Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (12 page)

~

First I had a milk shake. Then I went to bed. Then I got back up. I had raisin toast. Then I got a yogurt and stuck a spoon in it. I listened for any sounds from the bedroom.

~

I am never going to leave my wife.

My
DAD
was born in 1929. My mom was born in 1936. In 1956, Dad and Mom got married. I was born in 1959. In 1965, Dad and Mom got a divorce. In 1971, Dad married another woman. In 1974, he had a daughter from this other woman. In 1976, he had a second daughter from her. In 1993, Dad phoned me to see if I wanted to go for coffee.

~

Most of the time you couldn’t see my sister’s eyes because of her glasses. She had those glasses that look like butterflies.

~

Walking over to the mall, he was talking about Kyle.

“You know why Kyle is my friend, Daddy?” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because I like his name.”

~

I think eventually, for whatever reason, you have to give up everything. You have to say, I am not this and I am not that. Then, after that, you can sit back and wait to see what happens.

T
HIS
GOES
way back to the time Dad bought me a steak at a steak house. Back, even, before that. Before I was born. To the year Dad was in England. Or before that even, to the year my grandpa was in the war.

~

Tutti was with Sammy. We were at the beach. I was in the cottage and I could see Tutti out on the beach, sitting in the sand with Sammy. In a week I would be back at work. The phone rang. It was my sister. “We need the recipe for peach bars,” she said. I decided to have some toast.

~

My grandma and grandpa had a little room at the end of the hall where they stored all their stuff. They’re both dead now.

We’ve always had lockers to put our stuff in. In every apartment we’ve ever had, Tutti and I have always had a locker.

I like to go down and stand in the middle of the locker and look at the stuff we have.

~

Some nights I can’t sleep, so I turn on the light. I lie on my back and look up at the ceiling. The fan is on.

~

When Tutti was pregnant, she was always hot. She would lie on top of the blankets with her belly in the air. She could only sleep on her back. I would lie on my side and watch her sleep. I could see her belly sticking up in the air from the light coming in through the window.

~

I woke up. My eyes felt swollen. I lay there for a while.

I swung my feet over the edge of the bed. My eyes still felt swollen. The bottoms of my feet hurt. I stood up. I stood there for a while, feeling my hair. I was trying to figure out how much work it was going to take to fix my hair. I went downstairs.

I opened the fridge. I stood there, leaning on the fridge door, with my forehead against the freezer, looking down at my legs, how the hair on my legs got lit up by the light in the refrigerator. Ever since then the refrigerator light always makes me think of eternity.

~

There’s a guy across the road from us who drives a Cadillac. He’s bald and he comes out onto his front porch mornings to smoke cigarettes. Sometimes his son comes out with him. His son must be eighteen years old. He has long, blond hair, which is very beautiful, and he always wears a baseball cap. You can see that the world is just opening up for him and he has sworn never to be bald like his father.

~

I think when Dad and Mom got married they were making a promise to God. We kids were God. Mom’s handwriting was God. Dad’s need for the perfect hardboiled egg was God. These were the things that were God.

~

What I say is, “We’ll get it done. Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get it done.”

Tutti says, “No, we won’t. We won’t get it done. It won’t get done.”

This is early in the morning. Tutti’s hair is out all over the place. She goes on saying this thing about nothing ever getting done.

She says, “Nothing ever gets done.”

This is what she did when she first got out of bed this morning. She went into the living room and looked at the windows. She kept standing there in the living room, looking at the windows. Finally, she came into the kitchen and got one of the brown vinyl chairs and dragged it into the living room.

Where I was is, I was in the kitchen. I was in there with Sammy, trying to get him to eat his cereal. He had some cereal in a bowl. I was trying to get him to eat the cereal. He kept getting up. He was down on the floor, eating the cereal, and what he was doing was, he kept getting up. He kept taking a mouthful of cereal and then he would get up.

I was saying, “He keeps getting up.”

This is what I was saying to Tutti.

Tutti was in the living room, standing on the brown vinyl chair, hanging curtains, and I was calling out to her, “He keeps getting up! Why does he do that? Why can’t he just sit down and eat his cereal?”

I was drinking my coffee, and the thing is, I could feel how bad my hair was. I could feel that my hair was as bad as Tutti’s hair.

I kept telling Sammy to sit down, to stay sitting on the floor. I said, “You’re not supposed to get up every time you have a mouthful of cereal. You’re supposed to stay sitting down.”

Meanwhile, what I am trying to do is, I am trying to drink my coffee. I keep pushing on my hair, trying to get it to look less bad.

I say to Sammy, “Sit down and eat your cereal.”

“I need it, Daddy,” Sammy says.

“Need what?” I say.

Sammy stands there in his pj’s with the built-in slippers. He keeps standing there looking at me.

The thing is, I know what he wants.

So what I say is, I say, “No, you are not having my chair.”

I phone the guy up. I get him on the phone. I hear his voice. It’s a thing where you try to get as close to dead as possible and then come back at the very last minute.

~

I could hear the kids outside, screaming in the street, and this would wake me up long enough to get all the pillows moved around, so that more or less of them were scrunched up under my belly. I could hear Tutti downstairs making things. Sweaters or brownies or dinner or phone calls. She was always in the middle of making something. Sometimes I would go downstairs and stand in the kitchen doorway for a while, watching Tutti, and I could feel where my hair was sticking out. Then I would go upstairs and get back into bed. Getting into bed felt like falling off a cliff, with the feeling in your chest of knowing you are never going to land. It made me want to cry. I cried when I saw the clock radio, or when I lay on my back looking at the little bumps on the ceiling where the guy who lived here before me had stuccoed the ceiling with one of those little sponges you can get.

W
E’RE
AT
the mall with the indoor amusement park.

I say to Sammy, “Do you need to pee?”

“No,” he says.

“I have to pee,” I say. “Do you want to come and pee with me?”

“No,” he says.

“If you need to pee,” I say, “you tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

~

When we get over to Grandma’s house, Grandma’s not ready yet. She’s not dressed.

“Can I eat the rest of your apple?” I ask Sammy. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, with the seat tipped back and my eyes closed and I can hear the rain coming down on the roof of the car.

“Sure,” Sammy says. He’s in the backseat, sucking his thumb. We’re waiting for Grandma to come out and get in the car.

We go over to the muffin shop and have our muffins.

After we leave the muffin shop, Sammy gets in the car. It’s raining on me and Grandma. Sammy wants to get all the snaps on his raincoat undone.

“Hurry up,” I say. I stand out in the rain, with Grandma standing beside me. Grandma doesn’t seem to mind all the rain that is hitting her on the head. We stand there watching Sammy pull his snaps apart through the rain on the window. When he has all his snaps pulled apart he says he doesn’t want to put his seat belt on.

“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” I say. “We’re getting wet out here.”

I love Sammy. I love him so much it is all I can think about sometimes.

Every five seconds the windshield wipers sweep across the windshield and things get clear again for a moment.

~

One morning I was eating my bowl of Rice Krispies in the backyard. I imagined myself telling people: I was eating my breakfast in the backyard. I imagined various people I was saying this to.

In a future where I had always had breakfast in the backyard, I was sometimes wearing my terry-cloth bathrobe. I would sometimes have the paper in one hand and my coffee in the other.

Years ago, there was only one twenty-four-hour gas station anywhere near where we lived, and this station was south of us. We would always be somewhere north and running out of gas.

I can see my mom’s hair all astray with the gray hairs standing out against the black. She is crying out the front windshield. It is always some deserted place.

Late at night. We are going like hell, trying to get to the twenty-four-hour gas station. Mom is mumbling at the windshield. Us kids are in the back, looking at her hair.

~

We drove to three or four restaurants that night.

I might leave Tutti. I might go to Africa. I might sail, or I might fly.

It’s not Tutti I’m leaving. It’s the phone calls. Coco calls. Says, “Is Tutti there?”

~

I did sit-ups for a while. I don’t have any willpower. I tried watching TV. I would do sit-ups first thing in the morning, or late at night. Nothing worked.

~

Tutti comes down from the cottage, wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts and her bra. There’s no one up here. It’s the middle of the week. There’s one guy, a young guy, up at number 413, but he sleeps all day. Then, around 5:30 in the afternoon, he stumbles down onto the beach and just lies there for a while, squinting up at the sky. My dog, Fido, tried to pee on him once. Fido must have thought he was a log. Fido tries to pee on every log on the beach. We come up for a week every summer and Fido loves to find the old logs he peed on last year. That’s Fido, though. If I had to describe Fido in one sentence…But then, why would I want to? Why would you ever want to describe someone in one sentence? I would want a whole book for Fido. I would insist on a whole book.

~

On my way home from work, I get going the wrong way on a one-way street. I go up onto the curb trying to get the car turned around as fast as I can. I can hear the hubcap of the front wheel bumping against the curb.

At work , earlier, Tutti called me on the phone. “Do you want to talk to Sammy?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Is there something you needed to tell me? Because I’m really busy here. It’s busy.”

“Sammy wants to talk to you. Hold on a minute.”

Sammy gets on the phone.

“Sammy?” I say. “Sammy? Are you there?”

The most Sammy will do on the phone is tell jokes no one understands. Then he laughs this laugh he’s picked up somewhere. I don’t know where he would have picked up that laugh.

~

I went out into the hall and stood outside Sammy’s door, trying to hear what he was saying. He was trying to tell somebody something, but I couldn’t understand the words he was saying.

I went downstairs to put my bike in the garage. I couldn’t get it in because of the way Tutti had parked the car.

“What is he saying in there?” Tutti said when I came back up to bed.

“I don’t know,” I told her.

~

At work, there is this door everyone is supposed to make sure stays closed so that people who don’t work at the library cannot get in.

T
HE
WIND
picked up the girl’s hair, then set it back down.

All the roses died that winter.

Using her fingers, she mounded up the soil. The following spring she unmounded the soil and waited. Every morning she went to the window and saw a different sky. There are limits imposed on your view of the sky that don’t seem logical. The woman looked out the window and said, “Damn.”

The next day she was up in the tree, at the top of the tree. It was as if she were seeing some edge of something, something that no one else had seen.

~

Sammy gets to ride the next-door neighbor, Veralynn’s, Batman Bigwheel. He can hardly get the pedals to go around. Veralynn is smaller than Sammy and she can get the Batman Bigwheel airborne coming off the curb in front of her house. When Veralynn’s daddy takes Veralynn in for dinner, Sammy struggles up the driveway on his tricycle and parks it in the garage. He parks it in the middle of the garage. He parks it so carefully, I don’t have the heart to move it.

~

I used to say goodbye to everything. I would run down from the cottage in my bare feet and yell, “Goodbye lake! Goodbye beach!” I would stand there in the wind, with the breeze coming off the lake, getting in my hair. “Goodbye sand! Goodbye pebbles! Goodbye sticks! Goodbye trees!” Then I would walk back up to the cottage slowly, my toes curling in the sand, saying goodbye to things as I went along.

Dad would drive us home from the beach and leave us standing in the driveway with our suitcases. Dad and Mom were divorced and Mom refused to speak to Dad. My sister and I would take our suitcases into the house and drop them on the floor. We would stand in the hall, watching, looking out the little front window, watching Dad back his car out of the driveway. Then I would go into my bedroom. There was a little space between the wall and the bed, and I would crawl into this little space. I would lie there on the floor, in this little space between the wall and the bed, and I would cry. I would cry so hard I thought I was going to break.