by Toni Graham
Slater cannot find the words to express what he is trying to convey to the group. None of them speaks for a few moments, until Jane offers the hand gesture she sometimes makes to indicate that the speaker should continue: a soft little curlicue in the air.
“Since Poppy died, my whole life is like that cockeyed bathroom. When he was alive, I didn’t love him enough. Now that he’s gone, I love him too much. And it’s the same with Beth—I loved her most of my life, but now it’s like I feel nada.”
There is silence in the room for a few moments, and then Dr. Jane begins pontificating about the effects of grief on familial relationships, but Slater has heard it all before.
Now Holly speaks. “Dave, have you ever read much Bellow? Saul Bellow?” she says. When Slater acknowledges he has not, Holly continues, “I read something in his collected letters. I never forgot what Bellow said: ‘Losing a parent is like driving through a plate glass window. You didn’t know the window was there until it shattered. But then for years to come, you’re picking up the pieces, down to the last splinter of glass.’”
Surreptitiously, little SueAnn touches him on the arm, her fingers hot as a sauna. When he looks sideways at her, she leans in and says sotto voce, “I don’t love anyone no more, either.”
Slater walks across the quad toward his car after his nine-o’clock design studio. The students had been there overnight for a charrette and were wired from caffeine and “smart drugs” and whatever else young people use to stay awake; when he was in school, the students had only coffee and the occasional bennie to get them through the all-nighters. The sound of horns and drums erupts into the morning air. The marching band, practicing for the weekend game, is playing the song “Oklahoma!” As he heads away from the architecture building, a memory long buried rises: One year, his father had marched in New York’s Labor Day parade, and from the sidelines in the crowd Slater had seen his father march right by him in the ILA drill team. Poppy had been practicing with the team every weekend for months before the parade and was designated as one of the marchers who carried and brandished a cargo hook as the drill team marched in formation. Slater was thrilled, as the cargo hook maneuvers had long been his favorite part of the parade—not counting the times the NYFD hook-and-ladder unit stopped and raised the ladder higher than the buildings on the parade route and a fireman ran up its steps and everyone cheered. Slater’s mother had been pregnant again that year, which may have been why they were able to get a seat at the curb, nothing blocking their view of the bands and marchers passing by. Now Slater gets into his Solstice and slams the door shut, but he still hears the muffled sound of the marching band playing “Oklahoma!” with much swagger. The band in front of the ILA drill team on that Labor Day was playing “Oklahoma!” too; the movie had come out that year. Poppy told his family before the parade, “The minute you hear ‘Oklahoma!’ start watching for me at their stern.”
He envisions Poppy, one arm behind his back, marching in unison with a line of union brothers also with one arm behind their backs, all with their right arms raised high, their cargo hooks slicing the air in dazzling arcs. The motions the men made with their hooks were balletic, but they also held a defiant subtext: every longshoreman knew cargo hooks had been used as weapons by union men during strike-busting attacks against them in the 1930s. It seemed to Slater on that Labor Day that his father was the handsomest man on the drill team, the one most crisply in step, the tallest marcher with the most concise slices in the air with his hook. As his father high-stepped by them, Slater’s heart leapt up. He dropped his bag of peanuts to the curb in order to applaud.
Slater has to pick up an exchange student from Japan at the airport this morning. He is running a tad late, as one of his amped-up students asked for feedback after the bell rang and they lingered in the studio a few minutes. He swings the car onto Main Street, which will take him onto the turnpike to Tulsa, at the same time leaning toward the glove box for enough quarters for the tolls. Someone honks, and as he raises his head, he imagines that he sees Beth coming out of a building. The guy who honked seems to be in a hurry, so Slater does not slow down to check out the Beth lookalike, but the woman is exiting the town’s Kingdom Hall. A short laugh escapes Slater’s throat: Beth walking out of a Jehovah’s Witness house of worship, no frickin’ way. He looks into the rearview mirror, though, and damned if there isn’t a silver Odyssey like Beth’s parked right in front of the hall. He turns onto a side street and decides to swing back around and get a better look. He speeds up, since the woman is walking toward her car and he does not want her to get away.
Slater manages to wheel into the area behind the Kingdom Hall and still be able to see the Beth doppelgänger walking toward the Odyssey. She does not wear shorts, as Beth often does, but a white suit of some kind, a skirt and jacket he has never before seen. She opens the car door with one hand, but he can see that in the other hand she carries—not a Bible, which would be weird enough—but what appears to be a stack of those pamphlet things they call the Watchtower. It is Beth. He sees the vanity plate as she drives off: LUVNY. He is tempted to follow her, but he does not know what he would say when confronting her. And the fact is, the kid from Japan will be waiting alone at the airport and Slater is already running late.
He heads back onto Main Street toward Tulsa, trying to make sense of what he has seen, to impart some sort of logic to the incident. In any case, she’s usually opening her gift shop at this time of the day, and don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses meet on Saturday or Sunday mornings, not Thursdays? The road in front of him swims before Slater’s eyes, and he tries to blink away some unpleasant floaters from his field of vision. A couple of weeks ago in the therapy group, Clay used the term “poleaxed.” Now Slater knows what the word actually means; he has just been hardcore poleaxed.
The first time Slater was aware of being a disappointment to his father was at Atlantic City. The family had driven to the shore for a summer vacation, and Slater and his parents were exploring the boardwalk after a morning on the beach. Slater remembers first noticing people pointing at something and hearing someone say, “Oh, there he is!” Coming toward them, growing larger and larger as it approached, was a huge peanut wearing a top hat. The hat added to the peanut’s height and made it considerably taller than Poppy. As the thing came closer, Slater could see stippling on the inhuman shell-body.
“Look, it’s Mr. Peanut,” Mom told Slater. As Mr. Peanut continued walking toward them, Slater could see that he wore a monocle—what Slater thought of then as a round glass thing over one eye. The glare from the sun had the effect of occluding the eye, turning the peanut into a Cyclops. Slater was terrorized and grabbed his mother’s hand. The peanut wore white gloves that frightened Slater; the arms and legs resembled human limbs, but the cloth hands seemed unnatural, spectral. The face on the peanut bore a grisly fixed smile. When the thing brandished his cane at them—Slater now knows the mascot intended only a friendly greeting—Slater lost it. He remembers howling and grabbing Mom’s waist and hiding his face in her maternity smock. Mom had patted him on the back and reassured him that Mr. Peanut was a good guy, and soon the embodiment ambled away down the boardwalk.
“Let’s get you some cotton candy, Davey,” his mother had said, clearly trying to calm him, but his father had remained silent. Later, back in the car, Poppy turned his face toward the backseat and said, “You need to toughen up, kiddo. Men aren’t afraid. Boys aren’t afraid of peanuts.” Slater can still see his father’s expression: he had the same look on his face as when he helped Rabinowitz’s father pump out the septic tank at their fishing camp.
When Slater wakes, Beth is already awake, lying on her side looking at him. Now, there’s something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Back in the day, he would often wake to find Beth propped up on one elbow, gazing at him with a tender expression and a smile, but now she usually gets up before he does and he wakes by himself.
“Why aren’t you up already?” he says. He has a hard time lookin
g her in the eye, not knowing how he can bring up the topic of his sighting of her at the Witnesses’ house of worship.
She tells him she’s not going to work this morning, that she has a doctor’s appointment. Who knows what’s true anymore? He segues away from this conversation.
“You know what I was thinking about last night at group, Bethie?” he says. “That apartment on Houston where we lived when I was adjuncting at NYU—remember that place?”
“Oh, god, yes,” she says, laughing. “The studio with the bed that slid under the bathroom.”
Beth’s memory is correct. The studio had a certain charm to it, in Slater’s view. There were bay windows, oak strip floors, crown moldings, and other nice touches. But the building’s version of a Murphy bed was a mattress that slid from the wall in a tray that rolled out into the room at night, then back on the rollers in the morning to its resting place directly under the bathroom, which was three steps up from the rest of the studio. More than once they had joked about their bed’s resemblance to the cadaver trays that slid out from a wall at the morgue. He says, “Remember when we first moved in, and our dining table for the first few weeks was a cardboard box?” They had sat on pillows on the floor.
“You were really romantic, though, Dave. When I came home from work, you’d have paper placemats on the cardboard box and candles lit, and a rose in a little bud vase you found in one of those trinket shops in Chinatown.”
Beth seems a bit wistful, and the memories are sweet for him, too. “You had a lace petticoat from one of your theater productions that you hung over the window to give us some privacy when we made love on the window seat.” Slater is grateful to Beth that she does not say something like “Yeah, back before you were impotent.” He smells bleach in the sheets on their bed, and a hint of musky cologne wafting from Beth’s bosom. He feels nostalgic and wonders for a second if they might find time for a bike ride this morning, or maybe a quick swim at the lake. He looks closely at his wife. Yes, he remembers the young Beth of the Houston Street days, but the woman in bed beside him might as well be a mail order bride from Russia, someone he ordered up from the Internet; he has no flaming concept of who she really is. There is no point in mentioning the Kingdom Hall sighting. She is too far gone. Or he is.
“It’s odd that you would bring up the place on Houston just now,” Beth says. Slater looks at her: why? “I’m moving out, Dave. I’ve found a condo over on Magnolia, and I’ve put a down payment on it.”
At first Slater doesn’t get it. They already own this house and hardly need a condo. But then her words sink in: I’m moving out. Now she adds, “And I’m not really going to the doctor today, I’m seeing a lawyer.”
For a moment he weighs his options: talk things out, have a confrontation, kiss her, kick her rear end. But what happens instead is that inwardly he says, Oh, well. Or maybe he even says it out loud. They lie on the daisy-dotted sheets in silence.
Slater is aware that once you start going back to the films from your youth instead of watching the new releases, you have entered your eldership. When he was a teen, he noted that his parents stopped going to film festivals and art cinemas. When they occasionally went to the movies on a Saturday night, they came back complaining that all the films now were too vulgar or too depressing. Slater had been embarrassed for them when they went to repertory theaters to see Casablanca again, or glued themselves to the Admiral in the living room when Our Town with William Holden came on TV. Slater had sworn he would never become the sort of loser who wanted to live in the past. But here he is, sitting in the TV room of his home with a stack of DVDs on the end table, none of the films made after 1969. Beth is still in residence but has gone to her yoga class—the classes that should have been a clue months ago. He has observed that once a woman starts going to yoga classes, she tends to leave her husband before long. In that regard the classes seem to have replaced the “consciousness-raising groups” of the 1970s. Or maybe there never were any yoga classes. Maybe, like Dr. Jane, she’s seeing some young stud, or maybe she is “worshipping” or “witnessing” or whatever it is she is doing behind his back.
Slater has spent the past two-plus hours with La Dolce Vita, always his favorite Fellini. Later this week he’ll be viewing some Bergman and watching Butch Cassidy again. Mastroianni is on pause, as Slater needed a bathroom break and also stopped by the kitchen for another Sam Adams and a refill of his popcorn bowl. The all-night party scene in the film has gone on for almost as long as an actual all-night party, and he knows the ending is coming soon. When he presses Play, sure enough, Marcello and his fellow attractive degenerates are running in their formal attire at dawn from the party mansion to the beach, calling out, “What’s that?” as they spot something at the shoreline.
Washed up at the water’s edge is something massive, swollen and formless. There is conjecture among the partiers about what the thing is, and guesses as to whether it is alive or dead. Marcello, tottering with dark bags under his eyes, smirks at the face of the creature and sways above it on his shaky legs. Slater too is having trouble identifying the beast. Is it a ray, or a gargantuan distorted flounder? It almost seems to be a figmental being rather than an actual denizen of the sea—some Old Testament leviathan. The jaded playboy portrayed by Mastroianni stares at the one visible eye of the sea monster, their gazes locked like a nightclub hypnotist and his subject.
While Slater stares at Marcello as Marcello stares at the eye, another such orbit materializes in the foreground of his mind. He feels like he is looking into a mirror at a man looking into a mirror. There is a squid in Slater’s past, a creature he knows was nothing as monstrous as the dead, bloated ray on the Italian beach, but when he was a kid, the squid he saw seemed every bit as horrific. He no longer recalls how old he was at the time, but he knows the event was at least a couple of years after the Mr. Peanut episode. By that time Mom had given birth to his first sister, who was a toddler then, so Poppy took David alone to Rhode Island one weekend that May for a squid-fishing trip. They had driven to the bridge to Goat Island, not far from Newport. It was dark by the time they arrived, but that was as things should be, because squid fishing was done at night. Slater had napped in the car on the way so he would be able to stay up so late. He had been excited, envisioning hauling in a sea creature like the grinning cartoon octopus in the illustrations for “The Little Mermaid” in the family’s volume of Hans Christian Andersen tales. He had wondered if the squid would blow heart-shaped bubbles like the creature in the book and then smile up at him when it was lifted from the water, if it might have a gold crown on its head like the octopus in the storybook. He had helped Poppy carry their gear from the car: two rods, a Coleman lantern, a dip net, and their bait box and ice chest.
The view as they approached is one Slater will always remember. One side of the bridge was packed solid with fishermen, their glowing lanterns like oversized fireflies over the water. The scene was festive as a carnival, and Slater’s heart thumped with the thrill of the spectacle, which at the moment seemed even more exciting than being at Coney Island. Men and boys whooped around them, shouting congratulations to each other as squids were raised in dip nets.
But as is always the case when fishing, the wait for a catch became tedious before long, and Slater grew bored and sleepy, up hours past his usual bedtime. His father told him more than once during the evening to stop whining, but finally Poppy got a hit, yelled, “Whoa, Nellie!” and began straining against his line. After what to Slater was an interminable amount of time, his father finally flipped the squid into the net and began hauling it up. Slater leaned over the side of the bridge, moving the lantern closer to get a good look at the creature. He could hear the caught squid thrashing in the net, and just as his father pulled it over the railing, black stuff gushed from the rim, alarming Slater. “He’s inking us,” his father said, laughing.
Not only did the squid not wear a crown like the octopus in the book, but its entire head was grotesque. The creature was giganti
c and slimy looking, its face indistinct and repugnant. As Poppy hefted it into the ice chest, he said to his son, “The bugger weighs at least twenty-five pounds.” Slater had hung back, frightened by the monster but not wanting his father to know. Poppy grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the chest, telling him to have a look. Urine leaked down Slater’s legs and he prayed his father would not notice. Looking up at Slater was a huge, disturbing eye, not a blue eye with curly eyelashes like the one in the book, but a black, inky carrion eye, staring him down.
On the screen, Marcello observes bitterly that the creature is glowering at him. Slater presses Pause again and contemplates the screen, as immobile as the beached animal. The monster’s eye stares even in death.
ASH
Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
I Corinthians 15:51
SueAnn starts to ring up the purchases of a regular customer, a skull-faced, copper-haired woman who, from the looks of her, is probably a meth user. But ice-lady holds up one hand in a “stop” motion. Each time the woman comes into the store, she is bonier and bonier, and her mouth has taken on the look of someone shedding teeth.
“Got any more of these ones?” she asks, and points to a can of powdered baby formula. “This is the last one there is,” she tells SueAnn, her tone accusatory.
Even though SueAnn knows that she herself was no great shakes as a mother, the thought of this ice-head tending to an infant bothers her. She offers the store-mandated response: All we have is what’s on the shelf. The woman coughs a rheumy cough without benefit of covering her mouth, and counts out coins, placing them on the counter, including stacks of pennies. Well, the cans of formula at least indicate that the woman is not nursing her poor baby.