Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  Olivia sits between her mother and grandmother at the funeral. The casket’s a nice wood and color, she thinks. Plain, simple, nicely shined. But she thinks her father would still say of it “Nice for somebody else, and not because I’m in it. But since it still looks too expensive and will only just rot in the ground and can’t even be recycled, not for me.” “Put me in a bag and dump me over the side of a boat into the ocean,” he once said to her mother. “Seriously, but of course not before my time comes; I can’t swim.” When she said “Shh, not even for laughs in front of the children,” he said “Only kidding, yak-yak, and you didn’t think I was talking about someone else?” She also thinks he wouldn’t like all the flowers around. He said he didn’t much like buying cut flowers, even though her mother loved getting them from him. And when Olivia picked them here and there out of the ground, which she was always jumping away from him in their walks to do, he didn’t much like that either. To him, even people’s private gardens and front yards were public parks, to be seen and enjoyed by everyone is what she thinks he meant. She knows he explained what he meant, because she asked him to, but that part she forgot. When her mother bought flowers he often put his nose in them and said “Smells very nice, like flowers,” and put them under Olivia’s nose and said “Breathe deep without stopping to think and tell me if it’s animal, mineral or vegetable.” He also wouldn’t like the electric candles by the casket. Garish would be the word he’d use. “Cheap, ugly, they even flicker,” he might say. “Either wax candles or forget it. I’m not worth the real thing?” He also wouldn’t like the things the rabbi’s saying about him. Too flattering, lots of the facts all wrong, making him sound the way he wasn’t. “Your eye is beginning to turn in,” her mother whispers to her. “Put your glasses on,” and she takes Olivia’s glasses out of her bag, rubs the lenses with a tissue and puts them on her. Also the unnatural deep voice like a stiff actor’s. Probably wouldn’t like there being any kind of rabbi up there. Just friends, he probably would want to speak about him in front of all these people, or only his brother. But probably no words and nobody up front and everyone staying in his seat and no getting up and down a few times on cue and just sad piano or cello music for the time of one side of a record followed by a few seconds of silence and then everyone go home or wherever they go and his wife, mother and brother and she could go to the cemetery to do very quickly everything that’s supposed to be done there. He said a few times that he never could stand anything nice said about him or his work to his face. Saying anything nice about him when he wasn’t around he didn’t like either, if it got back to him. “I hate compliments or giving them, except to my students if one really needs one and to my daughters and wife, but only if they don’t return them.” He also wouldn’t like that so many people are here. Maybe the only ones he’d like seeing if he was here would be the ones who read about it in the newspaper obituary yesterday or heard about it from someone who had and whom he last saw long ago and some he even thought were dead. “I like bumping into people I haven’t seen for years,” he said, “better than I like making a date to meet them. Best when it’s on a busy street and not muggy, overly sunny, raining heavily, unless one of us has an enormous umbrella for us both to fit comfortably under, or freezing cold. Snow’s okay no matter how hard it’s coming down, if you’re dressed for it, since it makes the encounter more fantastic. But no commitment to stay, this way, and the conversations are usually quick, lively and full of surprises—time speeded up, then a kiss on the cheek or handshake and goodbye.” He didn’t like crowds, that’s why he wouldn’t like all these people here. Once, yes, he did, he said—Ebbetts Field, Madison Square Garden, a half-million people marching to ban the bomb or around a factory that made casements for napalm. Lots of different faces, costumes, chance to meet a young woman, a single cause or event making everyone feel together or that things can get righted through sheer numbers. But no more and not for twenty years. A big crowd leaving the same place at the same time now made him jittery. Someone might faint, others could panic, gun might drop through the hole of someone’s pants pocket and go off, someone else could open fire on the crowd from a passing car or high on drugs or some political or even religious conviction drive into it, but maybe that’s going too far. It’s going too far. It’s off the point. Large crowds made him uneasy, that’s all, and there must be a couple of hundred people here. Three. Four. More people than seats. Or as many or near to it but most aren’t sitting close to one another. Where’d they all come from? Which ones did he know? Did a number of them come to the wrong funeral, directed by mistake into this chapel rather than one of the two or three other chapels having services now? Is there an important or well-known Howard Tetch in this city and some of his immediate survivors have the same first names that some of her father’s do and so a lot of people who read the obituary thought her father was he? “And talk about a change of mind?” he said not that long ago. “Nothing gets said to crowds or done through them, no matter how loudly a hundred thousand people yell back in unison. So now it’s one to one, two on two, six people around a round table, but that’s it if I can help it.” He’s refused just about every invite to a cocktail party or any big function like that the last few years. Particularly art gallery openings; no place to sit. He also didn’t like women’s perfume or men’s cologne or whatever it is men put on their faces and bodies and spray in their hair, when the smell of it got this strong and there were so many different kinds of it at one time. “It’s like drinking rum, vodka and scotch at the same sitting,” he said. “But my nose gets offended instead of my stomach. No, that explains it too much while adding nothing and making little sense, so in the end gainsays what I want to say. And that interpretation of my explanation’s trying too hard to be clever, which besides making the interpretation wrongheaded, worsens the wrongheadedness of the explanation even more. Too many fake fragrances, period. Or just ‘fake smells,’ since I should stay away from the sweet-sounding fake too.” He also didn’t much like fancy clothing on people on any occasion. Capes, floppy broad hats, big fur coats draped over women’s and men’s shoulders both. Ostentatious jewelry taken out of the bank vault or home safe for the day. Just overmadeup and overdressed people, hairdos that looked as if they took hours to do and cost a bundle, and so many here seem to have gone through much thought and great fuss getting ready for this. Just the shoes: so shined and new. “You didn’t give half a shit about me when I was alive,” he’d probably say, “hell with you now that I’m dead, or most of you. This is a show, no funeral. I’m just the ticket to be here, or whatever I am. The lure, the draw, the grease, the catch. None of those. The audience is the show, I’m just its reason for being, and a dead one at that. Did I have to explain that last remark too?” He also wouldn’t like being in that suit and which people were looking at him in when the casket was open. The shirt’s his: a blue button-down cotton oxford, one of two he owned and just about the only dress shirt he wore. The tie’s a nice design, color and style, one he wouldn’t have minded owning. But the suit he stopped wearing ten years ago but could never give away or throw out. Maybe wore it three times, at the most five. Everything else like that he’d eventually give away or throw out: shoes, shirt, pants, sport jacket, wallet or key ring or pen and pencil set he got as gifts from his mother and in-laws, but for some reason not this suit…. Ties, box of handkerchiefs, satin-lined bathrobe with a designer label, wicker picnic basket of different colored synthetic-fiber socks. Because it was so expensive, at least for him. Also because it was a suit, two complete articles made into one thing, each of which could possibly be used separately, and if it had come with a vest it would have been even harder to get rid of. No, the vest, if he couldn’t have bought the suit without it, would have been got rid of immediately and probably by leaving it at the store. He didn’t like the suit the day he bought it and left it at the store to be altered. When he was leaving the store that day, he told her mother some years later, he said to himself “Why’d I buy it? I
don’t like it. I’ll look silly in it. Why do I almost always buy the wrong thing for myself? I came in to buy a sporty medium gray Harris Tweed suit with a vent in back and if possible with flap pockets and little domelike leather buttons. So why’d I wind up with a ventless dark brown of another kind of closer-knit tweed than I wanted, the perfect suit for a witness or guest at an execution or funeral?” He also wouldn’t like the white handkerchief in his breast pocket, though at least it was squared rather than triangled and sticking only a little bit out. Nor that the casket had been opened: that most of all. People he didn’t know filing past. Just people filing past, most probably thinking at the time what a good or bad job the embalmer did on him and later talking about it when they got back to their seats. His mother collapsing for a few moments when she saw him. Her mother refusing to go up to see him. Olivia wanting to go up but not being allowed to till the funeral director announced that the coffin would be open only two more minutes. “I’m not scared. It won’t give me bad dreams. It won’t be the last impression I’ll have of Daddy. I have pictures. He has books with his face on the backs of them. I’ll stare at them till the picture of him in there goes away. You keep telling me how mature I am for my age, so give me a chance to prove it. He’s my father, not yours. I only want to see him. I won’t touch or kiss him. Someone will have to hold me up. Uncle Jerry’s there now, so him. But one look for only a second, please? Please?” Any of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to be seen. He said a while back that when he died he only wanted to be burned without any mumbo jumbo and his ashes trashed. His mother was the one who wanted it opened. After it was closed a final time she said to Olivia’s mother “Why? I didn’t need to be shown he was gone. Because it had been done for his father and my parents and sisters and brothers, so I thought why not for him, but it was just repeating past mistakes. I should have given in to you. You shouldn’t have given in to me. If I still insisted, slobbering over your knees even, you should have told me to stop instantly or leave. It’s something I’ll never live down for the rest of my life. Married to Howard even for a few years, you should know how much stubbornness runs on both sides of his family and how we don’t mind walking over weaker wills, and that’s all you needed to have told me. A reminder of what I can be. Remember that for the next time. Not for a funeral—the next one will be mine—but any time when I want to get my way. Now let’s try to get through the rest of it.” If her father could think, what would he be thinking now? He can think, that’s all he can do now, except maybe see them from someplace, and he’d be looking at them and probably crying while thinking “Oh my poor children,” meaning Eva and she, “what’s going to happen to you without me? I shouldn’t be dead just for that. And what will I do without you? Well, it’s all got to be planned. You just don’t go to no place after your funeral and do nothing for a billion years. Up there no doubt has something for me to do from now on or else people like me would get tired and bored from doing nothing for so long and then make trouble for the place. Washing clouds. Cleaning air. And lots of enjoyable things to do with a lot of nice people after these chores are done. But it just isn’t fair for me, that’s all. Nor for them. Skip me—just for them. They know I loved them too much for me to just leave them like that. So, settled—it’s all got to change. Anyone can do the things that are planned for me, and besides I’ll have a billion years to do them in. But only I with their mother can take care of our little girls.” He wouldn’t like the chapel either. Too gloomy and uninteresting, just like the awful organ music they played. Wouldn’t have liked the furniture and paintings in the other room where her mother and grandmother and uncle and she saw people before the funeral began. He didn’t like being the center of attention anywhere. He would like it that he isn’t expected to say anything.

  Olivia’s in college, dating a young man, and tells him, as she’s told lots of young men, “I have or had—I never know how to word it—two fathers. So I’ll say I have and had two fathers, how’s that?” “Sounds good to me,” he says. “One’s my stepdad. He’s fine. His name’s Eric, short for nothing.” “What do you mean?” “There’ll be a few of those. Don’t worry. Just stay tuned. He’s a psychiatrist. Very bright, trenchant. Biggest drawback with him is that he reads your mind right. He teaches psychiatry too, and he’s very sweet to my mother. They love each other tremendously, obsoletely, and he’s been as good a stepfather as anybody could want for one. Only I didn’t want one. I didn’t want two, get it? Some kids do, you know, something I learned by being the unofficial, meaning the self-declared president of the Association of Associated American Associative Stepkids dub.” “Is there such a one?” “Two live ones, you realize I meant. And it was good for my mother, marrying Eric, but I never wanted anyone—hold your hat, sir. Your head then, since this is where the big news break comes in. The blockbusting bombshell. ‘Bombadier to archivist, let it blow.’ Anyone but my real father. Did you guess that?” “From what you were leading up to, even with the animadversions … that’s not the right word. I’m not sure of the pronunciation either. But it’s a good one, yitch? Always wanted to use it in company, but intelligent company, like the opposing one, and pronounced right. But: yes, I guessed.” “Smart. This kid: he’s smart. Not my real dad; you, but he too. But I’m talking like this, this jerky nervous diversionary chatter, because the subject always distresses me. The subject’s he. The object I can’t right now turn into a pun. He died when I was six. Or five. Which is it? Definitely five. Why my kidding myself with that pretended muddlemindedment? Or trying to kid-smart you? ‘Cause I know, babe, this gal knows. Some people can tell you exactly where they were and what second of the minute of the hour of the day, etcetera, it was, when they learned that World War IV began. At least those who have reached three. You didn’t get that. Same with me when I learned he died. So I just subtract all those years and seconds from my present age and get the exact age I was when the big boom hit. The big broom, really, since it made such a clean paternal sweep. My own World War IV, over in a second. ‘Darling, take cover; Dad died.’ ‘Oh no,’ roar, and part of me’s forever dead.” “I’m not quite following you, Ol.” “Follow. I can never forgive him. Forget him. Hoo-hoo, that was some frisbeeing flip. And unintentional. You believe me?” “Not quite.” “Believe me. I can never forget him. I can get him out of my head, but the little fella always slips back in. Sometimes I think it’s the same for me as it was for him with my brother. His brother. What’s going on here? Oh, I see. He’s in him who’s in me.” “That I don’t catch.” “Because the after’s before the before. I’ll explain. He had a brother two or so years older who died when my father was twenty-three, I think. Drowned in a ship, went down, ship-he never found. They were irreversibly close and both irreversibly lost. It’s all documented.” “Where? When? By whom?” “Well, most. Because my father was a junior newsman and their oldest brother, Jerry, was a budding hotshot in what he did at the time, little news stories saying brother of news cub and hotshot bud among the dead at sea. My father kept them and I or my sister still have some, just as we have all of my father’s later writings about it. Obviously, my father wrote, and sometimes, he told my mother, part of what he wrote came with the help of his dead brother. How so? It goes like this.” ‘Tour family’s haunted.” “Hauntingly. Frightfully. But don’t fear. It’s only a couple of gentle consanguineal ghosts in me, but that’s the after before the before again. You see, his brother was a writer of the same time, long and short imaginative things, but preceded my father at it seriously by a few years. Before his brother died, my father—or Dad,’ to shorten this a bit—only did news. In fact, he told my mother, he felt he took over where his brother had left off, though his brother had hardly begun. Dad had been piddling a bit at it, but soon after Uncle Alex died he really got with it, as if possessed, he said. I like to think I carry on the family tradition in that category, but orally, which should explain all the who’s-in-me’s.” “It does, sort of.” “Dad told my mother—or ‘Mother,’ to shorten t
his even more. It’d be even shorter using just ‘Mom,’ but she was never just ‘Mom’ to me. But he swore Alex gave him ideas for writing when he was stumped, like first lines and startling last ones and sudden plot moves, and was even responsible for some of the more usable typos he made. ‘You again,’ he used to say, saluting him, Mother said, and then ‘Now get lost—I don’t believe in collaborative prose.’ In one piece, which Dad said Alex had contributed or sparked a significant part, he thought he should bill them both as its authors, but realized the tough time he’d have explaining it. Alex, the better read and educated of the two, provided him with right words, dates and historical situations and characters, besides doing some overnight editing on his punctuation and grammar and the prose’s rhythm. Occasionally made the paper tear when Dad was pulling it out of the typewriter, so Dad would have to rewrite the page. Deleted words and sometimes sentences and paragraphs in the rewriting, which Dad only found out about, and approved of, much later. And also nudged him away from the typewriter to do some useful chore that didn’t have to be done right away or to take his brain for a walk, when it was clear to Alex but not Dad that his work wasn’t going well. Dad’s wasn’t. Alex, when you think of his own writing he must have missed and what he had to do to do all this, was doing great with his unasked-for stintless work. Or maybe he only wanted to keep his hand in—I just thought of that. For the day when he returns—so he won’t get stale at it. Lots of experiences and people and their stories to write about where he’s been, if he went or got that far or the place actually exists. A first from the real netherworld or stopping-off place, which should get plenty of critical attention and publicity and, as a consequence, sales. And if Alex could, and maybe one only can make that kind of comeback through serious or at least well-intentioned writing, why not Dad, which was always my big wish. So what am I getting at in all this?” “You tell me.” “I am. I’m just stalling, waiting for his nudge or spark. It didn’t come. It never does when I wait for it or try to induce it. It seems to only come, as it must have from Alex to him, in flashes, pops, minipinpricks or minor accidents when I’m least expecting it. But this: that he helps me out in similar ways. Not much but enough times to make me think it’s real. Little tip on a test whispered in the air near my ear. Tiny smudge on a love letter, so I should think about writing it again or whether to mail it at all. Grabbing me—I swear I felt I felt it—when, with my head in a thought, I stepped off the curb while a car was shooting past. Maybe Alex too, but very small stuff, though I feel he’s just dormant if still there. If Alex did get back, he’s probably just hiding out and writing—to make up for lost time, let’s say—but not seeing any of his family, unless Uncle Jerry’s holding something back. But he’s still my working father, Dad is, which is probably why Eric could never take that spot. For sure in my dreams too, though that’s where I expect him to be, my sleeping conscious churning out images and actions of him advising me or providing me with the material to make wakeful decisions and take right-path directions. Does all this sound odd and too loose?” “Toulouse? Like the city? Or Lautrecian like zee artiste? Or just too scattered, making it hard to catch or take?” “The city? It’s near the prehistoric cave area, so maybe. No, that’s Bordeau or some coastal wine city or region with a B. Maybe like Lautrec. Stunted body for stunted mind? Just no focus or center, so, misconceived, half-believed, all over the place. Anyway, now you know something that’s sunken in me. If you want to know something of what he conceived and probably believed, which might help you understand me and what I said better, these are some of his books.” “OK, let’s see. Very attractive covers, solid bindings, sort of maudlin catchy titles: dark this, catastrophic that. He was a handsome man for that period, I guess, but why the tie in most of the jacket photos? Some nice things said about each book and his body of work, but they always are, aren’t they, else why put them in? But lots of suspension points in the quotes, so who knows what’s missing? A storyteller beyond compare…’ if this was the nineteenth century and the world was an island with only one writer on it … but you know I’m only kidding. Several different publishers, so I suppose they didn’t do too well by him and he had to keep moving, or else he got a bigger and bigger deal with each new one. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, but I never heard of your dad or his writing. But then I haven’t really kept up, or should I say ‘gone back into the library stacks,’ or read much since high school other than school work. Neither do most of my friends or either of my moms or dads read anything but what sells or will help them sell something, so nobody would have clued me in if he was really someone to read where my life depended on it. Each of these is a fairly long-to-enormous work, with lots of dense pages, fat paragraphs, microscopic printing for the most part, and what seems at quick glance like a lot of big words I’d be tempted to look up. You want me to read a whole book or is there a fairly short part of one or a particular not-so-long story or two that will do the trick?” “Just start one of the books from the beginning and see if it gets ya.” “I’ll take the slimmest here, if nobody objects, which also seems to have the shortest paragraphs and most dialogue and fewest printing shenanigans, since I have a bunch of exams coming up and papers to do in the next weeks. And I’ve always, skimpy reader that I’ve become—or maybe because of that, for who’s got the time to waste these days on frivolous or just no-account works—that if you don’t like one of a writer’s books, you won’t like any of them, no matter how many years he bangs away at it.” “You know, after all I’ve gone into about myself and my relationship with him—what the hell he continues to mean to me, for christsakes—you’re taking an offensively insensitive approach to me and him and his work.” “Did he just whisper that to you to say, to sort of start the great nudge away from me?” “I think that remark’s uncalled-for also.” “Oh, you don’t say? You do tell? Well, pip pip, have a hot toddy and tip-tip-erary and all that, old chap, and here’s his herd of doorstoppers for the next unfortunate who comes to you with fresh ears to be chewed off. Mine, let me apprise you—” “Fuck you too, dildo, and that comes straight from my mouth only.” “So you say. So you say.”