Section II: Relationships
Sinking
My mother and I, we position ourselves for maximum sun. So it hits us head on. Sit close to the water for cooling, for better roasting. Our chairs so low our butts get wet when the waves come in. Piles of sand sit like loads in our suits. We don our U.V.-protected glasses so our eyes are covered with mirrored lenses. Apply sun block. The book I gave her to read, My Mother, My Self, sits unread in her bag. The book on her lap is titled Nights of Passion. Her thumb is stuck to the page. I wonder if she’s gotten to a good part yet. I am unable to read so watch seagulls flying. Waves come in, go out. We have our feet firmly planted in the sand. The water rushes up, hissing, washes some of the sand away, and we sink a little bit more.
“Look what you’ve done to your feet,” I say. She bends over and looks down. “What?” They are gnarled tree roots. And just as hard. “Look at them. They look like they hurt.” She pulls one side of her mouth back. Sits back. Goes back to reading.
“Why do you wear your shoes so tight that they do that to your feet?” I say.
She says, “You want me to wear those dumpy shoes you do? No wonder you’re always home when I call on Saturday night.” I look at my feet. I have callouses on my little toes from my dress flats but my toes are still straight.
“Mangled feet aren’t sexy,” I say.
She doesn’t look up from her book. She half mumbles-says, “They’ll never get that far.”
I look at the choppy water, the wind rippling the surface. “Well maybe I don’t want a man who wants me to wear high heels all day, kill my feet on that concrete.”
“Oh would you get off it,” she says. She almost slams her book closed, but doesn’t. “I don’t tell you how to dress.” She looks at me with one eyebrow raised—I dare you. I look into her mirrored lenses looking for eyes but instead I see my floating head on each lens. My hair curling from the heat, my too-cool sunglasses, my bright red nose, my lips pursed. Her floating head in my sunglasses reflects, her raised eyebrow turned on herself.
I watch the water swell, feel the heat on my skin. The sun’s hot and burns right through the sun block. I have no base tan. She is such a liar. How many fights did we have that started
Her: You’re not going out like that.
Me: Watch me.
Her You step one foot out that door.
Me: And what? I can’t come back?
Her: Yes. (When she is mad it is clean and obvious. Her look is bold. But her face changed. Like she’d just stepped on a nail.)
Me: Fine. (Here my face changed. I look like her but with teeth clenched and jaw tight. I can step on two nails.)
I look up the beach, away.
“Did you drink all the lemonade?” she says. She sits with arm extended, glass empty, sour look. Yes, I drank it all. I was dehydrated, from the sun, from the beer I drank in the car coming, in the parking lot waiting, preparing to meet her.
“It’s too hot to sit here. Let’s go in the water,” I say. Sweat beads on her chest, her lip, wets the hair above her ear. She says O.K., marks her page. We remove our sunglasses. We stand where cold water rolls in and splashes us up to our knees. I squint to look at the bright water sparkling.
“You should really lose that pot if you’re going to wear a bikini,” she says. I look her over, looking for flaws.
“You’re getting saggy arms just like Grandma had,” I say. “Your whole back is flabby and freckled.” I turn her by pressing my hand to her shoulder. Press my fngers into her back and scratch her shoulder blades. The skin is sticky and greasy, a layer of it comes away under my nails. She smells of coconut and sweat.
Run before the wave crashes. I dive under it as it curls over me. The cold takes my breath and the sand burns my knees. She wades out slowly, letting the small waves crash into her waist. No big ones come. She plods toward me, her hair still dry.
We wade out to a sand bar and beyond to where the waves only swell. Water makes my thigh fat and white. We float on our backs, squat with only head and shoulders exposed, look back at the beach and our empty chairs.
A school of blue fish pass right in front of us, their silver-green bodies so close I could step forward, reach out, and touch. But I squat, still, feel the lightness of water around me. The blue fish pass with wide open expressionless eyes. Their lips pout. I watch the water turn dark where the school swims. My mother is following them with her eyes, too. She says they will attack people if they are hungry enough. I tell her not to spoil it. But then I start to worry about stepping on a crab, or touching a jellyfish. My hair hangs in dry salty lumps.
We wade back in. Sit in our chairs till water turns to salt crust, put our sunglasses back on so we don’t get frown lines, so the brightness doesn’t burn our retinas.
“I’m going inside,” I say, “before I’m toast.” I press my thigh with my finger. Pushing makes white, releasing red. I start to leave, walk on hot sand and broken shells.
“Just put on more lotion,” she says. I turn and we’re looking at each other. Already her skin is pink red. She will stay here until she blisters if I let her. “Coming?” I say.
“I guess,” she says. She was waiting to be invited. I say “Good. We’ve cooked enough for one day.”
And she says, getting up from her chair and folding it, “We have to have something to burn tomorrow.”
The Secret
Wrapped in the folds of my grandfather’s coat was a secret, in the dark parts where no one looks. Somewhere where dust and cobwebs grow, a place for a man moving to put his skeletons. Because of what he hid there in the folds, his granddaughter would kill herself. Four of his five children would go insane. But there, on the deck of the ship that took him from Italy to Ellis Island, my grandfather imagined he had outrun his family’s history and nothing cataclysmic would befall him or his relations. So, surrounded by water without edges, he let a small smile raise his cheeks. He smelled the salt air. He felt the wind. He thought then that he might even be free soon. The foreign shore got closer, the place where freedom rang, but he did not feel freer on approach. He wrapped his collar about his throat and swallowed unwillingly. People disembarking started pressing him forward, but he froze, only relenting when the crowd moved him forcibly down the gangplank. The noise of the city consumed him and the quiet that had left him to his thoughts made him ache with its leaving.
Standing on the shore, he took his wife’s hand and walked into America. But he did not see possibility. Instead, he noticed the smell of rotting fish, ugly buildings made with no grace, concrete, restaurants, shops, trash cans, streets, people. It was too much for his hope, this man who loved the smell of the earth and growing things. It was too much for this man who needed quiet and stillness. He did not understand the secret could make him small and mean from too much, and it could take away his love, make him paranoid, irrational, dangerous. He did not know this, and as a man he could not think it. He pulled his coat tight. His wife reached for his arm, but he jerked away. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, and she said nothing. She could not in those days. Instead she focused on the sidewalk in front of them and kept walking. That she could do.
Perhaps Eustaccio was a terrible man to think crossing water to a new place full of promise, somewhere far from his family’s past, would keep the secret from manifesting itself, in him, in his children. Perhaps he was not terrible at all.
A son. It would take 28 years for the secret to show itself, too late for questions, too late for answers.
Raffaella had more children, and one by one the secret revealed itself in them. She could not speak of her grief. She was silent when she heard one of her daughters dropped to her knees in the middle of a busy street to pray to a vision of the Virgin Mary. Raffaella died two days later of a heart attack. Eustaccio lived much longer, alone, while the truth unraveled.
Eustaccio and Raffaella did not start the conspiracy of sile
nce; it had spread down the ages like vines around an old tree that choke it tighter and tighter until no choice was left the two but to root elsewhere. They fought to live, despite it. They fought hard. A terrible thing it is: that desire to be.
Daughter
A clap, a sucking noise, and a whoosh. The door slammed and Emily’s soul swooped away. Wide eyed, she froze. Quiet. Slow motion turning of her head. Sticks, red leaf, the garage door, the blacktop. Biting her lip, a pause before resolve. Fist around keys, she tried forward motion. She was stuck, like the weather stripping. Immobility unacceptable, she shoved, but her legs failed to go forward. Her knees were locked, and her brain could not tell them what to do. Her soul had put up with a lot, but leaving her aging mother to fend for herself was it. Slow motion head turning to look at grey clouds and a hint of light behind them.
What happens when the soul leaves the body: first, the ribs clamp closed around the heart and stab into it. The heart skips two beats and considers stopping. The breath comes out in a cold cloud. Something falls off the shelf, a box too high reached for in desperation. The person disconnects from every atom and every atom is disconnect. There is no stopping the grief.
Emily dropped her keys. Her arms hung down. She hung down. Her hair hung down. And there would be no motion until it was a pivot and she was facing the other way. Motion made, she stared at her mother’s door and begged it to let her back in.
Her mother sat in her chair and looked out the window at the trunk of a brown tree. She was looking at the spot where the bird feeder was supposed to hang, the one with the spikes so the squirrels couldn’t eat the seed. How she had hated those squirrels. The dickens, she fought them and the birds had come. Now she stared at the nail where the feeder had hung and realized she didn’t give a fig about squirrels. She didn’t give a fig about birds, either, but she had once so she thought she should. She should buy birdseed and hang the feeder. Eh, she’d seen enough sparrows. Anyway, she would have to get up out of her chair. She would have to dress. She would have to drive. She would have to walk down aisles. And then the bag. She put her hands to her face and felt her soft cheeks. She was still her, but something had changed. She was about to not give a fig about that, either, when something beautiful just out of reach passed over her and out the window into the sky. A soul, her daughter’s. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt it, stretched toward it, dancing arms toward sky. She smiled, her eyes like clouds. Her fingers grasped at air, and she stared off at a grey sky that was just letting a few rays through.
Outside, Emily reached for the knob and turned it.
Who’s there?
Me, again.
Oh! What a surprise. Her mother who was still sitting in her chair, ankles cold. The daughter noticed then how soft and fine and grey her mother’s hair had become, how she had lines on her face where expressions had been and how her eyelids drooped as though she were perpetually sad. She noticed the gnarled joints on her mother’s hands from the arthritis and the thin bird legs. She could just scoop her up she had become so small.
The daughter walked toward the kitchen and said, I’ll make us some lunch.
Oh no dear, her mother said.
The daughter stared at the back of her mother’s head, said, No trouble. She looked for food. You’ve got nothing! The daughter said. How can you have nothing. She opened and slammed every food cabinet.
Eggs, the mother said, Eggs.
You can’t eat eggs for every meal! But she pulled them out anyway, the fry pan, the butter, the milk. There’s only a drop of milk left.
Use powdered.
Powdered?
Tastes the same, the mother said.
The daughter made same. She set the table, made her mother some tea. When the food was ready, she went over to her mother and led her to the table. The mother looked at her strangely.
When they were seated and her mother had placed her hand on her fork, the daughter reached for hers but stopped. Time to say grace, she said.
Since when? The mother said.
The daughter started to speak. Our father, she said, and burst into tears. Her soul filled her mouth. She swallowed, and it slid down her throat.
There only eggs, the mother said, Lousy eggs.
Later, it rained and they watched the rain together.
The Tree
I asked Dennis if we could get the Christmas tree, but he said he was busy. I said I knew he was busy. He said he had to study. I said I knew that. It was too early. But didn’t he want to get one? But why did I have to have one now? When then? Didn’t I understand the pressure he was under? He had to read for class. I told him he always had to read for class. He said he wouldn’t have to read as much if he wasn’t always being interrupted. I told him I wouldn’t interrupt him ever again. He said he had to get ready for exams for God’s sake. I told him all I wanted was a frigging tree.
I stood on the brown carpet amidst the tan walls in the empty spot where the tree was supposed to be. Before I had gotten the nerve to ask him, I had imagined it in front of the sliding glass doors where the lights could shine down on the parking lots and apartment buildings, on the snow piles and brown trees. My mom always had white lights, but I had decided on multicolored. White lights were elegant, for people who had made it. Colored lights were festive, for cozy homes. I had thought I would see the lights at night when I drove up and want to come into our apartment. Over dinner, maybe Dennis would say something, talk like he used to. We could hang lights on the balcony. I could bake cookies. Our lives would be full of Christmas card promise. I could get mistletoe. Maybe then he would kiss me.
Standing in the brown empty spot, I started to cry. Dennis said “God!” and threw his book across the room where it hit the pressboard stereo stand. I walked away, to the only other room. I flopped down face first onto the bed.
Now he was mad and another little girl dream slapped the floor like so many of the others. I went down the list. I hated Michigan. I hated the dark, the cold, the barren trees. I had no friends. My job was menial. I did everything I was supposed to: work, cook, exercise, clean. Had no fun. I was doing what I was supposed to do, and it wasn’t enough. Something was missing, and that something the tree could fix.
Dennis came in a few minutes later in his parka, putting on his gloves. I lifted my head up and saw his silhouette in the doorway, put my face back in the pillow. “What?” I said, muffled in down. “Come on,” he said, but I said no, forget it. He said “Come on,” in the tone that meant I better get up so I did. I zipped and bundled and dried my eyes with my gloves.
Outside my lashes and snot froze with my first breaths. The doors to the car creaked. Waiting for the engine to warm, I shivered in my seat, sat with arms folded, fingers tucked into my armpits. Dennis blew into his gloves, and his nose turned red, his cheeks pale. Our breath froze on the glass. Between that and the salt splatters there was only fog to see.
Dennis said, “Where do you want to get the tree?” I would have to decide where to buy it, which one to get now, because I had thrown a tantrum. It’s not that I didn’t worry about his school. I did. It’s not that I didn’t know about the stress, the competition, the slim hope of money. But, I needed a happy tree. I needed to smell it and see it fresh in our apartment, look at it aglow.
I looked at my husband. Maybe I was on Jupiter, not in Michigan at all. They say the gravity is so thick there it would flatten me like a pancake. I closed my eyes, pulverized and flat.
“Where am I going?” he said, still annoyed. Without opening my eyes, I told him to go to the fruit stand.
We drove in silence through salt white streets and dark snow. Neither of us reached for the radio. Neither of us looked at the other. The heat from our car didn’t warm my feet and soon they felt oddly numb, unattached to my ankle. I was supposed to put my feelings up on a shelf, and so I i
magined a row of white shelves, a can of green beans, a can of sadness. But the shelf fell over and the cans fell and rolled down the stairwell into a cellar. My eyes popped open.
We pulled in. Lights were hung in the parking lot around the thicket of trees. It wasn’t easy getting out of the car with any sort of grace so bundled. The wind slammed my door closed. Walking with heads down, hats on, mufflers around our neck and mouth, the snow crunched underfoot. I smelled pine. Our breath made foggy clouds. It was Christmas. It was almost joyous.
“Why are we doing this?” he said. He walked into the tree lot. Dennis grabbed a tree and held it up. No, I told him, Scotch pine. One had to shop. The first tree found, even adequate, could not be selected. Besides, I didn’t like those blue short-needled trees. They looked half naked, like a Charlie Brown Christmas. We didn’t want a tree that looked unloved, did we? He said he liked them. I told him they were more expensive. His eyes got that worried look. This was going to cost money.
And then I saw the fruit stand lady. She was always at the stand, ringing up my vegetables every Saturday. She lived on a nearby farm. She ran the business herself. I liked her the way I didn’t like anyone else in Michigan. I liked what she did. I liked the way she smiled. I wondered what her house was like. I wondered if I would feel at home there, like at the fruit stand. And something else, she seemed happy. She was helping a family pick a tree. I would wait for her.
I went up and down the aisles slowly waiting for my turn. Dennis would grab a tree now and then but it was hopeless. I would not nod consent. They were too big, too small, too crooked, too holey. He was out of patience. I could hear it when he said, “What’s wrong with this one?” the way he wanted to say, “What’s the matter with you?” He didn’t receive an answer so stood firm. It was big enough. Full enough. Straight trunk. It was a beautiful tree. The fruit stand lady was free. I nodded at him and we walked toward her.
“Pick a tree?” she said. I wanted us to be happy tree pickers then. I wanted us to be on the way back from ice skating, on our way home for hot chocolate.
Dennis said, “Yes, how much?” He opened his wallet and thumbed through the money. I looked down at my boots. I looked up at the fruit stand lady, at those lines in her weathered face that told of laughs and love and growing things, sunshine. I looked at her and felt the first pangs of growth, thaw, there, in the cold. I had thought for a moment I wanted to ask her how to live, but I think she was showing me.
“Yes, we’re taking this one,” Dennis said, his lips cracked and white. And then the fruit stand lady did an amazing thing. She pulled out of her pockets bare hands in frostbite weather. She reached through the needles to the bark and hoisted the tree onto the table without any gloves. Her bare hands, wide and flat, thick and white, calloused and dried like jerky held the tree with one hand and a saw in the other. The cracks and crevices in her skin were like a map, a geography of where she had been, of where she could be. And I decided I would have hands like hers, a face of my own. Maybe it was the cold, but my lips stuck shut, frozen in a small, distant smile.
She wore no hat, only soft white curls all over her head. Her face was like Rhino skin with crow’s feet and smile lines. Her cheeks and nose were red and her breath came out in long curls. She winked at me with ecstatic blue eyes. She held my tree and made a fresh cut with her saw and then picked it up and twirled it. It could be anything I wanted it to be, that tree.
Childhood Memories
I was alone in the house when the electricity went off. It was very dark. Hurricane Agnes. I was eight. In the basement of what was a two-story Duke, the model name. My mother moved us every five years to bigger and bigger houses, told us the names and the builder and then left me to wander bigger and bigger spaces. Shirley construction wanted people to think of Dukes living there, but we weren't dukes, my mother, my sister and I. I lived in a matriarchy.
My sister had gone to her friends when the winds started raging. She was 13 and mean. I don't know where my mother was. I never did. My father was alone in his apartment talking to voices, I suppose. I didn't know then I wasn't supposed to be alone. That I wasn't supposed to have to take care of myself. We didn't have a flashlight. I wasn't allowed to light candles. I sat in the basement and got scared. So scared, I fought hurricane force winds and rain to get to my sister's friend's house, where my sister got annoyed at the sight of me. But her friend's mother gave me pigs in the blanket. I got to eat real food made by a mom.
One memory sticks with me: I was three, laying on the couch watching my favorite show, "Star Trek." I wanted Captain Kirk to guide me safely through the universe. He didn't. I had the flu. Mom tossed me a plastic tub and told me to throw up in that. And then she was gone. I don't know where. My sister? Gone. Later that night my father barging in and sounds of slapping in the kitchen. There was yelling. "You let my baby get sick." I smiled. Someone was trying to help. My sister looked at me and cried.
But, mainly, I don't remember my childhood. I see this as a choice. Like, be depressed as hell and hate or forget and enjoy the day. But there are a couple of things I would like to mention given the chance: No one taught me how to wipe. No one taught me to wash my hands after. I would go hungry. Getting on the school bus, the boys laughed. No underwear. I had dressed myself. I had to learn how.
Maybe no one knew my plight. Maybe somehow the truth of the neglect was never seen. But one thing I could not hide: the mat of knots of hair at the base of my skull. Me, alone, couldn't get them out.
Promise
Go down the long white hallway and listen to the black sucking noise each step makes. Notice the light bulbs in cages, the smell of roach powder. This, real like a dream but not. Pause to breathe before you knock. Here lives the father discarded, the father unwanted. Wearing his crown of thorns, he sits on his throne made of fiberfoam, watching Japanese action flicks, drinking liters of Coke, not waiting for the phone to ring. It won't. He sits in the terry cloth bathrobe he will die in because he has gotten too fat for his pants--can't spare the five dollars for another pair.
See him in the McDonald's. He gets free coffee because they know his face there. He comes every day to smoke the cigarettes that will give him lung cancer, says hello to the girl at the register, the boy making fries, the manager. They say Hi back, used to seeing men like him with his pants safety-pinned together or only partly zipped up. They're glad this one is friendly. He sits in the plastic booth by the door greeting anyone he recognizes. Some know his name, wave or shake his hand, bum a smoke. He is the swollen-faced man with big brown eyes like a deer's, like a deer grazing that looks up at the sound of footsteps. Medication has made him an herbivore.
Sit down across from him at his booth. Imagine you take a picture. A camera can be a tool for seeing, not just something you keep between you. Press your eye wide against the viewfinder and stare with big lashes unblinking, safe behind the glass. We need the camera because we insist on frames for seeing. This is another man, not your father. Ask him to tell you his story. Listen.If you probe, a fact or two will roll out onto the table and stare up at you. He will say he has a beautiful daughter. He'll show you a dated picture of her. She's older now, has breasts.
There is no girl in the picture, only you looking angry and old. He will tell you his favorite song is “Eleanor Rigby,” the one about all the lonely people, but he will say this with a laugh that makes his head go up and turn, makes him look at you out of the corner of his eye like it's a joke. Get it? He'll tell you he has fungus in his ears. You'll see the crust and believe him. What is wrong can't be fixed, like death or past mistakes. So forget.
His daughter is sent to have lunch with him, because he is still her father, even though her mother is not his wife. The daughter has left the three-story house she lives in to sit in his smokey room filled with furniture the social worker gave him and will take back when he i
s gone to give to the next person. She sits with him in the McDonald's embarrassed because she is from the suburbs and she knows how bad this looks. It is a sickly smile she offers to the girl at the register, the boy making fries, the manager, when her father introduces her, his daughter. She smiles sickly and looks into their eyes, a secret between them he cannot share.
When he takes her picture, she tries not to frown. Back at his apartment he offers her Coke in a dirty glass and will not take no for an answer. He wants to give her something. Gives her cookies out of a tin on the table, the chain he was wearing. The tin is dusty, the chain caked with greasy dead skin. When she gets home, she tells herself, she will wash. Every time she starts to speak she stops when she looks into his eyes. She stops at the eyes because they look like hers. Her tongue swells and sticks to the roof of her mouth. She pulls it loose and sucks it down into her esophagus. He gives her a sweaty hug that leaves her smelling of Old Spice and body fluids, waves goodbye until she is out of sight. On the bus, she knows she has forgotten to do something when she looks at him on the other side of the glass and so gives him the smile she can give him now that she is leaving.
She rides on the bus with eyes open, watching the sidewalks change from dirty to clean, wanting to be home already, but when she gets to her house she can't feel the comfort there. If she could close her eyes and forget seeing his, it might be different, but those eyes wait for her behind her eyelids, make the green grass spread out before her become a lie, full of secrets she cannot share. This house before her becomes for dolls, a play house, pretend.
His past lives, the ones that can't be seen: his father chasing him around the dining room table with a long, sharp knife. The boy runs, escapes, manages to get good grades besides, looked like the perfect American. That first life he left, rose up out of.
His second life: the tall young man walking home, greeting the folks in the old neighborhood, smiling because he has a new suit, a new job, a new wife, and a new baby. He is on a roll now, walking home to the shy Catholic girl he'd fallen in love with, a woman with brown hair that flips up when it hits her shoulders and her wide smile of red lips and white teeth. She has manners, nice legs, dresses with class, gave him a baby. People boasted, see the tall young man with a thick head of black hair over there? He's one of us. He works hard. Made straight As in school and pizzas at night to earn extra money. Won a scholarship to City College. Knows five languages. Five. The next president, his family said, this man people want to follow. And likeable. Disregarded, no one noticed the tick in the neck.
In army intelligence they paid him to be paranoid. The constant foot tapping, the sweaty palms, the mind misfires. They still don't know why. Now he can't tell his story; this narrator can only tell parts, having found no explanation for how that world, gone, spun out and away from him. Explanations should make sense, have a right and wrong to them.
The father discarded does not read. Words become bloated and fill his head with fumes. His law books smell old on his bookshelf. God tells him he is Weingert Saint Weingert. Medication makes his hands shake, his tongue thick in his mouth so he slurs his words and drools. If he can sleep, he sometimes walks out into the hall, locks himself out of his apartment. There is no one to let him back in. He did not mean to leave, but now he has. He stands in his underwear in the hall light, confused.
It is too sad, this before and after picture, for his wife, his daughter. The mug that was his long since washed and drunk from by another, broken and not replaced.
It is good when he dies. Not that day, alone, in his robe, reaching for the ventilator, knocking over the chair, but after, when he is a coffin with a flag on it and the picture above it is of him as a young man. The family talks of how he was loved then and of his promise--the trail of cars following the hearse giving him what he had lost.
At the graveyard, there is a short service. People sit with a view of the coffin while the priest says words. When he is done, they say goodbye and go home. The father remains in the casket flanked by palms. Empty chairs sit in rows facing it, as if there were to be another service later. But all that is left is to put the chairs and plants away until next time and to bury the coffin in the ground. It sits waiting.
Visions that alter a day: go to the beach and click your hard white teeth, the you that will remain, and see your primitive-looking footprints picked up by the wind, grain by grain, swirled in brown clouds and scattered, dropped back down, but by then, your trace, imperceptable.
True Fiction: A Pseudo Autobiographical Chapbook in Three Parts Page 3