Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  Alone in the house, Larken is struck by how cold and uninviting it is. There’s no physical imprint of her father here. And yet she still feels like an intruder.

  She ponders taking up residence in the large master bedroom—it would certainly be nice to spread out—but that’s where she and Jon stayed when they visited, and the whole point of coming here is to avoid those ghosts. Because of their proximity, the two other upstairs bedrooms are equally inhospitable.

  In the end she decides to move into the basement—which is even more sterile-looking than the rest of the house, not just because of the bland furnishings but because there are no windows; the only light comes from the fluorescent bulbs contained in a low, suspended ceiling.

  But the basement does offer a decent-sized bedroom, a half bath, the large rec room with its pool table, an empty refrigerator, and the big-screen color TV. No phone. She has everything she needs down here, and it’s completely private. If anybody comes by, they won’t even know she’s here.

  Supper at Viney’s house turns out to be a large group affair. Besides her siblings, Blind Tom is there, also Bethan Ellis and her son, Eli.

  Larken has trouble acclimating herself to the assembled energy. For much of the meal she feels as though she’s walked into the wrong house, or one in which familiar bodies have been taken over by parasitic aliens. Perhaps she’s stumbled onto the set of the Christian remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This just can’t be her family. Everyone—even Bonnie, especially Bonnie—is so happy.

  Gaelan has clearly outed himself about having quit his job. From what Larken can tell, he’s completely unconcerned with the minor matter of what he intends to do for the rest of his life. Maybe he’ll go to culinary school. Maybe he’ll teach. He might even start taking bodybuilding more seriously, consider competing. At the moment, he’s just glad to be here with his family. He’s very excited about his role in Our Little Wales.

  As Viney pours the coffee and they hand around a platter of cookies, Bonnie stands. “I have an announcement to make,” she begins. Then she looks to Blind Tom, who’s sitting next to her. “Actually”—and to Larken’s surprise, Blind Tom stands as well and they put their arms around each other—“Morgan and I have an announcement to make.”

  Who’s Morgan? Larken wonders.

  “We’re going to have a baby.”

  The energetic field in the room transforms instantly, from politely sedate to raucously celebratory. It’s as if Bonnie’s simple announcement inspires a fireworks display, a spirit-inspiring explosion of lights and colors and emotional pyrotechnics.

  Viney springs to her feet. “Oh, honey! That’s wonderful!” she says, rushing to deliver hugs.

  “Did I miss something?” Larken whispers to her smiling, alien brother.

  “What do you mean? Isn’t it amazing?”

  The idea of Bonnie being pregnant isn’t nearly as astonishing to Larken as its corollary implication: Bonnie—their odd, beloved baby sister: recluse, eccentric, spinster-in-training, source of all their worries and much of their conversational content—has an intimate, enduring relationship with someone of the opposite sex. She has acquired that most unexotic and predictable of life’s accessories, a boyfriend, and Larken hasn’t known a thing about it.

  Larken responds with all the appropriate behaviors. But inside, she feels nothing but dull confusion, betrayal, abandonment.

  Later, as she and Gaelan do the dishes, she eavesdrops on the zestful conversation taking place in the living room: an early planning session for the baby shower.

  How could this happen? she wonders, unaware that she’s spoken out loud until Gaelan inclines his head close to hers and whispers, “Well, gee, sis, I think they must’ve had sexual intercourse.”

  “You know what I mean. They told us in the hospital she couldn’t. Dad said she could never—” Larken cuts herself off, repelling away from wherever these words—and her sudden, unpremeditated invocation of her father—are about to lead.

  “Be happy for her, Lark,” Gaelan says, putting the last of the plates away and then slinging the dish towel over the edge of the sink. “And for us, too. I’m going to be an uncle!” he rejoices. “You’re going to be an aunt!”

  Aunt. The word is unattractive, uttered as it is in midwestern America: with a short a, nasally, the corners of the mouth pulled sideways as if smiling overzealously or following instructions from a dental hygienist. Nothing like the way it’s pronounced by sophisticated East Coasters, or Brits, with that long, luxurious, elegant “aaaaaah.”

  Aaaaaahunt Augusta. Aaaaaantie Mame.

  Ant Larken.

  “It’s a miracle,” Gaelan concludes.

  “Yes,” Larken concedes, half-hoping that when she gets back to Dad’s house, she’ll find a large pod containing her happy alien lookalike. “I guess it is.”

  After dinner, they all drive to the community center for a meeting of the newly formed Downtown Development Association. In preparation for the August visit from what’s being called the Welsh delegation, the association’s mission is to spruce up the falling-down structures of downtown. They also intend to develop a presentation that will be ready for Fancy Egg Days, one that will make this idea of a cultural and financial renaissance (Dad’s idea, Larken has to keep reminding herself) not just less than ludicrous, but plausible.

  Bud Humphries shows an endless series of slides while committee members speculate on whether or not the old egg factory could be re-fitted to produce the monks’ signature cottage industry product (organic snack bars), the train station transformed into a museum and tourist information headquarters, the hotel renovated as a monastic dormitory, and so on. Does the committee have enough money to hire an architect to render their ideas into blueprint form? Or mightn’t investing in a few flats of pansies and geraniums and organizing a planting party be just as effective in helping their distinguished visitors envision their cooperative future?

  Larken is lulled into a waking trance by the droning voices and the rhythmic shuffling of the slide projector; it’s one of those old carousel machines. The slides—photos of Emlyn Springs’ downtown streets and buildings—loop endlessly. This must be one version of purgatory.

  Larken remembers slide shows like this from elementary school: on birth control, what to do in the event of atomic bombs or tornadoes, auto assembly plants in Michigan, the natural resources of Peru.

  Eventually all she sees are the colors, the quiet, unassertive colors of weathered wood, broken pavement, bleached signs; the flat, pale blue of the sky; shadowed alcolves; whitewashed shutters. The only potency is found in the brick of abandoned buildings: variegations of red, the colors of the Virgin’s robes.

  A slow realization enfolds her, and she begins to dream herself into another room.

  There, she sits in the dark next to a younger version of herself: Jones, Larken? Here. Here. Here! the girl calls out with irritation, waving at the white-haired man down at the podium (is he deaf?), small-town slut, insolent fuckup, motherless daughter, one of a hundred failing small-town freshman girls jonesing for nicotine, self-exiled to the back row of Art History 101 because she needs the credit, wondering Am I going to have to know this for the test? and then rendered breathless, transformed forever by the image of that painting on the projection screen. That’s art, the girl thought, suddenly understanding a commonplace, three-letter word in a completely new way. She spent the next twenty years wondering why it was that painting that prompted her epiphany.

  It wasn’t about radical ideas or political implications, Larken tells the girl, kindly now, as if she could spare her the past and the future and maybe even the present. It was about the colors. Other things, too, but mostly it was simply that: the colors.

  Library; school; grocery; hotel; McKeever’s Funeral Home; the Williams mansion; Tinkham’s Five and Dime.

  When Robert Campin, a.k.a. the Master of Flémalle, and his unnamed assistants painted the Mérode Triptych, c. 1420–1430, 64.1 X 63.2/27.3 cm, Metr
opolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, New York, New York, they used the sad, familiar palette of Larken Jones’s hometown.

  She stays long enough afterward to have a cup of dilute, soapy coffee; then she excuses herself and walks back to her father’s house.

  The small box is still on the porch. Inside is a note from Hazel Williams:

  “Dear Larken, You’ll find copies of all eight contestant essays in this box. The girls have been asked to respond to the question, ‘What are my hopes for Emlyn Springs?’ They’ve been told that typed essays are preferable, but a legible handwritten essay is acceptable if an applicant doesn’t have access to a keyboard. Thanks for your help, and good luck!”

  Larken lifts out the handwritten essay on the top of the pile. The contestants are identified by number, not name, so that the contest judges can read and respond without favoritism. My biggest hope for Emlyn Springs, the first essayist begins, would be to see a McDonald’s get bilt here. A MacDonald’s would provid jobs for young people here as well as another place for famlys to go for a meal out for not to much money. It would also be a way to bring turrists to town, since everyone knows MacDonald’s and if a town has one they are sure to stop even if their on their way to someplace else.

  And almost everyone is, sweetheart, Larken thinks, pitying and at the same time loving this earnest, unnamed girl who can’t imagine a greater gift to her hometown than the arrival of a fast-food franchise.

  Hope’s Diary, 1977:

  Movie of the Week

  Dreamed of teaching a tap class to a coliseum of people. I was very good. Made it look so easy. The children were there: Bonnie was dressed in a ruffled pinafore, very uncharacteristic, and running a miniature vacuum cleaner as I gave my lecture demonstration.

  “Could you do that a bit later, sweetheart?” I asked, shouting over the sound of the vacuum. In another part of the room, Gaelan was doing magic tricks, I think, or else some kind of scientific experiment: There were balloons and kites. Possibly he was trying to re-create a wind tunnel? A wind machine? He was quite a showman, I remember, and had his own audience, all girls, none of them interested in tap dancing. I had trouble locating Larken at first; she was in the shadows, doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, don’t know what it was.

  Meanwhile, I danced a single step, repeating it over and over so that everyone in the room could get it. The step was rhythmically simple; the complexity arose from the accents. The adults were impressed; the children weren’t paying any attention to me whatsoever. I was happy that they were involved in their own projects; at the same time, I wanted them to see me doing this vital, playful, agile, carefree thing, tap dancing. I wanted them to remember me this way. Their mother, the tap dancer.

  I think what I cannot bear above all else is the demise of myself in full view of my children. They will only remember what they see last. The thought that their enduring image of me will be as a withered, incapacitated, speechless, muddled mass of exposed nerve endings is too horrific. I want to take a snapshot of myself for them before that point. I want to freeze their view, short-stop the long decline.

  I could keep deluding myself—maybe a cure will be found, maybe I’ll live longer than anyone imagines. I could say, “I’m not going to die,” like one of those noble types in the movies, whose lives are accompanied by sound tracks and who even in death have a professional hair stylist.

  The only thing I might be able to control is how my children remember me. I want them—especially the girls, for the halo of victimhood has been worn too long by women—to remember me as anything but this: the victim of a disease.

  The legs—poor stumps, they’ve been languishing for so long—are really, finally giving up. They will not be coaxed. Dead as felled timber. It seemed to happen overnight, although of course it didn’t. We’ve been on this path for a long time, my legs and I. Now it seems we must go on our way, if we’re to go at all, with the assistance of a wheelchair. No more canes or walkers. I will henceforth move through the world waist-high to most adults, eye to eye with six-year-olds.

  I am coming up against it now, the knowledge, the dread, the certainty. I am beginning to see my own death.

  I have the disease to thank for this clear-sightedness. Without it, I would have gone on like the rest of the world, not believing in death until much later, maybe not until the end itself, whatever that end would have been: a car crash, a stroke, a heart attack. My death will be a prolonged affair. I could fight. I could resist. I could try to comfort myself by saying things like “I am just as alive today as any newborn” in a hearty voice.

  But that is not my way, and I am not comforted.

  There was a great movie-of-the week on TV the other night. It was called “Griffin and Phoenix: A Love Story” and was about these two terminally ill patients who fall in love, but the woman (was she Griffin or Phoenix? I can’t remember) makes the man promise he won’t be with her when she gets to the end stage of her illness. She refuses to let him see her die.

  Usually these things are unbearably sappy and untrue, and parts of this one were, too, but all was redeemed by the ending, which I loved: Peter Falk walking down the street smashing windshields. It was perfect. I found it roaringly funny. L. looked like he’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin. He seemed disgusted. People who aren’t living under the shadow of a terminal illness just don’t get it, and I’m not talking about the high moral ground of suffering or any nonsense like that, but about how hilarious it can be sometimes.

  It’s so ironic. L. always used to think me the flighty and impractical one, the one with the romantic notions. And now our sensibilities are reversed. I’m sure he harbors quite a different scenario involving me and my illness and my death—something all Beth-like from “Little Women,” hearts and flowers, dewy-eyed children who’ve already forgiven me for abandoning them, cue the violins.

  I much prefer the windshield-smashing approach. Pissed at the Grim Reaper. Turning vandal.

  Unfortunately, I’ve lost my chance to walk down the street or stride out the back door wearing my carpet slippers. Tomorrow Viney will take me up to Beatrice to be fitted for a wheelchair.

  Can’t write anymore.

  It all makes sense now: coming upon Llewellyn working on something at his desk, then furtively moving papers aside and acting nonchalant; numerous phone calls for L. that didn’t send him out of the house but into another room; Viney’s announcement that she wanted to take me up to Omaha for the day, treat me to a shopping spree and lunch in the Old Market area. This proposal did not fill me with glee.

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s not my birthday.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Viney replied. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “Viney,” I grumbled, “I really don’t think I’m up for all that.” Admittedly, I was playing up my new status as wheelchair-bound invalid.

  “You can rest in the car on the way up if you need to, and on the way home, too,” she said. “I’ll help you get around. You’ll be fine.”

  And then there was Larken’s evasiveness whenever I asked, “Will you be okay this Saturday, alone all day?” (L. had already informed me of his plans: He had two OB patients about to give birth and said he’d be on call all weekend.) “What are you going to do when Viney and I are up in Omaha?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Maybe you and Gaelan and Bonnie would like to come with us,” I suggested.

  She scowled, chewed her lip, got quiet. “No thanks, Mom. We’ll be fine. It’ll be good for you to have a kid-free day.”

  So off we went, at the ungodly hour of 7:00 A.M.

  Visited shops and bookstores, had lunch at a cozy Italian restaurant. Viney practically rearranged the entire place in order to accommodate me and the Chair. I’m thinking of giving it a name; perhaps then I wouldn’t hate it so much.

  Anyway, I was ready to come home after that, but Viney insisted that we take in a movie. “Come on, Hope,” she said. “When’s the last time
you saw something in Cinerama?” So we went to the Indian Hills, where they were showing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

  I had several close encounters with the inside of my eyelids (it was a very long movie, and in retrospect I understand that was part of the reason Viney chose it), but I did manage to wake up in time to see the end, when the scientists were communicating with extraterrestrials through a simple, Coplandesque series of notes.

  Re-mi-do-do-sol. Re-mi-do-do-sol.

  It was surprisingly moving and sweet.

  Viney and I laughed quite a lot when Richard Dreyfus was sculpting all those phalluses. “Devil’s Tower” indeed. No one else in the theater seemed to get it.

  After the movie ended, Viney wanted to make one more stop. “Let’s pick up some pastries at that French bakery we passed,” she said. “Get something special to take home to the kids.”

  “I’m TIRED, Viney!” I whined in full-out, pain-in-the-ass, difficult patient mode. “I want to go HOME!”

  Fell asleep the minute we set off, and stayed asleep until we reached Beatrice. When I woke up, we were parked at a filling station and Viney was outside making a call from the pay phone.

  “Everything okay?” I asked when she got back.

  “Oh, shoot,” she said. “I was hoping you’d stay asleep until we got back.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Go back to sleep or I’m going to have to blind fold you.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a surprise waiting for you at home.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “That’s all I’m allowed to say about it.” She turned to face me. “You have no idea how much you’re loved, honey,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes.

  Originally, L. planned to do it all by himself. About a month ago, during those dark days after I got the chair, he went into Schlake’s with a few sketches and a supply list and started asking questions.

  Small towns being what they are, Harold Sr. started asking questions of his own, and before long L.’s secret one-man carpentry project became a public community effort.