Not the baby but the baby’s clothes defeat me— the cunning socks, the piles of onesies. A descant to the washer’s thrum, the strains of Pagliacci drift in from the study, dislodging a memory: a stormy weekend stranded at my cousin’s, the window wells filling with snow like the heaps of dirty laundry my aunt was sorting in the other room. Around us spread the scraps of paper dolls we’d wangled in the market, peeled now, and finished like our tangerines. We’d tired of mimicking Corelli whose whooping rose above the drone of the dryer where my aunt and uncle’s shirts embraced. “There isn’t anything to do,” I whined until my aunt emerged, a bar of Naptha gripped in her raw hand. What struck me was not her slap, nor even the stunned giggle before my cousin got hers like a portion, but the tenor’s voice dissolving in sobs, and the Clorox, smelling as a perfume might, if she had splashed it against her wrist.
After our son died, my wife found him in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly, at the oddest of times and places, and then in a pair of redtails that took up residence, nesting in a larch above our barn, and how their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us before rising over our kitchen roof made it seem as if they were looking in on us. In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home in high places—the edges of mountain trails, walking on a roof, or later, after he became a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder. So many mornings we woke to the redtails’ jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer, their presence multiplied my love for the ordinary more every day. We never thought, of course, any of those hawks was our son— who would ever want that?—but, once, watching one rise and rise on a draft of air, I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun— as if an old story could provide the distance I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged, and remembered a babysitter’s frantic call to come home, immediately, after she’d found our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing high up in the sky, throned on a branch, his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise of heights as he waved to me— and I must have looked very small calling up to him, staying calm so falsely as I pleaded with him to come down, to come down now.
I’m up at 6 A.M. to write, but all I do is stare at the rain and the trees and watch the wind strip away what remains of November’s leaves. Somewhere in Virginia, my father is dying. Not on the sidewalk of a sudden heart attack from shoveling snow, or in a hospital room monitored by nurses and beeping machines, but at home, alone, and almost imperceptibly from a sluggish, inoperable form of cancer. That man was never satisfied with anything. When leaves were green he wanted them red, when red then brown, when brown then fallen and gone. Once, after making me rake them into a curbside pile, he tossed in a cinderblock meant for the local punk who’d been plowing his 1982 Camaro through the heaped up leaves of our neighborhood. Two days later, the kid blew through our pile without suffering a scratch. My father didn’t realize that I, fearing for him as much as for the boy, had fished out the brick and chucked it in the ravine behind our house. As punishment, I had to climb down in there, retrieve the cinderblock, and bury it in the leaves after I’d raked them back into a mound. My dad said that was nothing if I dared to take it out. I can still see him, stationed at the window, watching and waiting for that boy to return— but he never did, because I tipped him off the next day after spotting him at 7-Eleven. Decades later and hundreds of miles away, a malignant brick buried deep inside him, my father still waits at the living room window, listening for the death rumble of that blue Camaro.
Sundays they’d meander down from surrounding hills to the watering hole just south of French Creek, where it joins the Allegheny, maybe twenty, thirty on a good day in summer, the fog in no hurry to lift off the river, & if I were visiting, my father-in-law would take me along, because this was the rhythm of Venango County men, week after week, season on season, for the members who hadn’t lost wives to dementia, cancer, or a cheating heart, a chance to get away from the women, bullshit, maybe win some money in the big drawing,
the Iron City flowing & Wild Turkey, not yet noon, a thumb-flicked Zippo, cover clicking back, scratchy rachet of the wheel, flame-sputter, flame, head bowing, a face sudden, illuminated, the long fhhhhhhhhhhh, with smoke stream, & a story would begin:
an Army jeep bouncing into a bombed-out Rhineland town, & in an old church cellar, great shattered wine casks, you drank as you sloshed through it, dark, fuck-cold; someone’s uncle down the Mon Valley, the Gold Gloves boxer who lost an arm; a lieutenant’s first whorehouse. That was the talk, and everything was Eddie, almost whispered, a shibboleth: duck boots, fly rods, the Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco—Elks Masonic to the nth degree.
Laugh, move among them, wear the flannel, stand them a round—still, I carried the scent of a distant country. One slight shift of wind & heads would lift, the circle tighten.
My sister says I greeted the swarm along the backyard slope, crawling, fat mouth slack, sodden Pampers saggy with supplication. Evidently, she scooped me up while they chased us through our father’s lavender azaleas where he dropped his shears and smashed yellow jackets against my skin, yanking off the diaper and waving it around his head like a lasso. We won’t get spanked again until winter. Everyone watches my sister declaim the tragic tale at family gatherings for decades as if she’s Dame Judi Dench. They love her nuanced performance, the lively hand gestures and operatic voice, how she tousles my hair before her triumphant finale: I got stung on my mouth, but he got stung in his asshole! I’m always grateful Dad isn’t here to witness this, or my marriage, or my career, or my incompetent gardening, the limp cosmos. I can’t believe you, a cousin smiles, shaking his head. Me neither, I reply. I don’t even know what I did.
Featured Art: Children Playing on the Beach (1884) by Mary Cassatt
As I get you down from the closet shelf and unwrap the brown shipping paper to the square white box inside I lift the lid for the first time and stick my fingers deep inside you / What does she feel like Barbara says and I say go on see for yourself but she shushes me and leads the way out back to where the creek used to run and we just do it quickly without any words because words are a foolish way of asking forgiveness for these five years we’ve left you up there stacked amid the empty shoe boxes and children’s playthings / But now with both hands I swing the box like sand in a pail and scatter you into the overhead cave of the old Judas tree where your tiny parts glow for a flickering moment like early snow / And Barbara whispers yes Patsy I know still trying to find your way home again just like the whole rest of your life without somebody’s arm to hold on to
By George Bilgere Winner, Editors’ Prize in Poetry: selected by J. Allyn Rosser
Featured Art: Mounted Model of a Polar Bearfrom United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory
A father died heroically in some Alaskan park while trying to save his kids from a polar bear.
Long ago, when his mother gave birth one summer afternoon in Bakersfield, California, could anyone have prophesied, as in an old myth, that the baby crying at her breast would one day be killed and partially eaten by a polar bear?
Has anyone from Bakersfield, California been killed and partially eaten by a polar bear? Yet her son was. He looked up from making camp, pitching the tent or lighting his Coleman stove, and there it was, white and immense. His fate.
And he died heroically and was partially eaten.
Of course, the bear had to be killed. The rangers shot it, which makes sense. You can’t have polar bears running around in the wilderness! The wilderness is a place for dads and kids and Coleman stoves. Polar bears just . . . they just kind of ruin the whole thing.
As for the bear, it didn’t die heroically. It just got shot and fell over and was sent to a lab for testing.
Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor
I worry what it says about my character, that I cannot picture the reality of sickness, I just wake and read Whitman and watch the sun on the brick of the next-door apartment. I have three cans of chickpeas, freezer-burned strawberries, half a bottle of wine. You have a stronger sense of the anthropocene. You buy soup, talk with your father. You know microbes are alive as they move across the grid. And in France each small town has a street named for Pasteur, who made men dig drains, convinced them to stop spitting. I wash my hands with hot water. I don’t want to be clean. What does it say that I am fully on my knees to this, that I admit such weakness willingly, that should you want company after any of your transatlantic flights I would take a cab immediately to your red and burning door.
You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home. Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.
You walk in with mystery. People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.
You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world. London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.
But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.
One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies. It’s perfect. It’s yours,
you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it, you start to smile more and more each time,
they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.
But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going, they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.
And they stop asking for your name, they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.
It contained home movies where he wore goggle-sized glasses, a toweled shoulder holding a small redhead at a birthday party, three hours
of ripped paper like static on a radio, the sun flaring off the ripples of the neighborhood pool. What do those thieves think of your soccer games,
the Go girl! and the rain that drove him cursing to the car? What about last Christmas? He was too tired, so you held the camera instead and closed in on his drooped head
nodding while everyone opened gifts. Would they tear up thinking of their fathers, would it convince them to call more? Ripped from your life, just a plastic box in a bag of stuff.
Maybe before wiping it clean, they will browse your home movies and say, What a good father, what a good life.
He’s in one of his funks again, my stepmother’s warned me, hair shaggy and mussed, baggy clothes afloat on his skinny frame.
My father makes hardly a dent in the overstuffed sofa he’s sitting on.
No, he’s not hungry. No, nothing in the paper interests him. No, there’s nothing I can do
but stare blankly into the distance where he’s staring
as I did sixty years ago when we hunched shivering and silent on five-gallon buckets flipped upside down on the ice of Cedar Lake, waiting for a tiny red plastic flag to snap to attention.
Now and then, we would stand up stiffly, huffing and hugging ourselves, stamping our feet, then skim the slurry from the augured holes and sit down again, nothing to do but wait, testing our wills against the deadening cold
and the wily old lunker pike we pictured
in the black, still depths below, impervious to the booted thunder rumbling overhead, hunkered down, hovering in its singular darkness, grim, stubborn, defiant.
We walk in on Thanksgiving, trash bags filled with clothes slung over our shoulders. Heather insists I break a twenty at McDonald’s. I buy a dollar cheeseburger, eat it as the cashier counts out the nineteen dollars’ worth
of quarters. No one else is there. Neither of us bothers to separate the whites from colors or obey the posted sign that says we shouldn’t
sit on top of the washers. So, we lie back, discuss the different shapes the ceiling stains resemble: a butterfly, atomic bomb explosion, ruffled
curtain, deep red crayon melting down the wall. We don’t want to go home. Three streets over, our parents wash the dishes, hit their joint again, and pack the leftovers
away, while their two daughters hope the dryers won’t really dry the clothes in fifty minutes. We drag them out. Heather insists we fold the underwear.
After talking with him for thirty minutes, as he lay cocooned in a thin wool blanket, I told my father I had to head back to Conway.
He turned his ashen head a bit and said, Conway . . . that’s where my son lives. I met my sister’s eyes before fixing his in mine to say, Father, I am your son.
His eyes widened in that way that makes us say, You look like you’ve seen a ghost, or as if he’d found himself the quarry of a hunt.
I touched his hand before I left to show him I was real. I think I could have walked through walls to get to my car, so grateful was I to be that ghost.
I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain although there is no mountain only rolling hills although hills don’t really roll & as I look at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store a gasp happens in my head a quake in my heart they aren’t here my father who loved sweets my mother who loved shoes & the sun shines on a world of orphans I quake along mountain street like a rolling gasp although if someone asked how are you I’d say fine like most of us are & aren’t I thought sadness was a prison but it connects us & if a chain it should be one of tenderness my father died two years ago although sometimes I say a year a way of keeping him closer can’t do that anymore with my mother need math on paper the ache woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests we live in a tsunami waves of being & non-being but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying bunion pads feeling drowned & drying under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song playing in my parents’ house in the sixties first there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is
Heads thrown back after one bubbly sip—the young in soft drink commercials seem as lavishly happy as lottery winners. They look the way we imagine ourselves on the stages of our dreams—glamorous, anointed, spotlit—our luck about to spill into graciousness.
And even in ads for walk-in bathtubs, incontinence pull-ups, stair chairs, dementia care, the actors don’t merely grin and bear it, but almost chortle, like Cheshire cats who just swallowed these amazing canaries, though the old they represent are more like expiring birds.
But the worst soft pitch: the “personal” Christmas pictures taken in the dementia wing of my father’s “retirement home.” In another life, his face would say This is ridiculous, even if he played along, and sat in the appointed armchair by the tree, and hugged the enormous white teddy bear prop, as instructed. But he is in this current life, and guilelessly presses his warm cheek against the bear’s fuzzy one, and stabilizes the bear’s plump feet with his free hand, as if they were a child’s.
Featured Art: Ancient Roman Ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini
–Rome
1.
My father fills a syringe with insulin, pushes the needle through his shirt into belly skin, looks through the window at his dying lawn. He writes a note to me: Summer’s early here, bud. Your mom’s still on me to lay off the Snickers. She means well, of course. The oak tree’s about to go—groans all night long. Caravaggio is one of my favorites. A sensitive scoundrel. Go see Conversion On The Road To Damascus. All is of Grace, Dad.
2.
Four lions stick out hollow tongues in the middle of Piazza del Popolo. Each tongue spews water—spilling down stepped plinths into four collection pools whose surfaces are mildly disturbed but never overflow. With their perspective of stone, the lions have remained unmoved for 200 years. How, I wonder, can they gaze without weeping at the sun-burned stoner strumming a distorted “Stairway To Heaven.” I stumble from one to another, dropping coins until my pockets are empty.
3.
When he baptized me, my father’s robe floated up around him like the wings of a manta ray, revealing the soft skin of his shins to the believers. We stood in a glass tank, with nothing to hide. He covered my eyes with a handkerchief, dipped me backwards into new life. I trusted his strong arms more than God.
4.
Fountains fill my photographs: pissing cherubs, horses with fish tails. Granite seashells emerge amid glistening mermaids— breasts taut in the exquisite way stone has of lying about flesh and time.
Featured Art: Evocation of Roussel by Odilon Redon
The letter came back from the post office so mangled it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box before being jumped by a clot of street thugs. Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man, his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway, woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes, with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours” they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for: the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble, she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds before sending him back out for his morning shift, because they both needed him to keep this job (there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce proceedings, was hungry for the alimony). And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched letters in his bag, feeding them through the system before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine, the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic, and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation, the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit, clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,” and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.
As my father hands me a bouquet of roses dyed the shade of a dozen sinking suns, my mother grasps his steady arm, teetering. Her body has begun its slow revenge for what it begrudged all along, and she’s afraid to walk since her last fall, which snapped her hip in half. My father is tired of holding her up. He scolds, Just take it. Her hand shakes as she holds the iPhone to get a photo of me in my mortarboard and hood. Let go and take it, he says, and she tries a one-handed snapshot, her trembling arm still looped through his.
I stitch a smile across my face. The phone flashes. As she grips his wrist, I can hear him in Greek, the language reserved for anger and, once, for sex. The language they speak and still think I don’t understand. Can I live this way, Tia? he asks.
I clutch my bouquet to my chest, trying to pretend these flowers aren’t lopped off at the stems. Trying to move into the next phase of realization that love is unsteady on its feet. That two people can resent each other, but care for their daughter and each other enough to stay put. Refusing to wilt into that place I’d go as a child—when I’d hear their fights and retreat to the backyard to play with cats, praying to make something else of myself, however small—I stand tall. How can I live like this? he says to her again. Still, I’m posing, smiling into the face of their slow decline. And all three of us trying, best we can, to hold each other shakily, and steadily upright.
By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him. She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance. I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them that, together, they’ll create a new generation of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl, the one who, forty years later, will see him, run to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother, in the words of the great North American philosopher, Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.” But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage, and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War has ended, but here I am standing at the window, watching while they meet, both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone, in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit. But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go. But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep: holding onto each other until death.
Written on the side of a payphone lashed to the wall of the bathroom in a Montreal café is Annie Oakley’s telephone number. I see it while I’m peeing. That’s how close the payphone is. Annie Oakley in black marker and then her number. I’ve only touched a gun once. Or maybe I didn’t touch it, I just thought about touching it and then said, No, thank you. It was my father’s gun. It was small, perfect for fitting into a lady’s hand. Is that called a .38 Special? Annie Oakley would know. I didn’t grow up with guns. I didn’t grow up with my father. People sometimes think that is a great tragedy. I did grow up near a little lake, beside which lived two goats and a horse. In spring and summer I would walk with my sisters the dirt trail overlooking the mountain to the gravel path to the stables. If the goats were out, we’d pass them cabbage through the fence. Back then I thought the greatest tragedy was August ending or my eighth-grade crush dumping me for a girl with nearly my same name. I’ve always had trouble locating the appropriate level of sadness about the father thing. I’m not saying it doesn’t register. I’ve just known from a young age there was nothing to do about it. Here is me. Here is my father. The distance between us could be as close as me to this payphone or as far as the mountain felt from the lake. Either way it changes things. Either way it’s done. Annie Oakley shot a squirrel’s head clean off at age eight. It was her first shot. Here is me, I hear her saying. Here is the squirrel. Right through the head or right through the thigh or right through the gut. Either way it’s done.
They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy, that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue, stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag
that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways, the loveliest part of the package except for the object you can barely remember, it’s been so long since you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,
you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you, and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church, no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,
no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here: whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley, you have your car, and now you’re on your way home to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which
is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head, and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided “to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni, and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying. That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.: we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely
after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle? No cathedrals in America, says Henry James, no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.
Since my dad was blind by then, when David and I led him from his apartment to the tee of the shrunken one hole golf course that served as kitschy courtyard for the complex of retirees only well-off enough for this unironic aping of the rich, it was by habit only that he looked down at the ball he couldn’t see, then up and out into the void of stunted fairway and green while first this foot then that foot patted the fake grass, almost kneading it cat-like till the tight swing arced the ball up high
as the second-story windows and I swear it was like a trick ball the pin on an invisible line reeled in straight down into the hole—his first and only hole in one, on the last swing of a club he ever took, though we didn’t know this then, and how we whooped my brother and I as we jumped and capered throwing the other balls up into the air while the old man baffled said what? what happened? what? already wistful for this best moment of a life it was his luck the blindness made him miss.
And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just my luck, to be the last one remembering, as if I’m not just there with them but also far removed above it all and watching as through the block glass of an upper-story window high enough for the ruckus not to reach me but too low not to see the filmy blur of bodies hugging one another pumping fists as arm in arm the three of them head out across the fake grass of that single hole.
Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade as three men at a slatted table play cards. Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes. All three are gray-haired, but none is my father. He wouldn’t have played without scotch on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.
2.
A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike. He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently, the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.
3.
Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay, I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves that grapple with the beach as they leave it.
On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low the bay curves like an ear to hear it.
Featured Art: The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia by William James Glackens
This morning, doing the laundry, smoothing collars and shirt plackets before placing it all in the dryer, I saw the ghost of my recently dead mother, her red-capillaried face looking on approvingly in the steam.
I didn’t expect to see her, and some of this must be pretend, but she was there, making a place for herself over by the baskets, in the light that fell through the windows at an angle that never seemed to change.
We got to talking—who doesn’t want to talk with the dead again when it’s morning and mostly sunny?— about the telephone pole in our old backyard, and the sound of the pulleys and ropes that carried the wash in and out.
I was lingering over the way a drying sheet took in a breeze and released it as if it were breathing, but my mother chattered away non-stop, moving as she always did, from topic to topic without transition,
only pausing here and there to punctuate with one of her sayings— Doing the wash makes you happy. It says you can begin again. And unlike when she was alive that seemed true. As the light’s angle
sharpened, none of our mistakes, our fights or failures, the old argument about Dad—or even the ridiculous, proper way to fold a bottom sheet—held us back as we finished the first load of darks.
And by the time she held a shirt by the shoulders, folded it in thirds, then flipped the bottom half under the top and laid it in the pile for the living, I was whistling, caught up entirely in the rhythm and pace of our task.
Someone has to identify the body. The funeral facilitator, Jeanne, gestures me into the room and clicks the door shut behind me.
You finally got your wish, I say to my mother. She’s wearing a shade of lipstick that unbecomes her, a subtle peach she would have hated. Her face is her face and of course is not, her hair parted in the middle, a new look. Her hands, composed across her sternum, are the color of parchment, skin thin as vellum.
I don’t stroke her arm. I don’t kiss her forehead, as I thought I would. Instead, I wonder, oddly, if the funeral people use the same gorgeous quilt that covers my mother now, with its sunbursts and bluebirds, for everybody.
When I think I have stayed long enough, Brahms trailing off in the corners, Jeanne is sitting outside the door, her long fingers forming a steeple. I want to say to her I have no idea who that is, I’m sorry, but levity isn’t encouraged here. Although I would only be speaking the truth: Alzheimer’s riddled her brain and sucked the marrow from her spirit; she became a stranger and a stranger to herself. What else was there to do but believe along with her that Hoss and his Bonanza brothers were indeed aliens from another planet, that Pat Sajak was “in on it,” along with everyone else who came and went in Mom’s room, stealing her clothes, her makeup, the nursing home grand conspiracy . . .
I’m sorry it’s taking me so long, Mom said in a rare lucid moment last week, and I had nothing to say, and I tugged the blanket snugly under her chin, and I handed her the plastic cup full of water which she waved away.
By George Bilgere Featured Art: Long Exposure Coupleby Jr Korpa
I walk past Erin’s house at dusk and there she is at her kitchen table, working on her book about the Reformation.
She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure, but it’s slow going because being a single mom is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation, which I can see her writing about right now, her face attractive yet harried in the glow of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.
Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son, shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage by the father now remarried and living in Dayton, as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble, against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead, my mother inside looking harried and scared, studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.
And although I hardly know Erin, I feel I should walk up, knock on her door, and when she opens it (looking harried, apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me. And she will smile with relief and say yes, of course, what took you so long, and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation and start frying up some pork chops for us
as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot, and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering on the basement workbench where the ghost father left them on his way to Dayton.
I will fill the void, having left voids of my own, except that my own wife and son are waiting down the street for me to come home for dinner, and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled, as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out a further contribution to the body of scholarship concerning the Reformation, and Andrew sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.
Featured Art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920by Eugène Atget
I saw you, daughter, sneaking a garbage bag of my treasures into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.
Never mind the cracked lenses and broken hinges, the bent frames. Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp. I’ll make a mobile.
The broken picture frames and dried-out pens. Even the bottle caps beg to be known. And how patient those stacks of hotel soap. Waiting. Just in case.
Yes newspapers haystack the walls. But it’s all there: knowledge at my fingertips. The postman will bring more.
There is an ocean liner inside my heart that waits to set sail. The crowds wave at the dock. My shades are drawn. Bring me, daughter. Don’t take. Bring me a basket brimming with words.
Not fester, not filth— fang words that surgeon my heart. Bring me gossamer, lagoon, violet-crowned hummingbird. Bring me, daughter, elixir of cloud.
Featured Art: Three Dogs Fighting by Antonio Tempesta
They are big and smelly and mean, and they’re living in her basement. I think they are dogs, but they might be wolves. Eight or eighteen of them, something like that. They all would bite me if I gave them the chance, so I’m really careful when I herd them out into the yard. What is it with my mother? Most families just have pets—usually one dog and a cat, nothing like this. How did she let this happen to her?
She’s living in some decrepit house now on Rt. 9 in the next town over and she’s evidently lost her taste in furniture. Everything is gold with rickety legs. She and I watch the dogs patrol around the yard from behind a glass sliding door. My mother is angry now that she’s old, and I think that maybe she and the dogs deserve each other, but I can tell that my mother is scared too, and I want to help her out because I’m the problem-solver in our family.
The dogs don’t play like normal dogs, they just move around the yard like big bullet-headed missiles. We have to get rid of them somehow, I tell my mother who is suddenly smaller than she was, and then I hold her in my arms and she’s a little girl. Whatever you do, don’t let them in, I whisper, but she’s already dead of lung cancer.
Featured Art: Buste van een oude vrouw by Anonymous
There are five recliners in a circle, each with a spongy blanket. The lights have been dimmed, but an aide has left behind her walkie-talkie and it sounds like it’s ready to lift off. My mother is in one recliner, I’m in another, an easy way to spend time now that she’s afraid of the color red and distrusts windows as if the glass weren’t there and the fingers of the dwarf palmetto would reach in and pull her down into its dark center to cut out the last cluster of syllables huddled beneath her tongue.
I look over to see if she’s sleeping and her eyes are open as though she’s forgotten to close them. Maybe she’s on some dusky street where half-drawn figures drift and sounds almost blossom into meaning. Maybe she opens a door and her aunts from Brooklyn are there and clutch her to their mountainous breasts where she could stay forever.
She tries to inch out of the recliner but an aide intercedes with a cup of apple juice which my mother examines closely for poison and studies her hand as if it’s screwed to her wrist. Then she brings the cup to her lips as if it’s the last thing left from the world when she was Shirley and carried keys, lipstick, cash.
And I hope that the cold, sweet liquid brings a moment’s pleasure, but how can it be that it comes to this, that at the end you get thrown in the ring for one more brutal round without enough stamina to put on your shoes or enough strength to say Thank you or Go to hell.
I unearth it while cleaning up my office, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing that my father sent me two years before he died, its bright red cover like an accusation, a yellow Post-it bearing his cheerful half-script still attached: “Jeff—even if you read only the first part of this book, you’ll get the gist. Return it some time, no hurry. Love, Dad.” I chose to place the emphasis on “no hurry” and hadn’t cracked its little crimson spine when, a year later, he asked me what I thought. When I told him I hadn’t gotten to it yet, he said he wanted it back, so he could lend it “to someone who might actually read it.” “But I might still read it,” I said half-heartedly. “No, you won’t.” Which made me all the more determined not to read it, so I said fine, I’d send it back. But I never did—and then he got sick, and our investment in that particular contest seemed pointless.
But here it is again, this little red book so unlike Mao’s, as if my father were making a move from beyond the grave. Okay, my turn. Is it because I need to prove him wrong even now, or that I want to make amends belatedly for disappointing him yet again that I open the book and begin reading? Or am I doing it in his honor? And is he still trying to tell me I invested in the wrong things?—poetry, for instance. “Counting angels on a pin,” he said once. Which is just the kind of cliché I find in the book. Later, though, he claimed to like my poems, the funny ones at least. And if we drew a graph of our relationship over his last decades it would look a lot like the Dow: a steady ascent with several harrowing jagged downward spikes. The little red book says nothing about those, though it does advise not getting too caught up in the market’s dramatic nose-dives.
Unless, perhaps, you’re trying to realize your loss—another topic that the book, with its rosy perspective, blithely avoids as it enthuses on “the miracle of compounding.” But instead of getting annoyed I feel an odd joy: my father could have written this book. He too was an optimist who liked to talk about money, and so I used to ask him questions— What’s the best kind of mortgage to get? Is life insurance a good idea?—and those led to some of our least fraught conversations. That’s why he gave me the book. And he was right: I get the gist after two chapters. And the suggestions seem helpful, if limited— I even underline a few sentences. Still, that other book, the one about losses, would be more complicated, and harder to write, its author finally coming to understand that, no matter what the future brings, he won’t be able to ask his father’s advice.
Featured Art: Crumpled and Withered Leaf Edge Mimicking Caterpillar (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Emma Beach Thayer
Unable to sleep, I imagine a blob of ants, erupting from a faucet.
If they puddle, that will mean sleep.
But if each ant descends on a crumb, steals what it can and lumbers robotically off, which they do, branching in veins across the tile floor, then I’m left listening to the sound of my two sisters downstairs in the summer kitchen where they’re making my mother laugh without me again, carrying their prize over invisible trails.
Featured Art: Figure with Guitar II by Henry Fitch Taylor
When I got the phone call, I listened to my sister’s voice give no hint, at first, that overnight, like that, her life had changed. I said hello and flipped through a book on the nightstand, knowing deep down, from all my missed calls, that she was preparing to tell me something important. How are you? I asked, trying to delay what I knew already I didn’t want to hear. And after her silence, then, I sat straight up—I was still in bed—my eyes blinking awake, the automatic coffee pot dripping into the quiet, and I said it: What’s wrong, Heather? expecting for one singular moment the death of our father, the sniffed pills, the heroin finally ending his life. But when she said nothing, I demanded, this time, hearing the pitch of her voice fill with the sound a brass instrument might make breathing a low note, barely audible, into the crashing, noisy universe. And she said it: Joel killed himself last night, choking on “killed,” and when I said, Oh my god Heather oh my god, she understood, she told me later, for the first time, that her husband was never coming back. The sun peeked through the window blinds. It flashed across the framed faces of his daughters, who I pictured, for a second, on the swing set behind their house, their father pushing them higher each time they swung back to him, further away each time, further away.
Featured Art: Horse Race, Siena, Italy by Walter Shirlaw
I asked about the old days, when they were my age—my mother scrambling eggs, Dad and I at the table. He aimed a glance sidelong at her, then took a shot toward me:
We’ve been very lucky, Son.
He must have meant their gamboling, teenage marriage after weeks of jitterbug jokes and getting-to-know-you’s in the Abilene Lady Luck pool hall in 1941.
Her silence like the hush of a tournament match, the cue’s tip skittish at the ball, probing for angle and spin, velocity, the all-important leave and follow-on.
By now—both gone so long, both unlucky— I understand his game, how words can travel in disguise, their spin covert, as on that morning when his mumbled plea
caromed off me—sharply, as off a felted cushion—and spun toward her, determined at the stove:
Come on, Honey, let’s play. Let’s keep the run alive.
Featured Art: Dog with pups by India, Rajasthan, Ajmer, probably Sawar school
That damn dog. Which one, Ma? The first one. There is no first one, there was always a dog, Ma. The shepherd, the one who kept the baby from rolling in to the road down the hill in front of the house. That was me, Ma. I was the baby. I know that. Rex. Rex. And what about your father’s, who jumped out the car window at a toll booth, headed for the hills. Skippy, ungrateful mutt. Then we got Duchess, because of Lassie on television. Duchess was weak. Duchess didn’t last. The toy poodle came in a hat box. She matched the décor! I swear to god, she did. Your chateau phase. What about your dogs? My dogs? My dogs, Ma? The fear biter who darted in the dark at the ankles of my bad choices? The herder who swam himself spent, circling me circling me when I was at sea? The too-happy dog, who I couldn’t keep, I forget why? Now this one, the big one, this horse of a dog who braces himself so I can stand? Who, the slower I go, the stronger he gets? Who can’t rest until I rest? This dog, Ma? This last one? Ma?
Featured Art: Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoiseby Camille Pissarro
“We’d invite you in,” my mother said, “but where would we put you?” I must have seemed enormous squatting before her door, third drawer from center.
If not for the marble nameplate, I might’ve seen a diorama of Jacobean chairs, tiny forks and spoons, and my stepfather’s bonsai.
“There’s barely enough room for the two of us,” my mother went on. Deep inside the granite walls, my stepfather growled, “I blame the Realtor.”
Dogwoods fluttered, casting stained blossoms into the fountain. Down the hill, a procession of bagpipes let out a skirl. “She promised us a view,” my mother shrilled.
I think my parents imagined themselves still at the retirement home, rolling along a tulip-edged path from the Independent Wing, past Assisted Living,
over to Memory Care, where the Admissions Lady touched my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry. We’ll help them downsize.”
When my father was ten, his mother died and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed at God. He said, “Take me, you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my uncle, was so scared he ran into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like, why God had let him come back, if he had seen their mother, what she was wearing.
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