Onion Songs (29 page)

28.
 
events

One of the things John remembers most about parenting is weekend trips to the emergency room. Illnesses and mishaps occurred almost invariably on weekends, and there quickly grew an atmosphere of desperation about it. His son panicked so he and his wife panicked as well.

He saw his neighbors visit the emergency room with their young daughter regularly for months.

Then one day they returned without her. The couple was quiet and had few friends in the area, so he never found out what really happened during those crucial moments of their last trip. Eventually they had another child: dark-haired, beautiful, and they never let her out of their sight.

29.
  
events

Every year or so there would be reports of a rabid dog on the edge of town. No one could specify the location or witnesses. A friend of a friend (for enemies keep their peace). Children were said to have been killed. No surprise there, John thought—children are always said to have been killed.

During these periods the whole town complains of a lack of sleep.
Mothers and fathers scream over small tardies. Out on the lawns the dogs slink behind bushes and will not come out.

“
This is the year of the monster,” is the oft-repeated whisper. “There is nothing we can do. It’s the worst we can imagine.”

There are always new babies the next spring as the town provides more food for its fear.

30.

CHAOS CARD

You just never know.
Random horror can occur at any time. One bad day and your life is changed forever. A brake goes out, a cable slips, an air bubble travels to the brain. Instant and irrevocable adventure happens. Disaster happens. Death happens. Weather is everywhere. The weather of high winds. The weather of torrential rain. The weather of a shower of bullets from scattered drive-bys. The virus secret in the heart. The resentment secret in a triggerman’s brain. It does not matter how good or bad the deal, how just or unjust, whether you say your prayers or deny the meaning in everything. It will come.

If you could only accept that, you might plan your life accordingly.

31.
   
events

All the moments collected, remembered, photographed, written down, passed from family member to family member still couldn’t explain the death of his child. All these happy faces and games completed, movies watched and parties attended, say nothing, nothing, about why the child decides one day to erase it all, to make sure no more moments come, except those of his parents’ grief, sorrow, and baffled wonder. Moment by moment John peruses the few photographs of his son’s life, each made all the more precious because of their scarcity: limited editions.

Small numbers of anything, he had discovered, will break the heart.
Ask any grieving father in the final afternoons of his life.

32.
  
events

The best moment of his life was the moment his son was born. It was more of a miracle than he could have imagined—one minute it is he and his wife, and the next minute they are a family of three. Almost immediately the baby showed signs of a distinct personality and all John could think was
where did this child come from
? It was as if fairies had spirited the child into their lives.

For every one of his son
’s birthdays John tried to relive that miraculous moment. One of the worst aspects of his son’s death was the sense that he had been robbed of that special moment.

But as John grew older, he wondered if at the moment of his own death he would at last be able to recreate the miracle once again.

33.
  
events

Beginning a year after his son’s death he saw a therapist for nine or ten months. This man was quiet and thoughtfully sad, and John thought to ask him what had ever happened to him to make him this way, but it would have meant crossing too many boundaries to do so.

Instead he went week after week and counted memories with the man:
1) the birth photograph, 2) the boy lying before the birthday record player, wagging a socked foot through the air in time with tunes too old for him, 3) the boy standing on his father’s feet as they danced as if some dream of princess and instructor.

John was thankful for the brevity of these appointments, reassured that there would be no time to reach the end of his pitifully small count.

34.
 
dreams

The world was always in motion. This wasn’t easy to recognize, as one’s own unsteadiness tended to cancel out the roll and wave of the world. But John knew that if you were quiet enough, and held yourself steady, and tried to think of nothing, it made itself obvious to you: the up and down of streets and ground, how the houses moved in and out of focus, the hesitant outlines of other people’s faces, the way colors wandered out of lines.

Choosing one single moment to remain steady was an impossibility.
You could not hold the world. At best, you might resist the dizziness resulting from all this shaking.

But these are things perhaps only the dead lie still enough to know.

35.
  
events

John did not date for two years after his wife died. She’d been taken in a car accident, and John felt he no longer had enough pieces to play with. Then, gradually, he built up enough confidence to at least speak to one of the women at work, to share a confidence or two, to offer help, to trade phone numbers. On their first date she spent the entire evening talking about people he did not know and their various adventures with cars, pets, and home repairs. On their second date she wanted to have sex immediately, then acted as if they had been dating for years. He concluded from this experience that the norm now was a streamlined and truncated courtship—people lived their lives with too many missing cards. He would not date again for almost a year.

36.
  
behaviors

After she was gone John let things go. Dirty dishes gathered in the sink, half-eaten food waited on the table, garbage stood in the corner, all murmuring their condolences.

It was an attempt, he realized, to stay
in the moment: if he kept the remnants of their last meal on the table perhaps the next—the cleaning her out of his life—might not occur.

But the flies came and the stench, for stalled time eventually rots, and cannot be kept.

37.
  
dreams

After John’s wife died he often found himself looking at very young women. Other people might find this perverse but he himself did not think it was. He supposed it did not embarrass him because he and his wife had never had a daughter.

In any case, he wasn
’t sure if there was anything sexual in his interest. His appeared to be more of an aesthetic concern. There was a freshness in them, a lack of cynicism, or so he thought. He was self-aware enough to know this was an idealistic view, but no matter. It made him feel better just to see all these beautiful young women about in the world.

38.
 
behaviors

For two years after his wife died John was but sporadically employed, taking odd jobs for odd money. Stocking shelves, inventory, yard work, but in the spring it was painting, which he enjoyed. So time consuming to make it right, but he always felt the world had been renewed with a reservoir of completely fresh moments.

Despite his advancing years he was always the new guy on these jobs. And
, after an initial display of deference, his co-workers must have decided he knew nothing, and treated him like a kid.

That was how he wanted it. If he could still take advice from a 20
-year-old the world might still be a well of possibility.

39.
  
events

John had managed to avoid crime most of his life, until he was forty, when a series of break-ins left him without a TV or stereo. He replaced them immediately, left the new boxes out in his trash, a signal to the thief that he was ripe for the picking again.

This relationship lasted off and on for over a year, with the usual swings of attention and inattention, disappointment and anticipation that pester most relationships.
Not a lover exactly, but John’s own private Santa Claus, a treat always left out to please and bring an unexpected chuckle.

40.
 
dreams

When looking through old photo albums he’d accumulated during his lifetime, John was annoyed by how many photographs displayed people he did not recognize, places he was sure he’d never been, or even images that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. He knew it was possible to take an unrecognizable photograph—his photography skills had always been less than average—but what would possess him to display such photographs? Obviously they had had some meaning for him at some time, but that meaning was long gone.

Which was the most distressing thing, he supposed.
How meaning could just slip away, seemingly at random, almost as fast as you might acquire it.

Perhaps his dead wife had taken the photos.
But why hadn’t he noticed them before? He hadn’t been paying attention. He had lost his memory of these photos. Little by little he had lost meaning. He had lost his wife.

41.
  
philosophies

He’d discovered that when life grew dull he could experiment with being his opposite. A teetotaller, he became a heavy drinker. Quiet around women, he became the ultimate charmer. Passive and reticent, he became forceful and brave. He might maintain the transformation only for a few days, sometimes only for a few hours. But each time he managed to retain at least a ghost of the person he’d pretended to be. For certainly these were all people he could have been, given the right circumstances. Chance could make you dull and fearful, or interested and competent. He believed we should have more control than that over our personalities, but so often we did not. Luck of the draw. Sometimes late at night he could hear the faint sound of the world shuffling, reshuffling, riffling the deck.

42.
 
behaviors

John had a sister who would forever define the best and worst of the female sex for him. A year younger, she had always been more mature. When they were teenagers she let him watch her get dressed so that “He would know the order that a woman’s clothes went on.” It was another year before he fully understood what she had been talking about.

They drew apart in their middle years.
He never forgave her for taking up smoking. She drank too much, dressed immodestly. The last time he saw her was after his wife died and following the end of her third marriage, and it shocked him how much she looked like their mother.