The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  Out in the parking lot, Whit helped my father into the backseat, guiding his head to make sure he wouldn’t hit it—the way a cop helps a felon into a squad car. I decided to ride in back as well. “Where to, kids?” Whit said.

  “Home,” my father said. “Where my wife is going to smell my breath for traces of alcohol and meals prepared off premises.” My father wound down his window and let the air blow in his face as we drove back toward our neighborhood.

  “You’re plastered,” I told him.

  He said, “A slight tingling sensation permeating the central nervous system.”

  “Plastered as Paris,” Whit said.

  We arrived home and came in through the kitchen door, hoping to avoid my mother. It was getting dark outside and I realized we had lost track of time. The house smelled of baking meat and it immediately brought me to my senses. The kitchen was strewn with pans and dishes. We all stood—stunned—as she called from the parlor.

  “About time. I’ve just set the table.” She came into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, bristling. Whit was supporting my father, his eyes large and wavering, his grin maniacal. He could have been a tramp we’d rescued from across town. My mother formed a Gothic arch with her mouth—the facial architecture she reserved for disgust. She stood in a Celtic skirt with a turtleneck sweater, an amber necklace around her neck—a middle-aged matriarch, a woman who knew a cup of flour by feel but measured it anyway, who believed tradition and making things from scratch were life’s great pleasures. She glared at all three of us: a trinity of blame. “What is that unholy smell?” she asked.

  “Multiple choice,” my father said. “A., domestic beer, B., fried chicken, C., the smell of the dying.” My father winced with self-disgust. “I’m sorry. I’m drunk. I asked these two to take me out for some spicy chicken wings.”

  “I picked mint from the greenhouse to go with the lamb.”

  “We’re sorry,” Whit said.

  “This is disgusting. I’ve spent the whole afternoon cooking. Forget it, just forget it, you bloody fools!” Anger blushed her cheeks. I thought of the Brontë sisters.

  “I’ll eat some mutton,” my father said. He moved uncertainly through the kitchen. “On second thoughts, the capacity of the human stomach is finite.”

  My mother, on the verge of sobbing, left the room saying, “From this day forward you can cook your own damn meals.”

  the longest recorded hunger strike was 385 days in wakefield prison, yorkshire…

  We all looked at one another. What would we eat if my mother stopped cooking? The kitchen could not close. It was the engine of the house. It was bread steam that made that old house yield to earthly concerns, square meals that kept my father from floating completely beyond our grasp.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Whit said. “That definitely sounds like a woman at the end of her string.”

  “Rope,” my father said.

  “Yes, rope is the thing,” Whit said.

  “She would say tether,” I said.

  Whit said, “My God that was good chicken.”

  “I need a nap,” my father said, suddenly exhausted.

  Whit and I helped him into the guest room, where he slept these days. He claimed my mother’s movements and her compulsive need for tucked sheets kept him awake. I helped him onto the bed and removed his shoes. His laces were badly frayed at the ends and I pictured him wandering campus, shoes untied, a slovenly pacing of gravel walks. Whit said good night and went outside to his car. I went to find my mother. I knew that it was me who had to apologize, to make amends. My father was dying and Whit was not a blood relative. It could start out as a ban on cooking, but soon the resentment could spread and deepen, ravage and poison the entire household. I went outside and found her in the greenhouse on the southern side of the house. Here she kept her flower and herb garden. We were the only family in Wisconsin who ate our own fresh basil in winter. She had sunlamps and heating ducts, a misting nozzle suspended from the ceiling. I watched her from the outside for a moment. It was dark except for a new moon low over the orchard and the warm glow of the heat lamps inside the greenhouse. She stood there weeding with a tiny trowel, her figure slightly warped and distorted by the mottle of the glass. I opened the door and felt a rush of warm, humid air.

  “Quickly, inside,” she said.

  I closed the door behind me. The rectangular boxes were labeled: sorrel, tarragon, nasturtiums.

  “Doing some gardening?” I asked.

  “I swear the weeds come up overnight.” Her tears were gone.

  “We put Dad to bed.”

  “He’ll feel wretched tomorrow. I suppose you considered that?” She brushed the leaves between her fingers.

  “It was his idea.”

  “Yes, and if he decides to inject himself with drain cleaner we should let him.”

  She pulled a weed from among some violets, held it like a mouse.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  She looked up, put the trowel to the side. “I’ve weeded these plants five times today.”

  I came and stood beside her. I was a foot taller than she.

  After a silence she said, “Your great-aunt Beulah used to dry lime blossoms in here.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “It’s a natural sleeping pill. She’d make tea out of it and drink it before bed. I think she was addicted.”

  “When you were a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  She picked up a spray bottle and misted some violet leaves.

  “You must have been lonely here just with her, after the train accident.”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But we were always so busy.”

  “I wish I could have known your mom and dad.”

  “That would have been nice,” she said.

  She lifted a bag of potting mix and leveled out a few cups into a pot.

  “Are you really going to stop cooking?”

  “Maybe.”

  “As punishment?”

  “Retribution.” She steadied her lips, considering a smile.

  “We’re going to starve,” I said. “Dad doesn’t know how to boil water.”

  “There’s enough food in the deep freeze to last a year. Besides, I don’t think learning how to operate the oven will kill you boys.”

  A gust of wind whistled through some cracks in the glass.

  “Nathan?”

  “What?”

  She looked at her plants, as if she were talking to them. “Your father will be gone soon and we need to start preparing for that.” She looked down at an herb plant, deciding which leaves to target. Then she dropped her pruning scissors and suddenly embraced me. The tears were back. I could feel the tension in her shoulders, the strength she’d developed from so many years of breast stroke at the YWCA. We stood there for a long time. Over her shoulder I looked out through the greenhouse walls. Night was everywhere now.

  thirty-one

  My father shaved his beard off later that week. Thinking of this now, I realize it was the day he accepted he was going to die. He emerged from a marathon shower, his face full of razor nicks, and stood in the doorway while my mother and I ate oatmeal in the kitchen. Her ban on cooking hadn’t even lasted a day. My father was born to wear a beard and had done so since the age of twenty. Some men may have appeared remade, retooled, without facial hair, but my father appeared stunted, baby-faced, like a man who could not tolerate sunlight. A face so naked it was hard to look at. His beard had, in fact, helped to conceal his death sentence, hidden the chromatic certainty that lives in the skin of cancer patients. My mother put her hand to her mouth and I stopped chewing. My father smiled this wide, hooligan smile, and it occurred to me that he was preparing us. He wasn’t going to allow his terminal days to be awash in quiet resolve and unspoken anguish.

  “This is what my face looks like,” he said.

  “Where is all that hair?” my mother asked.

  “Composted out back,” he said, still smiling. He
put a hand to his jaw and rubbed it like a wound on the mend. “Is it acceptable?” he asked.

  “Different,” I said. “Definitely a perceptible change.”

  “You sound like me,” he said. He came into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  I was still staring at his face, the rawness of it.

  My father said, “Dear, there’s something I want to discuss.”

  “You’re not going,” she said.

  My father looked at me, suspecting I had betrayed him. My mother paused and then said, “Dr. Benson called from the Stanford Linear Accelerator to confirm your arrival.”

  “I’ve been having this dream and in it I see the ghost particle as clearly as Polaris. I’m going to check which Greek letters are unused and name it. Brush its little cheek with a stream of electrons. A goddamn river of electrons, you understand.”

  longest dream measured by duration of rem is 2 hours 23 min

  “You’re not well enough to go. The doctors say you may need to be hospitalized at any time.”

  I looked down at my bowl, wanting to leave the room but compelled to stay.

  He said, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I have months, weeks.”

  “So you’d rather go out to California looking for something that may not even exist than spend the remaining days with your wife and son.”

  “I’ve invited Nathan and Whit to come along.”

  “I see,” she said, nodding.

  “You’re more than welcome to come,” my father said. “I assumed you’d rather stay here. I won’t fly out there because of cabin pressure and its effect on the tumor, so we’ll make a road trip out of it.”

  “What if something happens while you’re out there looking for this ridiculous piece of dust?”

  My father stared down at the tablecloth. For all I knew he was counting the shapes, tracing a hidden geometry, but then he spoke with such tenderness and tranquility that he sounded like a man roused from prayer. “I’ve been a bad husband, I know. I’ve ignored you. But I’ve always felt you here. The smell of bread…the wooden bowls of strange fruit. You’ve taken care of us. But I have to do this. My whole life comes to this, or it comes to nothing, Cynthia. Please give me this.”

  There were ten seconds of silence.

  Then I said, “I’ll look after him.”

  My mother stared at us, then collected some breakfast plates and carried them to the sink. She turned on the hot water and rinsed them, sending steam toward the windows. Without turning, she said, “If you die out there, I will never forgive you.”

  THE DAY OF DEPARTURE, WHIT sported around our house in a tracksuit and baseball cap, readying the Oldsmobile, checking tire pressure and radiator fluid with military precision. He prepared an emergency kit that would live in the trunk: a thermal space blanket, flares, a spare map, compass, flashlight, matches, reflective vests. I thought it possible that we were going mountaineering instead of driving to California on interstate highways. Whit was uncomfortable with my father’s naked face and avoided looking at it directly.

  I hugged my mother good-bye, uncertain whether I was in good standing with her.

  “You’re in charge of his medication. I’ve written it all out,” she said, handing me a typed set of instructions.

  “We’ll look after him. I promise.”

  “Don’t let Whit speed. He thinks he’s still a pilot. Well, I’ll have the place to myself.” A note of forced enthusiasm rose at the end of her sentence.

  “Okay,” I said. We hugged again. My father called to her from the upstairs bedroom.

  “What’s he lost now?” she said, and went to go see. I walked outside and got in the car with Whit.

  “Now, I’ll take the first shift. I’m good for six hours straight, no stops. More than six and I get a little antsy. You bring a thermos?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Usually on these things every man brings his own thermos.”

  “Whit, it’s not a hunting expedition. We’re driving on four-lane freeways to San Francisco. If I get thirsty I’ll stop at a gas station.”

  “All the same. The done thing is to have your own thermos.”

  He was writing the speedometer reading in a little spiral notebook.

  “In a past life you and my father were married,” I said.

  “No, no. In a past life I was a Tibetan monk. I see prayer flags and I go wonky. I got a reading once from a gypsy woman in Toledo with great legs.”

  My father emerged from the house and climbed into the backseat. Whit honked the horn three times and we pulled out of the driveway while my mother reluctantly waved from the kitchen doorway.

  THAT FIRST DAY WHIT DROVE like a man skipping bail, refusing bathroom breaks unless my father insisted. He commandeered the radio—classic rock and talkback—and led us out of Middle America bellowing she-bops and rejoinders to inane listeners. We passed seasonal road stands of folk art and fireworks run by teenage girls. We passed families in U-hauls, plodding west for the redemptive powers of California. We stopped for lunch in a small town with a municipal park and a bandstand. My father napped in back, reclined without a seat belt. There was a part of me that wanted to take issue with that choice, point out the greater tragedy of a man with a terminal brain tumor dying in a car crash, but I let it lie. Beardless, gauzy-fleshed, he was a boy we were taking on a road trip, napping under a plaid picnic blanket. We streamed along the freeway, past a bedlam of impoverished farms, animals caked in mud, radio towers rising out of stripped pastures, out of a jigsaw of Jersey cows. Late in the day, we stopped in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for gas and what Whit insisted on calling “provisions”—Snickers bars and root beer. He cracked open the cans with an alcoholic’s relish and handed one back to my father.

  Whit let me drive. My father took a stint sitting up front with me while Whit calculated our gas mileage in back, writing it in the logbook.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” Whit said. “The fuel-to-human ratio on this trip is starting to concern me. Warm bodies to octane is a real puddle on the tarmac.”

  “What are you talking about?” my father said.

  “From now on, no more heat in the mornings or AC in the middle of the day. And no radio,” Whit said. “I want to make the Golden State on ten tanks of fossil fuels.”

  “I can die early, if you’d like,” my father said.

  “Not funny,” Whit warned.

  “The radio doesn’t use fuel,” I offered.

  “Then you better tell us some stories if there’s no radio. I’m bored up here. My neurotransmitters are on strike,” my father said.

  “It’s the first day, gents. Pull yourselves together,” Whit said.

  “Stories,” my father demanded.

  “But no space stories,” I said, gliding my hands across the wheel.

  “No intergalactic masturbation stories either,” my father said. He was grinning. We were light, car-fevered.

  Whit said, “You guys are really burning a hole in my ass.”

  “Tell us some things. Go ahead,” my father said.

  Whit gathered himself, looked off at the horizon. “Did I ever tell you about me and Nancy’s honeymoon?”

  “Negative,” my father said.

  “We went to Arizona, a road trip, just like this one. We had an Airstream trailer with a cabin—Christ that thing could drink gasoline—and we pulled through the countryside. Little Indian cities and pueblos made of stone. She bought some of that Navajo jewelry, the kind Cynthia likes, from a guy with no teeth. We made love in a state park. I washed her hair in a claw-foot tub somewhere in New Mexico. I was a fucking king.” Something about a road trip, about our errand, allowed Whit to swear and blaspheme unabashedly.

  “Postnuptial wow-time,” my father supplied.

  “We stopped off at the Grand Canyon and got out of the car and stood there for five minutes. Space ruined me. I looked at it and you know what I saw?”

  “Tell us,” I said.

&nb
sp; “A movie backdrop. Flat, one-dimensional. Some donkeys down in the hole, that’s what I saw. In the morning, at sunrise, we made love in the hotel that overlooked the canyon. I promise you, the bed floated nine hundred feet from the bottom, and I could look out the window and see the cactus coming alight from the sun as our hips joined. Then we drove to Tucson to the plane boneyard—”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Air force facility. Retirement home for the big birds,” Whit said.

  “You honeymooned at a graveyard for airplanes?” I asked.

  “Old fighters, bombers, DC-10s, B-52s, foreign airlines, Qantas and Thai Air, you name it.” Whit’s voice pitched higher, took on the bravado of conquest. “I get us a tour and we drive around in an air force–issue jeep, flanked by long rows of gleaming metal birds. Turbines, wingspans, the black-snubbed noses of the bombers. The tour guide tells us how they wrap the planes to preserve them and how the desert knows no rust and I’m getting, well, excited, holding Nancy’s hand. I can tell she’s bored but trying, you know, for me, for the week-old marriage. Anyway, we come past a big old commercial-looking thing, 740-something, painted with the presidential seal and the guide says that it’s Nixon’s old Air Force One. But it’s only called that when the president is on board. Anyway, I about lose it right there, and all I can think about is getting a peek inside that plane. The guide knows I’m from the service, that I’ve served the country up there, so he lets us in.”

  “Into the presidential plane?” my father asked.

  “Yes,” Whit said. “So we walk around in there. Of course I go straight to the cockpit and I sit in the seat, touching the joystick and staring at the needles and dials and for some reason I’m pitching a tent—”

  “A funny time to camp,” my father said.

  “Dad, he means he had a hard-on, an erection.”