by Toni Graham
HOPE SPRINGS
Even though thou seekest a body, thou wilt gain nothing but trouble.
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Slater steps onto the front porch to scoop up the morning newspaper. When he stands, he finds himself looking up at the eaves, just above the mailbox. Only yesterday, there was a large wasps’ nest there. He is embarrassed to admit to himself that he had not realized what the thing was. Living in Manhattan had not exactly made him an expert on Oklahoma entomology, unless one counted a nodding acquaintance with cockroaches. But he had received a sharply worded note from his mailman: unless he removed the nest, there would be no more home delivery.
He is so allergic to stings that he has to carry an EpiPen to avoid anaphylaxis, so he was chary of dealing with the nest himself, and he sure as hell was not about to ask his wife to do it for him. At first, when looking through the Yellow Pages for a bug-extermination service, he was unable to find any. He soon realized that the heading “exterminators” no longer existed. Bug killers were now termed “pest control” experts. Slater felt like a wuss for seeking one at all. He remembered his father going out on the back patio of their family home carrying a Louisville Slugger and, with a powerhouse swing that would make Bonds on ‘roids look tame, sending a nest flying from the patio.
When the pest control van drove up yesterday morning, things grew rapidly worse: the exterminator was a woman. Slater was given the humiliating task of standing by while a petite female with a blond ponytail sprayed the nest with a can of something and then collected 125 ducats for being braver than the man of the house.
Though Slater had always thought his father was manlier than he was, he had not realized the old man was a stand-up guy until Poppy was gone. He and his sisters had often complained about what a coldhearted guy Poppy could be, and his suicide certainly seemed to confirm their opinion. Later, though, they learned that Poppy was a serial blood donor who had earned several plaques and a write-up in the Albany newspaper for record-breaking donations, that he had always given 15 percent of his income to Jewish charities, and that he had designated himself an organ donor. This last was not to be—the mandated autopsy interfered with Poppy’s attempt to give part of his body to someone who needed it more than he did.
Slater and his sisters were stunned three months ago when legions of mourners showed up for Poppy’s memorial service, people they had never before seen—weeping, all of them, as if these strangers themselves were Poppy’s family. Droves of them approached Slater, tearful or sobbing, to tell him what a wonderful man Isaac had been, how he had chauffeured them around, cooked for them when they were sick, come to their kids’ graduation ceremonies and bar mitzvahs, always weighed down with food and gifts. Their tears dried up momentarily when they began regaling Slater with tales of how funny Poppy had been, how he had been able to coax them out of their darkest moments with his good cheer and his hilarious jokes. Poppy, it seemed, was perceived by everyone but his family as a hybrid of Santa Claus, Robin Williams, and David Ben-Gurion.
Before retirement Poppy was a longshoreman, a thinking man’s dockworker like Eric Hoffer. When he was young, he met Hoffer and even knew Harry Bridges, and he remained a staunch union man until the day he took his own life. Suicide or not, everyone else at the funeral seemed to have believed all along that Poppy was a mensch.
Now a lone wasp buzzes on the porch, flying frantically around the spot where the nest used to hang. The poor schmuck, thinks Slater, it went out for a while and came back to discover there has been some sort of wasp holocaust, leaving him alone in the world. Slater cannot help it, he feels bad for the creature and rather wishes he had not caved in to the mail carrier.
Back in the kitchen, he decides he would rather go out for breakfast and turns off the kettle. He knows his wife will sleep for at least another hour, so he leaves a note on the whiteboard: Beth—Went to Sancho’s—back soon. Usually he vets students’ projects on Saturday mornings before he and Beth go out for a bike ride, but he has a hankering for huevos rancheros. Granted, the eggs will be Oklahoma style, not Tex-Mex, so he knows the unmistakable flavor of ketchup will taint the dish. The “Mexican” restaurant in Hope Springs is a place called Siesta Sancho’s, which has a red and green neon sign bearing a logo, the form of a man slumped against a wall with a sombrero pulled over his eyes, the prototypical racist vision of the lazy Mexican. The restaurant also sells T-shirts with the same snoozing image on the front. The shirts with the dozing, mustachioed, sombreroed Hispanic are pervasive in the town of Hope Springs.
He goes quietly into the bedroom, where Beth sleeps belly-down, breathing deeply, her gray-flecked black hair curtaining one eye, an arm flung across the spot where Slater slept. In the mornings she has begun to give off what he thinks of as a doughy smell, like sourdough bread except less appealing. Nothing that comes with aging is beautiful or fresh—this much he knows. And if Slater is repelled by his wife’s yeasty smell, she has complained somewhat bitterly that he often “reeks” of garlic. Maybe her doughy smell and his garlicky smell commingle in their bed to mimic the scent of Texas toast.
Slater picks up from the floor a pair of Levi’s and his Tool T-shirt and slips them on. Oh, shite, the T-shirt conjures a less-than-pleasant recollection. He wore the Tool tee on campus earlier this week, nearly late for teaching his senior seminar. While normally he would have worn at least an Oxford-cloth shirt and khakis, dressing in jeans and a T-shirt is acceptable in his department—the architecture professors never dress up the way some of the other faculty do. A few of the guys in English and in Theater are downright fops. But wearing the Tool shirt turned out to be a particularly unfortunate choice. As he rushed across the parking lot and toward the architecture building, he heard a girl, probably an undergraduate, say to her friend—not even bothering to lower her voice—”I bet he is a huge tool, too.” Her friend laughed.
Was simply being a fifty-nine-year-old noticeably balding guy wearing a rock-band T-shirt reason enough to be considered a frickin’ tool? Maybe he had heard incorrectly—maybe she actually said, “I’ll bet he has a huge tool.”
He puts on his Mets cap, glad that Beth is not awake to call him on the choice. She has often told him that most people are not fooled by the hat ploy. When she sees a man wearing a cap, she assumes the sartorial choice was made for one of only two reasons: he is very short and compensating by adding a hat, or he is bald. Well, what the fuck is he supposed to do: spray his bald spot with brown dye the way guys on TV do?
When he steps out onto the porch again, this time he notices that the neighbors have affixed yellow ribbons to the trees in front of their houses. Who are they mourning now? he wonders. He has noticed for quite some time that Oklahomans seem somehow to enjoy PDGs: public displays of grief. There is always a flag at half staff in Oklahoma, often for some dead football coach or deceased Republican former governor. Just as, during the historical Oklahoma land rush, many cheated by sneaking in early in order to claim the better homesteads, now they rush to get to the memorial services “sooner,” among the first to be photographed publicly sobbing. The Sooners come in droves, bearing teddy bears and plastic-wrapped bunches of flowers, weeping and mugging for the cameras.
He guesses that huge PDG exercises are the only thing other than football championships that provide a sense of glamour here. Whether this aspect of Oklahoma culture is a sad consequence of the Oklahoma City bombing he cannot say. He and Beth came here several years after the terrible disaster at the Murrah Building. Slater was offered an endowed chair at the university, and when he reluctantly but sensibly accepted, Beth left her New York job in advertising and opened a gift shop in Hope Springs.
The yellow ribbons are perhaps Iraq related, he figures. He and Beth are antiwar blue voters, living in a red state that is gung ho about the war. He remembers the yellow-ribbon type very well from the Vietnam War days. There was always a certain sort of person who loved wearing POW bracelets, loved war. In Oklahoma many of those people, older no
w, have young adult children who wear WWJD? bracelets, expecting the entire world to believe that, every second of every day, they are wondering what Jesus would do.
Slater seats himself in Sancho’s and without consulting the menu orders a pot of coffee and the huevos. He has chosen a booth in the rear of the restaurant, his back to the wall so that no one can see his bald spot. He removes his cap, then remembers he forgot to bring the newspaper. Slater habitually carries a small notebook in his jacket pocket in case he thinks of something he needs to take care of or wants to make a quick sketch. He pulls out the notebook and a pen and begins to make some notes in order to pass the time—no, face it, Slater, in order to seem occupied, to avoid looking like a sad sack.
He has recently begun to find himself making lists, lists that serve no real purpose. He compiles the lists, then seldom peruses them again. He looks at the list he began last time he jotted in the notebook.
THINGS NEVER TO DO:
1. Never answer the door to someone carrying a clipboard.
2. Never sit next to a midget on the bus.
This one is certainly moot, as he has not been on a bus since they left New York. He crosses out the word “midget” and replaces it with “dwarf.” After a moment he crosses that out too and writes “little person.” Then he changes it back to “midget.”
3. Never trust someone who is always smiling.
Slater now adds
4. Never call a pest control service—do your own killing.
He looks up for a moment and is surprised to see walking into Sancho’s the psychologist who runs the suicide survivors workshop. “Dr. Jane” they call her. He thinks her last name is something like McPhee or McMillan—it can’t be McGraw, that’s Dr. Phil, isn’t it? Dr. Jane is the group facilitator, also a “suicide survivor.” Slater has heard from friends who have been in rehab that the facilitators are always fellow addicts or fellow rape survivors or fellow something-survivors. Slater prefers the more antiquated terminology: “victim”—he and the others in the group are all victims of suicide, no matter if the word “survivor” is now the preferred nomenclature.
Dr. Jane is ordering coffee, and he cannot help but catch a good view of the back of her. She wears one of those ruffly knee-length full skirts he has been noticing on campus, but he can see that she has a nice ass for a woman her age, and her tanned legs are still shapely. He knows that when she turns toward him, she will have cute little painted toenails emerging from her sandals. He feels himself stirring like some jackedup seventh-grader drooling over a sexy high school girl, and his face heats. He is still married to Beth, has been married to her for thirty-some years, will probably always be married, and Dr. Jane is aware he has a spouse. He pages through the notebook, not wanting her to see him staring.
She passes by his table on the way to her own, her eyes not visible behind Jackie-O sunglasses, and as she breezes by (yep, there are the red toenails), she only nods slightly, with a tiny trace of a close-lipped smile of acknowledgment. Damn—he did not realize until now that he has some sort of crush on her. He figures this is no different from the crushes students develop on their professors; he has heard about what shrinks call “transference.”
Metallica’s Black Album plays on Slater’s car stereo as he drives home from breakfast. He turns up the volume even louder, the sound thumping through and from the car the way the gangbangers at home drove around, glaring out their car windows at anyone who dared to object. He presses the lever to open both front windows, treating his neighbors to a sweet taste of metal as he drives down his own block. When he pulls into the driveway, he spots a man who appears to be in his twenties, jogging along, wearing running shorts and a Siesta Sancho’s T-shirt, accompanied by a Doberman. The guy slows to a walk and stares Slater down. He and the dog are both lousy with muscles.
“Got that cranked up kind of loud, huh?” the guy says. His face wears no expression: he is either naturally poker-faced or making an effort not to show his cards. Is his question a benign inquiry, or is it a challenge? Slater is not sure.
“Rock on,” Slater responds.
“Sure thing, old-timer,” the jogger says, then canters off.
I ought to kick his ass, Slater thinks. It is not a serious thought, but he feels the sting: old-timer. He has become a codger, Slater realizes, a schlemiel.
Beth is sitting at the kitchen table when Slater enters. In front of her rests a ceramic pot of what smells like mint tea, and she sips from a cup as she watches the tiny Sony tucked into a niche on one wall. “How was Sancho’s?” she says, her gaze still fixed on the screen.
“Ketchupy.”
Beth asks if he thinks the weather is okay for a bicycle ride, but Slater finds he has lost his zest for exercise. “Hon, would you mind? I wanted to watch the Mets game this morning, and then I need to do some prep work for the Price Tower trip.” In fact, he had planned neither; he just wants some time to himself.
“Price Tower?” Her expression registers no recognition.
“Beth, I told you, I’m taking my undergrads to Bartlesville this week—a field trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright building.”
She says that oh, yes, now she remembers about the Price Tower trip but then returns her attention to the TV and says, “Will you look at that, Dave?”
When Slater follows her gaze, he sees a wedding cake on the screen. Beth picks up the remote and turns up the volume.
“—entirely out of Krispy Kremes,” he hears the TV person say. Apparently a woman in Muskogee is selling wedding cakes made from Krispy Kreme doughnuts. What is more notable, it seems the woman can barely keep up with the orders for wedding cakes made of doughnuts and is looking to expand her facilities. Beth laughs good-naturedly.
Slater says nothing. This is the woman with whom he occupied the administration building at Columbia during the student strikes in ‘68, the black-haired antiwar firebrand and fellow SDS member, the woman with whom he expected to be arrested. But on the evening of the second day of the building occupation, Beth’s period arrived a week early, leaving her sitting in a pool of rancid red fluid, some of the other students around them whispering and looking sideways. That was the end of their revolutionary stint; Slater had to wrap his jacket around Beth’s waist and escort her out of the building, where media people rushed them, wanting to interview them about their defection from the cause. His father had been so pleased to learn that Slater was going to be a part of the student strike that Slater was never able to admit to him that he and Beth had made a premature exit.
Slater drives to downtown Hope Springs to pick up some items for the field trip to Bartlesville. He buys a case of Mountain Dew and a Styrofoam cooler at the Discount Depot, then stops at the pharmacy to pick up some Tylenol and enteric aspirin and a box of Band-Aids. But when he tries to pull open the glass door of the pharmacy, nothing gives. He takes off his shades and reads the sign on the door: Closed for Memorial Day. See you tomorrow. Annoyed, Slater heads back to his car, realizing he will need to make a sortie into Walmart. But suddenly he sees something that takes the breath out of him: an old man wearing an American Legion cap, sitting in a lawn chair on the corner, selling paper poppies. Slater feels gut shot, even lurching to one side, off balance. Poppy.
Nearly every time he has to reveal to someone the oppressive fact that he lost his father to suicide, the first thing the person says is “How did he do it?” People ask horrible questions, rude and gruesome, and do so with benign, even consoling looks on their faces. Slater has to wonder if he himself might have asked such terrible things, before he became a “suicide survivor.” Slater continues to be stunned that rather than offering a politely sympathetic phrase such as “I’m very sorry to hear that, Dave,” they seem to perk up—their voyeurism kicks in immediately. The only thing folks want to know about is the morbid details: did he blow his head off, stab himself in the heart, jump off a bridge, drink drain cleaner? What was that song from the seventies?—”Just blow out your brains, James; jump off the Brookly
n span, Dan; gas yourself in the car, Gar; swallow cyanide, Clyde.”
And if asking Slater to furnish the grim details of the means of death is not enough, the next question is inevitably “Did he leave a note?” Why does anyone care, and what does a note have to do with the death of one’s father? Is someone’s terrible demise supposed to become a source of entertainment?
Fine, cough it up for everyone, he has decided; serve up the ghoulish details on a plate; give them the complete personal horror show. No, there was no note, folks. Poppy’s goodbye consisted of messages left on the answering machines of David and his sisters. “Sorry I missed you,” Poppy said. “Love ya.”
That “Love ya” was the closest his father had ever come in Slater’s entire life to saying I love you, son. His father had never once said the words “I love you” or even “I’m proud of you,” not a single time in Slater’s lifetime.
How did he off himself? Slater wishes he could report that his father blew his brains out, a death both dramatic and masculine, a real crowdpleaser. But no, Poppy never owned a gun, much less shot off his head like Hemingway or even like poor old Hunter Thompson or that kid Cobain. Poppy’s death was more like Marilyn Monroe’s, an uncharacteristically womanly mode of death. He simply swallowed an entire bottle of barbiturates, crawled between the sheets of his bed as if he were retiring for the night, and expired. The family knew Poppy had been despondent since Mom’s death, but they did not learn until after his exit that he had been diagnosed with a malignancy in one lung; Poppy had not chosen to share the bad news with his family. Couldn’t he have just had chemo like everyone else?
Beth had been astonished the first time she heard him refer to his father as Poppy. They were still students at the time, only just beginning to become a couple, when in conversation he mentioned Poppy.