The Flicker of Old Dreams

by Susan Henderson

  “I want this to be a good service for Robert,” I say. “And Doris.”

  My father puts his arm around me.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said up on the rims,” he says. “About this nature lover with so much free time in the afternoons.”

  I can already feel a tightness in my ribs.

  “You were talking about Robert Golden, weren’t you?”

  I don’t answer, which is as good as saying yes.

  My father turns toward me and cups a hand over each of my shoulders.

  “I don’t want to take anything away from your happiness,” he says.

  “Don’t start, Pop.”

  But he does.

  “Mary, honey.” His voice softens. “I think there are better men out there for you.”

  My body tenses and snow collects inside my back collar.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “You hardly know him. And besides, soon enough, he’ll be on his way to wherever it is he came from.”

  “Pop.” My words come out only in a whisper. “I’m going to spend time with him. Don’t make it so I have to lie to you.”

  We stand, not moving, as snowflakes dance between us.

  “I’m only asking you to take it slow,” he says and brushes snow from my hair.

  “We’ll talk later, Pop,” I say, needing quiet. “We’ll do some fishing together.”

  At the door to the gym, we stomp snow off our boots. I feel a nervous relief that Pop knows about Robert.

  The bleachers are sparsely filled, the turnout always lower for the girls’ games, and even more so with this storm under way. Still, there are a lot of people who can walk right over to the funeral home after the game. We move from towel to towel across the gymnasium floor.

  “I’m glad to watch a game with you,” Pop says, waving to Mr. Vinter up in the stands. “It’s been a long time.”

  I follow his elongated steps up the bleachers. He seemed to want to join Mr. Vinter, but without a handrail, his knee is too shaky, so we sit closer to the court. My heart still pounds from our conversation in the parking lot, and I wonder if this is the beginning of us becoming grownup friends and not just father and child.

  Pop takes off his coat, and I notice only now that he’s not wearing a suit. I can’t think of a time this has happened in public. Even when he mows the lawn, he’s a businessman mowing the lawn. He can’t seem to get comfortable on the bench, shifting in his seat, placing his coat beneath him, then changing his mind.

  I notice a number of scowling faces. A Sweet Adeline looks our way and whispers to a neighbor. The men who leave their cigarette butts in our driveway are probably here, too. Pop begins to sweat from the top of his head. He jingles his keys until I cup my hand on top of them.

  Slowly, a crowd trickles in, most wearing the school’s colors. I remove my coat but not my gloves.

  Pop, noticing, says, “I hope that’s not a sign that you intend to dash off.”

  “It’s just my hands are always cold,” I say.

  “It’s because you’re not eating and sleeping well. Your body’s trying to tell you something.”

  Pop swings the key ring on his pointer finger, staring ahead, keys clacking against one another. I let it go. He’ll quiet down for the pledge.

  Most around us talk of snow and the belief that tonight’s haloed moon is a beautiful but ominous sign of a storm even bigger than expected. No one talks about how we may soon be shut in, stranded either in or out of town. Thinking about it only prolongs the sense of confinement we’ll all have to face. For a handful of teachers, designated to get stuck on the school side of the blizzard, this means they will become boarders of a sort, staying with families who’ve agreed to put them up. It also means that they are responsible for the students of any teachers who can’t make it in.

  I imagine spending the blizzard with Robert, shoveling a path from our door to his. Everyone around me stands, and I notice the principal has stepped to the microphone, ready to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. We place our hands over our hearts. Tim and Martha Rudd arrive, and both Pop and I pretend we’re not watching everything about them. Tim takes off his Stetson and, standing in the middle of the court, stops to face the flag.

  The room swells with a sense of reverence. Men hold their hats against their chests, hair pressed down flat. With liberty and justice for all. Then, the crowd is in motion again. Hats return to heads. Scarves and jackets are removed. Eyes drift to the court, where the girls set up in their positions. The Petroleum players are always the smallest on the court—in a school with only six seniors, the varsity team reaches all the way down to the freshman class for players. Homemade signs come out, and several in the crowd chant, “Maggot, maggot.” The principal shakes her head to no avail.

  A whistle blows and the game begins. Every time someone in crimson so much as touches the ball, the crowd erupts. My father glances too often in the direction of Martha, nervously jingling his keys, smiling, then not smiling.

  The players’ legs are pink with cold, but heat up fast. Minnow is the skinniest on either team, wearing a headband that covers her wine-stain birthmark and sneering as if everything about being a teenager is miserable. I wonder how much of our parents’ affair she’s had to witness. When I overhear my father speaking in that lovesick baby voice over the phone, and now, as he tries not to gape at her mother, I feel queasy. I know that each time he calls Martha, no matter how bad her marriage might be, he helps to cut the rope, however frayed, that holds Minnow’s family together. Maybe just the last few cords, but he is sawing at them, all the same.

  Sneakers squeak along the polished floor, as girls run up and down the court. Whenever the referee blows the whistle, they stop where they are, hands on hips or resting on the tops of heads or, in Minnow’s case, smoothing bangs and making sure the headband stays in place. My father seems about as interested in the game as I am, regularly turning to look for Martha and pretending he’s just looking around.

  Suddenly Tim stands up, chest out. Other ranchers look his way, and one asks, “What’s the problem, Tim?”

  He does not take his eyes off my father. Martha, wearing crimson like most of the teachers here, tugs at the leg of his jeans, but he knocks her hand away.

  “You have some kind of obsession with my wife?” he calls across several rows.

  Pop ignores him as if he’s too invested in the game to notice. The bleachers bang and wobble as Tim moves closer.

  “Sit down,” Martha begs. “Please, Tim, sit down.”

  I turn my head and see his square-toed boots march the last few steps to our seats.

  “Stop,” my father says. “Not here.”

  “Great. Let’s have a little understanding outside.”

  “I don’t know what this could be about,” Pop says quietly.

  Martha hurries down the bleachers carrying both their coats. Teachers and students look on. A group of older boys laugh hysterically in the upper row.

  “Tim, let’s go,” Martha says, sidestepping toward us. “You’re making a scene.”

  “I’m making a scene? You think I’m the one doing something wrong?”

  “Sit down,” someone yells from higher up. And others join in, shouting, “Sit down. We can’t see.”

  The three of them beneath the fluorescent lights look so unattractive right now, it’s hard to imagine why any of them would compete for each other.

  When Pop stands, someone yells, “Take it outside.”

  Many in the bleachers shout this while others cheer extra loud for the players, hoping to drown out the distraction. Minnow stands in the center of the court, her face the extreme pale of winter, except for her cheeks, growing red and blotchy.

  “I’ll go,” my father says. “There’s no need for trouble here. I’m leaving.”

  Everyone must be watching our long walk down the bleachers and along the painted line surrounding the court. My father without his suit. Just a man, as I know him at home. He hold
s the door for me, a white spray blowing into the gym, the floor becoming slick again. I’m glad to leave the whispers and heckling behind us.

  What a lot of snow has already fallen. This is it. This is the blizzard we’ve been expecting, the sidewalk white, and the trucks parked closest to the building already needing to be dug out. I hear behind us the principal over the microphone, calling off the second half due to weather, though it’s more likely an excuse to defuse the tension.

  I have my eye on the American flag hanging wet on the antenna of my father’s hearse.

  Pop starts the engine while we clear the windows with scrapers, brushes, and sleeves.

  By the time we back out of our space, the parking lot is lit with headlights. The hotel boarders gather at the gymnasium door for their walk back to their rooms. The Agate players, steam rising from the tops of their heads, line up to board their bus. Blurred figures scrape windshields. Trucks take creative exits to the main road.

  Our headlights pierce the black, and I stare ahead to keep from looking at any neighbors as we pass them.

  “Pop?”

  “It’s just a misunderstanding,” he says.

  “Is it?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  It feels like a long time to drive two blocks. When we approach the house, Tim Rudd is waiting on our white lawn.

  “I have a simple message for you,” he says when we step out of the hearse. “Keep away from my wife.”

  My father stands at a distance, seems to know it’s best not to speak.

  “I’ve been onto you,” Tim says. “I’ve seen the looks you give her. No one looks at Martha like that but me.”

  Hearing her name, Martha steps out of the red truck. Minnow follows, shivering in a coat thrown over her basketball uniform. She looks disgusted that her game has somehow become this.

  My father says nothing, but he gives Martha a look that expresses friendship, love, sorrow.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tim says, seeing what he may not have believed until now. “Jesus, Martha. Him?”

  It seems he’d come to defend her honor. But could she have actually fallen for this funeral director with thinning hair?

  Tim clutches a handful of fabric over his heart.

  “Tim, are you all right?” Martha asks, moving in.

  “Wait in the truck,” he tells her. “Leave us the hell alone. Leave this between the men.”

  “You too, Mary,” Pop says.

  “No. I’m staying right here.”

  And it takes the wind out of their fight, how three of us are cold and impatient spectators, standing awkwardly in the snow and wondering when we can get warm. It seems both Tim and Pop had hoped to throw punches so that something would find release. Even physical pain would at least move them from this balled-up tension. But now, like so many of the men in our town, their grievances become a part of the body, like plaque or tar or fat.

  “I want to say good-bye to Doris,” Martha says.

  She says this to me. Not to the men.

  “Her visitation’s in an hour,” I say.

  “I’m getting in the truck,” Tim shouts.

  “I need to say good-bye to her now,” she says, still only to me.

  “She’s not ready,” I tell her.

  But I lead her inside, with Minnow trailing at a distance.

  “You’ll have to wait here a minute,” I tell them when we’re inside the swinging doors of the basement.

  As I pull Doris from the fridge, I feel protective of her dignity, unsure about letting anyone see her before I’ve done my finishing work. I cover her with a sheet up to the shoulders.

  “Okay,” I tell them, wheeling her to a corner of the room with no tools close by.

  We stand near her head. Martha smooths her hair, and Minnow looks more at her mother than Doris, as if noticing something she’d overlooked until now.

  “Good-bye, dear one,” Martha says, close to her ear.

  She kisses Doris and leaves the color I find on our cups.

  I tell them about the outfit and the hairstyle Doris will wear tonight.

  “That’ll be lovely,” Martha says.

  It can’t be good with Pop and Tim out there in the snow, with so many people to witness what my father keeps most private. But in this unlikely gathering, the three of us make space for quiet and tenderness, even as storms whirl about us.

  I touch Doris’s cheek before we leave. She was not ready for visitors, but I’m glad they came. We have not dishonored her.

  As we exit the basement, I think how, if circumstances had been different, if Martha hadn’t been married, I could say that my father had chosen well.

  “Thank you,” Martha tells me when we are back outside, the red truck rumbling in the snow.

  “Get home safe,” I tell her.

  Pop, soaked in the yard, looks beat. He doesn’t turn toward Martha or the red truck, just winces at the sound of the doors slamming shut, the wheels spinning before they find traction.

  39

  Pop hasn’t moved from his spot on the lawn, though Tim and his family drove away some time ago.

  “Let’s get inside,” I tell him, touching a shoulder to get his attention.

  We track more snow inside.

  “We may be in trouble,” he says.

  He has used we, which means our business.

  “There’s nothing we haven’t come through before,” I say, our habit of optimism, though I feel the distance my words have created, as if pushing his sadness out of view.

  “How long before the visitation?” he asks, still distracted.

  “About forty-five minutes,” I say, finding the cleanest suit in the closet and handing it to him. “You might want to spruce up.”

  He moves so slowly up the stairs, bent with grief he brought on himself. I wonder, if he could only let one of his many girlfriends meet the man he tries so hard to hide, would his relationships work out better?

  I turn for the basement as snow melts into my scalp and streams down my face. My hands, still red from the cold, itch as they warm to the temperature of the house. For all the sorrow today, I’m glad to have this time with Doris. I bring her under the light and open the tackle box filled with hair and makeup supplies. Plug in hot rollers. Then gently brush her hair, untangling the brittle and bent strands that want to reach in different directions.

  Once her hair’s set in curlers, I dress her without my father’s help. Her body is so slight I can lift her easily. I hardly notice my tears except when they land on the ivory foundation I’ve chosen to cover the gray as well as the invisible threads and wax fillers. Next: eyeliner, eye shadow, blush, mascara, lipstick. And still a sadness shows through, the lines of anguish I saw in the family photo and even as she danced in the dark wearing her red scarf.

  I spend longer than usual styling her hair, knowing the shame she feels about it. But she would like this, I think, how full it looks with these curls.

  I finish with her feet. No one will see them, but I scrub and massage her crooked toes then paint them with Strawberry Ice. After they’ve dried and I’ve slipped on her shoes, Pop shuffles through the swinging doors in his rumpled suit.

  “Do you need any more time to get yourself ready?” I ask him.

  “No. I’m fine,” he says. “Can I help you with Mrs. Golden?”

  Doris lies on the metal table, fully dressed and wearing high heels.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so dressed up,” Pop says.

  He means it as a mild criticism.

  “She wanted me to make her pretty,” I say, remembering a few last details.

  I dab perfume at her wrists, add jewelry she shouldn’t have saved for a special occasion—a sapphire bracelet and a gold pin that once said Mother. Last, I slip the red scarf behind her neck and let the faux silk fall across her scar.

  We lift Doris from the table to the casket, adjusting her head on the pillow, crossing her hands at her waist. I don’t take a button from her dress. I don’t want to h
arm her outfit in any way. And then we push, and I’m aware that we are walking through the still-wet footprints Martha left, the last trace of her here.

  I wait for my father to help me guide the casket up the ramp that connects the basement to the parlor. His hands are in position but his gaze far away.

  “Pop?”

  He begins to push with lumbering steps. If only he knew how to cry. If only I knew how to hold him.

  “The flowers didn’t arrive,” I say as we enter the parlor and center the casket under the pink light.

  “I figured that might be the case,” he says.

  I set up what I can: guest book, prayer cards, CD player, a platter of miniature chocolate bars. Pop dims the overhead lights while I watch snow fall on the other side of the window.

  “Did you read the obituary I wrote?” he asks.

  “I did,” I say to the snow. “I liked how you talked about her paintings.”

  His write-up was very traditional. Noncontroversial. He mentioned the grain elevator accident but in matter-of-fact terms, describing Doris as a woman who led a quiet life without vices.

  “Robert was supposed to drop off some items for the service,” I say.

  “Maybe that paper bag by the front door?” he asks.

  I hurry to the foyer.

  “He must have dropped them off during the basketball game,” I call out.

  I walk back into the parlor, lifting two bottles of wine and a CD from the bag. When I find the framed photo at the bottom, Pop steps close and touches the edge of it. I hear an intake of breath.

  You cannot look at this photo without feeling the enormity of that day. A mother in shock, trying to smile. A young man with a beard who doesn’t look the least bit alive. And a boy—a boy—who won’t receive a scrap of sympathy.

  No one in his family or in town could have prepared for the impact of what hit us that day. No one knew how to do this, how to lose so much at once. I wonder if Pop is remembering the kernels in his pockets, the compassion he withheld.

  I place the photo on the table beside the guest book, and he doesn’t interfere. What a night this might be, a night of truth telling, of healing, of returning to an old trauma with the benefit of time, a chance to understand it differently.