l i f e
waltzing matilda
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
the dinner
Heidi dropped four whole ears of corn on to the grill. The husks burned brown and curled up black, I watched the little hair-sized fibers catch flight; a bright red line against the black-and-white backdrop of the stars and sky. I took a sip of whatever beer Heidi had bought that week and quartered our steaks. I stirred the softening mushrooms, inhaling the smoke and sweating against the heat. I looked around me, at the mortar falling out of the red brick wall in front of our house, at the few gas lights coming on up and down the street, and I was glad we had passed the Vernal Equinox. The smell of oil, garlic, and loosening mushroom fibers lent a feel of permanence I associated with the approach of summer; the days get longer, and with the eerie light of 7:30 the faceless houses come alive. Everyone turns on their grills. The trees catch the odor of charcoal and flame. It's the one time during the year I catch more than glimpses of my neighbors.
"Feels really weird to have him gone, Heidi, even if we never talked," I moved a few sprigs of thyme out of the flames, "You really think this dinner is gonna help?"
Heidi, my finance, put her arm around my waist, "Depends on how you define help, but it worked for me when my grandparents died." She let go of me, nervously brushing her hands down the front of her shorts. "I mean it made me remember." She took my near-empty bottle and disappeared upstairs.
I stirred some coals around, making more sparks, and sat on the cracked wooden gray steps next to the carport. I leaned back, and though it was still light outside, the outline of a full moon was rising in the sky. The grill smoked on, smelling of the present, but the sky looked like it always had and I felt ten years old, remembering how then it was never enough to sit patiently and wait for my father to take notice of me on Saturday evenings with skies like this.
Back then, I sat on a bar stool the color of a saltine and waited for him to pass by. I'd listen for him coming down the hall and just before he got to the kitchen I'd tense, kick my feet against the counters, and start to spin. Everything became a dizzy blur except I knew my dad was there, I heard him. He never said stop, he just pulled up a chair beside me and carefully unrolled maps of the constellations. It was my job to connect the stars and form the shapes of myth, the caricatures that we are all given at birth. As I got older, the Saturday's grew further apart; so that by the time I understood what all the different signs of the zodiac meant, the evenings with my dad had disappeared completely. That was the beginning of the gradual separation between my father and me.
My younger brother, Scott, was different, always trying to stand on one foot longer than anyone else or to be the first to ride some kids' new bike around the block. He was the first to get a bloody nose in my family; and, for a couple days he could make it bleed when he wanted 'cause it hadn't healed yet. Me and the other boys in the neighborhood took turns pretending to hit him. My brother was the one who told me there was no Santa, the first to get laid, and knew before me that Mom and Dad were getting a divorce.
These last two things he told me on the hood of his '81 tan Chevette. After a shot of tequila, some salt, and a Pall Mall, he said simply, "Eric, guess what?" It was then he told me he wasn't getting married until he could afford the alimony.
"Thanks, Scott," was all I could think to say.
Heidi slid another beer into my hands and rubbed my knuckles; I was glad she was there. I got up to take the steaks off and noticed one of my shoe laces was untied. The blood had crept to the top of the steaks and ran down onto the coals, hissing smoke. I fumbled with the grill, holding two plates, a spatula, and a beer, sat back down and drank.
"You know, the more I think about it, the more I don't understand. I always thought I had it so clear, he wanted the space. Hell, you know my father never cared for either one of us."
I watched Heidi cut into her ribeye. "The awkwardness of never knowing what to do around him. Anything but the same old tired, familiar, sentimentality that always seemed to drive us further apart."
"It wasn't your fault." Heidi put down her knife and fork. "I just wish there were something I could do." She sighed and rolled a mushroom around her plate.
"Heidi, he mailed me a fucking letter, an impersonal Goddamned letter like you'd mail--shit, I don't know who." I turned my fork, looking at the thin line of red in the steak.
"Sure as hell not your son."
"Maybe you and Scott can work it out."
"Yea right. If he can slow down his life long enough to deal with this."
"You know he'll show."
"You shouldn't have to talk your brother into coming to your father's funeral." Heidi shucked an ear of corn and bent it almost double before it finally gave way and popped in two. I took half, "Scott always tries to leave some damn impression and it's never any good. He tries to push himself so far from where he came from-- from me and Dad. That's why the bastard went to school at Swarthmore. That's why he went to Italy last semester. To get as far from the South as he could go."
"You don't know that." Heidi pulled loose a hair of corn stuck between her teeth, and draped it over the side of her plate.
"Heidi, he told me that. He said he'd never be like dad was, but I don't care how many trips he takes or how many bartenders know him by name; he can't escape the fact that he's his father's son."
Heidi looked up from her plate, "Aren't you taking this a bit far, I mean, isn't that what you are?"
"I don't know what I am. Except tired."
We sat there silent for a while. I went back to looking at the stars. At some point the tears came and Heidi took me to bed, kissed me good night like my mom used to, and said it would be all right. I kept thinking of going back to my dad's house and cleaning out all the stuff. What to keep, what to throw away, what was it all worth?
I dreamt about my father's world of neon lights and bourbon. All the bars he visited became my own. His drunken breath kissed me good night and his typewriter clicked and clicked with stories he always talked about, but I never saw. I heard whispered arguments I wasn't supposed to, front doors closing quietly at night and every cracked street and cold wet manhole cover glistened with new rain, and I woke up, having thrown the covers on the floor.
Downstairs my fingers drummed the counter; I wondered why I didn't feel guilty. I pulled apart my father's letter, his script a choppy broken print. In the faint light from the moon outside I saw that he actually had written the letter on the back of his Christmas shopping list. There was my charcoal gray sweater written out with the words "specialty store" beside it, and Scott's daily planner he wrote me about with the single word "nice." Heidi was there, and Uncle Hal, even Mom though she'd been dead three years. I tried to think what she'd do, but she'd given up on Dad after the divorce. She said Dad was nothing but an unemotional shell that wrote stories to avoid the rest of the family. I asked her once after dinner what his stories were like. She was washing the dishes and I sat on the counter swinging my legs.
"Well," she'd said, "I remember one he wrote about and old couple who went to a restaurant once a week and always got the same table. The old man made his wife sit facing the back and he always excused himself right after they finished their salad to go to the bathroom." She'd paused and put down the dish she was drying, "Only, he never went to the bathroom, he always went to the bar and drank a double scotch in the time it would take to go to the bathroom."
"What happened?"
"The woman came in one week alone, the old man had died. Your father always has an annoying habit of killing his good characters and the stories always seem to die with them."
My mother's voice was clear in my head, but I stood half naked in the middle of my kitchen, holding my father's last words and I couldn't even remember what his voice had sounded like. The more I tried to remember the more I heard nothing at all. I leaned on the butcher's block and flattened out my father's letter. Reading it again didn't make it any clearer.
"Dear Eric" it began. I stopped there. In my whole life my father never said hello or goodbye with shallow salutations. He always said words should never be wasted. I read over the creases in the paper ending on the words, "I love you."
I thought of my dad, the polyester salesman. I never knew him as anything more. He was constantly going somewhere when I lived at home. At nights when I was a kid, me and my brother listened to the planes overhead and tried to guess which one our father was in; little red and white lights blinking in a deliberate arc away from us. He was a salesman, he took one too many flights, sat in one too many airport bars, and said goodbye to me any my brother one too many times with hard hugs that scratched while I grabbed at his polyester tie, never wanting to let go.
My stomach felt like it did when I was a kid waiting for Saturday morning cartoons to come on, hating our TV because you had to adjust the picture all the time. It was always cold in our house and I had those pajamas with plastic feet that slid on the hardwood floors. My brother and I would slide Saturdays until lunch when Mom made us get dressed. We had peanut butter and banana sandwiches with mayonnaise and we threw little pieces of banana at each other. I folded the letter my father gave me and put it next to the Handi-wrap in a kitchen drawer.
goodnight 5.13.98
