One of us chained herself to the building.
Every single moment is more baking hot than the previous. In the distance, on the other side of the parking lot, we hear loud music coming from Fiesta that’s been going on for weeks. Our shadows on the asphalt, one with a thin leg and one with big hair and a cane that clack-clack-clacks in the direction of Fiesta. We enter a Mexican bar where Gloria has had a good experience, head through a bakery with sparkly streamers hanging from the ceiling and display cases full of skull-shaped cookies in the red, green, and white of the Mexican flag, and squeeze through this confusion into a cramped room. In here it could just as easily be the blackest night, deafening mariachi music, hats everywhere, a guitar, an elbow. Miraculously we find an empty table with two chairs and order drinks from the waiter.
We have to shout. Gloria apologizes that she’s leaving me to myself this evening. I shout that I will be fine by myself.
Do you have any plans?
I am thinking about going to the movies.
What are you going to see? I name some random film believing that she, a woman of eighty-three, maybe isn’t quite up to speed with which films are playing right now. But I am wrong.
Oh, is that the one with Johnny Depp? she asks. Now whaddya think about that young girlfriend he just found?
I don’t know anything about that.
She’s lesbian, Gloria says. I betcha she just wants him for the money.
Johnny Depp is kind of feminine, I shout back.
Gloria agrees. One could get by with Johnny Depp. He’d do, she shouts. He’d do.
i ask my dad to look for the quilt again, before he flies down. At first he doesn’t know which quilt I’m talking about, thinks I mean one of Gussie’s that she never finished, not a quilt but a sack of fluttering fabric patches.
No, I mean Grandma Clark’s quilt. The baby quilt, you know. The one my mother always talks about.
The green one?
I think so. My mother calls it pistachio green. If you found it, we wouldn’t have to worry about the post office.
Okay, I’ll look for it again, he says. It may be in the garage somewhere. Or maybe in my office …
On the way to Ginger and Ben’s, where I am spending the night before picking up my dad at the airport, I visit Gay. I would almost characterize it as a form of audience with the head of the family living in Buda; Celia arranged it, in her mother’s own house, for an hour in the afternoon when she would be alert. Up until now, her name has been woven into all conversation in a way that indicates a shrewd matriarch who with indomitable will has made the correct decisions for the family business. She has patiently carried out her plans, sat through one lawsuit after another for the family’s contractor firm, preserved her dad’s property, and started a mill project that’s rich with possibility both for her children and for the city.
When I enter the room, which is small and looks directly toward the road, she rises from her plush armchair. Her voice whistles like wind through a rusty pipe, but the hug she gives me is as firm and vigorous as her gaze. A brown-haired woman in a turquoise polo T-shirt, she’s teeny-tiny, maybe even smaller than elflike Ginger. Not much larger than a prune, I think when she returns to her enormous armchair and doesn’t sink deeply into the plush, which seems soft and compliant enough, but falls against the back of the chair like a tiny turquoise pillow.
Judging by her surroundings, the small tables with practical things like eyeglasses, Kleenex, medicine, she spends most of her afternoons in the armchair, according to Celia, looking at the highway her family built, which is visible on the horizon.
Two small dogs that are difficult to get an impression of race around the room. Celia takes them to another room and scours the house for various things, cookies, water, napkins, fussing over her mother who accepts her worried care with dignity, a little like one tolerates a mosquito in a humid summer cottage.
You have to meet Gloria, I say when I realize she and Gay don’t know each other.
I think not, she says, laughing warmly and at length as if it were the funniest thing she’s heard. She gets together with her own cousin, Ginger, but the idea of spending time with one of my dad’s cousins, getting to know a new person, no thanks. As a child she, like Ginger and Gloria, spent a good deal of time at Gussie’s, her parents dumped her there, she says, simply drove her to my grandmother’s without asking Gussie if she had time, dropped her off, and drove away fast and furious on some fun weekend excursion. She laughs again. Back then she ran into Gloria, of course, when she was dumped off. She gives me a glance that’s neither patient nor impatient. There’s only so much time, it tells me.
I was just sittin’ here, working on my death and burial and all those little things, she says and laughs loudly and heartily.
She learned to love cemeteries at a young age; circumstances forced her since someone was always dying. First it was Christine, Ginger’s mother, and after that, the deaths just kept on coming. They’re all buried in the Lockhart cemetery, and she’s just visited them all, Gussie, Preston, Momma, Poppa, Uncle Gene, and all the rest.
A year ago, she discovered that the graves were all helter-skelter. She’d been to Lockhart to order a headstone, she says, a stone for Jack and me. Nice little tombstone place, right beside the cemetery. Following a period of alternating drought and rain, one grave collapsed, and another was thrown into the air, the earth shifting until it was all one big mess.
Well, but the mason said he could repair them. And now she’s spent a year trying to fix them, the family’s plot. Now they’re all level and straight.
Please tell Johnny I apologize, she says. I didn’t ask. She laughs.
I think you are forgiven.
Celia laughs as well.
I don’t know if Celia told you, but all the men in my family were road contractors. She stretches the vowels in ro-ad contra-ctors.
Celia explains that the family knows everything there is to know about stabilizing the ground.
Gay laughs out loud. They had to drive more cement out there than to some turnpikes, she says. I’ll tell you. But nevertheless, we stabilized.
Gay begins to cough, and Celia fusses over her mother again. Do you have enough of X? do you need Y? but Gay dismisses her with a wave. She doesn’t need anything. When she’s finished coughing, she looks at me and says: Gussie was a smart ol’ gal. In my opinion. The biggest success I ever saw.
How so?
Making money. With her two hands. With her two hands. Looking at me, Gay shows me her hands. The work of hands, the urge to build something, make something out of nothing, even if it’s baking cookies, is something Gay understands. All the life and wealth that can be created from just a pair of hands.
My granddad was sick his last two years, a stroke, and his doctor taught my grandmother how to buy and sell stocks. To play the stock market, Gay says. She took every penny she made and invested them. Sewed and baked herself to a fortune. Embroidered bibs, made Easter eggs, sold old odds and ends on her lawn. Shook her pecan tree. Grew rich.
The memory of Gussie sitting in her front yard selling stuff and enjoying herself with all the folks waiting for the bus makes Gay laugh, hard. She can’t think of anyone whom she respects as much as her grandmother. From nothing. With her two hands.
She did all this without one soul helping her.
I’ve never heard of anybody do what Gussie did.
I have a lot of respect.
A lot of respect …
Oh, it’s an interesting life, she says. But it was a good life. She’s been a little regretful about never getting an education. But it’s recently occurred to her that she’s been getting an education her entire life. I learned at every stage of my life, she says. Right now, she is studying aging, discovering a lifestyle for this age that’s new and interesting. She’s eighty-four, the same age as Gloria. A pile of letters is stacked on the small table beside her chair, the top one unfolded on its envelope. She’d been sitting there reading Jack
’s old letters to her. This way she’s always got a letter going. Gay’s face glows, there’s something inexplicably Christmassy about it. Beside the chair is an entire basketful of Jack’s letters. I don’t know how long he’s been dead, but it has been a while.
My ol’ letters, she says. They are my most precious possession. When she reads them, it’s as if she can hear Jack’s voice. As if he’s right there. She laughs.
Letters. The word makes my belly lurch. As if it’s a spoon that hollows out my entrails.
◊
Oh, look, Celia says when we’re outside. She points up in the air. That’s the same kind of airplane Bubba crashed in. I’ve always heard that Gay’s brother, my dad’s cousin, fell from the sky in a small airplane when he was seventy-six. What I’ve imagined was one of those kinds of two- or three-person puddle jumpers, but the machine buzzing in the sky above us, high, high up isn’t something I would call an airplane. There’s a man hanging Donald Duck–like in the air with a metal frame fastened to his back, a kind of backpack with motor and wings. He hovers there, and Gay’s brother must have done the same.
That’s crazy, I say. That’s not an airplane! It looks like a drying rack with wings!
Actually, there were two of them, Celia says. Bubba wasn’t alone. He’d taken his son Cecil, who was named after his granddad, along. They’d flown around until the wind took hold of them and threw them into a tree, the son relatively unharmed, Bubba dead on the spot.
So two grown men on a drying rack? I say.
Celia nods.
When I talk to my dad later, he says that it was the perfect way to die. Before age and its various humiliating diseases ate into his body, a fast and effective exit. He hovered in the air, perfectly free and idiotic, and the next moment he was dead.
the day feels razor sharp, the sky precise and cornflower blue, it’s only me who is all blurry from the butterflies doing their thing in my stomach for as long as I can remember.
At an airport counter I tell two uniformed men that I’m there to pick up my dad. I don’t tell them that he’s used to traveling the world, or that the idea of his retiring is, at this point, merely at the drafting stage. I tell them that he’s almost eighty. I call him my old dad, and they nod understandingly before handing me a special boarding pass that allows me to go all the way out to the gate.
I stand beside the gate, bright as a Christmas light, but he shuffles right on past. I have to call out to him. Dad! Daddy! He hears me but can’t see me, he turns his head from side to side, scanning the crowd. I’m right behind you, I shout.
People rush past while we stand in the middle of the swarm. I can smell his aftershave when he hugs me.
You look like yourself, I say, and he replies in mild surprise, who else would he look like?
When we’ve made it to the arrival hall, the dad in him takes over, and he begins to walk with the fast, faltering strides that almost seem like trotting in the direction of Alamo Car Rental. I’ve returned my white Hyundai, and now he’ll rent us a new car to save my money. It’s touching to see him head across the gray floor with such determination, his familiar figure a little older, a bit more stooped, but unmistakably him. It’s been quite some time since he got a haircut.
For a moment I think, that’s exactly how I know him. That this image encompasses everything. Not kite-flying on the lawn, not his hands around his camera, not the striped envelopes that I tossed away in the course of one random afternoon’s sheer lunacy, but to see him like this, running through an airport, see his neck, see his forward-thrusted upper body.
It’s a sight that causes our relationship to unspool before my eyes. As others have dinner tables and living rooms, we have our sprints through airports. If there’s anything I know, it’s my dad’s airport back. I can still feel the weight of the brown, leatherette suitcase that smacked stickily against the back of my leg as we ran across the winding cement sidewalk at jfk.
For a moment I think: We’ve never stopped running. We run and run toward the diffuse point that is our separation.
To my dad’s great disappointment, the car turns out to be a Mitsubishi, a little tin can that makes my white Hyundai look like a racing car.
His opposition to Japanese cars goes way back, it’s a holdover from growing up during the Second World War. Heading into Lockhart in our tin can of a car, he speaks with fascination of the decoratively painted fighter jets, the Flying Tigers, that outmaneuvered the Americans’ P40 Warhawk.
You hate Mitsubishi because you admire them a little, don’t you? I say.
He laughs. I guess that’s true. To a certain extent.
When I was a child, the tv commercials for Toyota made him angry. He considered it a national humiliation that Americans jumped for joy for ‘Fantastic Toyota’ without understanding how local jobs and a healthy American economy vanished beneath them as they hung excitedly in the air. Even now when I remind him about those commercials, he falls into the old groove. Toyota’s commercials said all that was wrong about what is wrong to this day, they were the beginning of the end, he growls, as his hand searches in vain for the gearshift.
Just before we reach the bridge that leads us into Lockhart, my dad snaps on the turn signal and drives down a country road, away from the city. We drive with our windows lowered, the air is pure and mild, pastoral, and we flit past open fields. Except for the gps lady informing us that we’re on Silent Valley Road, we are in a blissful silence. Here and there a house or a building, grazing cows, horses, and meadows containing various rusted-out machines, a pickup, a combine, and other machines whose purposes I can only guess. Texas sculptures, my dad calls them, huge contraptions eroding on land people have so much of.
My dad has rented a small ranch house from someone named Wagner. We drive back and forth until we find the right gate, and a suntanned woman emerges from the main house wearing a wide-brimmed hat, she scissors across the lawn on long, cool cowboy-booted strides. She opens the gate for us. Anna Wagner, she says, offering her hand. She calls my dad sir, smiling, her face weather-beaten and with native features, a salt-and-pepper braid slips from beneath her hat and travels down her back.
My dad parks beside a small house opposite the main house. On the way in, dogs leap around us, or one of them does, a curly little Jack Russell with brown patches, the others trot more good-naturedly after us, four or five different types of dogs. Anna Wagner reels off their names, and except for the energetic one called Roy, they all lie down on the porch to doze in the afternoon sun.
She leads us into the rental house. The kitchen is filled with muesli and grits, chips and chocolate, coffee and tea, and she’s put a bottle of red wine on the table, she says. She’s also put beer and soda in the fridge, and there’s a tray with fresh eggs from the hens, just let us know if you need more eggs or anything else. She points at the main house where she and her husband live.
A donkey grazes in the meadow along with a spotted brown horse. There are a great number of cows in a distant field behind the barn.
Roy rubs against my leg and stares up at me, wagging his tail and showing me his tongue.
Just let him out of the house if he bothers you, she says.
A living room, two bedrooms, and a dining room with a large, square table. One porch faces east, one faces south, and the prairie lies like a gigantic tablecloth someone has spread around us. The setting for the next ten days. Not three days as I’d thought, not five as I’d hoped, but ten. Imagine that, my dad and me for ten days in a little house on the prairie.
We drag our wheelie suitcases inside and begin to unpack in our own rooms. My dad comes to my room and tells me he has something for me that he found when he searched in vain for Grandma Clark’s quilt. Something even better, he says, a box full of letters in my office.
No!
Yes! I wanted you to have them now, he says, so instead of packing things he needed, he filled his suitcase with letters.
I think my heart skips a beat, letters, he found a box o
f letters. I threw my letters out, and now a box of letters turns up in his office. They’re not the same letters, of course not, he didn’t keep his own letters lying around, but maybe I can stitch a kind of line across time with the letters I sent to him, maybe—like an archaeological imprint—I’ll be able to read or deduce what he wrote to me.
I follow him to his room, where the letters lie in his open suitcase on his bed, three long, smooth plastic packages tightly wrapped in brown tape, each the size of a liter of milk. Or an ingot of gold, I think, when the first one’s in my hand, heavy, slick, and priceless. We carry the packages to my room, I ought to poke a hole in them to get a sense of what’s inside, understand just what kind of treasure I’m holding and possibly inoculate myself against later disappointment, but I would rather wait to read them when I return home. I lay them in my suitcase now that I’ve removed all the clothes, one, two, three long packages, all that remains of our shared past. For a moment I feel as though I couldn’t be any richer. Ten days with my dad and a suitcase full of letters.
Because of the letters, there was only room in my dad’s suitcase for a single shirt, socks, and underwear for the first couple days. We may have to go to Walmart one of these days, he says. I’m gonna need some more socks and underwear, and an extra shirt.
the wind tugs and whips at the grass like it does a tablecloth on a picnic. My dad says the sky is higher here, but to me it looks as though it’s the ground that’s lower. I approach the sky a little at a time. For someone who is not used to letting her eye roam free without bumping into a fence or a wall, it feels overwhelming to be constantly surrounded by these vast spaces. Like having your skull opened and feeling air rush directly to your brain.
Texas is obviously different than Denmark with our small, neat skies, but this couldn’t be any more different than the America I know from St. Louis and New York City. St. Louis with its ironlike downtown and wide boulevards, its parks and museums and swimming pools. The hot, humid summers and the lazy and slightly resigned Midwest sense of being encompassed by an already ongoing civilization. The expression: landlocked. Sealed within wide expanses of land. In the center of a radially flourishing territory, cultivated, developed, infrastructured. And then there’s New York City, whose horizons go in the opposite direction, wedging down between buildings in bright white slivers, which the fast-talking and nagging residents only see on the way to and from some place, always to and from some place, invariably clutching a paper cup with very strong coffee.
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