Before weekend visits with our father, my mother would give me or my sister something of his, something that he didn’t need or want, and then she’d leave for the day.
Growing up on a farm was a lot like being a fighter pilot. Most days played out in tedious monotony interlaced with brief moments of sheer terror. This was never more evident than the afternoon my brother and I set out to plunder the bee tree and return to the house with their comb victorious.
I saw a flame on the water a couple of miles out. The Coast Guard found John the next day, washed up on a small island. They pulled the plane and two more bodies from the bottom of a deep channel.
A black bear cub sat eating cereal on the kitchen floor. The woman had never seen this bear cub before. The Cheerios box was split open, little o’s scattered everywhere. “Oh,” she said. “A bear. A very cute bear.” The bear paused for a moment as if it knew it was a very cute bear. She got the broom and started to sweep the cereal into a pile. The bear watched her while it ate.
Twenty-eight years of marriage and never a cross word. I won’t argue with you, is all she ever said. There is nothing to argue about. You are what you are. The world is the way it is. And so for twenty-eight years we never discussed politics, never talked of war in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda, not even the insane increase in the price of her favorite cheese, Papillon Roquefort, now $24.80 a pound.
I don’t think he gets enough sleep. I get up in the middle of the night to pee, and I can hear the white noise of the off-air channel as the static strobes blue and the speaker hisses behind his door. This is what growing old in Lansing is. The television takes you to bed.
She asked me if I could help out with a friend of hers. He had problems with alcohol, women, and drugs. I already knew about the women, because every pretty girl in town seemed to have slept with him.
I don’t know what happened at the ice cream parlor after I left, but later that day while I put a load of sheets and towels into the Maytag at Mount-Wash-More, Soldier Boy watched me, leaning against a dryer, talking into his wrist-watch.
The baby, Lela, one day old, named by Effie without Dan, was a beauty, but girls are pretty to their fathers, which begged the question: Was this child his?
I am in the boss's cabin listening to him, and suddenly I feel my face flee. It is as if it is drifting sideways, toward the wall, or toward the translucent board that is riveted to the wall for scribbling thoughts.