Sweet Things, page 14
But he had to have the door open. Yoga works up a sweat.
That’s why he hated the seagull. The seagull watched. It not only watched, it was there every morning and tilted its head almost upside down not just to look Charles directly in the eye but to express an inquisitiveness, to express the thought non-verbally, “I have no idea what you are doing and you look really stupid doing it.”
The bird perched on the railing and looked as if it was going to share Charles’ secret with the world.
The first day, Charles threw a slipper at it. That was stupid. The slipper fell five floors from his apartment balcony and was run over by a lawnmower.
The second day, Charles tried to wave his arms. The bird mocked him, waving its wings back. Charles felt like an idiot.
On the third day, Charles held out a crust of bread. When the bird reached to take it, Charles pushed the gull off the railing, thinking “That’ll fix him.” That didn’t work. The bird fell a few stories then flew back with the crust in its mouth.
Charles decided to switch to hatha yoga.
He closed the balcony door. He turned on the hot water taps in the kitchen and bathroom. He turned up the heat, turned on the open oven full blast. Sweat poured down his face. The balcony door fogged. He fainted.
The apartment might have gone up in flames.
What saved Charles was the sound of the seagull slamming into the door again and again. The bird didn’t want him to die. The creature wanted Charles to stay alive and be amusing.
When Charles got up the strength to open the door the next day and let the summer breeze come in and cool him as he stretched and posed, a dozen gulls gathered round to watch.
Charles knew exactly which one the ring leader was. He had gathered an audience, and the longer Charles posed and bent, the more the other birds tilted their heads and began to caw to each other. Charles motioned the bird with his index finger in the universal ‘come here and say that’ gesture. The bird obeyed. It was going to get a closer look and hopped over the threshold into the apartment. Charles lunged at it and grabbed it, shaking it in fury as he throttled the bird by the neck.
This, it crossed his mind, was how the Ancient Mariner screwed up. What was he doing? Had he lost in senses? He stared at the bird. It was too late. The body was limp in Charles’ hands.
The other gulls set on him, pecking him, and covering him in their pin feathers until he was certain he was choking on one.
He held the limp bird and stood up, amazed.
A gracefulness flowed into every sinew of his muscles. He closed his eyes and saw a dumpster behind a supermarket and an empty parking lot where he felt he had to fight for a piece of pizza crust someone had tossed from a car window the night before. And it tasted so good, and he would fight so he didn’t have to share it with the others. It was his. His pizza crust.
He realized he could balance on one foot while holding the dead gull’s body aloft with one hand. The other gulls looked on. They were impressed. He lifted his leg in the Bird of Paradise pose and felt his inner light shining inside him the way a lighthouse passes its arm through a dense grey fogbank and the fish follow it thinking it must be the sun and the gulls chase the fish for a feeding frenzy and the world is in balance, mind, body, and soul.
The Little Dog Laughed
There was one day, and I don’t know what got into him, but he called me into the spare bedroom upstairs and he was sitting on the floor. In his lap, he had some books, children’s books, and he was weeping and reading out a nursery rhyme to me.
“Hey diddle, diddle,” he said sobbing and wiping his eyes on his shirt sleeve as he stared into the pages of that child’s book.
I sat down beside him on the floor and did what I could to comfort him. After that, he kept the door to that room closed. There were pictures of clowns on the walls, and a shelf full of brightly colored books. I never saw him that sad again.
Sometimes, when I knew he was feeling down, I’d do something stupid to make him laugh. I’d come into the room, pick up the first thing I could find and toss it in the air so it would come down and hit my butt. We’d laugh and laugh over dumb stuff like that. He used to say I had an infectious laugh because I’d throw back my head and roll my eyes and the more he laughed the more I would laugh. He’d cry then too, but it wasn’t the same sort of crying I’d witnessed up in the closed front room.
He used to call me on hot summer nights to watch a ballgame on tv. He wasn’t a fan of any particular team. He just loved the game. It would be hot as blazes in the house, hotter upstairs, because he would often say as he wiped his brow that he didn’t believe in air conditioning. It made his joints ache.
The next day, we’d go out before breakfast for a game of catch in a vacant lot near the house and he’d replay the calls from the previous night, and when he’d say, “Here comes the pitch, it’s a pop fly and the runners are going,” I’d make a point of giving him a great catch. Sometimes, I’d even pretend there was a cut-off man and he’d have to run after it, but mostly I was good at fielding and he’d tell me how much he appreciated what I could do. He’d say I had a career in the majors waiting for me.
“My man,” he’d say, “you’ll be in the show in no time,” and when we’d stop at the corner store for a quart of milk on the way home and the door would open and I’d feel a whiff of cool air from inside. We’d go back to his place and sit in the kitchen while he drank his coffee. He’d offer me some, but I wasn’t into it, but just for offering, I’d remind him in little ways he was a good sport.
I needed to look after him. His wife had passed several years before, and he’d say, “You’re all I’ve got. We’d better stick together.”
If he were gardening, I’d hang out with him, help him dig the beds in the spring
when he put in new plants, and when he cut the grass in the cool dusks of late summer I’d make sure he hadn’t missed any patches. I don’t think his eyesight was good. One night, I went ahead of the mower and just in the nick of time saved a small cedar waxwing that had fallen out of its nest. If I hadn’t been there, he’d likely have run over it. We looked after the hatchling until it was big enough to fly around the living room, and one day we went out into the garden together and he let the bird go from his hands. It took off and flew into the trees and we never saw it again. That was a beautiful moment, just watching it go somewhere and not look back.
The mother must have thought it was dead though after the bird had fallen from its nest and we’d rescued it, she must have sensed it was still alive because she’d be up in her tree and scold us if we sat out in the evenings on the front porch. People would walk by and call to us. They always saw us together, and they’d call, “How are you two tonight?” I could have told them I was fine. It was him I was worried about.
We had long discussions about growing old. Time is something everyone has to face. It is better understood in advance that to have it arrive as a surprise. I never felt that old. I figured it was he who was slowing down and I was just keeping his pace so he wouldn’t feel bad.
“You know,” he said, “the worst thing that can happen to a guy is to die alone. People leave the room during the final moments because they are afraid of what they will see. I promise you this, if it ever comes down to it and you’re at the end, I’m not going to leave you alone.” I felt the same way about him.
But when the ambulance came for him after he’d grabbed his chest and fallen down the stairs, after the neighbors heard me calling for help at the top of my lungs for hours, the attendants wouldn’t let me go with him. The guy next door invited me over to his place, but when I went out in the morning to stretch my legs in his yard I realized the garden wasn’t gated.
The old guy had shown me where just about everything was in town – the post office, the druggist, the hardware store, the corner milk place, and the hospital. There was a woman coming out of the hospital – it wasn’t as big as the hospitals that ask for donations in the commercials that interrupted our baseball games – and she had a baby in her arms and her husband was pushing her in a wheelchair. I would have stopped to say hello, but I felt an urgency to find him. I sensed he was in distress, that he wanted to see me, and that he was alone and afraid. I’m not sure how I knew, but I get very strong feelings and the feelings told me to take the elevator up to his room on the third floor.
I found him in a bed behind a curtain. He was hooked up to machines that made sucking sounds and beeped. I stood beside the rails and saw his eyelids fluttered open. He knew I would come. It was almost as if he was expecting me, that he had called to me, not in words but thoughts. I wanted to tell him that I kept my part of the bargain, just as I knew he would have kept his had it been me and not him. He smiled. He was glad I was there, and I was glad that I was there too. I could feel it. It would have been terrible had he looked around and no one showed up for him. There was a plastic clip on one of his fingers, but he reached out with his hand and stroked my head, and the last words he said were, “My Mack. Good dog.”
The Lesson Plan
I couldn’t stand to watch her die and drag her secrets to the grave. The whole idea of extreme unction is that a person dies with a clear conscience. Hell, as I see it, is the baggage one carries. It weighs one down. It was even more hell to watch her die.
She’d always been a person with a patient disposition, someone who would put a gold star on your work, tell you how far they thought you’d go. As her former pupil, I should have simply graduated to another grade but part of me wanted to remain the star of the class. That’s wrong.
Word in the community was she’d always been a good teacher. Respected. Well-liked. Giving. And she was certain he loved her. He brought her apples. He played to her pedagogical instincts.
What she taught me was difficult. So when I helped her drag the carpet to the end of her garden, quietly so the neighbors wouldn’t hear us that summer night, she told me I had to be schooled in tough lessons. Love was one of them, but love failed. That’s part of learning what love is.
Any body of knowledge contains what one doesn’t know or want to know. That’s what keeps knowledge vital, though I can’t unknow what I know, and if I shared it with you it would be a burden on you the rest of your life. And even if you mastered the lesson, I don’t give out gold stars.
Wallpaper
Although her real estate agent could not say exactly when the salt-box cottage had been built, Gail was certain some clues to the past of the house lay beneath the layers of wallpaper in the front room. There had once been a fireplace in the over-papered main room where she imagined people had gathered to converse, spend quiet evenings by the fire, or eat their meals at long and heavy table that had left identifiable leg marks on the wide-cut pine floorboards.
The front room, Gail decided, should be a warm cream, a hue that would show her pine antiques to their best advantage with a color that would be mild yet soothing enough on the eye that she could find comfort in the old house’s front room. She wanted to restore the house. Bringing the place back to life would do it justice. The rooms needed a touch of vitality, and in restoring the house she felt she was restoring that part of her recent life that had been so troubling. Now she was on her own with no parental obligations, no one to argue with her, no one to stand in the way of what she wanted to do. Bringing back the house would be her declaration of freedom.
The room’s chimney remained and she was certain the hearth lay behind sheets of plywood and planking that had been nailed in place by one of many previous owners to keep the draft out. But the wallpaper puzzled her. She pictured a crackling grate fire, the room perfumed with the scent of pine or even maple if she could find cords of that wood, adding a scent of hominess to her new environment. And beside the fireplace, seated on an overstuffed couch, her feet up on a sturdy coffee table, and a mug of tea at hand and a new book in her open palms, she would enjoy the tranquility of solitude.
But first, the wallpaper had to go. All of it. Pressing her fingers against the layers, she felt as if she was in a padded room, a place where the past had accumulated too much and had buried what was important about the house. She began by tearing strips off around the doors and windows. They came away easily. The outer layers were floral, very Twentieth century. The top layer of stripes had been applied early in the Twenty-first century, though the lines were not plumb and traced the corners followed the irregularities of the frame house as it settled beneath the weight of its own roof. That layer came off easily. It was intended to be replaced.
The large modern design of the next layer suggested it had been applied in the Sixties – the gaudy pink background, the flashes of black sprigs and leaves – was not really to her taste and by removing the first layer shredded patches of the second layer came away as if someone had torn the skin off a cardboard box.
Beneath more layers lay early Twentieth-century floribunda roses, the blooms of which were intertwined on a trellis as if a life beneath that papering fed the roots which lay beneath the baseboard. But she wasn’t prepared for the next layer. Along the crown work at the top of the room, someone had applied a scroll of dolphins playing in the surf and this was puzzling because the house was too far north for pods, though near enough to the sea that a misguided squadron of the creatures might well have visited and been remembered in the decoration of the room.
But she wasn’t prepared for what came next. Brown hand-stains appeared on a faded yellow print of sweetheart roses suspended in floating love knots. The small, perfect blooms were not attached to anything. They reminded her of bodies washing ashore from a wrecked ship, human shapes floating face-down in the water as if they were looking for something they had dropped to the bottom of the sea. The handprints, however, were more troubling.
She studied the palms and fingers. The fingers were thin, the palms narrow and delicate. They were not the prints of a man. Gail felt sick. Something terrible had taken place in that room and someone had left the signature of their terror on the wall.
They were waving at her as if someone were signaling her for help – hands that rose from the pulverizing waves as they crashed against the rocky shore on a stormy night. Splayed fingers, each reaching for a different source of salvation or, perhaps, attempting to tell her to go back or stop where she was and come no closer because danger was afoot were raised to communicate a warning.
What troubled Gail most about the handprints was their color. They had not been made by a playful child or children who, having been told the walls would be repapered decided to leave their marks for posterity to find. The palms and fingers were not blue or yellow – the colors of play – but dark brown as if they had once been bright red and had lost their brilliance as they waited like a rose pressed in the pages of someone’s favorite book from long ago to be rediscovered. Around the ends of some of the fingers and thumbs were splatters and she realized that blood, if left to dry on paper or wallpaper, would turn brown over time, losing its red vitality, its power of life within the veins to animate the life that contained it.
Gail immediately overpainted the handprint layer with a mixture of water and trisodium phosphate and scored the surface and, in a matter of minutes, had scraped the layer clean. The handprints upset her. They were rising from the past with a message of despair or helplessness or terror though she couldn’t decide how awful an experience had impelled their maker to leave them behind.
As the final, handprint disappeared from the wall and lay in shards on the drop cloth, Gail reached the original plaster beneath all the accumulations of color and flowers and trellises that clung like history to the room. The bare plaster was a sickly pale, indented with small pockmarks and pits. And written on the wall in a broad-leaded pencil, the kind carpenters kept for marking the lengths of wood they turned into fishing boats or an unhappy housewife might have kept long ago for wetting on the end of her tongue and jotting down a list of groceries, was a message.
“No matter how long it takes, I pray someone will find me and rescue me from the hell of a marriage where love has failed. I wait for you to find me for I fear I will kill the man I once held dear, and if it should come to that, I beg of you, do not hang me for my deeds, and let me be long gone, returned to the earth and the bosom of the Lord before anyone finds his body hidden in the flue of the hearth.”
Settling Up
I went to pay a debt for my father and realized there is no such thing as luck. My father was a gambler and though my mother would scream at him and throw dishes at his head every time he came home with his pockets empty, I loved him because the worst part of gambling is the hope it holds out, the illusion that an impossible is possible, and an imagined outcome will morph into a reality. My father wasn’t bad at betting on horses. He was a failed artist.
Horses were his passion. He just read them wrong. One day he pulled me out of school when my mother was away helping her sister recover from surgery, and he took me to the track. I felt ten feet tall standing beside him at the rail during the post parade. He asked me what I thought of each horse. He had five hundred dollars in his pocket and he was determined to spend it because he felt lucky that day.
“That one?” he asked, pointing to the Three horse who was struggling against its harness and prancing sideways. “He looks like he’s got some life in him.”
“No,” I replied without taking my eyes off the ponies. “Number Three is fighting his jockey. He’s not going to run somewhere. He wants to run away from something. Look at Ten. He’s a different matter.”
Ten had his head up and stared straight ahead. He was focused. He meant business. He had a job that day and nothing was going to get in his way. My father took ten dollars from the stack of bills he was carrying.
