Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  One memory keeps coming back. They’re on a bench. It’s summer, Maine, they’re eating fruit bars. He isn’t. He’s drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup, the cap on with a triangular hole he tore out of it so he could drink without spilling. Black coffee. Some sugar in it. One pack, which he emptied into the cup, twirled the coffee with a wooden mixing stick—this isn’t part of the memory but from other times when they were on the same bench, doing almost the same thing—which he then licked the coffee off of and put into his pocket to later put into the cook stove for kindling. “It’s pure wood, why waste it?” he said that time or another. He didn’t do it with their ice cream or fruit bar sticks because they were too messy. “Something new,” he said earlier that summer in the store where they got the fruit bars and coffee. “I take sugar in my coffee sometimes. I never liked it that way before, but I do now in the afternoons. Maybe I don’t eat enough during the day and my stomach’s hungering for food, so the sugar. Anyway, the coffee wouldn’t taste good now without it.” But in the memory they’re only on the bench. The bench runs the length of the red windowless left wall of the general store. The wall faces the road that leads to the private road they live on. Their house is about two miles from the store. A little more than two, her mother used to say. “‘Two point one miles on your odometer to the private road on your left,’ we used to tell first-time visitors and UPS drivers, ‘and then between .3 and .4 mile to our house on the private road. If you come to Alleluia Farm on the public road’, we also used to say, ‘you’ve passed our road, so turn around and .6 mile from the farm’s sheep shed you’ll see our road on the right. If you don’t know what a sheep shed looks like or missed it, then just about .3 mile from the ninety-degree arrow will be our road. If you end up at the public docking area, that’s as far as you can go and it’s 1.7 miles from the commemoration plaque of some 1812 War British ship shelling down there back to our road.’” They’d rented that house for a number of summers, at least five before she was born. They rented it the following summer also, so this memory doesn’t keep coming back because it’s one of the last good ones of him. There were lots of good ones, that summer and others. Bad memories too, plenty of them. But no memory of him comes back nearly as much as this one. Her mother didn’t want to rent the house the summer after the following summer. And the next summer, when she felt she could go back to it without being reminded so much of him and affected incapacitatingly by those memories, it was already rented to the people who had it the previous summer. Those people continued renting it for several summers and then bought it, something her parents and then her mother had wanted to do for years and the owner always said they’d and then she would get first crack at. He didn’t give it nor even tell her it was up for sale, but by then land prices there had boomed and she wouldn’t have had the money. But the bench. They’d just come out of the store. The last thing he did inside was pour his coffee from a pot in the automatic coffeemaker-water boiler on a table to the right of the door. That’s what he always did when he was with them and had coffee. The table, with a linoleum cloth, also had a serve-yourself hotdog apparatus, which they used a few times that summer but not that day, the cooked franks in the hot water compartment at the top of the apparatus and the New England-style rolls in the compartment at the bottom. Mustard, relish, ketchup, minced onions, teabags, sugar and sugar-substitute packs, plastic utensils, styrofoam cups in two sizes, were also on the table. Also a microwave oven for cooking hamburgers and barbecued-beef buns and grilled-cheese sandwiches kept in a refrigerated case to the right of the table. And mixing sticks, pepper and salt shakers and packs, probably paper plates, but she doesn’t remember that. He always got the small-sized cup. Napkins and a little sign about the possible health hazards of microwave ovens when they’re on. “I drink too much coffee as it is,” he said a few times. Before he got the coffee he got them their fruit bars. When he was also buying groceries there, which her mother said they kept to a minimum because the store was so expensive, he got those first, then the fruit bars, then paid for it all including the coffee and had it bagged, or bagged it himself if he was in a rush and the kids were under control or he just felt like doing something energetic or helping out, then got his coffee. “There can be a system to almost everything,” he once said or said in different ways a number of times. Sometimes Eva disappeared and he’d say “Eva, Eva” and glance around and then shout “Eva, Eva” and run to the door and open it, look outside, run through the aisles till he usually found her sitting on the floor with some items she took off the shelves in her lap or around her. “The coffee I like to get last,” he once said, “because I like it very hot so I can drink it for about as long as it takes you to eat your fruit bars. If you noticed, we almost always finish at the same time. Also because,” or something like this, “I don’t like carrying it around the store while getting you fruit bars and while I also might have groceries and sometimes even Eva to carry. Ice-cold things like fruit bars I don’t like to have start melting before we leave the store, but you also have to make some kind of compromise in almost everything too. So better they start melting a little than one of us gets burned from my coffee.” The fruit bars never melted that much before they got out of the store because they didn’t melt quickly, for one thing, and for another, it rarely got that hot inside or outside the store, and there was also never that long a checkout wait in the store, possibly because he always bagged his groceries whenever they got both groceries and fruit bars, but she doesn’t remember that. He slid open the freezer case that had the bars, ice cream pops and bulk ice cream and things like that. This is how it just about always happened. She raised herself to look in. Eva tried to raise herself, then held her arms up and he usually picked her up for a few seconds so she could look in. Sometimes Olivia tried to pick Eva up to look in. When he slid open the freezer case he always first told them, if they had their hands on the lid which they usually did, to take them off so they wouldn’t get pinched. He once said he got pinched by one of these lids when he was a boy and it hurt terribly and gave him a blood blister. He had to explain to her what a blood blister was. She probably screwed up her face. It sounded very ugly. She probably thought of the blister for days, imagined it several times bigger than it was. “How did you get rid of it?” she probably asked him. If he said he broke it with a needle or by squeezing it hard, she probably screwed up her face even tighter and said something like “That’s disgusting, I don’t want to hear any more about it,” and for days probably thought of him trying to break the blister with a needle and by squeezing it and the blister breaking and blood all over his hand. If he told her he left the blister alone, which is what she should do if she ever got one, and that it went away by itself that way, which is probably what he did say if she asked him how’d he get rid of it, she probably said something like “That’s what I’d do anyway but where does the blood go if you just leave the blister alone?” “What flavors are there again?” she usually said after he slid the lid open and she looked inside. “I always forget some of them and some of them look alike—red ones especially—and there are always new ones or they change.” “Today they have strawberry, raspberry, banana, coconut, lime, no lemon today, cantaloupe, watermelon and something called mixed berries, which is a new one to me but I suppose we can both guess what it is.” “What?” “Mixed. Everything. All the berries.” “Any other flavors?” she usually said. “There are others from other brands, but they have artificial everything and natural nothing besides too many of the numbered colors, so choose only from the ones I gave.” “I like coconut a lot but I think I’ll have strawberry today.” “Me too,” Eva always said. He got the bars out, handed them each one and told them not to start opening them till they got outside on the bench, paid for the bars and coffee, got the coffee, sugar, several napkins, mixing stick, and they went outside. He always held the door open for them and helped Eva down the step. If someone else was going in or coming out, he kept the door open, for up to a minute sometimes
if that person was lame or carrying a baby or that far away but it was obvious he was coming to the store. “Don’t hurry,” he’d say if that person was hurrying to the door now because he was keeping it open for him. “I’d hate for you to trip or something worse as a result of my saving you this slight physical effort.” Actually, he charged everything at the store, she now remembers, except for something like the local weekly if that was all he was buying, or if he was alone and only buying coffee for himself, for instance. She doesn’t know when that would have been since when he went to the store he either went for groceries or for a few dollars’ worth of gas when the tank was very low or to get them a treat after a trip to the town library or a swim at the lake or he made a special trip from home with them to get them fruit bars or ice cream pops and himself coffee, and usually those times to give her mother an hour or more alone to work or rest. They went outside, sat on the bench. This is where the part that keeps coming back begins. Not the part about buying fruit bars and coffee. Nor sitting on the bench and tearing the tops of the fruit bar wrappings with his teeth to open them. First she and Eva would usually try but they were never successful at biting a hole in the wrappings or just pulling the wrappings off. Nor pulling the wrappings off after he bit through the top parts nor handing the bars back to them. Nor going around to the front of the store to put the wrappings and empty sugar pack into the trash can there, but before going saying “Don’t get off the bench while I’m gone.” Saying it sternly. “Olivia, make sure Eva stays seated and you stay seated close beside her.” For cars were parked near the bench, some of them pulled almost right up to it, a few times the front fender was over it, so he didn’t want them standing up or even stretching their legs out when he wasn’t there. Now that she thinks of it she doesn’t know why he left them there like that. If Eva had wanted to get off the bench, she either wouldn’t have cared that much or wouldn’t have been able to stop her. Sometimes she hated Eva then and wouldn’t have minded if she was in a situation where she could get hurt or even killed, she remembers thinking. She also didn’t like to physically stop anyone from doing anything and also didn’t feel she had the strength to. And Eva, though she wasn’t even two then, when she really wanted to do something was very stubborn and strong. He was taking chances, not being careful. She doesn’t remember anything bad happening from it, and he always ran around to the trash can and back, so it was only a matter of seconds, twenty, thirty. Why did he think he had to get rid of the trash so fast? Fast like that, yes, once he got up to go, but why get rid of the trash and so little of it so soon after they made it? Anyway: from the time he came back and sat. The coffee, when he ran to the trash can, she thinks he always left on the bench but a few feet from them, if nobody else was sitting that close. If somebody was, or rather two people on either side of them, then she doesn’t know what he did with the coffee when he ran to the can. He couldn’t have run with it. But this part. Eva was on his left—he’d sat down between them—she on his right. He once said, sitting down between them this place or another, “I like sitting between you two because then I can hold you both at the same time,” and squeezed them into him. But starting with this. They’re both licking their fruit bars. He’s picked Eva up and set her on his lap. He’s pulled Olivia so close to him that her ear’s pressed against his rib cage. His right arm’s around her. His chin’s resting on Eva’s head. His other arm’s supporting Eva mostly from his elbow up while his hand brings the cup to his mouth to sip from. It’s a fair day, they’re all in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and probably sandals. They’re looking straight out. No cars are parked in front of them so they have an open view of the road, house across it, trees in front and around the house, blue sky, little white clouds. Occasionally a car passes, stops at the main road if it’s coming from the point, directional signals flashing either way, but it doesn’t seem to distract them. Eva’s leaned back against his chest. He kisses her head. Olivia’s nestled into his body, top of her head wedged into his armpit, his hand stroking her head. He takes his chin off Eva a few times to kiss Olivia’s head. But mostly his chin on Eva’s head, Olivia nestled into him, the girls licking, he occasionally sipping and kissing, all three of them not saying anything and just looking straight out. That’s all there is to it. It went on for minutes. She doesn’t know why it stayed.