Florida

THE BIG HOUSE

THE TRANSACTIONS I WITNESSED at the other end of the lake from Uncle Billy’s, I didn’t tell Aunt Frances — or anyone — I kept them to myself. At the other end of the lake from Uncle Billy’s was Nonna’s big house, the one she was wheeled in, sent up and down in by the Otis with the spring gate — me in the Big House finally, my favorite house with the elevator I could drive! I was thirteen — at last! — and left to wander. Three floors, eleven bathrooms, and bedrooms, bedrooms, bedrooms; the sunroom was all window, shelved in marble, a color green as of weeds or of weedy, shallow water streaked darker in places with amphibious nesting. The sunroom overlooked the lake; plants grew all over the windows, greedy cut-leaf light-lovers. But it was not warm in the sunroom, the sunroom was like Uncle Billy’s house and cold. Nonna’s parrot Polly was singing in her cage. “I like ice cream, we all like” and Miss O’Boyle, miss nurse, was feeding the bird ice cream to make Nonna smile. Miss O’Boyle said, “Nonna looks happy,” but I thought Nonna only smiled to feel how cool the ice cream was against her long, split lips, how sweet. Miss O’Boyle said, “Next time you see them, you tell your Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy your nonna is just fine.”

I did. I said, “Nonna has never looked better,” but I did not tell anyone about Nonna eating off the same spoon as the parrot and soundlessly laughing. I didn’t want anyone in trouble if what I did with my grandmother was wrong, was in-grown like old Nonna herself, was overfull of intimacies of the sort I had known with Mother. “I’m in the tub,” Mother saying, “come and talk to me”—this easy we had been, and I knew Nonna’s body just as well. Mornings I saw the folds of skin that was her back when Miss O’Boyle hefted Nonna into a tub and washed her.

Miss O’Boyle told me, “You make it easy for Nonna when you are talking. Keep talking.”

I talked about Walter, who had followed my father and exhausted us so! So that, yes, I was glad, yes, relieved to be away from Mother and living in the Big House with Nonna. “Mother gave a lot away,” I told Nonna. The bulldog clock, the malachite eggs, the Christmas spoons and lusterware. Also clothes, clothes, clothes — some of them mine. These betrayals of my mother shamed me but not enough to keep quiet. I wanted to sleep on Nonna’s ironed sheets and eat rare chops with mint jelly. I told Nonna, “I never want to live with Mother again.”

Miss O’Boyle gave me Nonna’s hand to hold, so that I might kneel at the tub and speak close, “Thank you, Nonna. I promise I won’t lose it,” I said, but I was really like my mother and careless.

Nonna’s eyes blinked understanding, but mostly she looked straight ahead and grew light in our arms in the water and floated, a small, grandmotherly, sleeping-sored body. “See those bruises?” Miss O’Boyle said. “She needs to be turned, and at night, you could do it. You could help,” Miss O’Boyle said. “Nonna’d like that,” and Miss O’Boyle smiled stiffly at Nonna. “You like Alice to take care of you, don’t you,” she shouted.

But I didn’t take care, or at least not that I could remember did I help Nonna very much. I often slept in the other bed; the best I could do was be company, but Aunt Frances on the phone said, “You’re a big girl, now, Alice. You could help the nurses with Nonna.” I talked instead; I sat with Nonna in the sunroom and talked and talked. I twiddled the desk gifts, a crystal paperweight with the company’s insignia, a letter-opener and a magnifying glass, printed envelopes and stationery, and all of it from the company’s president, long dead but still alive, Nonna’s husband. (Just look in the foyer at the cane collection, the paintings of naked women.) The bench was his in the walk-in closet, where Miss O’Boyle dressed Nonna, and I made as if to help, wondering, did Nonna feel the pinch of it, her husband dead, when so much else hurt? Her back brace, her brassiere. I did help sometimes; I heard the intake of breath when we hooked her.

Him, him: Was it her husband she was thinking about when we strapped her in?

I lifted Nonna’s heavy foot to the footrest on the wheelchair and wrapped the heel loop, which sometimes cut, with toweling.

Again and again, Miss O’Boyle had found blood on clothes, yet Nonna would wear them, the day-suits that hurt. She got red in the face whenever Miss O’Boyle tucked a tasseled throw over her legs.

Head shaking No! against it, Nonna wanted to be dressed in the dresses she had always worn — in long, knit suits, faux-belted.

Please! Twisted Nonna’s face when Miss O’Boyle was readying Nonna for the morning. She wanted to be dressed for breakfast! She wanted raspberries fresh, like I was having, not mush. But Miss O’Boyle lifted Nonna’s hand from the egg cup and spoon-fed the patient boiled egg. “No one listens to me,” was what I saw Nonna saying. Using what parts of her body still moved — her eyes, her eyes especially, which were big and swarmy even without her glasses — she used her eyes to speak; she put out her trembling hands, saying No! to the bed jacket, No! But Miss O’Boyle insisted. She insisted on the sun in the late afternoon, and she wheeled Nonna in it to warm her battered legs.

The sun, I thought, shone through her, through Nonna’s hair, her nose, her hands. And in the glassy sweep of windows were birds. And, too, the flurry of her open desk — no matter not much used. Here was life! Correspondence cards, hatches full of envelopes, a folded sheet of stamps. The pencils I found were sharp, and there was lots of paper to draw on. Greasy lead, heat, the nearby TVs noise, and Miss O’Boyle saying Really! To it, not sounding surprised. Nonna was snoring softly. Soon the cook would bring us cookies, then dinner, then Polly the parrot and Nonna were spoon-fed dessert.

I didn’t tell anyone how I liked these afternoons, these nights.

Something else I never told Aunt Frances or Uncle Billy, how outside the Big House, down the hill of stone steps to the boat-house where the boats hung by chains under canvas drapery, near to where the pier was piled up and also covered against the snow, at the lookout of the prickly cedars, I saw, I saw a car fall through the ice. I saw the ice crack and steeple. I saw the back of the car sink “Help! help!” I was calling despite no one near enough to hear me. The ice was thunking open and taking the car down fast, talking: small sounds from the car, the ice sounding, awe, awe. I made my own noises moving backward, hand to my heart, heel in old snow. I was afraid to run.

In the spring there might have been talk of raising the car, but I never heard it. I lived in the bliss of mystery. I was allowed.

THE BIG HOUSE

I HEARD SMALL MOTORS crossing the lake.

I heard treecutters that sounded like my idea of locusts.

Nonna was snoring soon after her bath while from the kitchen came the Mixmaster already mixing.

Light ticktocked through the house, and I followed. Room to room to room, I went through Nonna’s house on any day when I was not in school, and I was often not in school. Headaches, headaches, sore throats — I had a lot of these. I was sick enough that I did not have to dress and was left alone to wander in my nightgown. “Undressed!” Aunt Frances would have scolded, but I never told her. I never told Aunt Frances how many days I was too tired, too sick for school, how many days I had stayed in bed drawing or reading next to Nonna at her feet.

“Can I?” I asked, already starting, “Can I?” my hand in the jar of salted pretzels scrolled like the tops of old desk keys.

Someone else’s clothes I found in every closet of the Big House. Doll-sized gloves! I split one up the seam twisting in my hand. Worse, I didn’t put back what I had found; I broke the spines of narrow shoes, insisting.

I tried to be quiet: room to room to room, wandering.

My clothes hung in a room far enough away and which Nonna could not visit. The wheelchair was too wide; she could not fit through the door to see how it looked, my room, made up for me, ruffled and canopied and lit up by lamps that threw pleated shadows. Roses red forever were embedded in the door knobs noiselessly turned. Opening and shutting the doors then, out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, I went in and out and in and out a good part of the night on those nights I slept alone. A lot of the time I took baths. The water I ran at almost any hour was slow to heat and smelled of rust and wet stones as I bent to it: rushing water — rusty, yellow, then steamy — hot and hotter. Ah, underwater, then my breathing was as large as the voice I heard telling my story — I liked it.

“Do you hear me?” I asked imaginary children or someone else I imagined asked me. I spoke in many voices from whichever house I set the action — at Mother’s, Uncle Billy’s, Arlette’s, Nonna’s … on and on — and me in the story as the one who is watched.

“Can she hear me?” That was how some visitors started conversations with Nonna, asking of the nurses, “How has she been?” Asking such questions in front of Nonna about her diet, her pills, her doctors, her pets — about me, asking the nurses about me! “Having a teenager around doesn’t tire her?” when just to see us together, I thought, was proof we made good company. I knew what it was when Nonna pointed, and I brought it to her: her reticule, her tippet, her toque. I knew the old names to old things.

“Can I really?” I asked, and Nonna trembled shut the clasp to the twisted rope of garnet. I never told anyone of all that Nonna gave me although Uncle Billy noticed gifts I wore.

“Aren’t those Nonna’s pearls?” he asked.

Once, making a fist, Uncle Billy banged on Nonna’s screen. Once? No, more than once, but one time in particular he lost his temper. I saw him banging at the screen and whatever was being done to Nonna behind it. “Miss O’Boyle,” he said, “will you please get on with it? I need to talk to my mother,” but he didn’t wait or he couldn’t wait to say it. “Goddamnit, Mother. Why did you give to Alice what you always promised to Frances?”

I wondered what, of all Nonna had given me, did he mean? What did he mean now, and how did he suffer? I hoped he suffered a lot, and in this way, too, was the Big House corrupting. I hoped they all suffered. I liked it when I heard Uncle Billy yelling, “Daddy wanted me to have that prayer rug.”

Uncle Billy and his wants: the Italian urns and most of the paintings, too, that much I knew. He put his name on the backs of the paintings; he didn’t care who got the silver although someone would soon. There was to be a getting of Nonna’s house. The cook, the nurses, the cranky Arlette talked about Nonna’s possessions.

Arlette said, “Who would want to polish such a tea set for life?” Her hands were gray despite their work’s gleam. Strangers to me, friends of friends of Uncle Billy’s, all visiting Nonna and brought along to see the Big House, asked me Who would inherit? They asked me, “Do you ever get lost in this house?” They said, “What it must be like to live here!”

Sometimes I took them around.

I took them to the walk-in freezer where the plucked ducks, in their Nonna-colored skins, were bagged and shelved along with sacks of cut-up vegetables from Nonna’s garden. Here were freezer-burned raspberries never to be eaten and industrial tubs of ancient ice cream furred like the berries, fringed with freeze. “Only the parrot will eat this stuff” was the story I told the strangers, and then I took them to see the parrot as proof.

“This is the sunroom, but the marble keeps it cool,” I said, “even in the summer.”

“And the boathouse, yes, down all those steps.”

“The library.”

“His sailing trophies.”

“The library again.”

“He liked naked women.”

“We could even have a fire. Arthur will lay it. He helps here, too; there are no other men. Grandfather dead, Uncle Billy too busy, so Arthur does — has always — will do. He oversees the Big House. He makes sure of all of this, yes; Arthur is, yes, a bit overworked, but at any time he’ll make us a fire.”

Five fireplaces in the house, and they all needed cleaning. Eleven acres of specimen trees, terraced gardens, clay tennis court — this was an estate, and someone had to see to it everything worked, and that someone was Arthur. My grandfather was dead and Uncle Billy had his own concerns — who else was there then to see to it that Nonna’s house thumped on? His great store of keys on the keychain he carried was sharp, heavy, seeming dangerous machinery, some of which started other machinery that helped the Big House to run.

Arthur was the one most in motion, but to think of the monotonous driving he did, how he drove back and forth, from Uncle’s to Nonna’s several times every day, and for a time, and almost as often, Arthur drove to what was Mother’s house and mine, down Lawn Street past School. Our house, pretty thing, it made me wonder how my father could have left it. Perhaps he only wanted warmer — Florida, maybe — perhaps he was that way headed when the accident happened and he drowned.

The car through the ice, the fire up the hill. “Fire!” I told the visitors to Nonna’s house, “Even though we live on a lake!” I said, “and there is all this snow, and the summers are damp.”

The visitors said they hoped to come back in the summer to see the gardens and to swim. And sometimes they did come back these visitors, friends of friends, breathless on the landings. They came for an hour and stayed the afternoon. They wanted to see the garden even in the rain; the water they swam in was cold.

I didn’t go in; I watched. This was, after all, for a time, where I lived aged thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, on and on in the Big House with the mystery of Nonna and all of her money.

TUCSON

“BUT WHY, OH WHY didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Aunt Frances asked. She said, “You should tell me when the help is unhappy. Now we’re missing silver, but those women can’t get far in the jeep.”

In all of the houses I lived in, silver went missing.

Some of the help stole cars.

THE BIG HOUSE

“BUT NEXT TIME, TELL me,” Aunt Frances said. “Tell me if you think your nonna is failing — forget the nurses. Use the phone. Your uncle Billy has the keys to the house, and when the time comes, he wants to lock it.”

A year, another year, summers passed, yet they still made up a bed for me next to Nonna on the chance she could be comforted with company. Poor, forlorn Nonna! In a crib for old babies, railed and castered and made up with blankets no matter it was ninety damp degrees outside.

“Feel your grandmother’s forehead,” Miss O’Boyle said. “Feel how cold she is!”

But what I felt was soft and cared for, an unnaturally healthy grandma, clear spittle on her chin and wearing a bib, sometimes needing to be wiped. Her eyes were almost always open and wetly watching me at night.

Miss O’Boyle said, “She doesn’t want to miss what’s left.”

Nonna’s eyes showed interest when I told her Arlette stories. How Arlette ate catsup on white bread and gave me eggs for dinner and wouldn’t sit with me but ate standing up looking out at the river. Arlette’s house was by the river and was the color of the river, a house — really a shack — near a mud-brown gush ridden by kids in tires near collapse. These river-riders waved to the passing houses; they spun in greetings to the bankside: hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye. But most people didn’t wave back; they went on hosing down the porch; they went on fishing or working underneath the hoods of beat-up cars or burning trash or adding to the compost eggshells and coffee grinds — especially coffee grinds. I was too young for coffee when Uncle Billy first had Arthur take me to Arlette’s house. Mother was sick and needed quiet, “a little bit of Florida” was what Uncle Billy called it, that place where sad people went for cures. At Arlette’s there were different rules and different smells, mostly coffee. Everyone on the river drank a lot of it. The next-door mother spilled it in her baby’s bottle to flavor the milk as a kindness — besides, what other kindness could she show her baby when she was taking in laundry, taking in dogs, taking in other mothers’ toddlers. She kept her own diapered on a staked leash in the yard where it walked the rope taut, fell and walked, wagging a nippled-bottle in its teeth, or else it slept. Under the blaring sky the baby slept — dirt for a pillow at the mother’s house next door, one in a close row of three on the river. Horseflies following everywhere here and sounds that waked me, late-at-night plashes of thrown objects — bodies, large animals, bedroom furniture? I was ten when I consented to stay at Arlette’s but not so young I could sleep through such clamor. The question was who was fighting? Whoever had such energy late at night … I had thought only Mother, but Arlette, glowering the counter clean, said it was the neighbors in the lilac-colored house. “Those stupid people make noise like that.” She said, “They fight all the time.”

Noise abrupt as light, and just as startling for when it came, came late in calmed weather with not even enough heat to explain the rage in the way doors were closed. “All the time,” Arlette said, “they are screaming and clunking and gunning their car.” She said, “They used to hear me.” No one but Arlette in Arlette’s house now, not so much as a picture to prove a Walter existed, some man so big she could hear him clear his throat and spit from as far away as the road.

And why not a husband, except that Arlette was as pretty as a dog-chew — Mother had said. No fun! Done for the day, Arlette stood stunned in the drone of the TV set, forgetting I was even there, despite my croupy breathing. … I didn’t want to go to bed ever, but at Arlette’s every door gave way to where she was. Her back was to the kitchen table and the lineup of old appliances. Our dinner dishes were drying on a dishtowel; the armless chairs were seat-stacked on the table, and the speckled floor was washed. Every night Arlette did this: She did for her house what she had done every day for others. I watched, being quiet, so that I might have company.

Nonna’s wide-awake company, wet eyes on me!

I was thoughtless.

I wasn’t thinking of Nonna when I felt my way through the dead-of-night dark to say I’m home, Nonna. I’ll sleep here if you’d like. Me dressed and smelling of where I had been — some bar, some party, some car with boys.

I grew harder at Nonna’s; I grew older — fifteen.

“Where have you been?” from Miss O’Boyle to me come home — blurry, flushed, plucked. This was the beginning of boys, of my own Bobs and Ricks, and I was late coming home.

Miss O’Boyle said, “You’re just like your mother.”

“You don’t even know her,” I said, but then neither did I: only one visit to the San before she checked out with some Walter.

Miss O’Boyle said, “I know all about her.”

I only knew Mother was somewhere warm with a man she had met while resting. His name I forget, but he had been resting, too, had been a patient, too, if that was the right word for what they had been at the San.

I called Miss O’Boyle a bitch, and in private, a fucking bitch, but what did I call those boys — young men, beaux? — waiting in long cars, most often not theirs, waiting or leaning toward the passenger’s door, saying to me, “Don’t let the cold get in,” saying, “Hurry. We’re already late.”

Sometimes I let a boy wait. Sometimes I never went out but from a far-off window, undetected, watched this boy go about his waiting. I watched what I could see of him, one of those guys who yet never rang the bell for me but waited motionless in the warm car. Perhaps his horn sounded faintly, and the wind took up the noise.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I called out to the first serious man, a creepy boy in business school, I begged, “Please, wait!”

“You bring the boy in the room with you. Did you ever think of that?” This from Miss O’Boyle, Miss O’Boyle on some nights, who was sleeping in the chair but sleeping lightly and on her feet at my approach, largely waiting, saying, “Slow down, turn on the light, I want to see you!”

“Why?”

“Your aunt Frances, that’s why.”

“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” Aunt Frances asked, and Uncle Billy, “Is there anything you have to say? Are you meeting your curfew? Do you even have a curfew? You should not go out on school nights and on the weekends in by eleven. Eleven, twelve. We have to be able to trust you if you want to stay at the Big House. Do you think we can? Can we trust you?” Aunt Frances had the Garden Club and seats on boards in the city, yet she felt obliged to ask, “Is there anything we should know?”

I did not tell — I would not ever tell of what was spoken, of what was understood in the dark of Nonna’s room when, on her side, she was watching. She made an answering sound to the noise I was making. She hissed or spit or slapped the bed by which perhaps she meant, “Don’t do that! It isn’t nice.” But usually Nonna held still and watched; I saw the wetness in her eyes when somehow she knew where my hand was.

“Wind, breakage, often water, booming ice. “Do you hear it?” I asked Nonna.

I rushed to Nonna’s bed and was bending to her mouth to see, was she breathing, when she opened her eyes and saw me, and I was ashamed, jolted, almost excited. What was there in it for me if she died? Drama! I answered. Experience!

ANY HOUSE

“WHAT DID YOU EXPECT would happen if you didn’t come home at all?”

“You don’t know?”

“You don’t, really?”

“Am I to believe such a story?”

“You know who you remind me of, don’t you?”

ARLETTE’S STORIES

“YOUR NONNA SAID ONE time she accidentally clobbered your momma with a oar when they was on the lake. She knocked Miss Alice out. She said she thought your momma was dead. And I’m not saying this is true now — okay? but your nonna said the accident might explain the way your momma is.”

THE BIG HOUSE

AN OLD STORY WAS that my mother and my uncle Billy were fighting on the second-floor landing when he pushed her down the stairs in an argument. Nonna was watching from the foot of the stairs as her children, who were then no longer children, fought for possession of The Clockmaker, an oil the size of a double bed, a clockmaker at his work in windowlight, all fumy, red-based colors. Think of brandy or whiskey, think of whatever was being drunk by Uncle Billy and my mother and that was the painting’s preponderate color — the color of what made them drunkenly fight this way in front of Nonna. But Nonna liked to watch them fight was what my mother said, and I believed her.

I believed Mother when she said the argument with Uncle Billy was about a lot more than money. Of course it was! Nonna’s heart was ridged, rough, dry. The answer was simple: She only had room for Uncle Billy.

I believed Mother when she told me about her father’s mistress, met on a train, although how would Mother know where he had met her? Still I believed Mother when she said the mistress had walked by Daddy on the train. The mistress was an old-fashioned milk-drinker wearing spiked heels, and Daddy followed her.

Daddy’s mistress had a heart that wasn’t bitter.

“Do you believe everything you are told, Alice?” Uncle Billy had asked me in the desert. “Do you?”

Yes, yes, yes, I did. I believed that before Nonna’s tongue thickened, she took her husband out of any story she thought to tell. She talked about her father, instead, and favorite dogs and Uncle Billy’s travels.

I believed that when she had talked about my mother, and she had not often talked about my mother, Nonna frenzied helpless gestures. Talk, talk that was what Nonna did before her stroke, and after her stroke, too. I believe we talked, Nonna and I, and that she told me about my father. There was a flood — remember—and Nonna made waves with her hands.

My father gone away, yes, yes, yes, I was nodding; yes and the storms across the lake in air: stalk, leaf, stillness.

“What else, Nonna, what else do you remember? What? Are you awake enough to talk? Do you think I am like my mother?”

“Quiet,” Miss O’Boyle was saying, “your grandmother is asleep.”

When how could anyone sleep through snows that piled to the third-floor windows, rains that fizzed through screens and puddled sills?

The house was called the Big House, the Big House on the hill. It came with a horse chestnut tree and elms and oaks and a spruce tree I didn’t like, and in the middle of the circular drive something exotic, seeming shortened and level-headed when in blossom.

Norma went on living to be ninety-something; my father was dead at thirty-seven.

THE BIG HOUSE

LATER, WHEN I WAS struggling with calculus, Arthur ignored how we crossed county lines. He was talking along the long stretches we drove after school while I, driving, could only listen. I was driving Nonna’s unused car, and Arthur was sitting next to me, instructing. He kept his window open and put out his arm when the sun was on his side. He told me that the medicines he now took sometimes made him sleepy. Arthur talked and talked and talked a lot about himself in the way he had when his heart broke and he outfaced surgery and came home well.

“This thing with my heart,” he said, “made me ask lots of questions I never asked before.”

I thought he was changed, too. He was careful in the way he moved. For lunch he ate dryly cooked fish he only flicked at with his fork — eschewing even relish, saying, No. No and a sigh were his gestures, but I was glad — glad! — we were driving together again, and I was at the wheel.

“Want me to park?”

“No,” he said, “drive on.”

And I did. I drove on through the spattered light of fall, the warm, monied promise of it, the lights saying, Yes, it is possible: Purpose might find me and success might follow. My father could have been a poet; it is not absurd.

“It is possible your mother might come home,” Uncle Billy had told me a long time ago, and I had felt afraid of what might happen if she did, and then she didn’t come home, yet I was still afraid, often lonely — surely thirsty.

No one was ever as happy or as sad as she was, my mother, who might have come home to claim me, but she didn’t.

MR. EARLY

MOTHER HAD USED OVERCOOKED bacon for a bookmark or a hair pin, stick of gum, sucker-stick, twig — whatever was at hand. Her books were paperbacks, she said, and it didn’t matter how the water-swelled pages fanned, dried, stuck together. “Paperbacks,” she always said, “a great invention.” I read the way my mother did. I was impatient. I cut the uncut pages in Uncle Billy’s fancy books (sets of Tarkington and Conrad) with my finger for a knife until, found out, Uncle Billy took away my ragged Bleak House.

At Uncle Billy’s I learned to read behind the curtains and the guest room’s dresser skirt, but I could wander anywhere at Nonna’s and read.

Books, the orphan’s consolation.

“‘That head I see now … has it other furniture … within?’” I wanted my own Mr. Rochester and found him in the shape of Mr. Early. High school English, last two years:

By seventeen I had guessed

That the “really great loneliness”

Of James’s governess

Might account for the ghost

On the other side of the lake.

If the head was a room, I wanted mine cluttered, stuffed, Victorian style. I wanted Mr. Early’s praise, but the rebuking length of Mr. Early’s sentences, and the speed with which he delivered them, often left me dumb and angry, and the only assuagement was he spit. Pinball body, angry nose and bald spot, Mr. Early was a class joke except for what he said when he spoke; then the dwarfing capaciousness of his complex speech and the seriousness of his sentiments made us quiet.

Once, bending to where I sat shaking my hand out of cramp, he rolled my pen into the pencil groove, stroked my arm, and spoke: “Dear Alice, you don’t have to tell the whole story.”

Yet I wanted him to know how well I knew the story, better than anyone else because I was not like anyone else but special, inward, informed. I wanted to say: I have seen such things.

Days when, from nowhere, unappeasable, punishing sadness kept me at the Big House, and my name in the roll went unanswered, Mr. Early sometimes called to see how I was. We could have used you, today, we needed you, are you feeling better?

Yes! from Mr. Early. Good point. Well put. Exactly. I got this subject right. Mr. Early was excited, and I was responsible for his delight, and I kept him at his desk asking, What do you think about and What do you think about … and Mr. Early said, You tell me.

“You bring back how the red-winged blackbird shrieked …”

Mr. Early gave me the poems by the poet with the goofy name, whose affection for his daughter made me sad.

Once I told Mr. Early that my father had wanted to be a poet, and Mr. Early said, “That’s where you get it from. All the more reason you should,” he said, by which he meant I had to do for my father what he could not now do for himself.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t …”

“You do.”

FATHER

THE PREPOSTEROUS BLOSSOMS, CANDY pink and stupidly profuse, were in the night light strangely come as from another planet. But about time was what Aunt Frances said, “Spring? We never thought we would see it!”

Wash the windows then. Ruck the garden. Scatter seed. The dots of yellow in the wood, the spiked, green start of things: snowdrop and daffodil and crocus.

My father never came back — no matter what he may have promised. He took off one morning in the car we called the Mouse: gray, rounded fenders, a grill that looked like a snout and a decoration of chrome banding the hood for whiskers. The Mouse was a harmless name for a harmless looking car, and it killed him; or it was the water that took his life though he drove to it. The rolled-up windows imploded, sounding the glassy dazzle and rush of water as my father passed down and down in what might have been a lie, this story of how he died. I never did see him again. He was elsewhere buried after he was found.

Late spring, hard ground, then from out of nowhere nodding flowers and loaded branches.

FATHER

“EVERYTHING CONNECTED BY ‘AND’ AND ‘and,’” the poet writes on travel; I have some lines by heart. In the dark of the car, they occur; the words flare, and I see the driver’s neck. Hairs curled over a collar, a creased skin — white or reddened — always damp is how the driver’s neck looks to me. I will not touch him there — any more than I would touch my father there or the men I took for fathers. A father’s breathing, I remember, a breathing close and wet in my ear. The beard merely scorches.

My father.

My father is a name and the black oily roots of hair in damp, creased places. My father is a cutout — stark, defined — a standard man as seen by me from behind.

I am seated behind the driver and considering his neck and rising water rising to his neck and the kind of cold it must be creeping upwards with the water.

The passing scenery is passing.

ARTHUR

ALL THOSE YEARS I was always ready when the time came to leave, yet Arthur teased. He said, “I thought you wanted to stay.” Aunt Frances, too; my Aunt Frances said, “Now you’re sure? We have room.” Nonna was fretting when I left her, kneading the blanket’s silk banding even as she turned to be fed.

I was glad to be the one leaving — for camps and schools and college — but my intention was always to come back.