Sweet Things, page 13
The next day I brought my father to see the new tree. He picked a leaf from one of its branches and began chewing on it because he said it would make him wise. I heard the wind utter “O,” and when I sat beneath its shade the breeze through the leaves warned me never to grow a day older.
Silences
For my twelfth birthday, my parents asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted them to talk, not just to me, but to each other. They seemed surprised.
“Your father and I are perfectly contented with each other,” my mother insisted. But I knew there was something wrong. They weren’t communicating.
Other people’s parents said things to each other. They’d call goodbye, argue over who let the cat out, or shout about overspending, or the dinner being cold. My parents said nothing.
The three of us sat down at the dining room table, our hands folded in front of us on the linen cloth.
“Are you going to explain?” I asked.
My father looked concerned and glanced at my mother as if to say, “Are you or I going to tell her?”
“Dear, we do communicate. We just don’t use words. You’ve probably seen me break into a smile, or your father put his hands up to the side of his head and stomp his foot or caught me shaking my head in displeasure for no reason. We don’t have to speak. We communicate telepathically. We know what the other is thinking.”
“There are times,” my father added, “when I can’t control my thoughts, but I try to make sure they are always about your mother.”
“Such a flirt,” she said.
“Can’t you say something to each other? Just for me?”
I went to my room. The house was silent except for the singing in my head.
Suntrap
There was one corner of the living room where the sun flooded in on winter mornings and he liked to sit and face directly into the light until he took his eyes off it and everything around him went dark.
His wife complained that if he kept pulling back the drapes the floral slipcovers would fade, and they couldn’t afford new ones.
He would shrug when she said that.
He pretended he didn’t care, but just before he would get up to leave his spot on the couch, or if the sun passed behind a cloud, he would bend over and smooth the fabric, patting it and drawing his hand across the surface of the printed chintz to make the damage go away.
Lately, he’d grown quiet, seeming farther and farther away from her to the point that she wondered if he heard her anymore.
Months of winter still lay ahead.
Over lunch one day he said he wanted to sit out in the garden. She replied it was freezing out and far too cold. It was January.
He insisted the flowers in the living room were ready to bloom.
He’d always been a pragmatist. Now, though, she was certain, he had drifted off into a dream world. What had remained with him were memories from long before she had met him.
He would break into poetic recitations, and although they had been married for fifty years, she had no idea his mind had stored Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
Odd things set him off. The daffodil poem had emerged when a friend had them in for tea and handed him a cup decorated in the yellow flowers.
A woman chasing a toddler in the supermarket had triggered a round of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Everywhere they went, poetry flowed from him. He hadn’t been a poet. He’d worked in a bank.
When she found him one day after the sun had gone in, his mouth drooping and one hand open in his lap, she checked to see if he was still alive then attempted to settle him with his feet up on the couch. He reached to smooth the sun from the fabric and muttered the slurred word ‘spring.’
“Yes,” she said. “It is springtime now. It’s April at last.”
He tugged at her sweater and pointed at the cushion panel beside him on the couch. She looked at the slipcover and was awestruck as the buds in the pattern bloomed just as they faded in harsh light.
Gran’s Hats (Unlimited Literature)
Though she refused to believe Grandad was gone, she announced she needed a new hat. Black had never been her shade although she looked very widow-ish in her long Persian lamb coat. Most of her hats were grey or blue. We took her shopping and she found a black feathered Queen Mary and fitted with a black mesh veil.
” A person needs to dress for grief,” Gran said.
She said she needed new glasses. We guessed she wanted people to see the sadness on her face, so she settled on a pair of crow-like frames. But her eyesight didn’t improve.
At dinner one night we knew something was wrong. She ate only half her plate, and when she wasn’t looking we turned it around and she finished the other side.
Neighbors saw her sitting and rocking on her front porch at three in the morning. She told them she was waiting for her husband to come home. He always had.
The woman next door rang to tell us Gran had fallen down the steps. It was winter. We should have seen that coming. When we got there, Gran explained she had mistaken her shadow for her husband and wanted to hold him before he flittered away again. Did we know him?
When the ambulance arrived she insisted she would not leave without her hat.
Boxes of black hats tumbled from her wardrobe. We asked which one she wanted.
“The black-feathered one!” And each was ready to fly away.
Cornfield
So if I’m as pissed as you, who’s going out and find Petey in the dark? Just listen to him. Geez. Pleading, then pauses when he sobs followed by silence and the crickets chirping. It’s too nice a night. I figure if the kid had any sense in his head, he’d lie down between the rows, look up through the spreading arms of the corn, and count the stars. But no.
He’ll tell his Mom when she gets back. But what will she say? She’ll yell. She’ll tell me I’m a bum, that I couldn’t look after a child and if any of you are still here she’d tell you to fuck off. I think we’re just going to wait for Petey to figure his way out, maybe follow the sound of our laughter or the lights from the kitchen. Bob’s right. The kid has no sense or he’d come out.
When a kid is scared shitless, let me remind you, he does stupid things. I ought not to have told him there was a dead woman in the attic who will come out in her bloody dress if he didn’t get upstairs to bed. The two things, bed and the dead woman, sort of cancel each other out. Hey, if I had a dog I could send him after the boy, or maybe the dog would get lost, too and I’d have two problems – a howling dog and a screaming kid.
Maybe I want Petey to learn what it is to be afraid. Jimmy, before he drove off to bring back another forty and hasn’t returned so God knows where he’s gone, probably shouldn’t have told him the wolves would chase him everywhere but the corn.
Jimmy was halfway through a really dirty joke and he didn’t want Petey to hear so he told him to go hide in the corn. Jimmy is an asshole, but he’s a bigger asshole because he’s probably driven his truck into a ditch somewhere. Do you hear it between the kid’s screaming, “Daddy, Daddy?” There’s a horn that keeps sounding.
So what’s his mother up to? Yeah, I know. She’s off in the city with her girlfriends. Says she can’t stand it here in the summer. Says she can’t stand the heat. Can’t stand the sound of the crickets all night. Always saying there’s something in the corn, and there are noises in the attic, and Jimmy hears them, too. Sure, there are noises in the attic. My old man always said his Aunt Amelia ran off with a Bible salesman, that Uncle Stan said, “Good riddance to her,” and she never came back.
But Petey says he sees her. The pull-down stairs to the attic are in the closet of Petey’s room and he won’t put his clothes or his toys in there. Not for nothing. He says she scratches at the inside of the closet door. Says he saw her once. Says she ought to have been buried in the cornfield.
The Cloud (Flash Frontier)
Our neighbor is having a rough time of it again. It happens often. He tries to shrug it off, but everyone on the street knows his predicament. It isn’t fair. He’s the target of something we can’t explain. It only rains on his house.
This oddity of local weather has been studied by the Meteorological Service and various university climate programs.
Our basement drains back up a little. Every time it rains, however, only his house floods. It’s like an ocean in there.
The water drains once the pressure of his misfortune lessens and the storm sewer empties the place.
The rest of us, even two doors down, sit in our gardens on warm, sunny days, sip beers, and tilt our heads back to feel the blessing of sunlight on our faces.
Not our neighbor though.
We all know when he is suffering. We can hear him screaming for help, the splashes, the cries to save his wife and children first.
But what can we do? A cloud has hung over him his entire life.
We’d really like to help him, but we don’t know how. It’s hard to watch him suffer. Maybe he’ll just move away. We’ve told him if a house comes on the market, somewhere else in town, we’ll help him load the van.
There’s only so much a person can do for someone. If the sky falls on him or the earth swallows his house, we just hope he won’t take us with him.
Flight (London Independent Short Story
Prize finalist)
You never want to imagine the worst so you imagine the best or at least something better than the worst. My daughter asked me to imagine she could fly. It was a little game we played to pass the time and to take our minds off the smell of bleach in the hallways. I told her people don’t fly.
“That’s your business,” she insisted. “Maybe you like the truth, but just for the sake of imagining things imagine I can fly.”
So I did.
Then I asked her where she would fly too if she had the chance.
“Mexico.”
“Why Mexico?” I asked.
“I’ve never been there.”
“Do you mean the resort Mexico where the hotels have swim-up bars in the middle of the pools with grass tiki huts where you can catch some shade after you’ve been out in the sun too long?”
I wasn’t sure what she wanted. Was she hinting at an all-inclusive? Mexico is not merely one thing, and if we were going to imagine it properly I needed more information.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I want to see butterflies. Mostly monarchs with their orange and black wings. Do you remember when we were up on Manitoulin, at Providence Bay? We’d just walked out on the shallow sandflats of the bay, and as we came in together from as far as the lifeguard would let us go, the water up only to your knees, a butterfly lit on your arm.”
“I remember that. You must have been about four. How long ago was that?”
” Only six years ago.”
“Six years is a long time,” I replied.
“There’s no time in the mind. You told me that. Do you remember what you said? You said it had a long way to go. You told me how they fly south every year just like the birds and then after the winter they fly back again, millions of them, to feed on the milkweed pods in the ditches of Manitoulin, and when the heads break open and the fluff floats through the air like Santa Clauses they head back south again before the cold weather. They must work very hard to make it home. I want to see what that home looks like.”
“Alright,” I said, “Let me give it a try.” She closed her eyes. “There are mountains between the desert in the center of Mexico and mountains closer to the Caribbean coast. Those mountains rise up like dragon’s teeth, or at least they looked like that the first time I saw them on the road south of Monterrey. It was very dark. I could see their outline.”
“So, you aren’t imagining. You are remembering.” She was refereeing our game.
“Ah, but there’s a difference. Yes, I was there, but I am imagining you there with me, not here, not in this place, so it’s different. You can imagine a real place as long as you’re seeing it in a new way. Okay? So, we’re there together. As the highway snakes higher and higher into the hills, the Sierras as they are called are green because the green side, the Caribbean side, catches the rain. We pull off the highway. There’s a stream running through the valley. It is called an arroyo. We climb down the bank of the creek, carefully holding on to branches but watching where we put our hands. Do you know why we have to take such care? Imagine that every branch is lined with butterflies. There are millions of them, not just monarchs, but millions of yellow, blue, white, and even red butterflies. They are everywhere. I want to tell you to be careful where you tread, not to hold on to anything too tightly or to open your mouth to speak because the butterflies might fly in to get a better idea of what you are saying. We kneel beside the arroyo. We can hear the water chattering over rocks in the streams, and it is cool beside the flow. We are covered in butterflies until they lift us in the air. They are holding onto us tightly, and they won’t let go because they don’t want to drop us.”
“Where do we go from there?” she asked as she shifted in the hospital bed and turned one cheek toward the pillow.
“Anywhere you want,” I said. She fluffed the pillow around my head.
“Even as we lie here waiting for you to get well,” she whispered, “we can imagine flying away. We can become angels, and I can imagine that angels never feel pain, that they never suffer because they have no bodies, take up no space, and are pure thought just like you told me.”
I smiled. I had never imagined what it would be like to be without my body, but the idea of becoming a thought made me smile. I wanted her to think of me whenever this whole thing was over, perhaps lie down on a grassy hill in midsummer, stare at a clear blue sky above, and watch a pair of butterflies dance with nothing to hold them up except the perfection of their flight.
Same Time Next Year
Someone set up a makeshift Golgotha on a hill across the highway from the Three Trees Motel where Garth and I had our annual afternoon of it. Each time we parted he’d say, “Same time next year, Lizzie?”
He paid cash for the room, explaining his wife checked his credit card statements since they’d found Jesus.
Garth rolled off and stared at the ceiling as if the roof opened above him. He was staring into eternity. He wasn’t breathing, just staring as if he saw something beyond the spackled hotel room ceiling and was gawking at it in awe.
I thought, “Oh, for the love of God!” What would his wife, my husband, and my kids say about this?
I kept praying, “Think straight. Think straight.”
That’s when the Lord spoke to me.
” Leave Garth in Vernon Park.”
I dressed him and brought his car around to the motel room door. Were his shoes on the right feet? Was anyone watching?
I put on mittens from my coat pocket to avoid leaving fingerprints on his car keys, then I went back for the Gideon in the nightstand and tore out the flyleaf with the hotel name on it.
I set him up on a park bench with his arm propping his head on an estate agent’s ad on the back of the long seat and opened the Bible in Garth’s lap to Colossians. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.” Seemed right to me. He’d died as he lived.
A magnolia was blooming above the bench. The perfume was heavenly. I stood back to admire him. He was deep in his mystery.
Every year at the same time I go back there. The blossoms are amazing. Why didn’t I close his eyes?
Rats with Wings
Charles was told yoga would be good for his nerves but most of the poses made his heart race.
What if he tore his yoga pants?
What if he farted. Should he look around and blame it on someone else?
What if his back seized, as it often did, and he could not exit from a Downward Dog and he’d have to walk around the rest of the day explaining he was not doing the pose for his health or looking for change that had fallen out of someone’s pocket but that he was in pain?
Why didn’t his chiropractor have no appointments available until late next week? He decided he would not attempt the pose, especially the Downward Dog. He had more respect for dogs than to claim he understood what they were all about.
A mystical sitar played in the background of the studio as the teacher spoke.
Why did the teacher not know that parts of Charles were ripping? How could the teacher know his pupil was failing?
Failure, Charles asserted, is personal. It is not what one shares. And why should he? No one wants that kind of lousy truth to get out. No one wants to know that his body could not pose like a dog. What would he say if he met a friend in the street on his way home?
“Hello Charles, what’s new with you today?”
“The dog just wasn’t in me.” Would that be a suitable reply? Would the friend think he’d lost his mind? The idea of the Downward Dog made Charles anxious that there was a dog inside him, that it would be healthy to find it. He closed his eyes and saw trees and fire hydrants and wanted to go to the change room as soon as the lesson ended.
“Practice this at home,” the yoga master told him.
Each day, Charles began his yoga by opening the balcony door. His yogi had told him that he should feel the animal he was assuming, embrace the pose, feel the limits of his human form, and press against them, exceed himself in both mind and body. Only then would grow. Only then would he feel the benefits of his lessons and the three hundred dollars he paid to sign up for ten sessions where he was surrounded by lithe young women whose bodies could contort and alter as if they were shapeshifters.
If Charles was self-conscious among a room of fellow practitioners of the twisted art, he felt more uncomfortable every morning as he practiced his poses. He didn’t want his neighbors or the people in the opposite block of apartments to see him struggle to bend over his belly. Even with the door open, people would talk. They’d say, “There’s that man contorting himself again.”
