Assisted Living
Page 3
Nothing clarion came of her, either.
•
Days skated by, I let life scribble its pending drolleries on me, but my gut told me nothing, my body was mum, I pressed myself next to my wife in restaurants and hideouts, we were a couplelike pair in stormy civilities, in burlesques of togetherness. At a store that sold a little of everything, all we ever bought was friction tape and mattress pads. But things must have shot out of her in her sleep (how else to explain, come morning, the sudden booty on the floor, once even a snow shovel that had obviously been through a lot?), and then a suspicion at first, then later a hope (that in the set of her feelings for me was a subset of gustier feelings spun off for other people), and then another death, another parent.
This one had wanted a viewing, a “visitation,” full-body burial, a tarp for the interment. An arousing wall of brothers, sisters, cousins, family men, and any last, hoarsened aunts. Rounding them up fell to me. The rebuffs I took as gloats.
Convenient that they had a boilerplate thing for the death notice. I filled it out as follows, though I’ll skip the names:
At the time of her death, her life had occurred, or was forthcoming, in New City, Old Town, Lower View, Upper Falls, Eastwood West, and Beach Canyon. She had been awarded life from a mother, ______, and a father, ________, and held a marriage license from _________. Twice a candidate for second-trimester abortion, she was the co-founder of two daughters: ______(19__) and _________ (19__). Furniture, trumpery, and dental bric-a-brac of hers were collected in seven rooms and one and a half baths. She was the motor-vehicle operator, most recently, of a 20__ ______ ______.
The morning of the service: weather digressive: a sun-shower, a cloudlet or two, then the sky seemed sealed off from us.
She didn’t look as gawky for once. Life had fallen through her completely. She had aplomb there in her bin. Packed and on a pedestal again.
In the guest book: mostly chicken-scratched You will be misseds.
The basement luncheon afterward, the tainting embraces.
•
“What does the commute do for you, other than maybe keep you at bay?”
Good question!
But must I ask it myself?
Classes were half-hours of heaving the right facts up out of the right chapters.
I was overdefinite of face, I’m afraid, and my body looked flung together from muckered, wished-away parts of others. (The brittle of my wristbones, the shoulder blades out of true.)
And others in that tournament of love interests I’d called my forties? Must we look back even just this once?
Lucerne, of the slowpoke pulse: I’d return to find her not so much asleep as nursing some oblivion within.
Aiden: fated-looking, skimming her feelings off what others had felt first, her opinions thinning themselves into whimsy.
Elara: lacking other facets, yes, but that spill of bracelets down her arm when she raised it to put another stop to her tolerance.
Emme: boisterously despondent. Infections, abscesses, things bubbling up where there oughtn’t be bubbles.
The last you heard of some of them was that speed was believed to have been a factor.
All of them lively, lovely, and tiring: the motifs in their complexions, the drift of their arms, the hallowing of their absence.
Then the one who tiptoed roughshod over and around me.
•
But, true, not everybody gets to live in the state’s fifth-largest city. Not everybody gets to be met with familial fanfare at the bus station. Not everybody gets to peak too late. Come to think of it, the landlord had a new stove brought over and parked it obstructantly in the middle of the kitchen. The thing was black and wouldn’t budge for us. It wasn’t even hooked up. (Hoses, wires, and whichnot, left on the sideboard.)
Something for us to walk around together, something to set us apart, something to come between us?
All three could have worked.
•
Make no mistake: We didn’t “break up,” my wife and I. It was just that we all of some sudden both moved out, separately, on almost the same day, and went off in different directions. But one afternoon I dropped by the assisted-living in hopes of seeing her no matter what. I had to sign the guest log like any other. Residents puddled by in wheely contraptions. They faced me with faces of febrile unconcern.
And then there she was, plain as day, that day anyway.
It was one of those days when it finally just comes to you—when to end a conversation, I mean, and when to renew an ordeal.
In memory of M. L.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals in which the pieces in this book originally appeared (some in different form and under different titles): BOMB, Caketrain, Lake Effect, New Flash Fiction Review, and Sleepingfish.
With gratitude to Kevin Sampsell, Gordon Lish, Derek White, Lisel Virkler, Kramer, Thomas Vasko, E.M., Vannessa Barnier, Lauren Leja, and Jane Unrue.
* * *
The entries herein are works of fiction. names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as to actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2017 Gary Lutz & Future Tense Books
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ISBN 978-1-892061-78-2
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