his hand across the water and crossed himself. The two
men moved forward into the dimly lit interior. She stepped into the alcove.
Blonde or brunette? Maybe a redhead? I wonder how she died He looks
forty-something. How long were they married? There are no children wrapped around
him. Perhaps they were newlyweds. I need to see so I can say the right thing.
The filtered light forced through the stained glass version of some saint or
martyr, shed gold over the casket. Cherubs cavorted in the stained glass sky above the
exalted figure.
Why do images ofdead children appeal to the Catholics?
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A boy in a dark blue suit-surrounded by suffocating folds of silk-lay in the
casket.
How ridiculous. Boys did not like suits. Why did these morbid people stuffhim
into one? He couldn't say no. Couldn't say that he would look like a sissy. Boys of
that age-he looked fzfteen, maybe sixteen-death changed people. Took away their
birthdays. His eyes were closed. Blonde curls grazed the collar of his light blue shirt.
She wondered. Was it the light through the martyr and cherubs? Or was his face the
color of gold? His lips wore a pink shine. A little silver cross peeked out from under
the stiff collar.
Damned undertakers. Lipstick on a boy. And take that cross ojj!
She thought she screamed. No one reacted.
The man nailed to that cross. What did he do for this boy? Did he need another
cherub? It's an abomination that cross! A stamp ofapproval.
She was back in the car with no clear idea ofhow she got there. Looking out the
window, she saw a still and pale blue sky.
I could enter one thousand ofthose places. The clouds would never come. I
could spit in their holy water one thousand times.
*
Beau sat in his damaged Mustang, in the garage. His memory of the funeral
reduced to words, whipping about him like mile-high seas. Awash in italics.
"Beau Halsey did well. Yep, Beau held it together despite everything that's
going on with him. Which is quite a bit you know. Got to give him credit for handling
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it all like that. Never once broke down. Took everybody's hand. Said the right things.
Did you see her? She was there. Not that she shouldn't have been there. But it was a
little awkward since they weren't standing actually together. I wasn't sure which one
to talk to first. But Beau, he just reached out to people and took charge. Denise, on the
other hand. I never saw her reach out. Did you?"
He knew most meant well. Some good people lived in Avery. He and Denise
moved here because of the slower paced, small-town atmosphere. Coming from the
wild side, they called it, having moved from the coast with its salty party atmosphere.
The kids were little when they moved, but Denise and Beau still owned the smugness
that comes with the pre-parenting life. The one thing they were absolutely sure kids
needed was that small-town life, that hometown brewing.
A very looked like the right place. It was quaint-rolling hills and lots of
trees-and somewhat isolated. A little top-heavy with Republicans. They held
nothing fierce against Republicans, but there was a conservative bent to the place
unveiled on car bumpers and rear windshields. The Christian fish often swam in front
of their car at intersections, gobbling and gulping Darwinian icons. Denise went crazy
when she saw those Darwin-eating fish. She looked everywhere for the pro-Darwin
symbols, the ones with the fish sprouting prototype feet and a tail reflecting evolution.
A very did not sell those.
Lisa was three and Nick was five when the Halseys moved. Life was pretty
good then, Beau thought. We were caught up in the move. Daring transplants.
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The new house sat on a mild rise with a view. Rabbits, squirrels, mice and
their predators-the coyotes and red-tail hawks-lived in a separate civilization around
their three-quarter acre. They had loved them all. Even the coyotes, whose howls and
soprano yips and yaps made the hairs on the back of Denise's neck stiffen. But they
were welcome noises after the rattle and bang of the beachside suburbs. Their last
house sat at the intersection of a four way stop.
Ten years. Doesn't seem that long.
And I'm alone in our house. My son. My
Nicky is dead. Denise doesn't live here. My daughter doesn't live here. I'm not really
living here. Sort oftaking up space. The living dead The place looks great. I keep it
clean. Very neat.
Beau had thought about letting Mario, their Guatemalan gardener, go. He lived
by himself now. There would be more time to look after the yard. But there was no
more time.
I didn't know I would be doing everything Denise used to do.
That thought didn't ring true. He did not come home and cook dinner for the
family because now he didn't have one and it was only his laundry. He didn't drop
them off and pick them up and drop them off... so Mario still worked in the yard on
Saturday, his family still in Guatemala. His wife and two boys and four girls and his
parents. And his wife's parents. Mario sent them money every month. Beau bought
him lunch and paid him forty bucks at four o' clock. Denise used to tell him to give
Mario more than five dollars an hour since Beau liked the work he did. "It's what
people pay," he'd said. After Denise left, Beau gave Mario fifty dollars.
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Beau kept up the mortgage payments on his own though Denise offered to
"give" him half. Now she was willing to give me something. Now she would give me
halfof the mortgage payment.
It was the way she said it that blew him right up. She made it sound like a gift.
She owed him the mortgage payment and for her to say "give" in that affected beaten
down tone of hers made him nuts.
There was never a time when I didn't pay my bills on time. Not only that, I took
care ofrefinancing the house-twice. We had the best interest rate ofall our friends
because I knew what I was doing, and I did something about it. Twice. And now she's
going to "give" me halfthe mortgage payment.
He lifted his head from the steering wheel and looked around the garage.
There was Lisa's old bike, hanging from a couple of rusty nails by the door.
I miss my little girl. She's fourteen. It's true what they say. She'll always be
my little girl.
Lisa said she hated him for ruining everything. "I hate you, Dad. You ruined
everything."
Lisa could have stayed with him, in her house, in her room with the four-poster
canopy bed that she begged for when she was eleven. She could have stayed with her
Derek Jeter posters, her boy-band computer-generated pictures held up with colored
push pins. Beau gave up worrying about holes in the walls long ago. She could have
stayed with her white cat that still sleeps in her bed.
That cat gives me the evil eye whenever I walk into Lisa's room at night.
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Where is Lisa? The green-gold eyes accuse him. Beau was sure he'd wake up
one night to fmd the cat sleeping across his face trying to suffocate him for "ruining
everything."
I have to take care of the cat. I am the only one to let her in and out. Ad
infinitum. And I spring up to do it. I can't let anyone or anything else down.
Now he'd have to take care of the damage to the Mustang.
That old lady wanted to do the right thing. I was too messed up to deal with it.
Why shouldn't I be messed up? For God's .. .for GOD'S SAKE! My boy. My Nicky.
He'd stay in the garage for awhile.
Me and my messed up goddamn car. Both of us shot to hell. Both of us took it
in the rear end. I can't get out ofthe car anyway. I can't even see. "There's too much
water in my eyes, Daddy. " That's what Nick used to say when he cried really hard and
I wanted to comfort him. There's too much water in my eyes, son. Where are you, son?
Lord have mercy on your soul. Your Very Young Soul.
*
"Wake up. Get up! Start moving or I'm calling the ambulance. Have you
taken something? Talk to me."
Bam. A stinging slap against the side of his head. Aunt Ruth?
"Jesus! What the hell's going on?"
"Good. You're not dead. Can you get out of the car? Can you walk? You can
try and lean on me but I'd suggest the fender. I don't think I could support your
weight."
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Is it Aunt Ruth? No, Aunt Ruth was butt-ugly and about four foot six in her
stockingfoet. This woman is old. But pretty. I know. It's the lady who whacked my
Mustang. She does have very blue eyes. Nice skin.
"Lady, I can't lean on you. I'd kill you. I'm all right. I must have fallen
asleep."
"When I first drove up and saw your car in the garage, then you in it with your
head dropped down against the steering wheel, it gave me quite a start. At first I
thought you might be trying to kill yourself. But if you were, I thought you must be
incredibly stupid. Trying to kill yourself with the garage door open and the car turned
off." She had even white teeth.
"Then I thought you might have taken something. When you didn't respond to
my voice, I had to get physical. I'm sorry ifl hurt you."
"No. You didn't hurt me. Though for a minute there I thought my ugly Aunt
Ruth had come back to box my ears."
She had a great smile. Beau saw the bathing beauty behind that smile. I bet she
used to be something.
"No. I wasn't going to box your ears. But I think you should get out of the car.
I still need your information for my insurance company."
"Yes. Information. I have that." That much I have. He invited her to come in.
He wasn't sure why. All his insurance information was in the car.
She was, he thought, the kind of woman who immediately felt right at home.
She walked in without that air of expectation or apprehension typical of most people
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entering a house for the first time. She expected to be made welcome. Beau did his
best, offering a cup of tea-decaffeinated that he bought by mistake-and a plate of
stale Oreos.
"How did you fmd me? I don't remember giving you my name or my address."
She sipped her tea before answering. "I followed you. However," she put the
teacup down. "I didn't stop. I sat in the car at the curb while I had an argument with
myself first. Then I took care of a few errands before returning. That's when I saw you
were still in the car."
They listened to the languid buzz of a fly.
The old woman shifted in her chair and looked taller than she had a moment
before. "I see you put all the photographs away. I can understand that. There is such a
thing as too much remembering. It's not healthy. Accomplishes nothing."
He hadn't noticed. Denise had taken all the photographs.
But she told me she didn't want to take anything from "our" home. Then she
cleaned me out. Robbed me of their faces.
With a muttered "excuse me" Beau got up to check the hall closet, the catch-all
closet filled with old sewing kits, placemats, candles, desiccated arrangements
of fake holiday flowers and a paper sack filled with photos-the only thing
missing from the closet. It was as if Denise had fled from a fire, taking those
pieces of life no one but the owners would cherish. Photographs, an armful of
clothes from the closet, a lamp they had picked up at a garage sale. And my
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daughter. I've been left with the chewed ruins. And the cat "-suppose I have
come at a bad time. I can come again or call, if you'd prefer."
"No. I'm all right. I'll get a piece of paper. Write it all down for you."
She had tucked the slip of paper into her purse before he realized he hadn't
asked for her name or her insurance information.
It came out, "Who are you?"
"I am Willa. Willa Dunne. Willa Victoria Dunne. It's an awful name. My
mother was a stupid woman."
She took a small green notepad from her purse.
"I'll give you my name, address and the name of my insurance company. And
my telephone number in case you have any ... well, I don't know. Anything, I guess."
"I've never heard that name. Willa I like it."
"At least it isn't 'Willow.' I comfort myself with that thought."
"Why don't you like it? It's nice. Reminds me of nature. Being outside."
"It's kind of you to say so. But after years of hearing the other children at
school with their 'Willa you kiss me? Willa you hold me? Willa you miss me?'" She
laughed. "Actually, now it sounds rather sweet. But I hated it when I was a child.
When I got older, I considered going to my middle name. But I am not a 'Victoria.'
We are what we are. There is no amount of name changing, nose surgery or breast
enlargement that is going to alter that situation. We are what we are." She slipped the
notepad back into the depths of her purse.
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"I am sorry about your son. I am assuming he is your son. He could be a
nephew or a friend's child."
"How did you know?
"I went inside. I saw him."
"He is-was-my son. Nicholas. His birthday is-was-in two weeks. I
don't know when this 'is, was' goes away. I don't know how to get used to this."
"Don't worry about that part of it. Say whatever comes out at the time. Don't
change it. Don't apologize for anything. Talk about it if you want to. Keep it inside
forever or scream it from the top of your roof. It's nobody's business but your own.
You are entitled to work with it as you please. Now sit down. You've gone very pale.
You're probably dizzy."
He was. Since Nicky's death, this was the longest conversation he'd had about
his son. The effort was sucking the equilibrium out of him.
"He had a cold one day. Then a fever. Then he died." He felt like all he
wanted to do was talk. For the rest of his life.
"Sniftles and a runny nose. Like all kids get, that's what he had. I sent him to
school. I went to wake him up the next day. He told me he felt really lousy. I took his
temperature. It was 101. I told him to stay home. When I got home from work, he was
still lying on the couch. I teased him about putting a permanent dent in the cushions.
He didn't laugh. He didn't want to eat. Soup or anything. He said he had been
throwing up. So I put a bucket by the couch. I thought he had the flu. Most people
would. Right?"
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He gave her no time to answer.
"That night his fever went up. To 104. I gave him some kind of fever reducer.
Tylenol. Something. I didn't give him aspirin. I remembered something about aspirin
and fever. He was probably old enough to deal with it. I didn't want to take any
chances. I was doing it all right. I had taken care of the kids when they were sick. He
wasn't that bad. Kids get high fevers. He said his head really hurt. He didn't want to
get up. Didn't want to move. But who would? When you have the flu, you don't feel
like running around."
He remembered putting the portable phone by the couch, right next to the
remote, and telling his son to call if he feh worse. Nick said he would. He didn't hear
anything from him all morning. There was something about the way he looked right
through Beau before he left. Like he wasn't there anymore.
"I came back around ten that morning. I found him standing in the eomer ofthe
dining room. Facing the wall. I called him and he didn't answer. I put my hand on his
shoulder. He turned around. Stared at me. Then started to walk by me. He hadn't seen
me. He started talking about this puppy he'd had when he was really little. He was
calling for it. Whistling for it. I put my hands on his shoulders to lead him back to the
couch and my God, that boy was on fire! The heat glowed through his t-shirt. He kept
calling for his puppy. Looking past me."
He watched it all happen again.
"I put his bathrobe over him. I led him out to the car. I got him into the front
seat and buckled in. The hospital is close, not more than five minutes away. At the
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very least, I figured they could get his fever down. That's what had me so scared. I
didn't have to take his temperature to know it was raging. I could feel it! He stared the
entire way. Once or twice he looked at me. Shook his head as if he had no idea who I
was. When I asked him how he felt-he didn't answer."
I never heard his voice again, Beau thought. The last word his son had spoken
was 'Milo.' Milo. The name ofthe puppy he'd been calling for.
"I got him out of the car and into the ER. Kept him right next to me. The
admitting nurse was telling us to take a seat. The doctor would see us soon, whatever
they say. I told her we wouldn't wait. My son was really sick."
He remembered. The nurse had given him one of those 'Yes, we know
everyone is really sick' looks and pointed him towards the waiting room.
"All of a sudden, Nick pitched forward onto the counter. Like someone had
bent him over at the waist and slammed his head down. His cheek was slapping the
counter. It all happened so fast. Then he was on the floor. Convulsing. Like-like
someone was tickling him. Tickling him too hard."
He stood and stared out the window.
"That was the end of waiting. They put him on one of those beds on wheels.
Pulled the curtains closed. There was a lot of doctor mumbling. The nurse sort of
pushed me back into this small waiting area. I wasn't there long. One of the doctors
came out. She said Nicky was being admitted. Immediately. They had to take tests. I
asked what kind. She said they were drawing fluid. They needed a-1 remember-a
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'culture of cerebrospinal fluid and blood specimens.' I asked what for. She said they
needed to rule out bacterial meningitis. That's all I knew for awhile."
He sat down. He could see himself, walking back to the admitting desk, his
shirt untucked and his eyes out of focus, answering their questions while the doctors
finished their tests and got Nicky into a room.
"I remember almost laughing out loud because they were hospitalizing my son
for the flu. Man, I would hear it from Denise. Overreacting as usual, she would say."
He dropped his head and stared at the floor.
"It helped to think like that for awhile. I knew it was worse. I'd never seen
either one of my kids become that disoriented. Convulse like that. I'd heard it happens
with high fevers. I let that thought take over. Then I remembered the doctor's words.
'Culture of cerebrospinal fluid ... ' Okay. Precautions. That's what they were supposed
to do. Poor Nick. I was hoping they'd give him some sort of anesthetic. I'd heard that
spinal taps hurt like hell. Yeah, I'd owe him for this one. 'Overreacting again, Dad.'"
When the nurse came to get him to take him to the floor where Nick had been
admitted, he remembered walking behind her but moving like he did in dreams. He
didn't know how long he'd waited before the doctor arrived, a different one, looking
tired. Scaring him to death.
"You know, how in movies and television, the doctor, when he has bad news,
always looks tired. He runs his hand through his hair. Then he puts his hands on his
hips. I swear to God, that is exactly what this doctor did. Exactly what he did."
Willa stared past him.
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"He told me they had run their tests. Nicky had bacterial meningitis. I told him
I had to see him right away. I knew he'd be scared. The doctor told me I could see him.
He warned me that Nicky wouldn't be talking. He had gone into a coma. I asked the
doctor if he was sure. Maybe he was just really tired. The things we say. No. He was
in a coma. His condition was extremely serious. The doctor wanted me to
know--extremely serious-he wouldn't be giving me any calls on his chances. It
was--don't ask. You know?"
He thought Willa might nod or say something.
"I watched him for hours. I looked at his face. Thought that he was still such a
little fella. Kids look even younger when they're sick."
Beau saw his boy's smooth skin, rosy cheeks, those absurdly long eyelashes
that his mother said she should have instead of her son. He thought about his hair.
Short. Sort of shaved on the side. Longer on the top. Some of the pieces fell over his
forehead.
"I couldn't decide which was darker as I stared at him. His hair or those
eyelashes. His mother is part Italian. He inherited this almost jet-black hair from her."
The old woman twitched. Like she'djust woken up.
"You go through a lot sitting by your child in the hospital with the words
'extremely serious' chipping away at your sanity. I wanted to kiss every inch of his
face. Smell his hair, crawl in next to him. Hold him tight while I whispered to him.
'You're going to be fine. Come on now, wake up and eat something. Wake up now,
please. I'll rent your favorite movie. I'll get pizza. We'll stay up as late as you want.'
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The whole time I wanted to grab him, hold him. Take big, deep breaths. Smell the life
in him. It was the worst-1 couldn't hold him."
He moved closer to Willa, his hands clasped on his knees. Like a little boy.
"Then I remembered. I had forgotten to call Denise. Maybe, unconsciously,
I'd decided not to call her. She left us. Why should I let her share? I have him to
myself. I knew that was pretty sick. I stepped into the hall. Told one of the nurses I
needed to call Nick's mother. I wouldn't call her my wife. I had to remember what I
was going to say. 'Extremely serious ... cerebrospinal fluid ... suspected bacterial
meningitis ... antimicrobial therapy has been administered ... coma.' I dug through my
wallet-trying to fmd that scrap of paper with her new number. I hated being away
from Nick. I hated her. I finally found it and got her damn answering machine. 'Hi!
Denise and Lisa can't come to the phone right now, but please leave your name and
number and a brief message and we'll get back to you. Thanks for calling!'
It was Denise's voice. I swear to you, right then, I felt like reaching through the
phone and choking her until she begged for mercy. 'Thanks for calling! Yep, I'm
away from my husband right now and available for fucking! Thanks for calling!"'
He shook his head. "Hey, I'm sorry."
Willa touched his hand.
"I left her a message all right. Everything boiled up inside. I let her have it. It
was a shittything to do. 'Nick's in the hospital here in Avery. Where you used to live.
His condition is extremely serious. He's in a coma, Denise. So he can't come to the
phone right now. I'll leave my number so you can get back to me."'
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"You're probably wondering how I could do that."
She finally spoke. "I don't question what people do under certain types of
circumstances. There's no answer for most of it. So I don't ask."
He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Well, I'm beginning to think
you're not like most people, Willa Dunne." His eyes met hers. He took a deep breath
before continuing. "By the time I got back to the room, they were sending a nurse to
page me. You see, Nick, he--Nicky died while I was on the phone. When he
died-he only had those doctors. I had been right there!" He was choking on these
words. "For hours. I'd been by his bed. He was alive.
He threw his head back. "Maybe he waited in there. Way deep inside ofhimself.
He waited for me to leave. He didn't want to die in front of me. He knows me. He says
'Dad, you're so weird. You cried at The Little Mermaid. I saw you!' I'd say, 'I didn't
cry. I just got a little misty.' He didn't buy that. So maybe--he waited for his Dad to
leave. To make it easier on me. 'Gotta go, Dad.' He always said that when his friends
came around."
'Gotta go now ... "' Beau's hands fluttered in a half wave of farewell
before drifting back to his knees. "He knows me pretty well." My Nick. "He knows
me." he whispered. "Pretty well."
Willa's hands covered his. "Your wife says you waited on purpose. That you
deliberately waited so she wouldn't be able to see him alive. Didn't she?"
"How did you know that?" His throat was tight. It hurt to talk.
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"Mr. Halsey, it is a cliche, but I have lived for a very long time. I know what
most people are apt to do in most situations. Of course that's what she'd think. She
was in the midst of a grief that is unimaginable. I'm sure she thinks she hates you."
"Yes. Yes, she does. I don't really care. Most of the time I hate her too. She
left me and took Lisa. She would have taken Nick but he told her he wanted to live
with me. Hey! How convenient. A 50-50 split. Good thing we didn't have three or we
would have had to cut one of them in half! That's what I told her when she told me
what she thought would work out best. Oh, she's a real thinker. Thought it all out.
And now, she thinks that because she left our son in my care, she is somehow
responsible for his death. Because of her bad judgment. Bitch. I'm sorry again."
Willa stood up. "Both of you are going to blame yourselves and each other for
a very long time. It won't do you or your daughter, Lisa, I think you said her name is,
any good. It is an unfortunate part of being human. My only advice to you is to not
take anyone's advice. Keep yourself very busy. That last part sounds like advice, but
it's only common sense."
"The doctors said it was an infection caused by bacteria. The infection causes
the inflammation. The inflammation causes the brain to swell. And those soft," he was
whispering now, ''unimaginably fragile, almost invisible tissues of his brain pressed
against his skull. Until-they were damaged." He shook his head. "Until they died."
"Mr. Halsey-"
"It's really pretty common. Did you know that? Some people can carry around
those germs for days. Weeks! Even months. They don't get sick." His voice rose. His
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hands stroked his knees. "Some people are just carriers. They develop an immunity to
this-bacteria that lives in the back of their nose. Or their throat. Did you know that at
any one time ten to twenty-five percent of the whole fucking population are carriers?
Did you know? It is the rare situation when those bacteria gain enough strength to
overcome the body's natural defenses. But if that happens-it's fatal in one in ten
cases. I'll bet you didn't know. I didn't!"
"Please, Mr.-"
"Did you know the fmal diagnosis was pneumococcal meningitis? Yes. What
happened is that the pneumococcal bacteria caused a sepsis in his blood. A sepsis. Do
you know what that means? Putrefaction. To make rotten. Yeah, I'm a goddamn
dictionary now. These septic organisms poisoned my boy's blood. After he
died-they looked in there. His brain was full of fluid. Blood. Pus."
He stood now. Ramrod straight. Goddammit! Find your eyes soldier!
"Did you know? In any given year, 4.5 children per l 00,000 will get this
disease. But these are children between the ages of one month and twenty-three
months. This disease can occur at any age. But ninety-five percent are children under
five.
'It is more common in boys than girls, Mr. Halsey.' I remember every single
word. They said it once. I have a lousy memory, Willa Victoria Dunne. Really lousy.
The doctor said to me-don't blame yoursel£ The battle was almost lost when the
symptoms showed up. If it's pneumococcal meningitis, well that's the one with the
highest likelihood of a bad outcome. Bad outcome. What do you think about that?"
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He leaned against the wall. Tears glazed his cheeks. There is too much water
in my eyes, Nicky. You know your Dad He cries so easily.
Willa watched. Listened. To the clock. The fly. The pounding in her chest.
"Mr. Halsey. I am going to go. You have done what is best for you. I am glad
if I was able to make things any easier. But I do have to leave. I have things to do. So
do you if you stop and let yourself think about them. Keep on with your errands. Your
everyday doings, Mr. Halsey. It is the only way. I or my insurance company will be in
touch about the car."
She walked through the door.
"Miss, or is it Mrs. Dunne? I've been very-"
"It's Missus or used to be. My husband died last year."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"I wasn't. Now collect yourself. Go to the market. What are you out of?"
"I think I'm out of milk. I need that for my coffee. I need coffee. I think I need
a lot of stuff."
"Go make a list, Mr. Halsey. Make a very detailed list. Include your cleaning
and washing supplies. Check the cat food. Make sure you go through the refrigerator
bins. You may have vegetable matter that has gone soupy."
He walked her to the curb.
"Mrs. Dunne-"
"Please. Do not call me that. Think about that sound. 'Missus Dunne.' Call me
Willa."
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"Call me Beau."
"I will. Goodbye Beau."
Then she was in the car and he was in the house. Making a list. He thought he
had seen her at the funeral. A slight but outstanding presence-wearing a dress.
Maybe a suit. The same vibrant violent-pink of the ice plant that bloomed in early
spring.
He stood in front of the refrigerator. Stopped-for a moment-to put it
all together. Denise and death. It stalked her and did not spare him.
He remembered Clare's funeral-the pounding savagery of Jared's grief in
stark contrast to the shadows enveloping Melanie's pain. And Denise, trying to
comfort them both.
She had done the same after Pat's suicide. Denise's mother wailed; Gail sobbed
quietly into a handkerchief. Aaron stood by his mother, his hand cupping her elbow,
his wife April by his side. Denise, back and forth between them all. Rock of ages.
She left me a year after his funeral.
I'm forgetting her father. Death by fire. Denise couldn't talk about it or him.
Now I have been burned.
*
Willa Dunne drove the speed limit. Perhaps five, no more than eight miles
over. Why have a speed limit if everyone makes up their own? In Willa's mind, eight
miles over did no harm. But ten miles? That would be taking the law into one's own
hands. Her speedometer now showed five miles under the speed limit.
Tammone101
He said his son had dark hair. Really dark hair. There were no pictures. I can'
check. Why should I? He'd know the color ofhis son's hair.
The image of the boy in the casket blocked out her surroundings.
I should pull over. No. Just a firmer grip on the wheel. And reality. I'll make
it home in one piece. So will everyone else on the road
Finally home and out of the car. She fumbled with the keys, searching for the
one that would unlock the heavy and ornate front door. Once inside, she strode through
the entry way and living room and into the den, stopping in front of an old-fashioned
cherry wood roll-top desk. The top left drawer, unopened for thirty-five years, slid
open as smoothly as if it had been opened yesterday. And every day before that.
His picture. His face. His eyes-flung that day long ago into the back of the
small drawer-looked up at her. Her own boy. Jimmy. His golden hair grazing his
shoulders. His cheeks, illuminated by the photographer's back lighting, sporting a pale
crop of peach fuzz. How handsome he was. She remembered. Gordon had collapsed
into a frenzied rage after the funeral. Throwing away everything that reminded him of
Jimmy. His round eyes had exploded from their sockets giving him the look of a
rampaging reptile. He seemed to sprout extra arms, snatching every trophy, every
ribbon, every macaroni-decorated picture frame and ceramic knick-knack ever shaped
by the golden-brown hands of their Jimmy.
"Nothing!" he raged. "Nothing will remain in this house that is him. He is gone.
Dead. In the ground. To the worms! We will not live in his shadow. Build shrines to
his memory. Life will go on in this house! Willa!"
Tammone 102
She could still hear the sound-Gordon's meaty fist pounding on the bathroom
door while she knelt on the other side, refusing to come out. The picture, the one she
held now, pressed to her heart. For hours they remained on opposite sides of that door.
Gordon, alternately raged and blubbered over his 'Jimmy.' Willa, clutching the
photograph of her son so hard, she'd fmd dents in her flesh carved by the comers of the
silver-plated frame. Only after he promised not to throw away the picture, did she
come out. "But!" he crowed when she finally opened the door, "it will go where I do
not have to see it. It will stay there! Do you hear me! Willa? Girl! It will stay there.
Take it out when I'm not in the house."
Gordon was a weak man. It was his way of coping. He refused to grieve. He
refused to mourn. He refused to remember that he had a son. It was how he endured
without losing his mind. Willa never took the picture out. What if Gordon should find
her? Snatch it away. So it rested in the drawer. For thirty-five years. After Gordon's
death, she hadn't thought to take it out, so ingrained was the fear of its loss.
Her finger touched one comer of the frame. Stroked the warm thin glass.
I can take out his picture. Put it anywhere I please.
Willa stood by the desk for a very long time before she closed the drawer.