Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (2 page)

“You sound busy,” my father said.

“Just getting some work done,” I said.

We exchanged postcard versions of our last few weeks. I'm fine, Carrie's fine. He's fine, Lara's fine. I'd decided I would let him bring up the journal.

“Been writing,” he said.

“Here and there. Some days it comes, some days it doesn't.”

“I meant me,” he said. Then slowly he paddled through a summary of how he'd been writing stories since I sent him one of mine (I'd forgotten this), and of reading dozens of story collections, and then of some dream he had, then,
finally
, of having his story accepted for publication (and two others, forthcoming). He sounded chagrined by the whole thing. “I told them to publish it as Seth Moxley but lines must've gotten crossed,” he said. “Anyway, I'll put a copy in the mail today. If you get a chance to read it, I'd love to hear what you think.”

“What happened to scuba diving?” I asked.

“I still dive. Lara and I are going down to the Pennecamp next week.”

“Right, but—writing's not some hobby you just dabble in, Dad. It's not like scuba diving.”

“I didn't say it was. You're the one who brought up diving.” He inhaled deeply. “Why do you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“Make everything so damn difficult. I had to drink two glasses of wine before I called, just to relax. You were such an easygoing kid, you know that? Your mom used to call you Placido. I'd wake up panicked in the middle of the night and run to check on you, because you didn't make any noise.”

“Maybe she was talking about the opera singer,” I said.

Pause, a silent up-grinding of gears. “You don't remember much about your mother, do you?”

“A few things,” I said.

“Her voice?”

“Not really.”

“She had a terrific voice.”

I didn't listen to much after that. Not because I'd already heard it, though I had—I wanted to collect a few things I remembered about her, instead of listening to his version again. Not facts or adjectives or secondhand details, but . . . qualities. Spliced-together images I could summon without words: her reaching without looking to take my hand in the street, the pockmarks on her wrist from the pins inserted when she broke her arm, her laughing, her crying, her warmth muted, her gone, dissolving room-by-room from our house. I'd never been able to write about her, not expressly. Whenever I tried, she emerged all white-robed and beatific, floating around, dispensing wisdom, laying doomed hands on me and everyone. Writing about her was imperfect remembering; it felt like a second death. I was far happier writing about fathers making sons help drag a deer to the roadside, saying, “Look into them fogged-up eyes. Now that's death, boy.”

“She always had big plans for you,” my father was saying. It was something he often said. I never asked him to be more specific.

It occurs to me that I'm breaking two of Hodgett's laws here. Never write about writing, and Never dramatize phone conversations. Put characters in the same room, he always said. See what they do when they can't hang up. “We'd love to see Carrie again,” my father said after a while. “Any chance you'll be home for Christmas?”

Christmas was two months away. “We'll try,” I told him.

After hanging up, I returned to my students' paragraphs, happy to marinate for a while in their simple insight.
My room is the special place
, Monica Mendez wrote.
Everywhere around me are shelfs of my memory things
.

I
magine a time for your characters, Hodgett used to say, when things might have turned out differently. Find the moment a choice was made that made other choices impossible. Readers like to see characters making choices.

She died in May. A week after the funeral, my father drives me and three friends to a theme park called Boardwalk and Baseball. He probably hopes it'll distract us for a few hours. All day long my friends and I ride roller coasters, take swings in the batting cage, eat hot dogs. I toss a Ping-Pong ball into a milk bottle and win a T-shirt. I can't even remember what kind of T-shirt it was, but I remember my glee after winning it.

My father follows us around and sits on a bench while we wait in line. He must be feeling pretty ruined but his son is doing just fine. His son is running from ride to ride, laughing it up with his friends. In fact, he hasn't thought about his mom once since they passed through the turnstiles.

My father is wearing sunglasses, to help with his allergies, he says. His sleeves are damp. I think he's been crying. “Having fun?” he keeps asking me.

I am, clearly I am. Sure, my mom died a week ago, but I just won a new T-shirt and my father gave each of us twenty dollars and the line to the Viper is really short and the sun is shining and I think we saw the girl from
Who's the Boss?
, or someone who looks a lot like her, in line at the popcorn cart.

I cringe when I remember this day. I want to revise everything. I want to come down with food poisoning, or lose a couple of fingers on the Raptor, something to mar the flawless good time I was having. Now I have to mar it in memory, I have to remember it with a black line through it.

“I'm glad you had fun,” my father says on the drive home.

Our house is waiting for us when we get back. The failing spider plants on the front porch, the powder-blue envelopes in the mailbox.

N
ovember was a smear. Morning after morning I tried writing but instead played Etch-a-Sketch for two hours. I wrote a sentence. I waited. I stood up and walked around, thinking about the sentence. I leaned over the kitchen sink and ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers. I sat at my desk and stared at the sentence. I deleted it and wrote a different sentence. I returned to the kitchen and ate a handful of baby carrots. I began wondering about the carrots, so I dialed the toll-free number on the bag and spoke to a woman in Bakersfield, California.

“I would like to know where baby carrots come from,” I said.

“Would you like the long version or the short version?” the woman asked.

For the first time in days, I felt adequately tended to. “Both,” I said.

The short version: baby carrots are adult carrots cut into smaller pieces.

I returned to my desk, deleted my last sentence, and typed, “Babies are adults cut into smaller pieces.” I liked this. I knew it would make an outstanding story, one that would win trophies and change the way people thought about fathers and sons if only I could find another three hundred or so sentences to follow it. But where were they?

A
few weeks after my father sent me his first story, I received the winter issue of the
Longboat Quarterly
with a note:
Your father really wants to hear back from you about his story. He thinks you hated it. You didn't hate it, did you? XO, Lara
. No, Lara, I didn't. And I probably wouldn't hate this one, though I couldn't read past the title, “Blue Angels,” without succumbing to the urge to sidearm the journal under my sofa (it took me four tries). I already knew what it was about.

Later, I sat next to Carrie on the sofa while she read it. Have you ever watched someone read a story? Their expression is dim and tentative at the beginning, alternately surprised and bewildered during the middle, and serene at the end. At least Carrie's was then.

“Well,” she said when she was done. “How should we proceed?”

“Don't tell me. Just punch me in the abdomen. Hard.” I pulled up my shirt, closed my eyes, and waited. I heard Carrie close the journal, then felt it lightly smack against my stomach. I read the story in the tub. Suffice it to say, it wasn't what I expected.

As a kid, I was obsessed with fighter planes. Tomcats, Super Hornets, anything with wings and missiles. I thought the story was going to be about my father taking me to see the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's flight team. It wouldn't have been much of a story: miserable heat, planes doing stunts, me in the autograph line for an hour, getting sunburned, and falling asleep staring at five jets on a poster as we drove home.

The story is about a widowed father drinking too much and deciding he needs to clean the house. He goes from room to room dusting, scrubbing floors, throwing things away. The blue angels are a trio of antique porcelain dolls my mother held on to from childhood. The man throws them away, then regrets it as soon as he hears the garbage truck driving off. The story ends with father and son at the dump, staring across vast hillocks of trash, paralyzed.

I remembered the dump, hot syrup stench, blizzard of birds overhead. He told me it was important to see where our trash ended up.

When I finished, I was sad again, nostalgic, and wanting to call my father. Which I did after drying off. Carrie sat next to me on the sofa with her legs over mine. “What are you doing?” she asked. I dialed the number, waited, listened to his answering-machine greeting—
Fred and Lara can't believe we missed your call
—and then hung up.

“Have I ever told you about when I saw the Blue Angels?” I asked Carrie.

“I don't think so.”

“Well, get ready,” I said.

I
quit writing for a few weeks and went out into the world. I visited the airport, the beach, a fish camp, a cemetery, a sinkhole. I collected evidence, listened, tried to see past my impatience to the blood-radiant heart of things. I saw a man towing a woman on the handlebars of a beach cruiser. They were wearing sunglasses. They were poor. They were in love. I heard one woman say to another:
Everyone has a distinct scent, except me. Smell me, I don't have any scent.

At the cemetery where my mother was buried, I came upon an old man lying very still on the ground in front of a headstone. When I walked by, I read the twin inscription.
RUTH GOODINE 1920–1999, CHARLES GOODINE 1923–.
“Don't mind me,” the man said as I passed.

At my desk, I struggled to make something of this. I imagined what happened before and after. What moment made other moments impossible. He had come to the cemetery to practice for eternity. I could still picture him lying there in his gray suit, but the before and after were murky. Before, he'd been on a bus, or in a car, or a taxi. Afterward he would definitely go to . . . the supermarket to buy . . . lunch meat?

“A
nything worth saying,” Hodgett used to declare, “is unsayable. That's why we tell stories.”

I returned to the cemetery. I walked from one end to the other, from the granite cenotaphs to the unmarked wooden headstones. Then I walked into the mausoleum and found my mother's placard, second from the bottom. I had to kneel down to see it. Another of Hodgett's six laws: Never dramatize a funeral or a trip to the cemetery. Too melodramatic, too obvious. I sat against something called the Serenity Wall and watched visitors mill in and out. They looked more inconvenienced than sad. My father and I used to come here, but at some point we quit. Afterward we'd go to a diner and he would say, “Order anything you want, anything,” and I would order what I always ordered.

A woman with a camera asked if I could take her picture in front of her grandmother's placard. I said, “One, two, three, smile,” and snapped her picture.

When the woman left, I said some things to my mom, all melodramatic, all obvious. In the months before she died, she talked about death like it was a long trip she was taking. She would watch over me, she said, if they let her. “I'm going to miss you,” she said, which hadn't seemed strange until now. Sometimes I hoped she was watching me, but usually it was too terrible to imagine. “Here I am,” I told the placard. I don't know why. It felt good, so I said it again.

“Why don't you talk about your mom?” Carrie asked me after I told her about going to the cemetery.

“You mean in general, or right now?”

Carrie didn't say anything. She had remarkable tolerance for waiting.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Anything you tell me.”

I forced a laugh. “I thought you were about to say, ‘Anything you tell me is strictly confidential.' Like in therapy. Isn't that what they tell you in therapy?”

For some reason, I recalled my mother at the beach standing in the knee-deep water with her back to me. Her pants are wet to the waist and any deeper and her shirt will be soaked, too. I wondered why I needed to hoard this memory. Why did this simple static image seem like such a rare coin?

“Still waiting,” Carrie said.

M
y father published two more stories in November, both about a man whose wife is dying of cancer. He had a weakness for depicting dreams, long, overtly symbolic dreams, and I found that the stories themselves read like dreams, I suffered them like dreams, and after a while I forgot I was reading. Like my high-school band teacher used to tell us, “Your goal is to stop seeing the notes.” This never happened to me, every note was a seed I had to swallow, but now I saw what he meant.

Toward the end of the month, I was sick for a week. I canceled class and lay in bed, frantic with half-dreams. Carrie appeared, disappeared, reappeared. I picked up my father's stories at random and reread paragraphs out of order. I looked for repeated words, recurring details. One particular sentence called to me, from “Under the Light.”

That fall the trees stingily held on to their leaves
.

In my delirium, this sentence seemed to solve everything. I memorized it. I chanted it. I was the tree holding on to its leaves, but I couldn't let them go, because if I did I wouldn't have any more leaves. My father was waiting with a rake because that was his job, but I was being too stingy and weren't trees a lot like people?

I got better.

The morning I returned to class, Jacob Harvin from Prep Writing set a bag of Cheetos on my desk. “The machine gave me two by accident,” he said.