by Mike Allen
I don’t know why and neither do they. The doctors, I mean. Tests are inconclusive. (You see? I can understand these things; I’ve got a Masters in History, after all.) They say it past me, to the woman who says she’s my daughter (although my daughter is bright and small and energetic, not tired and sad like she is), but I listen. And sometimes I remember.
Kay chats to me while she dampens my hair and takes out her scissors. I had beautiful hair (I have photos), thick and brown. Jack used to run his hands through it and beg me not to cut it, although long hair wasn’t really the fashion and I really looked better with short. Now, I look in the mirror and it’s all dull gray and I can see parts of my scalp showing through; it makes me want to cry, more than the wrinkles and the pieces of my life that have disappeared.
I start to get up, to get away from the mirror, but the moment I start to move Kay swings the chair around so I’m looking instead at the TV set that’s been set up high on the back wall. “There,” she says. “You don’t mind facing the wall, do you? It’s so much easier for me.” She chatters on, about her friend’s daughter who is pregnant and miserable; about how the weather has been unseasonably icy and why do they call it global warming when things are getting colder?
Beneath the TV set, a young Asian girl with a sour expression carefully works on the nails of an old woman with bright orange hair (am I that old? Surely I’m not that old) and nods, and says we’ve ruined the world and that one day we’ll wake up and all the oxygen will have disappeared from the earth. She says it with satisfaction.
* * *
On the TV, a man walks around the streets of a foreign country (because nobody else is speaking English), and stops in a marketplace and talks to a man who is frying foods in a little booth, and tries some of the foods, although it looks extremely unappetizing. (Let them eat what they want, I told my sister when she tried to make her kids eat their vegetables, and what was her name again?)
“There you are!” says Pat (no, not Pat, that was the woman who cut my hair when I was a girl, this is Kay, it says so on her name tag). “Ready for the dryer?”
Kay puts a pillow on the chair so I can sit comfortably and settles me in. She puts a magazine on my lap and brings over a small can of ginger ale, placing it carefully on a table next to the chair. “There,” she says. “We like to make our ladies comfortable. Ready?”
I nod, and look up at her. She takes her glasses off and smiles, and wait, something is wrong—her eyes are striped, completely striped through the pupils and the iris and the whites, all green and silver. I want to call out, to warn somebody, but I don’t know who here will help me and then she pulls the dryer down over my head like a giant upside-down cup and turns it on.
Something hums and grabs my head and my brain and where am
I smell morning and hear eggs frying and there is sunlight coming through the gauze kitchen curtains Catherine! it’s a school day young lady do you know what time time time is on our side and her eyes are getting cold it’s cold outside please stop blowing bubbles in your milk round like a hairdryer yes honey your tie is on the hanger does he still love love me do don’t tease the bye baby bunting have a good day at the office, dear, and don’t forget and there he goes and she goes and they go and it’s quiet and oh the baby’s crying but what is that sound and where did everyone go and what was I going it’s all going it’s all
“There now,” a voice says. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
There’s a woman standing over me wearing a smock with flowers and a tag. I suppose it’s a name tag, but I can’t read it, it’s just squiggles. I’m in a . . . a . . . someplace with a lot of women and it looks nice, but something is missing.
The woman smiles at me and bends down. “It’s all right,” she whispers, and her eyes are pretty stripes and somewhere under her voice is something, a hissing or a crackle. I can’t tell what it is or what she is. “I can’t,” I tell her. If I could only. But. “I just can’t. They’re missing.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ve got them. We’ve collected them from you and many like you, and we’ll keep them safe long after you and yours are gone.” She puts on a pair of glasses and raises her voice. “Now, let’s go back to the chair and I’ll comb you out.”
She helps me up and takes me to a chair. I sit, and look at the old woman in the mirror, and wonder who she is.
WHEN WE MOVED ON
Steve Rasnic Tem
We tried to prepare the kids a year or so ahead. They might be adults to the rest of the world, but to us they were still a blur of squeals that smelled like candy.
“What do you mean move? You’ve lived here forever!” Our oldest daughter’s face mapped her dismay. Elaine was now older than we had been when we found our place off the beaten path of the world, but if she had started to cry I’m sure I would have caved. I hoped she had forgotten that when she was a little girl I’d told her we’d stay in this house until the end.
“Forever ends, child,” her mother said. “It’s one of the last things we learn. These walls are quickly growing thin—it’s time to go.”
“What do you mean? I don’t see anything wrong—”
I reached over, patted her knee and pointed. “That’s because the house is so full there’s little wall to be seen. But look there, between that sparkling tapestry of spider eggs and my hat collection. That’s about a square foot of unadorned wall. Look there.”
She did, and as I had so many times before, I joined her in the looking. I was pleased, at least, that this semi-transparent spot worn into our membrane of home provided clear evidence: through layers of wall board like greenish glass, through diaphanous plaster and thinnest lathe, we could see several local children walking to school, and one Billie Perkins honored us with a full-faced grin and a finger mining his nose for hidden treasure.
“Is that Cheryl Perkins’ boy?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her in years.” She sounded wistful. It always bruised me a bit to hear her sounding wistful. I’ve always been a sloppy mess where my children are concerned.
“You should call her, honey,” her mother said, on her way into the kitchen for our bowls of soup. My wife never tells you what’s in the soups she serves—she doesn’t want to spoil the surprise. Some days it’s like dipping into a liquid Crackerjack box.
Elaine had gone to the thin patch and was now poking it with her finger. “Can they see us from out there?” Her finger went in part way and stuck. She made a small embarrassed cry and pulled it out. A sigh of shimmering green light puffed out in front of her, then fell like rain on the floor.
I handed her a cloth napkin and she busily wiped at the slowly spreading stain. “They just see a slight variation in color,” I replied. “It’s more obvious at night, when a haze of light from the house leaks through.”
She smiled. “I’ve noticed that on visits. I just thought it was the house sparkling. It’s always been.” She stopped.
“A jewel?”
“Yes. That’s not silly of me? I always thought of it as the ‘jewel on the hill,’ so when it seemed to sparkle lately, to look even more beautiful than ever, I thought nothing of it.”
Of course she has been using this phrase since she was a little girl, but I said “What an interesting comparison! I’d never thought of it that way before. But I like that, ‘The Jewel on the Hill.’ We could paint a sign, put it up on the wall.”
“Oh, Daddy! Where would you find the room?”
This was, of course, the point of the conversation, the fulcrum about which our future lives were to turn. A painting can become too crowded in its composition, a brain too full of trivia, and a house can certainly accumulate too many plans, follies, acquisitions, vocations, avocations, heart-felt avowals, and memories so fervently gripped they lose their binding thread.
All about us floated a constellation of materials dreamed and lived, attached to walls and door and window frames, layered onto shelves and flooding glass-fronted cabinets, suspended from or glued t
o the ceilings, protruding here and there into the room as if eager for a snag. There were my collections, of course: the hats, the ties, the jars of curiosities, monstrosities, and mere unreliabilities, the magazines barely read then saved for later, and later, all the volumes of fact and fiction, and the photographs of fictive relatives gathered from stores thrift and antique or as part of the purchase of a brand new frame, bells and belts and pistols and thimbles, children’s drawings and drawings of children drawing the drawings, colored candles and colored bottles and colors inexplicably attached to nothing at all, my wife’s favorite recipes pasted on the walls at levels relative to their deliciousness (the best ones so high up she couldn’t read them clearly enough to make those wonderful dishes anymore), and everywhere, and I mean everywhere, the notes of a lifetime reminding our children to eat that lunchtime sandwich as well as the cookie, don’t forget piano practice, remember we love you, and please take out the trash. Our notes to each other were simpler and less directive: thinking of you, thinking of you, have a great day. In one corner of the living room you could see where I had sat reading a year of my sister’s unmailed letters found in a shoebox after her death, each one spiked to the wall after reading, feeling like nails tearing through my own flesh. And near the windows kites and paper birds poised for escape through sashes left carelessly ajar. An historical collection of our children’s toys lay piled against the baseboards, ready for the sorting and elimination we’d never quite managed, and floating above, tied to strings were particularly prized bits of homework, particularly cherished letters from camp, gliding and tangling with the varied progress of the day. And the authors of those works, our precious children, preserved in photos at nearly every age, arranged around the ceiling light fixtures like jittering moths, filling with their own illumination as the ceilings thinned to allow the daylight in. Gathered together I thought each child’s history in photos could have been portraits of a single family whose resemblances were uncanny and disturbing.
There were trophies mounted or settled onto shelves for bowling, swimming, and spelling, most candy bars sold and fewest absent days. And the countless numbers of awards for participation, for happy or complaining our children always did participate.
Some of the collections, such as the spider eggs or selected, desiccated moth wings I couldn’t remember for sure if their preservation had been intentional. Others, like the gatherings of cracks in corners or those scattered arrays of torn fabrics were no doubt accidental, but possessed of beauty in any case and so needed to stay.
These were the moments of a lifetime, the celebrations and the missteps, and I wondered now if our children ever had any idea what they both stepped in and out of on their average day in our home.
“What’s going to become of it all?” our daughter exclaimed. She moved through the downstairs rooms unconsciously pirouetting, glancing around. She’d seen it all before, lived with all but the most recent of it, but blindness comes easy. I could see her eyes trying to remember. “You can’t just throw it away!” she cried, when a rain of doll’s heads from a decayed net overhead set off her squeals and giggles.
“You kids can have whatever you like,” my wife replied from the passage to the kitchen. “But thrown out, left behind, or simply forgotten, things do have a way of becoming gone. Which is what is about to happen to your lunches, if the two of you don’t come with me right now!”
Within the sea of salt and pepper shakers (armies of cartoon characters and national caricatures with holes in their heads) that covered our kitchen table my wife had created tiny islands for our soup bowls and milk glasses. I had the urge to sweep that collection of shakers off onto the floor, just to show how done with this never ending tide of things I’d become, but I knew that wasn’t what Elaine needed to see at that moment. She stared at the red surface of her soup as if waiting for some mystery to emerge.
“Sweetheart, we just don’t need all this anymore.”
“You seemed to need it before,” she said to all the staring shaker heads.
“It’s hard to explain such a change,” I said, “but you collect and you collect and then one day you say to yourself ‘this is all too much.’ You can’t let anything else in, so you don’t have much choice but to try to clear the decks.”
“I just don’t want things to change,” she said softly.
“Oh, yes, you do,” her mother said, patting her hand. “You most certainly do. Everything has an expiration date. It just isn’t always a precise date, or printed on the package. And you would hate the alternative.”
I’d been distracted by all the calendars on the kitchen walls, each displaying a different month and year, and for just that moment not sure which one was the current one, the one with the little box reserved for right now.
Elaine looked at her mother with an expression that wasn’t exactly anger, but something very close. “Then why bother, Mom? When it all just has to be gotten rid of, in the end?”
“Who can know?” My wife smiled, dipping into her soup, then frowned suddenly as if she’d discovered something unfortunate. “To fill the time, I suppose. To exercise—” She turned suddenly to me. “Or is it ‘exorcise’?” Without waiting for an answer she turned again to her soup, lifted the bowl, and sipped. Done, she smiled shyly at our daughter with a pink moustache and continued, “our creativity. To fill the space, to put our mark down, and then to erase it. That’s what we human beings do. That’s all we know how to do.”
“Human beings?” Elaine laughed. “You know, I always thought you two were wizards, superheroes, magical beings, something like that. Not like anybody else’s parents. Not like anybody else at all. All of us kids did.”
My wife closed her eyes and sighed. “I think we did, too.”
Over the next few weeks we had the rest of our children over to reveal something of our intentions, although I’m quite sure a number of unintentions were exposed as well. They brought along numerous grandchildren, some who had so transformed since their last visits it was as if a brand-new person had entered the room, fresh creatures whose habits and behaviors we had yet to learn about. The older children stood around awkwardly, as if they were reluctant guests at some high school dance, snickering at the old folks’ sense of décor, and sense of what was important, but every now and then you would see them touch something on the wall and gasp, or read a letter pasted there and stand transfixed.
The younger grandchildren were content to straddle our laps, constructing tiny bird’s nests in my wife’s gray hair, warrens for invisible rabbits in the multidimensional tangles of my beard. They seemed completely oblivious to their parents’ discomfort with the conversation.
“So where will you go?” asked oldest son Jack, whom we’d named after the fairytale, although we’d never told him so.
“We’re still looking at places,” his mother said. “Our needs will be pretty simple. As simple as you could imagine, really.”
I looked out at the crowd of them. Did we really have all these children? When had it happened?
I suspected a few strangers had sneaked in.
“Won’t you need some help with the moving, and afterwards?” Wilhelmina asked.
“Help should always be appreciated, remember that children,” I said. A few of them laughed, which was the response I had wanted. But then very few of our children have understood my sense of humor.
“What your father meant to say was that moving help won’t be necessary,” my wife said, interrupting. “As we said, we’re taking very little with us, so please grab anything you’d care to have. As for us, we think a simple life will be a nice change.”
Annie, always our politest child, raised her hand.
“Annie, honey, you’re thirty years old. You don’t need to raise your hand anymore,” I told her.
“So what are you really telling us? Are we going to see you again?”
“Well, of course you are,” I said. “Maybe not as often, or precisely when you want to, but you will see us.
We’ll still be around, and just as before, just as now, you’ll always be our children.”
* * *
We didn’t set a day, because rarely do you know when the right day will come along. We’d been looking for little signs for years, it seemed, but you never really know what little signs to look for.
Then one day I was awakened early, sat up straight with eyes wide open, which I almost never do, looking around, listening intently for whatever might have awakened me.
The first thing I noticed was the oddness of the light in the room. It had a vaguely autumnal feel even though it was the end of winter, which wasn’t as surprising as it might normally have been, what with the unusually warm temperatures we’d been having for this time of year.
The second thing was the smell: orange-ish or lemon-ish, but gone a little too far, like when the rot begins to set in.
The third thing was the absence of my wife from our bed. Even though she always woke up before me, she always stayed in bed in order to ease my own transition from my always complicated dreams to standing up, attempting to move around.
I dressed quickly and found her downstairs in the dining room. “Look,” she said. And I did.
Every bit of our lives along the walls, hanging from the ceiling, spilt out onto the floors, had turned the exact same golden sepia shade, as if it had all been sprayed with some kind of preservative. “Look,” she repeated. “You can see it all beginning to wrinkle.”
I’d actually thought that effect to be some distortion in my vision, for I had noticed it, too.
“You know what you want to take?” she asked.
“It’s all been ready for months,” I said. “I’ll be at the door in less than a minute.”
I ran up the stairs, hearing the rapidly drying wooden steps crack and pop beneath my shoes. When I jerked open the closet door it seemed as if I was opening the door to the outside, on a crisp Fall day, Mr. Hopkins down the street is burning his leaves, and you can smell apples cooking from some anonymous kitchen. I brushed the fallen leaves from the small canvas bag I had filled with a notebook, a pencil, some crackers (which are the best food for any occasion), and extra socks. I looked up at the clothes rod, the rusted metal, and nothing left hanging there but a tangle of brittle vines and the old baseball jacket I wore in high school. It hardly fit, but I pulled it on anyway, picked up the bag, and ran.