by W. S. Penn
Mother left to attend another serial in the funerals of the women in her family. The only vacations mother ever took nowadays from her appliances were to attend funerals and memorial services. While her own mother had died from a weak heart, these other women seemed to be dropping over the edge of sadness. Having mortgaged their hopes and dreams with alcohol, they bloated like balloons and burst, scattering on the winds like asbestos dust. The last one had consumed herself in the ashes of a late and drunken cigarette, and I imagined mother staring into her coffin and whispering “Fudge happiness,” while confirming herself a teetotaller in the recesses of her own fragmented mind.
Coming home from a weekend with Elanna, during which her roommate’s boyfriend had gotten me so drunk on gin that I had spent the night practicing my own personal mode of free speech in the bathroom, I once again overheard uncle and father talking about divorce.
The phone rang and I had to leave without finding out whose divorce they were talking about. Allison was on the other end, weeping into the mouthpiece, telling me that she was pregnant and asking what I was going to do about it.
“Nothing,” I said. Allison seemed to be confused over the propagative qualities of fingers and tongues. It had nothing to do with me. I killed the connection and left the phone off the hook, and hurried back outside. When Mrs. DeForest rang me back later that night, filling the telephone lines with implication and accusation, I asked Mrs. D. what she’d been doing at the Ramada Inn on such and such a night, in the company of strangers like William the Black.
One reason I resisted the notion that all things were connected like dandelions holding together the soil of our dreams against the implacable disruption of earthworms and Death was that I couldn’t figure out how all these things related to each other.
“Life,” I told Grandfather, “is like an erector set. Every time I take it apart and try to put it back together again, it’s different. Every construct seems fake.”
“Like vegetables,” Grandfather said, trying to help me see that father’s working over the technology of Sunset Magazine was not dissimilar to uncle’s careful construction of model railroads or his careful destruction of airplanes and yachts. Uncle was extreme; denying the death of his six friends left him living on the cliff edges of an untenable reality. Father, on the other hand, might ignore death, but he never denied it; that let him live in the middle ground of his own equally untenable reality. Somehow, this explained why uncle might leave his wife, the Vegomatic, while father in his mind had never left mother. Of course, mother was what you might call difficult to leave, since her ship had sailed over the edge of her own reality years ago. Her only connection to the world that was digesting me was electrical, the blips in her brain random and disorganized like bits of telegraphical information lost in the distances they had to travel over the wires of her cortex.
On his middle ground, father assumed Elanna was the adventurous one of my sisters and failed therefore to keep a watchful eye on Pamela. But Elanna was too much like mother must have been and was more interested in wider horizons which were, due to her intellectual nature, political. Pamela, in reaction against mother, was more stable in a commonplace way, and yet all too capable of succumbing to the incubus of the middle nights.
And me? I seemed to be somewhere in between: I had nearly raped Allison DeForest and yet had managed to slip that trap. On the other hand, I had been saved from intellectualism by a natural slowness, so well documented by Dr. Bene whom one heard of, from time to time, in Palo Alto, wandering the ivied halls of Stanford pulling a red wooden cart filled with papers behind him, or slipping out onto the football field during home games in an overcoat and watch cap, where he would feverishly collect the I.B.M. cards the fans used for confetti. I owed Dr. Bene a debt for making me find those keys after giving me a coin purse to lose on a field that didn’t exist anywhere but in my memory. My ground was an imagined baseball diamond at the heart of America, and my purpose was plain and simple—to find those keys.
28.
Pamela had told me that adults try to return to the place of their happiest childhood memories, a fact she’d learned from the Buddhist monk who taught a course called “The Fear of Life” under the awning of the Psychology Department at the Community College she attended, and cross-listed in the catalogue with Lepidoptery 201, which Pamela managed to pass, having failed the course taught by the monk. So when mother met father and me at the door with “Preggers!” I went straight to Pamela’s closet to look for her. By the time I returned to the living room, Pamela, her boyfriend, and his brother and sister-in-law were sitting on the edges of slip-covered sofas and ottomans in tense anticipation as father paced the room saying, “Oh balls!” It already had been agreed that Pamela and her boyfriend would marry.
Mother sat in a corner, wagging her hand like the arm of a metronome, counting the passage of time until she noticed me and turned to my father and asked, “Did you forget to shut the door?” To mother, I was becoming a stranger; the moments were rarer and rarer that she would look at me, the mists receding from the fog of her mind long enough to say, “You were a sleeper.” She meant that as a baby I had been given to sleeping through anything and everything.
Even now I was tempted to curl around father’s wrath like an anemone. I didn’t. Someone had to say something besides “Oh balls.” I went over to Pamela and put my arms around her and told her that “It would be all right.”
Pamela’s gratitude, combined with the choric sigh of relief from my brother-in-law-to-be’s odd relatives, made me overlook the rattle of the back door’s knob, an ominous but fragile sound, as though someone was early for a party whose hosts he didn’t know.
Possibly, not answering that rattling door was a mistake. I would think so, at times, as I sat in Pamela’s closet trying to hold on to the sound of her voice, while begging her to forgive me for having lied. It was not all right. Several months later, I heard the same rattling at the door, alternating with a cat-like scratching on the wood as though the party-goer was tired of being left out in the cold, as Pamela miscarried, hemorrhaged, and died. At the door was a sneering, twisted little man, come in a Rent-a-Wreck van to make a pickup. Taking Pamela away, he made a point of letting me know that this time, Death had fooled Grandfather as well as me.
Mother closed the house into darkness, while father silently washed and rewashed both cars. Elanna came home from Berkeley, and she scratched my head absent-mindedly as together we retreated through whatever happy memories we had that had escaped the deluge of Pamela’s bleeding to death. Casseroles appeared magically on the doorstep, left there by neighbors, and Running Dog grew fat on the food we couldn’t eat and didn’t have the heart to return.
Grandfather took it somewhat philosophically; but Laura Pamela could be heard cursing him and all the men in the family, exclaiming that now she knew why she had never used her middle name as the pots on her potter’s wheel collapsed slowly into a pulpy mass of clay, over-wet from her tears.
Giving Laura P. time for her tears to soak into the hard red rock of Chosposi, Grandfather spent the next two weeks in his workshop, holed up in the artificial light of his own failure, making a pair of brass wind chimes which he bored and filed to perfection, until they gave off a hollow ethereal “bong,” sadder than all the cathedrals in France. These he sent to me and I hung them above the plain and eloquent marker of Pamela’s grave, spending hours in the graveyard listening to them until one night they were stolen.
For Elanna, Pamela’s was a double death. Not only had she lost her companion from those childhood trips to uncle’s house, but, when she discovered that mother had cleaned out her room, discarding everything that reminded her of what she had been, she felt as though she’d lost a good half of herself. I became doubly important to Elanna and she tried to smother me with caution, preventing me from buying a motorcycle and preparing me to resist the draft, while, at the same time, making me read. If I suffered one of the migraine headaches I began getting, El
anna would drive all the way home from Berkeley in the middle of the night to take me to the hospital for the codeine shots which allowed me to cease the painful vomiting. For her sake, I became a model student, reading through her assigned reading list so quickly that before I graduated from high school, I was already on the “esses”—Shakespeare and Sartre—reaching von Kleist by the time I was accepted to an expensive, private men’s college for the next fall.
Elanna didn’t approve of my choice of colleges but after Pamela’s death, which seemed a betrayal, and after Allison DeForest had confused revenge with cowardice and sliced up her wrists twice, I wanted nothing more to do with women.
Not even mother could penetrate the furious indifference that I used to protect myself. But then mother changed, becoming thoroughly competent in an apparent attempt to make up for the lives that had miscarried around her. Where once her madness had been interesting, if not fun, after Pamela’s death she became as methodically sane as father had been before. Closing the house in darkness for several weeks, she spent her days scrubbing the floors, polishing furniture, cleaning carpets. She changed the locks on the doors, surprising father when he came home late one night with his old set of keys. She installed timers on all of the lights in the house, so that after dusk you could be startled by a light blinking on, followed by one blinking off. She turned Pamela’s room into a study, and registered for courses at the state university, throwing out her toaster and refusing after that to cook for what was left of the family.
No longer did the happy shouts of “boom” surprise me as I fished through the refrigerator. The few friends I had ceased to comment on how mother seemed strange, and instead treated her with the respect and lack of caring that they gave their own mothers. She would ask them the same questions their mothers asked, such as “How was your day?” and they would say, “Fine.” When the washing machine broke down or the vacuum needed repairing, mother would roll up her sleeves and fix it with the tool kit she purchased after she enrolled in a shop class for women. The machine would work, when mother was done. When William the Black phoned angrily, now, to thank me once again for ruining a good thing with Mrs. DeForest, the messages mother took were more coherent than the writing I did late at night, having taken it up as a defense against the solitude I felt closing in on all sides. In postponed agreement with mother, I felt there had to be more light, and until I could get to the desert where the light was flat and plain, writing was the only way I could imagine to keep from being bored to death.
It was father who suffered most, perhaps. Thrown off guard by mother’s changing the locks on the house, he became obsessed with debugging his roses with malathion. If I offered to help him wash and wax the cars, he simply stared at me as though I were an aphid or a Mediterranean fruit fly. He no longer brought men home from the office to have dinner and instead began eating out more and more often. The fact that mother no longer visited doctors and hospitals seemed to make him more generous and to get me out of his way, he would hand me a twenty-dollar bill and tell me to take a bus up to see Elanna for the weekend.
Two weeks after I graduated from high school, he took me out to lunch. Impatiently, I watched him from behind my wall of silence, as his face changed from confusion to decisiveness to pain. By the end of lunch, he managed to say, “You and I have never really talked to each other,” to which I said nothing.
Before I left him there, he spit out the question I had known was coming all along. “What,” he asked, “would you think if I told you I was thinking of divorcing your mother?”
I looked out the window, avoiding his face which I knew would make me feel sorry for him, which would tell me better than any of his words that he was trying only to live in this world which he couldn’t understand for better or for worse. I remembered the first time his brother had mentioned divorce and he had turned to me and asked if I wanted to go fishing, and I cracked open the memory of the time he had smacked me when I’d asked him if he was looking for suds in mother’s Kenmore. Had I taken the time, put in just a little effort, maybe I would have seen that all father needed was someone he could put his arm around and promise that it would be all right. I heard Grandfather sigh as I looked straight at father, shrugged, and said, “Whatever.”
What I couldn’t say to father was that he was already divorced from mother, that in the flatulence of his neediness he had invented the intricate illusion that his wife and children needed him—an illusion held aloft and dry on the stilts of breadwinning over a swamp of resentment. I couldn’t say that to father, not because it would have hurt him but because I didn’t know it until the night when I sauntered into the no man’s land of mother’s living room and encountered her group raising its consciousness like a barn.
It was a small group and when I stumbled into its midst, sucking the salt out of a celery stick, I felt threatened and out of place. The one male participant in mother’s group was pale, as though he’d not seen the light for years, and from the waist up he looked as though he had grown to his full height bound between boards. The women, in varying shapes and sizes, looked mean in their discontent, unsexed by disappointment and clothes.
“Anyone for Scrabble?” I asked, as they stared at me.
As I gathered together cans of food for Running Dog, who was cowering beneath my bed, and began packing my bags, the voices coming from the living room sounded like corn popping in a lidless pan. That night, I dreamed of a time when I would have been at camp as a boy, the face of my one friend resembling at one moment my father’s face, alternating with my uncle’s. When the nostalgic illusion of a girl named Tammy seemed, suddenly, to look like Pamela, I woke with a start and smiled, realizing that mother’s encounter group was freeing me of a burden I’d never asked for, and having, had never wanted. Once again, with the vague feeling of a senseless repetition that was closing the gap in my life like the drip of a stalactite onto a stalagmite, I knew I was alone. Mother’s newfound awareness of her own sanity would bubble and boil with trouble as it was heated by the bitterness of her divorce from father, and in the process I would be burned by its distillation, even as far away as Clearmont.
That wouldn’t happen right away, though. In Chosposi, a month later, Rachel would discover a bundle of unopened letters from mother on the mantel of Grandfather’s cement block house behind the mission.
“What are these?” Rachel would ask.
“Letters from mother.”
“They’re unopened.”
“They all say the same thing,” I would say. “Mother has taken up writing letters in an effort to re-examine her life, affixing blame like a postage stamp.” I took the bundle from Rachel, separating the letters.
“If you read this one, you’d find out how much like my father I am.” I pulled another one out of the bundle.
“This one says nothing about my father, but it asks if I am aware of how I kept her from living her own life. And this one disguises mother’s hatred for men beneath the very cleverly deceptive question of when I am coming home for a visit.”
“A mother can’t hate her own child,” Rachel would say. “Besides, how do you know, smart ass, if you’ve not even opened them?”
“Maybe you’re right,” I’d reply, handing the bundle back to her. “But if all things are connected, then to my mother I am my father. Besides,” I’d say, grinning, “I’ve never been able to read my mother’s script, which looks more like the marks left by the tails of gila monsters than handwriting.”
“You are a fool,” Rachel would say. “You know that? A real bastard.”
Thinking, I don’t need you either, I would reply as calmly as I could, “Anything’s possible.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
29.
It happens,” Grandfather said, firing up a cigar, the blue-gray smoke obscuring his face. “Death huffs and puffs and blows sand in your eyes. Sometimes it may only seem as though it’s happening and you reconstruct what will have happened out of the stems and stipes. Your heart clots
with the fear of rejection and the happy frustration that comes from playing the game of love. You’re overwhelmed by the immense and universal sadness of sunsets in the desert and you wonder if confusion isn’t caused by celery having more salt than tuna.”
A trail of smoke drifted toward the San Francisco Peaks, waiting in the distance. He looked at me, the lines around his mouth playing through love, anger, frustration, confusion. Pamela’s death had aged him. His eyebrows had grown long and shadowed his gray eyes, giving them an unspeakably sad look as though he had seen things he did not want to see, things he could not or would not even hint at in the cloud of his confusion. His face looked heavy, reflecting less of what I’d once believed was quiet serenity and more the snuffling hidden rage and the inert balance of a Pit bulldog. The hinges on his jaws loosened as his brain began to rust.
More and more often I was having trouble understanding what Grandfather meant, let alone predicting what he would mean. He sat there, static but not still, and I was forced to close my eyes even as he spoke and try to listen to the distant whispers of what he would have said, a twofold process. On the one hand, I had to exclude everything he had already said. On the other, I had to exclude everything he never would have said. Only then could I author a reasonable semblance of what Grandfather might have said.
Not until long after Grandfather’s death would I begin to suspect his apparent confusion had been calculated. He was forcing me to stop and close my eyes and look inward to know what he as well as I would have said—and, by extrapolation, what father, mother, Elanna, or the as-yet-unloved Sara Baites could possibly have said. I would begin to see that Grandfather had planted the seeds of fiction that summer which, when processed like tomato seeds, explain how I came to write with my eyes closed.
Rachel had come to love Grandfather and coming often to his and Laura P.’s house, she was saddened by what she imagined was Grandfather’s senility. Yet Rachel only saw him while he was sitting still, and when he was still, looking out across the desert from his aerie on the side of the mesa, what Grandfather said, according to Rachel, seemed “all of a same.”