Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  Galean never knows what will prompt these emotional stirrings: a lighthearted comment by one of the anchors, the swelling of the KLAN-KHAM news team theme music, the cameraman’s shoes. It used to be that, once he was on the air, nothing else got in; it was like being in a tightly circumscribed spotlight. But the boundary that has always kept him focused and held his awareness of the rest of the world at bay has been invaded somehow, breached.

  It’s the dead. They’re the invaders.

  These are their portals: music and dreams, chiefly, but sometimes they get in by other means: through gestures, objects, symbols.

  And in the same way that a body weakened by a compromised immune system is susceptible to illness, a spirit newly underpinned with grief is susceptible to communiqués from the dead. Such communiqués may not be solicited, expected, or even welcome. They are frequently inconvenient.

  Gaelan has used the raindrop graphic for years without encountering any emotional hazard. Furthermore, raindrops caused no problems earlier in the day, when they made their on-screen appearance during the six A.M. broadcast.

  But now, during the noon segment, something is loosed when he sees himself on the monitor pointing to a queue of water droplets.

  “Sorry to put a damper on your weekend plans, folks,” he is saying. “No pun intended, but …” He starts to experience an agitated, spiraling sensation at the base of his throat. His voice grows tight. His lachrymal glands go into hyperdrive. His corneas itch. “… What the radar picture seems to indicate is that we’ll be experiencing an extended period of …”

  Gaelan stops speaking. The shapes on the screen have ceased to symbolize a prolonged likelihood of precipitation; they’ve turned into commas, nostrils, symbolic representations of the soul and undying devotion. He thinks of incarcerated Arabian pirates. Of Welsh Love Spoons. Of spooning. Of yin and yang. Of …

  “… gravestones.”

  There is a pause. Did he say that out loud? He thinks perhaps he did.

  “Grave showers,” Gaelan says emphatically. “Scattered spoons.” He clears his throat and speaks slowly. “An extended. Period. Of. Rain. Turning to. Scattered. Showers.”

  He becomes aware of other people in the studio: the cameraman, the sound man, the production manager, the news anchor. Some of them look perplexed. None of them look happy.

  Gaelan has made mistakes before. He knows that the situation calls for him to elaborate, banter, embroider, bullshit—in short, recover so that he can fill up the fifteen or thirty or forty-five or sixty seconds remaining in the time that has been allotted him—but as soon as his eyes return to the monitor, he becomes transfixed once again by the solemn parade of apostrophes.

  “Back to you, Greg,” he says dully, but before he can finish, his screen goes black. He’s off camera.

  “Well, thanks, Gaelan!” the news anchor bellows jovially from the other side of the sound stage. He lets slip with a politically incorrect comparison between Eskimos and weathermen, and then, beginning with “Singin’ in the Rain,” launches into a chronologically ordered medley of weather-related tunes in a hearty but slightly desperate-sounding voice. He gets all the way to Bob Dylan’s “It’s a Hard Rain Gonna Fall” when finally, mercifully, someone cues the theme music.

  The show is almost over. Gaelan starts to unclip his mic.

  “And that’s it for the midday news,” the anchor resumes, regaining his composure as the music crescendoes. “Have a great afternoon, folks. Stay dry out there, and be sure to join us again this evening at five as the KLAN-KHAM team brings you the latest in national and local news, sports, and weather.”

  Music up, Gaelan thinks, trying to command his awareness back into the here and now. Picture and sound out. Go to commercial.

  He strides toward the sound stage exit. He doesn’t speak to anyone. He doesn’t change out of his suit or take off his makeup. He snags his gym bag from the dressing room, puts on his sunglasses, and heads straight for the Y.

  “She calls that art? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  Professor Jones is running through a slide presentation that she gives near the beginning of each semester in Art Appreciation 101; it’s a twenty-minute visual anthology of two hundred or so significant painted works dating from prehistory to the present and shown in nonchronological order.

  Larken shows the slides lickety-split, saying little. They’re strung together in what to an untrained eye would seem to be a dysunified way: da Vinci’s Last Supper next to Andy Warhol’s Elvises; a Dutch still life next to a dreamscape by Salvador Dalí; a Hockney swimming pool next to one of Constable’s landscapes; the symbol-rich Mérode—with its blue and white pitcher, water basin, white lilies, snuffed candle, song birds, rose bush, mousetraps—next to one of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. And so on. Larken usually has a lot of fun putting this presentation together, changing it every semester. But this year—not having had her usual prep time—she’s making do with a rerun.

  She feels vacant, disengaged—like a reliable actor who’s doing the thousandth performance of a great role in a brilliant play: skilled, but uninspired.

  Currently on the screen is one of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings: Lavender Mist. Every semester there is invariably one naive, callow-faced boy who mutters something at this point and, in so doing, unwittingly becomes the prime designate of Professor Jones’s attention for the next three months.

  Larken freezes the slide show, letting the Pollock linger.

  “Did someone have something to say?” she asks. “Please speak up.”

  From near the back of the lecture hall, a hand is raised. “Anybody could do that,” the boy continues. “It looks like he dribbled a bunch of paint on the floor.”

  “He did, actually,” Larken comments. There’s an eruption of constrained snickers. “Why, in your opinion,” Professor Jones continues, “does that disqualify it from being ‘art’?”

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” the boy says, confident that he’s making an entirely unprecedented observation and speaking on behalf of everyone in the room. “I mean, what’s it supposed to be?”

  “Tell me, Mr….” (She pauses to examine her roster. This is purely for effect since Larken has a near-photographic memory and learns all her students’ names by the third day of class.) “Houser. Why does it have to look like something to be art? Does that really matter?”

  He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. None of them do, not yet. But that’s okay. That’s what she’s here for.

  “What if we define ‘art’ differently?” Larken continues. “In the case of this painting, for example: Can it be interesting? Can you be curious about it, ask questions? Can you have a relationship with it?”

  It has always been a source of grief to Larken, the metaphors through which American culture—and especially Nebraskan culture—instructs its boys. The prevailing belief seems to be that all of Life’s Lessons can be learned through engaging in bone-bruising sports and/or enlisting in the armed services, and summed up by expressions like the ubiquitous No pain, no gain and Pain is only weakness leaving the body.

  Professor Jones is tenured. She doesn’t have to teach a class like Art Appreciation 101; she chooses to because she feels called to affect the viewpoint of freshman farmboys and ranchers’ sons: boys whose ideas about art come from the home furnishings department at JCPenney’s, or the Sears catalog, or from gas station and farm co-op calendars, or from county fairs where vendors sell the dead on velvet; small-town boys of beefy build who are here on football scholarships and are only taking Art Appreciation 101 because they need an easy credit; boys whose lives are hard and blunt, and who without her influence will grow into hard blunt men who’ll fuck young girls in the back seats of trucks parked outside nameless bars and strip clubs on the fringes of border towns.

  Larken continues. “The artist Pierre Bonnard said, ‘A painting is a little lie which adds up to a great truth.’ Let’s talk about that statement in the context of Mr. Pollock’s wo
rk.”

  She’s interrupted again—this time by the sound of the lecture hall door opening. Larken turns, expecting to deliver a public chastisement to a tardy student; instead, she sees Chris hovering in a thin slice of light at the room’s entrance.

  “I’m sorry, Professor Jones. May I speak with you for a moment?”

  There is sedate muttering. Larken excuses herself and then vacates the podium and follows Chris into the hallway.

  “It’s Professor Collins,” Chris begins hoarsely, her eyes glistening, hyperreflective. “Arthur. He collapsed in his classroom, the paramedics were just here, they’ve taken him to LGH …” She goes on and on, her eyes leaking with the irritant of grief, her words ferrying more and more raw feeling out of her body: an airborne affliction, a virus that Larken must not catch, not here, not now.

  She covers her mouth with her hand and looks at the floor, enfolding herself in a compensatory darkness and protective silence.

  Shut up, she wants to say, because the unguarded human voice is such a responsive vessel, clear as glass; as soon as It’s Arthur was poured freely from the heart to the mouth, Larken knew everything she needed to know so shut up shut up SHUT UP.

  Chris has stopped talking and is staring at her. “Larken. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Is he—?”

  “I don’t know. They think it’s a stroke. Eloise went with him.”

  “Lincoln General, is that what you said?”

  Chris nods, tears up again, and then swipes at her nose with what’s left of a tissue. “She’ll call the office as soon as there’s any news, but … Well, I know how close you are to them, and I thought—”

  “Yes, yes …” Larken will not think of anything beyond what’s called for in this moment—the practical actions of a commander under siege.

  “Cancel my classes for the rest of the day. I’ll check in later.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she hurries away, down the hall, into the elevator. Office, coat, purse, and then up and out and as quickly as possible to the car, the car, she must get to the car: a staging area where emotions can be contained and expressed in private.

  Meanwhile, the students of Professor Jones’s Art Appreciation 101 class—abandoned, uncertain, increasingly restless—have lost interest in having a relationship with Jackson Pollock. Without the benefit of Professor Jones’s insistent queries and intimidating presence, they can’t be bothered with redefining their ideas about art.

  “Did you say catheterize?” Viney asks.

  “No, no: ‘kasherize,’” Bethan enunciates. She’s standing at the stove in Viney’s kitchen, warming up some soup and explaining why it is she brought her own saucepan. “It means to make a kitchen kosher, which means observing certain rules about preparing and serving meals.”

  “Kasherize.” It’s an exotic-sounding word, and uttering its peculiar admixture of sounds has a pleasant, empowering effect, as if it invokes magic. Viney decides to direct it toward the framed photo on the wall, the one she and Welly had taken last spring at that professional studio up in Lincoln. “Kasherize,” she repeats, and then waits.

  Nothing happens.

  Viney sighs. “What kind of rules?”

  “You can’t eat any kind of dairy in the same meal as you’re eating meat, for example; you have to have separate cookware and dishes for meat and dairy; eating pork in any form is prohibited …”

  “Not even bacon?” Viney asks.

  “Nope,” Bethan chuckles. “I have to admit, it’s the one thing I really miss …”

  No bacon, Viney muses. That’s just bizarre.

  It was kind of Bethan and her son to deliver a hot meal and help with the yardwork—Eli is outside, raking leaves—but Viney had completely forgotten they were coming. She was napping on the living room sofa when they arrived, blinds closed, still in her bathrobe. The house is a mess.

  “Leo, my husband, wasn’t religious,” Bethan goes on, “even though he was a professor of religious studies, isn’t that funny?”

  “Mmmm.” It’s the most Viney can manage.

  “But it was important to us that we observe some of the Jewish laws and traditions, for Eli’s sake mostly. The same way I’ve tried to keep up the Welsh …”

  It’s just that she’s so tired. She’s barely able to speak, much less understand the complexities of the Jewish faith as it relates to cooking.

  “… It’s been a comfort to me, too, I guess, a way of staying connected to …”

  Bethan’s voice trails off. She opens the oven and checks on the potatoes.

  Viney hopes Bethan isn’t planning to leave her with a lot of leftovers. She only just got the fridge emptied out; it smelled awful. Everything people brought after the mayor died had gone bad. It was just too much trouble—heating things up, dirtying the dishes. She ended up throwing it all away.

  Outside, there’s the rhythmic sound of dead leaves chafing together as they’re being raked into a pile. A universal sound, a seasonal sound. If she closes her eyes, Viney can imagine that it’s Welly out there, or Wally Jr., or Gaelan, even Waldo or Papa or Grandpa Edryd. She can see each of them in her mind’s eye so clearly: the individual shape and carriage of their strong male bodies, and she’s always had strong men in her life. She could identify every one of them in silhouette from a great distance.

  She can’t picture Bethan’s boy, though; she doesn’t know him well enough.

  “Viney?” Bethan’s voice startles her. “Why don’t you go back in the living room and have a rest? I’m sorry about our timing. We interrupted your program.”

  “Oh, no, don’t be silly. I just turned it on so I could watch the news.”

  This is a lie. Viney spends most of the days now dozing on the sofa while cosmetically perfect people in fictional small towns with ridiculous names commit adultery, endure scandals, and never miss a manicure. In the world of daytime television, even the elderly are glamorous.

  “Really, Viney. Go watch your show. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  “Well, all right then,” Viney says. “If you’re sure I can’t do anything to help.”

  “Not a thing.”

  She drifts into the darkened living room and sits back down on the sectional. On TV, a bunch of people are standing in a hospital waiting room. Their expressions run the gamut from worried to smug to sinister to overwrought to hysterical. A doctor enters the scene, wearing scrubs and a surgical mask. The camera pans the crowd as everyone turns to face him, expectant, desperate for information. Slowly, the doctor pulls down his mask and regards each of them in turn. He does not speak. His expression is impossible to read. The screen fades to black.

  Viney throws a sofa cushion at the TV.

  Across the room, one of her hymnbook angels skydives off the piano.

  It was Viney’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Bauer, who introduced her to the concept of grief bacon. Viney was ten.

  In the weeks following the death of Viney’s grandfather, the significant adults in her life—especially her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother—seemed half-asleep, distracted. They never seemed to be looking at anything, and they kept saying things like, “Don’t bother Grandma right now. She’s taking a rest.” Or “Play by yourself, can’t you, Viney? I have to lie down for a while.” Viney had never seen the womenfolk in her family like this. It disturbed her terribly, because their behavior could only mean one thing: They had succumbed to a terrible sin.

  One day, Viney was moping around the front yard. She’d been banished from the house because she was being too noisy (even though she wasn’t being any noisier than usual) and was protesting this injustice by pulling up hanks of grass and throwing pebbles into the street. A distinct sound coming from next door let Viney know that Mrs. Bauer was down on her hands and knees, scrubbing her front porch.

  Viney worked up a loud belch.

  Mrs. Bauer poked her head around the porch wall. “What is the matter, Alvina?”

  Viney answered with authorit
y. “My grandmother is going to hell.”

  “Really?”

  “So is my mother and Aunt Molly and Aunt Lizzie.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Mrs. Bauer got to her feet and started across the yard. She was wearing a floral print apron—women always did in those days—and as she walked she bunched up the apron, first in one hand, then the other, using it like a towel. It was a gesture Viney had seen her mother and grandmother do hundreds of times, their hands shriveled and scalded red like Mrs. Bauer’s from being too long in hot water. Watching Mrs. Bauer cross the yard while wiping her hands on her apron gave Viney a funny feeling in her throat, and so she looked down and yanked up another big fistful of grass.

  “Tell me, Alvina, why do you think this about Grandmother and Mother?”

  “The laundry isn’t folded. There are dishes in the sink.” Viney whispered the most condemning evidence. “They’ve been taking naps.”

  “I see.”

  “They’re lazy. That’s another word for sloth.” Realizing that Mrs. Bauer’s English vocabulary might not include this word, Viney added, “Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Bauer said. She knelt in the grass next to Viney. “Well, Alvina, first of all, we should not judge what we have not lived. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “You lost your grandpa. That is your sadness. But have you lost a papa, like your mama has? Or a husband, like Grandmother?”

  Viney was confused. Why was Mrs. Bauer talking about her grandfather?

  “No, of course not.”

  “So you cannot know how this feels, can you? This loss of Mama and Grandmother.”

  Viney frowned. Grandfather’s Tridiau and Gymanfa happened a long time ago, in February. She was sad when he died. She’d cried and sung along with everyone else, but wasn’t that the end of it? Weren’t they all done being sad? Viney started tweezering single strands of grass out of the ground with her fingers and flicking them onto her outstretched legs.