Ash
DEAD INFANTS DON’T GET URNS UNLESS YOU PAY FOR them - and then they stuff crap in besides just ashes to cover the smallness. All those years ago? My daughter’s ashes were in a small pink box - pink for girls - a box the size of a hacky sack ball that fits in the palm of your hand
I took my box to Heceta Head. The coast at Heceta Head in December is epic. Me, my first husband, my sister, and weirdly, my parents. Near strangers.
Pretending to be a family, we stumble-walked down over the rocks to the water’s edge. The sound of ocean waves is large enough to stop your thinking. My mother closed her eyes and said a prayer in a southern drawl. Phillip sang I See the Moon - the lullaby my mother sang to me as a child - which made me feel a little like I might faint. My sister read “Ample Make This Bed” by Emily Dickinson, nearly killing us all. Then my father, the architect, pulled something out of his pocket. A folded up piece of paper. On it, he’d written a poem. Sort of. It rhymed. When he read it, his voice shook. The only time in my life I heard that.
It rained cold. Windy. Like Oregon is.
After that, Phillip and I took the little pink box which I had been clutching in my hand hard enough to nearly crush it and walked over to where the river joins the ocean. That’s why I’d picked that spot. I could see river rocks leading into the sea and sand, and I smelled and tasted saltwater. I don’t know if I was crying - my face was wet with ocean and rain. The lighthouse stood guard. All the waters of a life met at that tiny nexus.
Then I handed him the fragile little box. He took it in his hand. I said, throw it as far as you can. So he - there isn’t another way to say this. He chucked it.
Yeah, so the thing is, that little riverway that leads to the sea? Right there at Heceta head? It has a mean cross-current. So while Phillip and I stood there watching the little box float nearly out of eyesight, we also stood and watched it … come the fuck back. Pretty much to our very feet. Knocking itself against his shoe.
I looked back over my shoulder to where the posse of sadness that was my idiotic family stood - they were far away, almost dots. I looked at Phillip. Then I said, try kicking it out. No, I don’t know why I said that.
So he, um, kicked it.
This time it didn’t go very far at all, it simply launched soggily into the air and plunked back down and circled back to us, just slower this time. Without being able to stop, I started laughing. And he started laughing. I mean hard. I said go get it, goddamn it. So he did.
By then the little box had begun to disintegrate. Cheap ass pink crappy cardboard. As I peeled the dumb paper away, I saw that the ashes were actually inside a little plastic bag. Almost like a pot baggie. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help it, and Phillip went what? And peeked over my shoulder. We had giggles we couldn’t stop.
I said goddamn it I have to stop laughing. It’s not funny. It’s pretty fucking far from funny. He agreed, but he couldn’t stop either. I had snot all over my face. I was laughing so hard my stomach - former world - hurt. Finally I knew what to do.
I opened the little faux caul full of ash carefully with my teeth. Like animals do. Then I walked out into the ocean for real. I had a vintage red wool coat on. And brushed leather cowboy boots. Phillip tried to follow me in but I said no. I wave walked until I was up to my abdomen. The water felt ice cold on my stitches. Numbed the hurt there. I dumped the nearly weightless contents of my daughter into my right hand. Some of the ash blew into the air, but most of it didn’t. It was wet. Like sand. And then I let my right hand lower into the water, and I let go. I closed my eyes.
My father told me later it was the bravest thing he has ever seen. I never knew how to take that.
When I walked out of the water back to my first husband, he held me close - we were already apart by then - but he did it anyway. Then I felt his shoulders shaking, and I thought he was crying, but nope, he was laughing again, so I said what? And he pointed to the side of my vintage red coat at the smear of ashmud there. I laughed again too and went I know. I know. Clutching each other.
My sister said from where they were we looked like we were sobbing.
Maybe we were sobbing.
I don’t know.
I kept the plastic in my pocket like that for years. I still have the red coat - though if there is any trace of ash left, you can’t see it.
II. Under Blue
Baptismal
A FAMILY ON THE BEACH AS IF WE WERE EVER A FAMILY on the beach.
When my sister and I were adults we visited my mother and father in Florida. We visited them because of guilt. We visited them because of shame. We visited them because of delusion. We visited them because grown women are idiots. I don’t know why we visited them. I can’t remember. I think my mother begged to see her daughters. Me 26. My sister 34.
My mother stayed with her shorter leg on the sand. A father and his two daughters waded into the ocean at the beach in St. Augustine. When we played in the ocean we forgot ourselves: sister, self, father, memory loss. The water in Florida is body temperature. The waves, unless there is weather, are calm. They roll a body gently. I heard a sound from the shore. I saw my mother running, lopsided. I followed her arm and finger to the father face down in the sea. I tasted salt on my own lips. When I finally reached him I could see the moles on his back at the surface of the knee-deep water. Running in water is like running in Jell-O. Almost funny. When I flipped him over, his face was distorted into a grimace - clenched teeth, bulging eyes, purple and white blotching his face. My sister then there. Us pulling his 220 pound of dead weight onto the shore, both screaming at him, “Daddy.” The image of my mother: a tiny squawking penguin with a cane on the shore, too far from her daughters.
There are moments between years that surface with a great force when you do not expect it. My father almost dead in front of me. I’m going to say it plain: I could have killed him. I looked down into the flesh losing its color, the popping, staring blue eyes twinning mine, the animal teeth. His face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it. I held his nose closed. I put my mouth to his mouth. I could feel his tongue, his teeth, spittle. His lips were warm but unresponsive. My sister pumped her fists into his chest. His swim trunks were half off. His sex hung harmless. I held my lips to his. I breathed air into his mouth until an ambulance came.
Hypoxia is suffocation in water that does not result in death. It may include brain damage and multiple organ failure. My father lost his memory from hypoxia.
I did not kill him. I did not save him. How do you live on land?
Swimming with Amateurs
YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A PERSON FROM SEEING them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain.
I swam, once, with Ken Kesey. In a man-made reservoir up near Fall Creek. Puffy with drink, his bulk rounded and bulged around his former reputation. It was night swimming. Five people, I think. Totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high.
The moon kept coming in and out of focus as the clouds moved around. And the water was warm yet, so it must have been late summer, but in my mind it has the crisp clarity of fall for some reason. If it had been fall we would have frozen our tits off. So sometime in late summer less than a decade before he died, we entered the waters. Man-made reservoirs smell like dirt and concrete mixed with algae.
I dove down into the black and opened my eyes. Looking into lake water at night is like looking into deep space while drunk. Black, and blurry. I resurfaced and strong-armed into a glide, went down, came up again, then took a look back, and saw his unmistakable head and burled broad shoulders. “Goddamn girl, what are you, some kind of mermaid?” he said. Spitting a stream of water. Yeah.
In the black reservoir water we swam around each other looking at the sky, treading water, floating on our backs and letting our
feet break the surface. Sometimes Kesey’s belly rose up like an island. We shot the shit, mostly he told stories …
That’s a bald faced lie. Just now I made it sound like we casually shot the shit out there, but really my brain was as numb as a wad of cotton and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so I just let him talk and I don’t even remember what he said because my head was expanding and contracting like an idiot’s.
And he wasn’t really in the water with me.
He was on the shore.
But then he must have said something from somewhere that penetrated, because I opened my mouth, and it was nothing nothing nothing words until it wasn’t nothing anymore, and I was listing all the horrible things people had said to me since my baby died.
Things like: “You know, it’s probably better that she died before you got to know her.” Or: “ Well what you really want in your 20s is the freedom to party.” Or my personal favorite, from my father’s sister, fascist catholic: “The saddest part is that she’ll go to hell, isn’t it, since she wasn’t baptized.”
Then he was saying “When Jed died, everyone who talked to me said something asinine. Like the craziest crap you can imagine. No one understands death anymore. Death used to be sacred. Look at the Upanishads. Goddamn religion has killed death.”
I had read the letter he wrote to friends Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Ed McClanahan, Bob Stone, and Gurney Norman in the summer of 1984 in CoEvolution Quarterly when Jed died. How they built a box for his body themselves. How he threw a silver whistle with a Hopi cross soldered on it into the grave. How the first shovelfuls of dirt sounded like “the Thunderclaps of Revelation.”
I held my breath. I thought about water. I thought about the ashes of my daughter swimming in the ocean off the coast of Oregon. The deaths of our children swam in the water with us, curling around us, keeping us twinned and floating.
So if Ken said these things to me, does it really matter if he was in the water or not? If meeting Ken so close to a death brought writing into my hands, and if I cast that out as a dreamy lake front scene, who gives a shit if he was in the water? His big hearted wrestler’s body. His irreverent mouth. His dead son. My hollowed out gut. Me in my better world. From the water I could see him on the shore, a little miniature Kesey doing his former Kesey thing, the smaller man within a man like a Russian doll.
That night I swam the lake and back trying to drown out voices.
Father
BEFORE MY FATHER’S HANDS MOVED AGAINST US HE was an architect; lover of art.
Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War.
Before my father was a navigator he was an artist.
Before my father was an artist he was an athlete.
Before my father was an athlete he was an unhappy altar boy.
That’s the best I can do. I think.
Goddamn it.
Let me try again.
Before my father’s hands moved against us he was an architect; lover of art.
His hands. I remember his hands at work over great white expanses of paper, rows and rows of pens and pencils and sophisticated erasers, a T-square sliding up and down a wire on the drafting table, his tall form bent over the territory of his designs. I remember the sound of classical music coming from his room, orchestral arrangements weaving up my spine, the names of composers going into my head. I can still see the great thick-paged architectural and art magazines on the coffee table. This striking man teaching me how to draw, what is shadow, what is light, composition, perspective. I walked with him through the spaces of other men’s buildings, and in place of bedtime stories, I heard about Le Corbusier, Antonio Gaudí, Carlo Scarpa, Fumihiko Maki. The beauty of him speaking about art, slowly, a cigarette pointing toward heaven, swirls of smoke like curls of water around the sanctity of his speech. I walked with my father through Fallingwater.
Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War.
I can only go to black and white photos here. When I hold them in my hand I suddenly have to face the fact of real war, and his body in it. The photos have barracks and rifles and uniforms. The photos have jeeps and helicopters and the landscape of the military. The photos are of my father with men I never met nor ever will, men who may be dead by now, men who went to war before I was born, before Vietnam.
There are two kinds of photos. In the first kind each frame is filled with an extraordinary architecture - Korean Buddhist temples and shrines.
The second kind carry men. There is a black man who reappears in several of the photos. When I hold the photos, my father isn’t the abusive fuck. He becomes a different story, the one he and my mother and uncle and aunt told and retold about the lengths he went to concerning his best friend - a black man whose name I will never know. I can’t remember it. I was a child when these stories were told.
But the stories are all about how my dad would sit out in the car with this guy when the other guys would go out to eat or drink or dance when they were on leave. How he’d go in and get food or beer and bring it out to the car or the curb or some vacant lot near whatever establishment and they’d sit and share it together.
I look at the black man in the photo. I wish I could talk to him. Ask him questions about my father then. Was he funny? Was he kind? Did he ever make a drawing for you? What things scared him, or hurt him, or made him happy? What was my father like during wartime? What is a man?
My father was handsome.
Before he was a soldier he was an artist.
Sometimes, when we were alone, I would ask my mother questions about my father when they first met. She would nearly always go into the spare bedroom, pull a shoebox down from the closet, sit down next to me, and unfold a piece of drawing paper. On the paper was a redbird. A beautifully drawn - I mean artistically stunning redbird. She would smile, and keep her eyes down, and say in her soft southern drawl almost in the voice of a girl, “Your father won an art prize for this drawing.” In the same box, she would unfold a yellowed scatter of pages filled with beautiful handwriting. “I won a prize for this story.”
And then she would carefully fold it all back up, put it back in the box, return it to the closet.
When I hold photos of the two of them in my hands my heart aches. My father looking all James Dean with his rolled at the cuff denims and his white muscle tee with cigarettes tucked in the sleeve and his mirror sunglasses. My mother in her 50s dresses with wide skirts and her hair tied back, her lips that were red as a coca-cola can looking black in the black and white photos. They were gorgeous. Hollywood. She was smiling. He looked like someone a woman would fall in love with.
There is another photo of him sitting at a picnic table. He has khaki pants on and a white shirt. The way he is sitting? His crossed legs and bad posture and long fingers running through his thick hair? His other hand wrapped around his neck so that his elbow folds softly in? He has the body language of an artist. I know. I married three in a row.
Before my father was an artist he was an athlete.
I know how to tell this story. I know how to story over things.
His senior year. Bases loaded at a catholic school. Cleveland, Ohio, the gray of pavement and winter sealing fates. Nuns and Fathers in black, black coats and boots and hats on the bodies of family members. The boys on the field as beautiful as boys on a field are; strange angels. Breath making fog from mouths. Eyes keened in on plays and moves and the edge of things. Top of the ninth. The board wearing its scores, though no one needs to look. At the moment sweat is forming at his upper lip, and just as his arms uncoil to connect thick whack and send the little world out of the park, at that moment all the nuns and all the fathers look up, like faith. Right then the end of things rings in the boy like hope. He sees college. He sees leaving home. He sees a chance at inhabiting the word athlete. His arms surrender. His body shivers. A cheer rises up like a chorus. Everyone is a single voice. Except one. At that moment a man leaves. His back stopp
ing the action.
The home run. The father gone. The boy turning into man - he must have looked … beautiful.
That’s it.
That’s as far as I can go.
To go further into his story, it takes the air right out of my lungs as if I’d been swimming all night.
I do know his tongue was cut. When I look at my son and think of that I think I could kill a woman who would cut a boy’s tongue.
Before my father was my father he was a boy.
Just a boy.
Before I hated him I loved him.
How To Ride a Bike
WHEN I WAS 10 TO CHEER ME UP FROM MY DESPAIR OF my sister’s leaving, my father brought home a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars. I saw him pull it out of the trunk of the station wagon. I saw him wheel it up to the front porch. I saw him kick the kickstand and let her rest. The window a membrane between us.
I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen - except for my green metal toy army jeep. Still. Its hot pink glory. Its streamers like hair. That big white banana seat. I gasped.
The thing was, however, I did not know how to ride a bike. Like at all. Scared of most things that required me to “do” something besides swim, I’d even forsaken trikes, their threewheeling menace not something I’d ever mastered. With trikes I’d flat foot the thing along, my failure disgusting my father enough to hide it away in the garage. So when I came outside to touch the hot pink ride, beautiful as she was, all I felt was terror. When my father said, “It’s time to learn to ride a bike,” my legs shook and my throat hurt.
He meant right then. He meant for me to get on and try right that second.
My mother stood in the doorway saying “Mike, she doesn’t know howah” in her southern drawl, but my father meant business.
The Chronology of Water Page 7