The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (3 page)

At ten after seven he filled with joy as she began to stack things and put them away in the metal desk’s drawers, wrapped a light silk scarf around her neck, put the last of a packet of crackers in her mouth and threw away their plastic wrapping along with the lettuce and the wax paper. She mouthed something to herself as she inventoried the contents of her oversized purse, she pulled the ball chain of the iconic green-cased lamp, she stood and beamed at him briefly.

She walked ahead of him to the elevator; she beat him at pressing the button that would bring them to the lobby and out of the building. He was to follow her in his car to a restaurant she knew. She was a terrible driver, and he
watched as she failed to signal, changed lanes without reason, drove too close to people, honked at red lights. Her slender wrist emerged and withdrew from the driver’s side window when she flicked her cigarette.

She had chosen a soul-food place with a wooden front porch and chairs that rocked and strings of heavy white bulbs that crisscrossed over the tables. She insisted on sitting outside, though the night was certainly not warm and nothing like the wet, dense Southern heat that the restaurant’s ambiance implied so heavy-handedly and that my father knew and my mother didn’t. She talked and listened with a rare balance and got gravy all over her face. When my father proffered his neatly folded handkerchief, she seemed touched by a gesture so old-fashioned, and took it gladly.

What was said? These are the details my father strains more to recall. She told him about her life and he told her his. Her father was a lawyer; her father was a drunk; she had found her brilliant older sister dead by her own brilliant hands when she was seventeen. Before college she lived in Yosemite for a while, cleaning cabins, swimming naked, taking and posing for photographs that later would go into an album titled
THE FUN CLUB
.

By the end of the meal they were both sufficiently drunk, she hooting and clapping her hand over her mouth as if in shock, he cackling and telling stories with his hands, using forks and knives as props. He insisted on driving her home and laughed at the way she stuck her head out the window like a dog, happy to feel air on her booze-warm face. He thought her somehow more
beautiful red nosed and slightly sloppy. To his amazement, she invited him in.

After a nasty incident in which my father made the mistake of sowing one last wild oat with a secretary from the floor below who called him “dear,” my mother did not return his desperate answering machine messages, did not look at him in the break room, and certainly did not express thanks for the books and flowers he left at her house. But for reasons my father can’t supply, she finally gave in and then it seemed they were together for better or worse. As beautiful as she was, as hungry as she was, my mother had reached a point similar to my father’s at which she looked around and realized she’d had enough fun. After only four months, they leased an apartment together. She committed herself to domestic life, cooking terrible dinners, painting flea-market purchases yellows and blues, adding art to the walls of the absurdly long Victorian hallway to make it seem less like the brothel it once was. They bought a Siamese cat who was pretty thoroughly unpleasant to be around and made a habit of clinging to the walls and hissing, who is still alive somehow, and whom my father has always insisted he loves.

When she became pregnant six months later, my father, who figured he had missed the paternal boat, was ecstatic. He took many photographs of her belly growing rounder in the bathtub, on the plastic chaise longues set up on the roof of their apartment. In these pictures she looks both
happy and thirsty, pretending not to smile; the city behind her winks in the sunlight, as if in on the joke.

Like so many parents, mine wanted to create for me the life they never had and began scouting for a quieter place to plant themselves. Having just inherited a neat sum of money from the death my grandfather, they were able to finance the small house in the small town bisected by a river of the San Francisco Bay where I would live and my mother would die.

T
he day following James and Jackson’s unknowing suggestions toward a place where I could reach my mother, I woke early, stepping over the gnarled oak branches and cracks in the sidewalk, although my mother was dead and had no back to break. I quietly opened my front door, ran a bath, used the soap bar of my father’s that left my skin dry and pine scented, braided my hair, listened to the snaps and crackles of my cereal, and packed my mother’s dilapidated messenger bag. The walkie-talkies went in the safest pocket. Next, my father’s fishing pole, poking awkwardly out from beneath the left flap, a roll of tinfoil, and two silver capes James and Jackson had left on my bedroom floor. I remember feeling, then, a rare sense of faith and control derived from both the arranged materials and the magic the boys’ sleep had produced.

James and Jackson had only just woken when I crawled back in their window. Already, Jackson, whose mother liked to say would have gray hairs before she did, was rubbing
his eyes and sighing as he resurveyed James’s damage to the circus, demanding when, precisely, his little brother had witnessed a monster at a circus.

The astronaut clock that made satisfying rocket noises on the hour read ten fifteen. By eleven thirty, we were pink faced and moist, trudging down the tracks of the railroad that hadn’t run in years.

Jackson and I walked ahead of James, him lagging behind to poke dead birds and using a found stick as a cane. I did not share my inspiration with Jackson, and he didn’t ask after my strange quiet that day. I slowed my pace as we approached it, and the chalky dust rose around my ankles. I had seen it two weeks before, when my father’s car had started making unsettling pinging noises as we crossed the freeway overpass. He broke into his strange brand of expletives (“Well I could just shit” is one I’ve never been able to explain); I got out of the car to witness the excitement and dramatics, and happened to look down at what majesty the freeway carried us over.

The abandoned railroad trestle I’d seen from safety above now stood in front of us, its up-close reality leaning in too many directions in too many places. The planks were not placed evenly, some had fallen, and the guardrails on either side clung grimly to their name, bending as if to meet the river halfway in compromise. A man slept at the edge of the water, ten feet below us, on a pillow of grocery store bags.

I offered James and Jackson their capes and motioned for them to sit down, placed the contents of my bag in a
neat row, and asked Jackson to fasten one walkie-talkie as bait to the fishing line. Next, we tore three large pieces of tinfoil off the roll and set about constructing three crowns. I had no good reason for this, except the hope that it would cast us as more regal, more deserving, more capable of conducting electricity through our small bodies.

We held hands and assumed our positions against one of the rails; I delivered instructions as they stood and gaped at the filthy river. Above us, the highway made the sounds it does, whisking people away and bringing them back.

The fishing pole was too heavy for James on his own, so Jackson helped him lean the middle of it through the second rung of the guardrail. As the fishing line descended, it jerked with the weight of the walkie-talkie radio. James remained a king in his crown, noble and devoted to the good of his country.

At my count, Jackson and I began to sing. Although Jackson didn’t know the implications of this song, I did. Knew them in every part of my breastless, motherless body. As verse moved to chorus, I became louder and more desperate, pressing my lips to the blue plastic. I sang like my father while he tenderly washed brick red plates and worn wooden spoons. It was an old Irish folk song he had taught us, that my mother’s Irish uncles had taught her; because it was about a woman named Mollie, I understood it as written for my mother. The song is about a faraway city and a dead woman, once beloved, who died suddenly, still haunts the streets with a wheelbarrow full of mussels for sale. My father loved it for obvious reasons.

When the song was over, I pressed my ear to the radio, hoping for some sort of aquatic transmission from the ghost I was singing for. Jackson and I took turns listening. I paced up and down the bridge, hoping ghosts got reception three steps northwest. They didn’t.

At five thirty, we stood where we’d started, silent. Even James was disappointed, though he couldn’t tell why. He was the first to step down from the throne, then me, then Jackson.

The crowns bobbed as the river slowly pulled them past the homeless man, who had switched his face away from the bottles of urine.

T
heir father’s face is clear in my mind from the photographs that surfaced once Jackson and James were “old enough,” but I do not recollect any of the times he showed up on our street to smile and squint at James and Jackson through his thick Buddy Holly–esque glasses.

The pictures of Thomas are of a birdlike man dressed in ill-fitting suits, thin ties, and sharply angled dress shoes. He looks both embarrassed by and friendly toward the camera, and seems always to be leaning: it’s like all the objects of the world constantly presented themselves to him in support. The sun often in his blue eyes, which are so light they seem almost diaphanous. He has the slight smile of a person who is in on a joke you are not.

Jackson later put up a photo of him in our apartment. It came not out of a sentimental place or an effort to miss someone he barely knew, but rather a black humor that most found disturbing but I, as someone who was also parentally ghosted, found hilarious. In it, Thomas is nearly
literally dancing on a grave. The background is a Confederate cemetery he stopped by on a road trip at twenty-two or so; he has his hands out on either side of him, a bottle of beer dangling somehow from between the middle and index fingers of his left hand. His right hand is four inches higher, his feet placed one in front of the other. The photo is taken from the back, and the wings of his coat indicate motion; he doesn’t know there’s a picture being taken, but his face is turned just enough to indicate he is smiling.

Jackson had it blown up to a 14-by-16 and hung it between the two windows we frequently kept open despite the weather. The enlargement resulted in a graininess, and friends or acquaintances visiting our apartment for the first time liked to cluck their tongues and remark how striking it was, sometimes even going so far as to assume it was this writer or that artist captured by such and such a photographer. On one occasion, when the asker was particularly thoughtful and mistakenly convinced of her cultural awareness, when she went so far as to insist she knew the image of this obscure poet walking on a graveyard and had seen it in a gallery in London, Jackson and I looked at each other and laughed, inclusively, at length. When we finally calmed down enough to explain that the washed-out image was no poet but rather just the long-dead, drug-addled father of Jackson here, no one thought it was very funny. Many people don’t understand, I suppose, that while respecting the dead is important, it’s not always easy and it’s generally pretty boring.