Frog

15. Frog Dies

He dies. How does he? He’s running, collapses. Happens that quickly. Doesn’t even know it, or barely. Sharp pain in the chest a few minutes before but he thought it was an upper abdominal stitch, stopped, pressed on it to move the gas bubble down, waited till the pain went, pain went, continued running. Then a sharper pain in the chest a few minutes later, and maybe just when he realizes what’s happening or might be, he’s unconscious, never recovers. He’s in his car. He’s thought for a long time he might die in a car accident. Not a heart attack in one, making him lose control of the wheel, but because of some wrong move or bad decision on his part or the driver’s in another car. It’s been close several times. Several times he’s thought if he’d been a second slower in reacting to this or that, or if he hadn’t looked to the right just then, or if the car behind him or to his side had been a foot closer, a few inches closer…. He just hoped neither of his children nor his wife would be with him when this accident happened. This time he pulls off the highway into a one-way street and a truck speeding his way. He tries to avert it by making a sharp right but the truck tries to avert him by making a sharp left. Three young man come up to him at a bus stop, say it’s a holdup, give them everything he has, he gives them everything he has, they shoot him in the head. Stomach pains, been feeling them late at night for weeks, thinks they’re because of the wine and liquor he drinks too close to bedtime while he reads, tells himself to stop drinking at least two hours before he goes to sleep, can’t, one hour, never does it, treats himself with antacids, pain increases, turns out to be pancreatic cancer, he has one to two months, three to four weeks, barely has time to prepare for it, his wife and children barely have time. Then he gets so sick and weak that just about all he can do in his few waking hours a day is think about his nausea and pain. He also cries a lot, that he’ll be dying and losing his children and wife, the growing up of his children, his children as adults. He’s in a restaurant, fishbone gets caught in his throat, tries coughing it up, someone runs up behind him, clears a table with a sweep of his arm, throws him on the table facedown and uses a method on him to dislodge the bone, it doesn’t come out, he continues to choke, can’t breathe, just as another diner is about to cut into his windpipe with a steakknife, he dies. He’s crossing the street, hat flies off his head, he chases it, looks both ways, no cars are coming, picks it up, gets clipped by a car. A plank is blown off a building going up and hits him on the head. A hammer falls from a building going up, a flowerbox in an apartment windowsill, part of a cornice of an old building.

His oldest daughter can’t believe it at first. No, she believes it. “Daddy isn’t coming home anymore,” Denise tells her. “Why?” “Daddy passed away.” “What’s that?” “Oh Jesus, how should I explain it? It means Daddy’s not coming home again ever.” “But why not?” “You still don’t know what I’m saying?” “No.” “All right, plain and simply: he died.” “I know what ‘to died’ is. You don’t have to explain to me. I know I won’t see him anymore. I feel bad, but it’s OK.” She can hardly sleep, is morose most of the day. When she can sleep, she twists around fitfully, has nightmares she says she’d tell what they’re about if she could remember them. “All remember is big teeth in every one of them, some with no faces, and scary dancing deer.” Eats little, won’t play, never laughs, avoids her baby sister, talks mostly in whispers, doesn’t want to go out or to school, sits by herself all day at school looking at books or staring out the window or keeping her eyes shut. Starts to play by herself with a bear she’s renamed Daddy. Dresses it in cloth napkins, toilet tissue and doll socks, feeds it her snacks, takes it for strolls around her room in her doll carriage, puts it to bed at night and covers it up to its neck and hums or tells stories to it, but she won’t sleep in her bed. She sleeps with Denise for weeks, clutching a soft shark. The youngest child asks for Dada several times a day. Phone or doorbell rings: “Dada.” Comes into the kitchen while Denise is cooking or cleaning and says “Dada, where?” and looks around for him there. Other times: goes into the coat closet, shuts the door and when Denise looks for her and finds her sitting in the dark there, says “Dada, looking.” Says “Dada out,” and turns with little quick steps in a circle, meaning she wants him to take her out. Sometimes puts her hat on, carries her coat or snowsuit around the house saying to Denise or to no one “Dada work.” That could mean she wants to be in the back- or front yard where she thinks he’s working or in the cold basement where he did his schoolwork and typed. But she doesn’t seem sad, sleeps the same, hasn’t lost her appetite, wants to play with Olivia, cries or screams when Olivia ignores her or shuts her door on her or pushes her away, goes to her toddler group once a week with no fuss. Years later when they talk about him, she gets sad. “I wish I’d known him. First I wish he were here. He wouldn’t be that old. Even if he were, he’d be a big vigorous sixty-five. I’ve so little to almost no memory of him. Sometimes I think I’ve more than that, but then I suddenly know I’ve been leading myself on.” When they’re adults they sometimes look at photographs of themselves with him, with Daddy alone, of Daddy alone, Daddy as a baby and a boy, with Mother, holding both of them, cheeks against his, week after Eva was born. “This was the first time we took you out after you came home from the hospital,” Olivia says. “I can’t say I remember the event, but I do recall the photo.” Daddy and Olivia hamming it up for the camera, Eva crying behind them. “I’m sure he didn’t hear you — I wouldn’t say the same for me — or he would have stopped clowning immediately to take care of you. Mother probably just didn’t see you through the viewfinder.” Daddy carrying them in a garbage can, standing beside them seated on a camel, squeezed inside an igloo with them he made in the street after the city’s biggest snowstorm in a decade, holding them in one arm on a beach. “He was always so lean and muscular,” Eva says. “Look at that neck. No wonder Mom fell for him at his age.” “He was still doing a thousand pushups a day when he turned fifty,” Olivia says, “then as a birthday gift to himself dropped to nine hundred. And running three miles every morning except on the first day of a bad flu or when the streets were coated with ice. He was a little bit too musclebound and showoffy for my tastes.” “Daddy a showoff? According to Mom he was self-deprecating and overly self-critical, hid himself in dark clothing, was taciturn at gatherings, wouldn’t be interviewed, was invited to but never wrote articles or reviews, even in class, was unduly apologetic to his students and scarcely expressed his views.” “Musclebound and vain, then. He used to flex his chest and arm muscles in front of my bedroom mirror some mornings after he thought he got me back to sleep. And I once walked in on him pulling himself off in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, though their sex life, Mother’s said, except when she was just being generous with her body, was nothing but ripe and raw.” Eva holds up several photos. “What beach is it?” Olivia doesn’t know, calls Denise. “Chincoteague,” she says, “home of wild ponies and soggy oysters. We went there for a weekend every spring and fall, before and after the tourist season. This was going to be a family tradition, your father said, even after you both got married and had children and if the oyster beds survived, but it only lasted four to five years. I remember that day well. You can always tell a great day when we have so many photographs of it, though there were some great days when we overexposed the film or quickly ran out of it. It was so windy on the beach that your father, with the emergency shovel he always kept in the car next to the emergency rope, flares, books, pads and pens, dug a hole in the sand deep enough for all of us to sit belowground and have lunch, even if Eva was still only nursing. I wouldn’t go down. It just seemed too silly. I knew people would pass, hear us and take pictures of us down there. I also didn’t trust the walls. I felt if they collapsed he’d only be able to get you two out and I’d be buried alive with Eva’s breasts.”

On his birthday every year one sister calls the other and the one who’s called usually says something like “I know why you’re calling; I still miss him too.” “If only you could remember him better,” Olivia says, “it would make these memory days more memorable. I have to do it all for us, which makes me distrust my memory somewhat, going so uncorrected and uncorroborated.” “I feel I’m remembering him a little more each year. The smile, which I keep seeing: sort of soft, benign, kind of bringing me in, no artifice.” “Photographs. What about his black scowling look, or the reproachful one, which could go on for hours. Nobody I’ve known was ever more up and down, back and forth, than Daddy. In that way, bad father. One moment he’d be all over Mother and me with praise and fondling lovingness and be thoroughly sincere about it. Then I’m off to first grade and can’t find my eyeglasses and he’d rave, stamp and complain how she was the last to see them and I’m old enough to remember to take care of them and the money they cost and he’ll be late again getting me to school, meaning he’ll have to park the car and walk me to my classroom, and what the fuck the glasses doing for me anyway? — ’You go to an eye doctor; he always prescribes — bunch of born hustlers!’—and shove his arms up to his shoulders in the kitchen trash can looking for them, thinking you might have dropped them there or Mother or me with some other garbage by mistake. And then apologize profusely when he finally drives me to school, for making me so sad and afraid and resentful and possibly a little screwy with his sudden changing moods. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll stop doing it, my lovey-dove — I swear,’ and kiss my head and hands and also my eyes, if we didn’t find the glasses, and say ‘So, are we friends again?’ and I’m telling you, cry sometimes too because of what he’d say was his base treatment of me. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, or I did but knew I didn’t want to be there.” “I’m glad I missed it.” “You didn’t; you simply don’t remember it. Listen, I saw him a few times, though he never did it when Mother was around, throw you on the bed when he was changing you, angry that you peed just after he put a fresh diaper on. Or wipe your face so hard with a paper towel that I thought he’d take your skin off, all because you wouldn’t eat what he thought was the minimum amount for you or you stuck your hand in the gooey food or dropped some of it on the floor. He couldn’t stand a mess, books out of place, records out of their jackets, a disheveled room.” “Actually, if I had the choice I’d want to remember what he did to me no matter how bad it was. Anything. But you know, a few weeks ago, when I was waking up, I suddenly saw myself falling asleep on his shoulder. Now that had to have happened, since I can’t remember you telling me of it regarding either of us and I never saw a photo of it.” “He had a sleeping shoulder, he used to say — but you wouldn’t remember him saying that.” “I certainly don’t ever remember talking to him, being talked to by him, anything with talk, except in my dreams, where he’s gone on about all sorts of things in speedy stream-of-c style, and more times than not that he wants me to be or why I should become one, a pianist who concentrates on Mozart and Bach and Satie and in the orchestral-piano works conducts while she plays. But I’m sure I remember the shoulder and much of the scenery surrounding it. Was the guest bed in the room with my crib a big oak double one with a headboard taller than most men?” “I told you that; my very words.” “You did? Then did I have an oval mirror above my dresser that was too high to look into except when someone held me?” “We both did, which I’ve also spoken of, though I got to see myself in it via a chair. Mother said that whenever she couldn’t walk one of us to sleep — they alternated nightly on the one being walked — she’d give us to him and we’d flake out in minutes. He used to sing songs to me when he put me to sleep like that.” “My shoulder memory doesn’t include that, but I’m sure he did the same for me.” “I know he did. You were in the next room and I never permitted my door being closed at night. I only found out later about him singing to me when I asked why he sang to you when he never had to me and he said that for more than two years I got the exact same special heed. They used to put me to sleep the same time as you then — eight-o-dot. I thought it unfair, considering our age difference and that I needed no sleep cajolery, but anyway, I could hear him singing to you in his high lyrical baritone gone to seed and a number of times saw him singing while walking you when I barged in to say good night to him. Love songs, mostly — how you were without doubt the weirdest, most worthless, least pleasurable — no, really, the fairest most gorgeous adorable mild-tempered redolent intelligent creature in all the galaxies, bar none, not even the ones to be discovered yet, and how sleep would only make you more squeezable, beautiful, smart and sweet. And all the words made up on the spot it seemed and I believe same went for the melodies when they weren’t lifted from old show tunes and radio theme songs or from his favorite operatic arias or piano or liturgical scores. This is fun, Eva. Work on, without my help, bringing back other memories of him. It’s not as if I’m talking to myself anymore.”

On what would have been his sixtieth birthday Denise and the two girls go to his grave. He once said he wouldn’t mind being buried, if it was no trouble, near the cottage they summered at in Maine, his mother wanted him buried in Long Island between the grave of one of her children and the cenotaph of another, Denise went along with her because she was so insistent or emotional or something about it—“Last thing for the little time I’ve left I’ll ever ask of you,” that sort of thing — that Denise couldn’t resist and also because of the cost of a burial plot anywhere and maintaining it and the ticklishness of finding one in that Maine town which would admit a summer renter and one, counting the four summers Denise went there alone or with lovers, of only eleven years, who was also Jewish. They meet, without planning it, his brother there. He came with a prayer book, covers his head with his hand and reads the mourner’s prayer in phonetical Hebrew and then says “Maybe, as long as we’re all here, we should say something about Howard, even Eva. How we felt and have been feeling since and so on — you know, about him, theoretically reaching sixty, or just anything. Like to be first, Denise?” “You wouldn’t want to?” “I don’t know what to say yet, if I’m going to say anything but ‘Continue to read I mean rest in peace, if you are, my brother,’ and I thought I’d be polite. Please, you were the person closest to him ever, but if you don’t want to and everyone thinks it’s a bad idea…” “All I can say—” She turns to the grave. “All I can say is that—” “And about him being sixty, maybe that’s ridiculous. But say what you want. Please.” “All I can say is that I loved him — you, darling — very much, and still miss you and think you would have — no, he, him, he would have, because it’s so silly. I don’t believe in spirits or that he’s here in any immaterial way like that. Maybe that’s not the right word, or right word when employed like that, but this is where we plopped him, so fine, period. I’m sorry, sweethearts,” to the girls. “I don’t mean to scare you. Maybe your father’s spirit is here. I’m not saying I know one way or the other, or definitively. It would be nice to think he’s here in some way, or maybe not, for him — unrest. Anyway,” to the grave, “I think he would have wanted me to go on the way I had and approved of most of what I did. If you’re here and it’s true, my old darling, or just that you agree with me for the most part, knock twice or do something earthshaking to let us know, if it’s all right with the higher or lower authorities, if there are those too — With little major disruptive mourning at first, little to none thereafter, lots of sad semisleepless nights throughout it, taking over things as well as I feel I did.” “You did. Don’t let anybody say anything if anyone did,” Jerry says. “Nobody did that I know.” “Good. They were right. You had it tough and did a great job. And sorry for interrupting. Go on, if you’re not finished — please.” “Taking over the householding and child rearing and moneymaking and such completely — well, not completely. When I remarried two years later and for the months I knew him before, I got plenty of help from Eric. But also that: that he would have wanted me to remarry and so quickly, just so I’d get some help and wouldn’t be lonely, and also have another child, since a third’s what Howard and I had wanted and begun working on, and what else? Getting rid of all his manuscripts, unpublished and pubbed. I mustn’t forget that, since it seemed as important to him as almost anything for me to take care of if he suddenly died and was his written and several times his spoken wish. ‘If I die but before then can’t tend to this myself, after the craziness is over and everything’s clearer, out all these go,’ which he left in a letter envelope marked ‘Incalculably urgent’ and pasted on the inside manuscript cabinet door. ‘And don’t waste your time burning them or tearing them up. Green or black trash bags and probably the three-ply leaf kind; and all in one Wednesday or Saturday pickup and without telling anyone what’s inside.’ Actually, I shouldn’t lie here. Olivia’s giving me looks as if I’m lying, so I won’t. I did, after the postfunereal craziness and in a period of clarity, send a number of those manuscripts to publishers and parts of them to magazines, saying these were the last works of my recently deceased husband, hoping that might give them a sentimental and for the publisher a promotional edge, but they were just as swiftly returned as they had been before. Only after they’d been turned down four or five times each did I get rid of them. I did keep a few to remind myself of him whenever I wanted to — manuscripts that were clearly about his life with me and his work and also the girls and us. But after a year or so I forgot about or misplaced them, though I know I didn’t dispose of them, and now I haven’t a clue where those remaining manuscripts are. Probably with the note he left on the cabinet door and that folder I kept with all the new rejections of his work and the list of what manuscript went where and when. Maybe, if his spirit’s here and wants to tap for something it or he deems important, it can tap for that — once for whether I should try to find the manuscripts and send them out again, for maybe the promotional edge is even greater now — the widow who finds her husband’s lost manuscripts after almost ten years — or two, to find them and put them in the next trash pickup — OK, enough, and everyone here should know that when I said I had plenty of semisenseless nights after he died, or however I put it, I meant that for a couple of weeks I felt I could have killed myself if I’d had the easy means and no kiddies and cat — that that’s how, well, that that’s just how, well, just end of graveside chat, and I’ve gone on so queerly long. Olivia?” “I miss him too much to say anything.” “So say nothing,” Jerry says. “Nothing’s fine sometimes.” “I also wouldn’t know what to say. I’m too young to say anything that intelligent or right or unembarrassing. Or maybe I’m just intelligent enough not to say anything that young and innocently wrong and so not very embarrassing, or not for so long. Something, though, but you know.” “So what have I been saying?” Jerry says. “Really, my little olive, probably my idea wasn’t that smart a one for you kids. What do you think, Denise — should we put a closure on it for now?” “I think if they want to say something at his grave, now’s a good opportunity. Nobody but you has been out here for years. And as a family we haven’t been here since the stone was put up, and even then, Eva wasn’t with us. But it’s up to Olivia.” “I’m so unhappy,” Olivia says, “that if I did say anything — but I’m already crying while I’m saying this, which was what I was about to say — I’d cry.” “Honestly, I don’t see the point to this anymore,” Jerry says. “The point,” Denise says, “is that if it’s simply a big quick emotional hurt that can get somewhere nothing else has been able to, all the better for her while we’re here and he’s there, spirit or spiritless. Tell a story then or an anecdote of you and your father, or anything.” “Or nothing. Excuse me again, Denise, but as I said before,” to Olivia, “nothing’s OK too, and at times can be perfect.” “Jell-O,” Olivia says. “OK, Jell-O. What?” “Just Jell-O. Something that happened. It just popped into my head. Not a real standout memory or one that’s going to do anything moving to me. But it’s as good as any between us, and it was so like him, I think. It typified.” “Tell it, I never heard it,” Eva says. “Now I think I forgot it.” “Come on!” “I was around five and it was a Sunday. It had to be a Sunday since that’s what he was talking about. And I couldn’t have been more than five years and seven months, since that’s what I was when he died. And it was about Jell-O because of what comes next. I was sick and he was going food-shopping and Mother asked him to bring back, guess. It was all I could digest, etcetera, except maybe applesauce, which I don’t think we ever ran out of, even on the road, for fifteen years.” “Jell-O was just about the only liquid you’d take when you were very ill,” Denise says. “So. When he came back he was talking in this funny ethnic accent he always seemed to come back with from this particular market because of the people who shopped and worked there, he said.” “Baltimore-Jewish,” Denise says; “you can say it.” “He always caught it like a cold, he said — in fact, the ‘Jewish flu’ he called it, and then in that accent — I can’t do it, so I won’t even try, or I’ll sound silly. Vs for Ws and so on and lots of ichs and uchs. But that he got my favorite Jell-O flavor. ‘What kind?’ I probably said and he said ‘Onion Jell-O.’ No, this is too dumb.” “You can’t stop now,” Eva says, “and it’s new.” “I said ‘But this is lime,’ and showed him the lime picture on the Jell-O box and he said ‘No, that’s a very old onion, which turns green inside like a lime. Cut any old onion in half and you’ll see how green it is.’ I didn’t know what a real green onion was then. If I did I’m sure I would have said, just to try to be a match for him, ‘But a green onion is a very young one.’ And I’m sure he would have said to that ‘Well this a prematurely old green onion — something happened to it in its youth. In its salad days, we could say,’ and have to explain what that meant since I wouldn’t have known about that too. And then given several ridiculous but sort of sensible reasons why the green onion became prematurely old. Green onion disease or fell in love with a leek who thought he was too young for her, etcetera. Anyway, I said Is that true, Mommy?’ about the old onion turning green like a lime, and she shook her head and I said ‘She says it’s not true.’ And he said ‘No, she’s shaking her head, all right, but on Sunday’—maybe I made him sound too anti-Jewishy before, and at a Jewish cemetery too. He isn’t; he wasn’t. I’m sure.” “You didn’t sweetheart,” Denise says. “He sounds fine. Go on, finish.” “‘But on Sundays,’ he said, ‘when you shake your head it means yes, and when you nod it means no. I’m surprised, you being such an intelligent girl, you didn’t know that.’ Is that true, Mommy?’ I asked and you shook your head and he said ‘You see? She’s shaking her head. So what I said’s true.’ That’s all. Story’s over. I knew—” “No, it was fine,” Denise says. “Lively, revealing; just right.” “It was flat, stilted, long-winded. I didn’t catch him. I never catch him. Too much made up.” “Can I go now?” Eva says. “It’s getting late and maybe too cold for all of you and I’m a little tired from standing,” Jerry says. “Sit on the grass, Uncle Jerry.” “You can’t sit on the grass.” “Give her a minute,” Denise says; “we’ll all button up our coats.” “I wish I could have got to know him,” Eva says. “I think I knew a little of him. I remember him playing peekaboo with me. I think I remember that and also him holding my hand. This one,” showing the right. “And him feeding me. I’m in that special baby’s chair attached to a table, he’s sitting beside me with a book opened for me and saying ‘You eat, I read,’ and I think I’m saying ‘Bunny, bunny’ in the way you said I did,” to Denise. “Maybe that’s remembering more than there was. But I do remember once lying beside him on the bed in my parents’ room while he was watching the news and he put his arm around me and I rested my head on his chest and I think I was holding the bottle by the nipple between my teeth and he kissed the top of my head many times. Milk in the bottle and he was propped up against pillows and maybe only kissed me once or twice. But that one I remember a lot. I can’t remember anything else right now except through the photos of him with me and what other people have said about him over and over again till it’s maybe become what I think I saw. Or was that Olivia’s idea? She always gets there first.” “Do not.” “Anyway, what else, since I don’t think I’ve said anything yet. I like the man Mom married next but I never felt he was my father. I can say that without hurting your feelings, can’t I, Mom? Well, too late. Of course I’m glad you married Eric and it was nice of him to adopt us and that you love him real well, as you say. The truth is, I’m not telling the truth. I think I felt I had to say those things because we’re standing here, something of him must be around in the air or underneath, and I’m superstitious and maybe a little scared. The truth is, Eric to me is my father and my real actual father, Howard, is like a ghost, a nobody, a shadow. Really, most like a shadow. A shadow holding my hand, a shadow feeding and kissing me. An apparition, I mean. See it but not feel it. That must be old stuff. I can never be original. Olivia can. Not that I don’t admire her for it. I do, it’s wonderful, I’m envious in the most generous way. ‘My sister,’ I say, ‘she’s great.’ So what do I have to say after all my eagerness to speak? And because it is getting chilly and poor Uncle Jerry looks both bored and tired.” “Just a bit tired, sweetie.” “I’ve nothing to say. All this time, and with an all-ears audience, and nothing. If I’ve one thing to say it’s I wish he hadn’t died so soon. If I’ve two, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t combine one and two into one, it’s I wish he had taken care of himself better so he wouldn’t have died so soon. I don’t know what that would have meant.” “Entailed,” Olivia says. “And you shouldn’t think he was at fault. He might have ran himself too hard, but what he got ran in his family, and he did reach fifty. Maybe we’ll get what he got and not reach forty.” “Romantic nonsense,” Denise says. “Just get checkups and don’t think it.” “Then the two of you should have had me sooner, so I could have had the experiences with him Olivia did. And the photos. And you should have pushed them too, Ollie, saying ‘Sister, I want a baby sister, baby baby sister,’ but saying it so many times and in such a loud whiny voice that they would have started me sooner rather than listen to you anymore. Three years sooner, even two, I’ll take two. I’ll take one. I would have come out something the same. We look alike, Olivia and I, just as all of Uncle Jerry’s kids and us look alike, so I probably would have been a slightly different looking person with the same name. An inch shorter or taller. I mean, when I’m fully grown. I’ll take taller. I’ll take prettier. I’ll take Olivia’s complexion and hair and nose and frailer legs. I’ll take anything to have definite memories of me with him. Mine, I mean. A quotient — that’s the right word, right? — dumber or smarter. I’ll take smarter, but if dumber, then not so much so. Meaning, where it’d incapacitate me. And I wouldn’t take sickness either. Throwing up a dozen more times than I’d normally do over fifty years, fine, but nothing life-lasting or short-living like Howard’s sister Mira.” “Vera,” Jerry says. “Right over here. I’m going to ask you all at the end to put a small stone on her monument just so she doesn’t feel ignored. Dad’s too, if we can find that many, though I doubt it would bother him, and he’s probably sleeping through all this or thinking we’re all such sentimental fools. Your Uncle Alex’s is only a cenotaph, so we don’t have to worry about his feelings unless this is where he decided to settle, and why wouldn’t he? So his too, but by then we’ll probably have to share a single stone. But is that all, Eva? I’m not rushing, simply asking you, but also shivering a bit, as I’d like to say something too.” “All. You didn’t like what I said, right?” “No no, sweetie.” “Not bright, too shallow, nothing from inside.” “No, it was smart, something, not shallow; felt, so very nice indeed. And what’s the difference? If anybody wasn’t a speaker it was your father. He’d appreciate someone trying to find the right words and failing at it. And his daughter? You can bet, not that failing’s what you did, but he distrusted people who didn’t hem and haw. But — Howard, on your sixtieth birthday, and are we supposed to believe that? My stringbean kid brother, the boy I ignored for his first twenty years? But you see the respect, I’d say love, you have from all those who were so very close to you. As you can also see, I’m not that hot at this either — and Mom, who’s all right. Still hanging in there, drinking, smoking, coffeeing, reading without glasses and pretending to hear, a little more lined but still a beauty, was a trifle too, what was the word Eva used? frail, to undergo today. But she said to give you her love, and even confessed to me that you were her favorite after Alex of the boys, but she also said she had to admit that Alex had the advantage in that department of having a natural sweet disposition since birth, compared to us, and dying young and being the first boy to go. But — let’s see. I shouldn’t go on at length, for one who complained about the cold, so just may your soul rest in peace, if it hasn’t been, and continue to for eternity, if it has, if that doesn’t seem too deathlike a fate. That’s all I can say, and I think everyone here shares those sentiments, besides joining with Mom in sending our strongest expressions of love,” and breaks down. “Amen,” Denise says and puts her hands on the backs of her children who are hugging Jerry, was looking at Howard’s stone so didn’t see if he’d beckoned to them in some way first or they came to him on their own.

Olivia calls Eva and says “I had a dream last night that Dad — Howard — returned. That he just came back, like that — knocked on the door, looked very old. Sunken cheeks, completely bald, no way we’d ever seen him in person or photos. Ugly face hairs, teeth rotted and cracked, little pits and bites around his mouth, and he said to me when I opened the door and immediately started screaming, for he was also in these awful torn clothes and smelled like piss so it really seemed as if he’d just stepped out of the grave, ‘I am your father, Chütchkie.’ That was his favorite nickname for me. ‘I want to hug and kiss you but know what a mess I am. I want to swing around with you on a gate again but know I’ll disintegrate if touched. I want to say I’m always near you, hideous as that thought must be to you, or almost always near — I stay away when it’s discreet for me to. If there was only some way for me to really return. If I only could.’ That’s when he started digging his long fingernails into his forehead. ‘If I could only be in normal clothes and health for someone my age and just talk to you on the phone, even, or whatever they have today where people communicate with one another from different places. To write a letter to you, even, if those things are still sent. I’d deliver it personally. I’d be satisfied just to slip it under your door. Leave it on your front steps. When I was alive I used to think a lot about what I’d do if you died first. I wouldn’t be able to go on, I decided, and never decided against that. I loved your mother and sister but could have survived either of their deaths, though would always have been sad after that, or almost always, maybe because I would have had you to hold on to. But you, plop, I would have disappeared. The things you did and said that made me so happy. “I remember when I was born.” ‘Here he’s quoting me when I was around four-and-a-half, which actually happened. ‘“It was dark, crowded and wet.” ‘For some reason he found that brilliant, Mother said. I apparently also claimed I heard music when I was in the womb, though admittedly close to term. “That piece,’ I said about some Haydn piano variation or sonata the record player was playing, ‘I remember it when I was inside Mother,’ and sure enough he had played it nearly every day for a month when she was pregnant. I don’t trust that reminiscence, but he went for it. Then in the dream he goes on about his favorite memory of me. How he came into my room when I was sitting busily working at my little kid’s table with crayons, pencils, a huge sheet of paper. After a few minutes I turned around, he said, and announced ‘“I’m drawing a picture of a zoo for the kids in my class so they’ll know where they’re going tomorrow. Here’s a cage. There’s a chattering monkey. Up here’s a bird with many colors. Over there’s an ice cream man and balloons. The sun’s shining because it’s such a nice day. Way in the background it’s raining, but that’s over another city. There’s all of us on the grass having fun. Adam, Claire, the two Ryans, Marianne…. Over here’s a dog walking by with his master, glad to be so close to so many different kinds of animals. He’s telling his master that — see the barking lines? The sky is blue, the trees are green, flowers are floating down from the branches, the girls are all wearing pretty colorful dresses, the boys are in new jeans. The hearts I put around the picture are for decoration and how we all feel. Over here’s a giraffe I didn’t draw very well, but I think I got the neck and spots on it OK. When it’s done I’ll cut it out, and after my class uses it I’ll give it to you. Are you proud of me for what I’m doing, Daddy?” My Church,’ he said to me, I have to come back to you, there are no two ways about it. I have to continue where I left off. I want to buy food for you, go to the zoo with you, read you a story, listen to you make up poetry, kiss you good night, dim your light, sprawl on the floor beside your bed with my head on your legs till you’re asleep, maybe hold your hand while I’m doing it if you don’t mind for me to, shut your light off, slowly close your door, stand outside your room with my head against the door jamb thinking of the things we did together that day or I saw you do, what we might do the next. My dearest’—this is still Howard talking—’I loved you more than I loved anyone in any way in my life. Your mother knew. We had few secrets and none about that. Eva I loved enormously also but didn’t have the time with her I had with you. I’m sure, though maybe not, since she was the second and I loved my first so much, but it very well could have been the same with her or fairly close if I’d had two more years. Maybe there’s something you can do to help me come back. Sounds silly, but church after church was built on miracles, or for the most part, and still keep themselves going that way somewhat or their holds over their flocks, so maybe those things do exist. Love would be able to set one off if anything could, I’d think, or one as deep and tight as mine, though so many people like me or in my position I’ll say must feel and think that, so the chances if there are any must be very slight. But try to think of something to help me. And Eva. Speak to your sister and see. Maybe my big advantage over the others is that I was lucky to have such smart capable girls. Funny, but those were the exact adjectives my father used to say about his boys.’ Then the dream ended. What do you make of it? I’m just following instructions. I didn’t repeat any of it to hurt you.” “It’s a good dream,” Eva says. “Maybe even a great one. I know I never had one better or near so good. Big, strong, clear, reverberatory, though with little take to the give. So much like a fine short slow artsy European movie, more Nordic than Alpine or Mediterranean, and one that most viewers wouldn’t take to unless their life stories approximated yours. To be shown in four or five select theaters around the country, is the way I’d distribute it. Not much profit, in other words, and no bundle to be made through public TV either, since it wouldn’t get on till 11:00 P.M. And that it sunk in so much. Improbable, if it had come from anyone else. I wish I saw him in a dream like that. All bones and stink and rot and monolog — I wouldn’t care so long as I knew it was he and he spoke to me or at least showed he saw me or heard. Even in a quick daydream, just ‘Hello and good-bye and I love you, my little pancake,’ or just some rapid eye contact, but it’s never happened and by now I’m convinced it never will. Think of it: all these years and all my efforts. Staring at his photos and reading some of his manuscripts and also published stuff before I went to bed — even the most autobiographical ones and especially the few where even I’m included, albeit as a crawl-in — just to help it happen. But it’s really too late at night or early in the morning for me to speak coherently about it. Tomorrow, or much later today — whichever comes first. You still at the same temp job? Say, I just had a brainstorm. Maybe if we went to church some quiet afternoon when hardly anyone but the sexton was there and prayed for him to return in one real wholesome recognizable human piece. Dad as you knew him or, more orderly, as he would have, devoid of all debilitating diseases, aged. Synagogues have never been good for that for me. I never got the impression prayer will get you anywhere there. No incense essence or votary candles for sale or come-in-and-pray-anytime policy or transformed or sorrow-torn or just trouble-free people on their knees, and they certainly don’t promise to get you a step or two closer to heaven or away from hell. But tell me where you’re working now.” “My last week secretarying. It’s no good for my brain.” “Then you phone me at my studio, since you get the freebie and by leaving soon have much less to lose. Maybe I can fly in to see you in a week and we’ll devise some plan like that praying-at-a-church, to bring him back if just for an hour or a day.”

Olivia writes an essay about her father. “The most important person in my life,” it’s titled. “Actually,” she writes, “he wasn’t the most important person in my life. My mother was. But I didn’t want to write about her. I wanted to find out what I was feeling about him. I know what I feel about her. I love and respect her tremendously. I loved my father a lot too but I had some major grievances against him. Major, by the way, was one of my father’s favorite words, my mother’s said, as it is one of mine, though she told me this only after I started using it a lot. Since I seem to take after him in many other ways, like my walk and ear for music and having trouble getting to the point I want to make, besides most of my physical traits, she thinks maybe my use of words was inherited from him too. And I had to look up the word ‘grievance’ before. I’m saying all this because I want the readers of this essay, which will probably only be my teacher Mrs. Zimkin (should I have put a comma after ‘teacher’? I think so) and maybe my classmates, if she thinks it’s good enough to read parts of in class or really that good to read the whole of (or bad enough to show where the unnamed student, in this case, went wrong, as an example for the entire class. I used ‘entire’ then because I didn’t want to use ‘whole’ twice in one sentence. Maybe I’m wrong in doing that). But Mrs. Zimkin will probably still be the only reader, since my classmates, if they get to hear any of it, will just be listeners. (Did I really need all that space to make such a small point? And why I used ‘just’ when I felt like using ‘only’ then, I already said. But it’s so unnatural that I think I’ll change that policy.) Anyway, I want the reader and listeners, if there are any, to know just how honest this essay is. In both its ideas and aims and so on, as well as its conception, or just realization or execution, three more words I just looked up for their spelling. But: grievances against him. (If this essay is among the best she’s ever read of a student’s, Mrs. Zimkin’s said, or better put, which I’m sure she’ll appreciate: ‘among the best student essays she’s ever read,’ then not only do the classmates hear all of it, if it’s not too long, but she asks Mr. Zimkin, who’s chairman of the English Department of a major university in the city, to read it. That would mean it would have at least two readers, but one very distinguished one. Another word I just looked up, and sorry, Mrs. Z. You’re great, but he’s got the prestige.) (I’m not sure the comma was necessary after ‘great.’ And when I looked up the rule for it, I couldn’t understand it.) But: grievances. That my father wouldn’t just let me eat, for starters. (I had a better example to start with but lost it in all the other stuff I put in.) That he did most of the cooking and feeding for my sister and me didn’t help matters either. (Notice the proper word usage there with ‘my sister and me.’ Elementary ((word looked up)) for some, but I had to look up the rule for maybe the tenth time this term.) But because of that or something else — some compulsion (looked-up word, and put that way—’looked-up’—just to change things around a bit; but this time ((also notice the punctuation just then (((I mean with the semicolon))) and also now’s and right after ‘elementary’ before, since I don’t have brackets on this machine; not used by most kids my age, I’d think)) I didn’t have to change the spelling I originally had, though ‘originally,’ also looked up, I did, since I was origginaly going to write it that way. I think that was too tricky of me. I also didn’t have to look up the punctuation I so self-admiringly pointed out, though I did have to look up ‘punctuation’ and the adverb of admiring or admiration or ‘to admire’ or however one would put that ((I looked up a way to put it but couldn’t find anything in the English usage book the school gives out to help me define what I meant — mean? — to say))). And now I forget what I was going to say about my father’s compulsion and also where I was with all those parentheses. (‘Parentheses’ I definitely had to look up. I never know if it’s ‘-is’ or ‘-es’ for the plural.) Maybe I was going to say ‘just some compulsion of his.’ Or ‘need.’ Why don’t I stick with the simplest words instead of going fancy and also the simplest punctuation? But either will do. Meaning: either ‘compulsion’ or ‘need.’ Because I want to get on and done with this essay. Mrs. Zimkin said it shouldn’t be longer than a thousand words. I know I’m fast approaching that. I tend to be verbose (looked up) in speaking and prolix in writing. I bet the reader and/or readers and/or listeners (I don’t think that’s right) think I had to look up ‘prolix’ but omitted (1.up for the one or two t’s) saying so for some reason. I didn’t have to look it up. It’s a short word and easy to spell once you know what it means. And since I know what it means, I didn’t have to look up the meaning either, which is the second reason for looking up a word. The third reason — but I’m really being incorrigible. Telling myself to get on with the essay and then running all over the place. (Bye-bye 1,000 words.) And ‘incorrigible’ is my newest big word, I only got it yesterday from a book of the only writer I’m reading these days, other than for those in the school books I have to read: Dostoyevski, though some of his books have his name with a ‘y’ rather than an ‘i’ and also nothing between the ‘o’ and ‘e’ where I have a ‘y’ I prefer the way I wrote it. Looks more Russian. But where was I? The ‘third reason’ for looking up a word. I know there are a lot more than three reasons (just going through the dictionary randomly ((LU)) to build a better vocabulary, for instance). But the third reason I was going to write here was… not punctuation. That’s the word that immediately came to me though. It’s probably close in spelling or sound or length — something — to the word I wanted. That one — tip-of-the-tongue-type stuff — means to break up a word into syllabules so you’ll know, for one thing, where to break it off if the whole word (this usually happens when it’s a long one like syllibication) doesn’t fit at the end of the line. (I didn’t mean to be tricky there. Sometimes things like that happen naturally.) Syllibication could be the word I wanted, but it just doesn’t feel right. And I didn’t look it up. (I probably should have, as I’m not sure of its spelling — two l’s or one; and if syllabule has an ‘a’ after its l’s or 1, shouldn’t ‘syllibication’?) I’m obviously not sure of ‘syllabule’ either. Nor which of those letters and words deserve quotes and which sentences deserve parentheses. But I’m tired of looking up words and rules for this essay, just as the reader and listeners, etcetera, must be tired of reading about it. (‘Etcetera’ should be two words, and no hyphen, but I like it as one. Dash? Hyphen?) That’s my problem probably, thinking I can have my way with words so early, and no doubt one of the reasons this essay will get a bad mark and won’t be read by Mr. Zimkin or to my classmates. That’s okay. I’m not proud of the essay. Nor am I interested in that sort of thing: praise, great grades, wider distribution. (I won’t say, just as I won’t with any word or rule from now on, if that one was l.u.) But enough of all that. I’m going to see where I left off before. I realize that this type of honesty — telling what my every move is in writing this essay — well, not ‘every move.’ I didn’t tell when I got up to make weewee. Probably because that had nothing to do in the writing of this. But when the typewriter jammed — that did, and I didn’t mention it. After I unjammed it a new idea came to me about the sentence I was writing before the typewriter jammed. So I wrote it right after I unstuck the jammed keys. Then I had to wash my fingers because of the typewriter ink smudges on them. I didn’t want to smudge the paper or the typewriter keys any more than I already did when I quickly typed out the new idea. Not smudge the typewriter keys that got stuck but the ones you press down on to type. The keyboard keys. And no new idea came while I was washing or until I got back to the typewriter and continued writing this thing. Anyway, all of that will be chucked now. It’ll just be a straight essay, I mean. Except for finishing that line before. That I realize that this type of honesty has little to do with the honesty of what I want to say in the essay. And now I’ve looked back. My father and food. Not my first choice for starters but I forgot the first. As part of my grievances against him. That he forced me to eat. He didn’t hold me down or shove it into my mouth. But he’d get upset if I didn’t eat or not much and of course this upset me, scared me a few times too when he really got upset about it, and probably affected me after. Sure it did. It made me hate food for a long time. Made me intentionally throw up a lot of my food for about two years, I remember. And that he joked so much. That was the grievance I was going to write for starters. Funny it should come now. When after I gave up ever remembering it. And I’m not saying he joked about food. But he probably did that too, when I was eating well, or at least what he took for well. But just that he joked about almost everything too much. I know it got to my mother too. With me he was hardly ever serious except when I wasn’t eating well. And even that wasn’t seriousness; that was just plain strange. So, was he ever serious with me? Maybe when I was crossing a busy street with him and things like that. When I got a bad splinter. When I fell. All this troubled me. Bugged me, I wanted to say. Also infuriated me sometimes when I wanted to speak seriously to him about something and sometimes to someone else. If I spoke seriously to someone when he was around he usually interrupted with jokes, or little asides, such as ‘Boy, is she smart?’—in this real put-on dummy’s accent. I didn’t know how smart she was. Boy!’ Or ‘Who told you that what you just said? Too smart for it to be me, I mean “I,” I mean “him.” I want to know the guy who told you that so I can know someone who’s really smart, outside of my own daughter, of course.’ And so on. That he praised me too much too. Grievance. I wanted real honest praise, not total overwhelming sticky silly fake praise. I wanted real honest rejection from him too. Criticism, I mean. Something that could help. In just when I cut something out of paper, for instance. Made designs. Drew. But I almost never got it because of how unserious he was. But I loved him for his affectionateness. Which he gave a lot. I must have been kissed and hugged and said beautiful words to—’my darling daughter, my pretty princess, my wonderful bunny’—more times in the five years I knew him than anyone could be in, well, twenty-five years. In a lifetime even. That he spent so much time with me too. He could because of his job. But he also could have avoided it, claiming work, work, important older-person things he had to do, but he didn’t. I loved him for it. Appreciated it, rather. Both. But I didn’t like it that he yelled. Major grievance. He could turn on me in a second and this scared me too. Up and down, back and forth he was too in his niceness and anger bursts. He probably scarred me on that. When I hear a sudden gruff voice sometimes even today, I shake. Also his crazy temper things and yellings not against me this time but sometimes against everything. What I mean is — Well I have a memory put away somewhere from when I still wore diapers, because he was changing them then and I was on my back on the bed he changed me on and suddenly with his fists he’s banging the bed on both sides of me and screaming not words but straight yells as loud as he can. But he never hit me. Maybe once or twice I don’t know of. But normal for anyone, maybe even for someone who later becomes a saint: twice, three times in five years 111 say. I’m not trying to apologize for him. I’ve hit some kids and my sister for no reason and sometimes for good reason and swung at my mother once or twice too, but of course I’m much younger. And if he hit me I’m sure it was only a slap, on the hand, probably the little top part of it, but not hard and nothing more than that. I also admired the work he did. Not admired it, since except for it just lying around on tables and shelves I never saw it, but just that he did it, never stopped, year after year, started long before my mother met him, and that he wasn’t bothered or boosted by what people said of it, but that’s something else and maybe not for me to talk as if I know what I’m talking about. If it had any influence on me, it’ll turn up later. I like it too that he, with my mother, encouraged my reading and own creating and before that, read to me, every day and night, almost from the time I was born. So he was serious in that with me, which I forgot. Also that he dropped everything most times to get something for me. I’m talking about food, books, for my thirst, anything. He’d run into the house, he’d turn the car around and drive back five miles to the house, to get me a sweater if I was cold or my favorite stuffed animal at the time if I forgot it and was sad. So what I’m saying is he was generous most times with his time with me for a person who was really short of time, when you think that besides what he did at home he was doing two other work things. I’ve counted the words on two pages and multiplied that by the number of pages I’ve written so far and then divided it all in two and see I’ve gone way way over the word limit. Maybe I should just sum up now — I’m sure nobody will want to read even half this much from me and probably will just want to skip from page two to this last one — and say that I know I didn’t answer the aim of the essay Mrs. Zimkin asked for, but that losing my father so early in my life was a major tragedy for me, if that isn’t repeating myself after all I’ve said, and if this sentence isn’t too complicated, with not enough commas or something or with just not breaking it up into two or three sentences, to understand. And ‘the major’ then, I’ll say. The.”

Olivia sits between her mother and grandmother at the funeral. The casket’s a nice wood and color, she thinks. Plain, simple, nicely shined. But she thinks her father would still say of it “Nice for somebody else, and not because I’m in it. But since it still looks too expensive and will only just rot in the ground and can’t even be recycled, not for me.” “Put me in a bag and dump me over the side of a boat into the ocean,” he once said to her mother. “Seriously, but of course not before my time comes; I can’t swim.” When she said “Shh, not even for laughs in front of the children,” he said “Only kidding, yak-yak, and you didn’t think I was talking about someone else?” She also thinks he wouldn’t like all the flowers around. He said he didn’t much like buying cut flowers, even though her mother loved getting them from him. And when Olivia picked them here and there out of the ground, which she was always jumping away from him in their walks to do, he didn’t much like that either. To him, even people’s private gardens and front yards were public parks, to be seen and enjoyed by everyone is what she thinks he meant. She knows he explained what he meant, because she asked him to, but that part she forgot. When her mother bought flowers he often put his nose in them and said “Smells very nice, like flowers,” and put them under Olivia’s nose and said “Breathe deep without stopping to think and tell me if it’s animal, mineral or vegetable.” He also wouldn’t like the electric candles by the casket. Garish would be the word he’d use. “Cheap, ugly, they even flicker,” he might say. “Either wax candles or forget it. I’m not worth the real thing?” He also wouldn’t like the things the rabbi’s saying about him. Too flattering, lots of the facts all wrong, making him sound the way he wasn’t. “Your eye is beginning to turn in,” her mother whispers to her. “Put your glasses on,” and she takes Olivia’s glasses out of her bag, rubs the lenses with a tissue and puts them on her. Also the unnatural deep voice like a stiff actor’s. Probably wouldn’t like there being any kind of rabbi up there. Just friends, he probably would want to speak about him in front of all these people, or only his brother. But probably no words and nobody up front and everyone staying in his seat and no getting up and down a few times on cue and just sad piano or cello music for the time of one side of a record followed by a few seconds of silence and then everyone go home or wherever they go and his wife, mother and brother and she could go to the cemetery to do very quickly everything that’s supposed to be done there. He said a few times that he never could stand anything nice said about him or his work to his face. Saying anything nice about him when he wasn’t around he didn’t like either, if it got back to him. “I hate compliments or giving them, except to my students if one really needs one and to my daughters and wife, but only if they don’t return them.” He also wouldn’t like that so many people are here. Maybe the only ones he’d like seeing if he was here would be the ones who read about it in the newspaper obituary yesterday or heard about it from someone who had and whom he last saw long ago and some he even thought were dead. “I like bumping into people I haven’t seen for years,” he said, “better than I like making a date to meet them. Best when it’s on a busy street and not muggy, overly sunny, raining heavily, unless one of us has an enormous umbrella for us both to fit comfortably under, or freezing cold. Snow’s okay no matter how hard it’s coming down, if you’re dressed for it, since it makes the encounter more fantastic. But no commitment to stay, this way, and the conversations are usually quick, lively and full of surprises — time speeded up, then a kiss on the cheek or handshake and good-bye.” He didn’t like crowds, that’s why he wouldn’t like all these people here. Once, yes, he did, he said — Ebbetts Field, Madison Square Garden, a half-million people marching to ban the bomb or around a factory that made casements for napalm. Lots of different faces, costumes, chance to meet a young woman, a single cause or event making everyone feel together or that things can get righted through sheer numbers. But no more and not for twenty years. A big crowd leaving the same place at the same time now made him jittery. Someone might faint, others could panic, gun might drop through the hole of someone’s pants pocket and go off, someone else could open fire on the crowd from a passing car or high on drugs or some political or even religious conviction drive into it, but maybe that’s going too far. It’s going too far. It’s off the point. Large crowds made him uneasy, that’s all, and there must be a couple of hundred people here. Three. Four. More people than seats. Or as many or near to it but most aren’t sitting close to one another. Where’d they all come from? Which ones did he know? Did a number of them come to the wrong funeral, directed by mistake into this chapel rather than one of the two or three other chapels having services now? Is there an important or well-known Howard Tetch in this city and some of his immediate survivors have the same first names that some of her father’s do and so a lot of people who read the obituary thought her father was he? “And talk about a change of mind?” he said not that long ago. “Nothing gets said to crowds or done through them, no matter how loudly a hundred thousand people yell back in unison. So now it’s one to one, two on two, six people around a round table, but that’s it if I can help it.” He’s refused just about every invite to a cocktail party or any big function like that the last few years. Particularly art gallery openings; no place to sit. He also didn’t like women’s perfume or men’s cologne or whatever it is men put on their faces and bodies and spray in their hair, when the smell of it got this strong and there were so many different kinds of it at one time. “It’s like drinking rum, vodka and scotch at the same sitting,” he said. “But my nose gets offended instead of my stomach. No, that explains it too much while adding nothing and making little sense, so in the end gainsays what I want to say. And that interpretation of my explanation’s trying too hard to be clever, which besides making the interpretation wrongheaded, worsens the wrongheadedness of the explanation even more. Too many fake fragrances, period. Or just ‘fake smells,’ since I should stay away from the sweet-sounding fake too.” He also didn’t much like fancy clothing on people on any occasion. Capes, floppy broad hats, big fur coats draped over women’s and men’s shoulders both. Ostentatious jewelry taken out of the bank vault or home safe for the day. Just overmadeup and overdressed people, hairdos that looked as if they took hours to do and cost a bundle, and so many here seem to have gone through much thought and great fuss getting ready for this. Just the shoes: so shined and new. “You didn’t give half a shit about me when I was alive,” he’d probably say, “hell with you now that I’m dead, or most of you. This is a show, no funeral. I’m just the ticket to be here, or whatever I am. The lure, the draw, the grease, the catch. None of those. The audience is the show, I’m just its reason for being, and a dead one at that. Did I have to explain that last remark too?” He also wouldn’t like being in that suit and which people were looking at him in when the casket was open. The shirt’s his: a blue button-down cotton oxford, one of two he owned and just about the only dress shirt he wore. The tie’s a nice design, color and style, one he wouldn’t have minded owning. But the suit he stopped wearing ten years ago but could never give away or throw out. Maybe wore it three times, at the most five. Everything else like that he’d eventually give away or throw out: shoes, shirt, pants, sport jacket, wallet or key ring or pen and pencil set he got as gifts from his mother and in-laws, but for some reason not this suit…. Ties, box of handkerchiefs, satin-lined bathrobe with a designer label, wicker picnic basket of different colored synthetic-fiber socks. Because it was so expensive, at least for him. Also because it was a suit, two complete articles made into one thing, each of which could possibly be used separately, and if it had come with a vest it would have been even harder to get rid of. No, the vest, if he couldn’t have bought the suit without it, would have been got rid of immediately and probably by leaving it at the store. He didn’t like the suit the day he bought it and left it at the store to be altered. When he was leaving the store that day, he told her mother some years later, he said to himself “Why’d I buy it? I don’t like it. I’ll look silly in it. Why do I almost always buy the wrong thing for myself? I came in to buy a sporty medium gray Harris Tweed suit with a vent in back and if possible with flap pockets and little domelike leather buttons. So why’d I wind up with a ventless dark brown of another kind of closer-knit tweed than I wanted, the perfect suit for a witness or guest at an execution or funeral?” He also wouldn’t like the white handkerchief in his breast pocket, though at least it was squared rather than triangled and sticking only a little bit out. Nor that the casket had been opened: that most of all. People he didn’t know filing past. Just people filing past, most probably thinking at the time what a good or bad job the embalmer did on him and later talking about it when they got back to their seats. His mother collapsing for a few moments when she saw him. Her mother refusing to go up to see him. Olivia wanting to go up but not being allowed to till the funeral director announced that the coffin would be open only two more minutes. “I’m not scared. It won’t give me bad dreams. It won’t be the last impression I’ll have of Daddy. I have pictures. He has books with his face on the backs of them. I’ll stare at them till the picture of him in there goes away. You keep telling me how mature I am for my age, so give me a chance to prove it. He’s my father, not yours. I only want to see him. I won’t touch or kiss him. Someone will have to hold me up. Uncle Jerry’s there now, so him. But one look for only a second, please? Please?” Any of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to be seen. He said a while back that when he died he only wanted to be burned without any mumbo jumbo and his ashes trashed. His mother was the one who wanted it opened. After it was closed a final time she said to Olivia’s mother “Why? I didn’t need to be shown he was gone. Because it had been done for his father and my parents and sisters and brothers, so I thought why not for him, but it was just repeating past mistakes. I should have given in to you. You shouldn’t have given in to me. If I still insisted, slobbering over your knees even, you should have told me to stop instantly or leave. It’s something I’ll never live down for the rest of my life. Married to Howard even for a few years, you should know how much stubbornness runs on both sides of his family and how we don’t mind walking over weaker wills, and that’s all you needed to have told me. A reminder of what I can be. Remember that for the next time. Not for a funeral — the next one will be mine — but any time when I want to get my way. Now let’s try to get through the rest of it.” If her father could think, what would he be thinking now? He can think, that’s all he can do now, except maybe see them from someplace, and he’d be looking at them and probably crying while thinking “Oh my poor children,” meaning Eva and she, “what’s going to happen to you without me? I shouldn’t be dead just for that. And what will I do without you? Well, it’s all got to be planned. You just don’t go to no place after your funeral and do nothing for a billion years. Up there no doubt has something for me to do from now on or else people like me would get tired and bored from doing nothing for so long and then make trouble for the place. Washing clouds. Cleaning air. And lots of enjoyable things to do with a lot of nice people after these chores are done. But it just isn’t fair for me, that’s all. Nor for them. Skip me — just for them. They know I loved them too much for me to just leave them like that. So, settled — it’s all got to change. Anyone can do the things that are planned for me, and besides I’ll have a billion years to do them in. But only I with their mother can take care of our little girls.” He wouldn’t like the chapel either. Too gloomy and uninteresting, just like the awful organ music they played. Wouldn’t have liked the furniture and paintings in the other room where her mother and grandmother and uncle and she saw people before the funeral began. He didn’t like being the center of attention anywhere. He would like it that he isn’t expected to say anything.

Olivia’s in college, dating a young man, and tells him, as she’s told lots of young men, “I have or had — I never know how to word it — two fathers. So I’ll say I have and had two fathers, how’s that?” “Sounds good to me,” he says. “One’s my stepdad. He’s fine. His name’s Eric, short for nothing.” “What do you mean?” “There’ll be a few of those. Don’t worry. Just stay tuned. He’s a psychiatrist. Very bright, trenchant. Biggest drawback with him is that he reads your mind right. He teaches psychiatry too, and he’s very sweet to my mother. They love each other tremendously, obsoletely, and he’s been as good a stepfather as anybody could want for one. Only I didn’t want one. I didn’t want two, get it? Some kids do, you know, something I learned by being the unofficial, meaning the self-declared president of the Association of Associated American Associative Stepkids dub.” “Is there such a one?” “Two live ones, you realize I meant. And it was good for my mother, marrying Eric, but I never wanted anyone — hold your hat, sir. Your head then, since this is where the big news break comes in. The blockbusting bombshell. ‘Bombadier to archivist, let it blow.’ Anyone but my real father. Did you guess that?” “From what you were leading up to, even with the animadversions … that’s not the right word. I’m not sure of the pronunciation either. But it’s a good one, yitch? Always wanted to use it in company, but intelligent company, like the opposing one, and pronounced right. But: yes, I guessed.” “Smart. This kid: he’s smart. Not my real dad; you, but he too. But I’m talking like this, this jerky nervous diversionary chatter, because the subject always distresses me. The subject’s he. The object I can’t right now turn into a pun. He died when I was six. Or five. Which is it? Definitely five. Why my kidding myself with that pretended muddlemindedment? Or trying to kid-smart you? ‘Cause I know, babe, this gal knows. Some people can tell you exactly where they were and what second of the minute of the hour of the day, etcetera, it was, when they learned that World War IV began. At least those who have reached three. You didn’t get that. Same with me when I learned he died. So I just subtract all those years and seconds from my present age and get the exact age I was when the big boom hit. The big broom, really, since it made such a clean paternal sweep. My own World War IV, over in a second. ‘Darling, take cover; Dad died.’ ‘Oh no,’ roar, and part of me’s forever dead.” “I’m not quite following you, Ol.” “Follow. I can never forgive him. Forget him. Hoo-hoo, that was some frisbeeing flip. And unintentional. You believe me?” “Not quite.” “Believe me. I can never forget him. I can get him out of my head, but the little fella always slips back in. Sometimes I think it’s the same for me as it was for him with my brother. His brother. What’s going on here? Oh, I see. He’s in him who’s in me.” “That I don’t catch.” “Because the after’s before the before. I’ll explain. He had a brother two or so years older who died when my father was twenty-three, I think. Drowned in a ship, went down, ship-he never found. They were irreversibly close and both irreversibly lost. It’s all documented.” “Where? When? By whom?” “Well, most. Because my father was a junior newsman and their oldest brother, Jerry, was a budding hotshot in what he did at the time, little news stories saying brother of news cub and hotshot bud among the dead at sea. My father kept them and I or my sister still have some, just as we have all of my father’s later writings about it. Obviously, my father wrote, and sometimes, he told my mother, part of what he wrote came with the help of his dead brother. How so? It goes like this.” ‘Tour family’s haunted.” “Hauntingly. Frightfully. But don’t fear. It’s only a couple of gentle consanguineal ghosts in me, but that’s the after before the before again. You see, his brother was a writer of the same time, long and short imaginative things, but preceded my father at it seriously by a few years. Before his brother died, my father — or Dad,’ to shorten this a bit — only did news. In fact, he told my mother, he felt he took over where his brother had left off, though his brother had hardly begun. Dad had been piddling a bit at it, but soon after Uncle Alex died he really got with it, as if possessed, he said. I like to think I carry on the family tradition in that category, but orally, which should explain all the who’s-in-me’s.” “It does, sort of.” “Dad told my mother — or ‘Mother,’ to shorten this even more. It’d be even shorter using just ‘Mom,’ but she was never just ‘Mom’ to me. But he swore Alex gave him ideas for writing when he was stumped, like first lines and startling last ones and sudden plot moves, and was even responsible for some of the more usable typos he made. ‘You again,’ he used to say, saluting him, Mother said, and then ‘Now get lost — I don’t believe in collaborative prose.’ In one piece, which Dad said Alex had contributed or sparked a significant part, he thought he should bill them both as its authors, but realized the tough time he’d have explaining it. Alex, the better read and educated of the two, provided him with right words, dates and historical situations and characters, besides doing some overnight editing on his punctuation and grammar and the prose’s rhythm. Occasionally made the paper tear when Dad was pulling it out of the typewriter, so Dad would have to rewrite the page. Deleted words and sometimes sentences and paragraphs in the rewriting, which Dad only found out about, and approved of, much later. And also nudged him away from the typewriter to do some useful chore that didn’t have to be done right away or to take his brain for a walk, when it was clear to Alex but not Dad that his work wasn’t going well. Dad’s wasn’t. Alex, when you think of his own writing he must have missed and what he had to do to do all this, was doing great with his unasked-for stintless work. Or maybe he only wanted to keep his hand in — I just thought of that. For the day when he returns — so he won’t get stale at it. Lots of experiences and people and their stories to write about where he’s been, if he went or got that far or the place actually exists. A first from the real netherworld or stopping-off place, which should get plenty of critical attention and publicity and, as a consequence, sales. And if Alex could, and maybe one only can make that kind of comeback through serious or at least well-intentioned writing, why not Dad, which was always my big wish. So what am I getting at in all this?” “You tell me.” “I am. I’m just stalling, waiting for his nudge or spark. It didn’t come. It never does when I wait for it or try to induce it. It seems to only come, as it must have from Alex to him, in flashes, pops, minipinpricks or minor accidents when I’m least expecting it. But this: that he helps me out in similar ways. Not much but enough times to make me think it’s real. Little tip on a test whispered in the air near my ear. Tiny smudge on a love letter, so I should think about writing it again or whether to mail it at all. Grabbing me — I swear I felt I felt it — when, with my head in a thought, I stepped off the curb while a car was shooting past. Maybe Alex too, but very small stuff, though I feel he’s just dormant if still there. If Alex did get back, he’s probably just hiding out and writing — to make up for lost time, let’s say — but not seeing any of his family, unless Uncle Jerry’s holding something back. But he’s still my working father, Dad is, which is probably why Eric could never take that spot. For sure in my dreams too, though that’s where I expect him to be, my sleeping conscious churning out images and actions of him advising me or providing me with the material to make wakeful decisions and take right-path directions. Does all this sound odd and too loose?” “Toulouse? Like the city? Or Lautrecian like zee artiste? Or just too scattered, making it hard to catch or take?” “The city? It’s near the prehistoric cave area, so maybe. No, that’s Bordeau or some coastal wine city or region with a B. Maybe like Lautrec. Stunted body for stunted mind? Just no focus or center, so, misconceived, half-believed, all over the place. Anyway, now you know something that’s sunken in me. If you want to know something of what he conceived and probably believed, which might help you understand me and what I said better, these are some of his books.” “OK, let’s see. Very attractive covers, solid bindings, sort of maudlin catchy titles: dark this, catastrophic that. He was a handsome man for that period, I guess, but why the tie in most of the jacket photos? Some nice things said about each book and his body of work, but they always are, aren’t they, else why put them in? But lots of suspension points in the quotes, so who knows what’s missing? A storyteller beyond compare…’ if this was the nineteenth century and the world was an island with only one writer on it … but you know I’m only kidding. Several different publishers, so I suppose they didn’t do too well by him and he had to keep moving, or else he got a bigger and bigger deal with each new one. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, but I never heard of your dad or his writing. But then I haven’t really kept up, or should I say ‘gone back into the library stacks,’ or read much since high school other than school work. Neither do most of my friends or either of my moms or dads read anything but what sells or will help them sell something, so nobody would have clued me in if he was really someone to read where my life depended on it. Each of these is a fairly long-to-enormous work, with lots of dense pages, fat paragraphs, microscopic printing for the most part, and what seems at quick glance like a lot of big words I’d be tempted to look up. You want me to read a whole book or is there a fairly short part of one or a particular not-so-long story or two that will do the trick?” “Just start one of the books from the beginning and see if it gets ya.” “I’ll take the slimmest here, if nobody objects, which also seems to have the shortest paragraphs and most dialogue and fewest printing shenanigans, since I have a bunch of exams coming up and papers to do in the next weeks. And I’ve always, skimpy reader that I’ve become — or maybe because of that, for who’s got the time to waste these days on frivolous or just no-account works — that if you don’t like one of a writer’s books, you won’t like any of them, no matter how many years he bangs away at it.” “You know, after all I’ve gone into about myself and my relationship with him — what the hell he continues to mean to me, for christsakes — you’re taking an offensively insensitive approach to me and him and his work.” “Did he just whisper that to you to say, to sort of start the great nudge away from me?” “I think that remark’s uncalled-for also.” “Oh, you don’t say? You do tell? Well, pip pip, have a hot toddy and tip-tip-erary and all that, old chap, and here’s his herd of doorstoppers for the next unfortunate who comes to you with fresh ears to be chewed off. Mine, let me apprise you—” “Fuck you too, dildo, and that comes straight from my mouth only.” “So you say. So you say.”

Eva writes Olivia a letter. “My dearest O. I’m at the office now and want to get this down to you before I forget a thing about it or more than I normally would or already have, minds being what they are. Before the phones start ringing and intergalactic heliomagnetic printing gadget starts binging and clients and colleagues and corresponders and coffee-tenders start pouring into the office and the experience gets filtered through all the events of the day and for the most part lost. Okay: Today, just ten minutes ago imprecisely, I saw a man on the street who looked just like Daddy did in one of the more notable photographs with us. Same chintzy hairline, bricky build and circus tentpole neck girth; same face, almost, with that particularly prominent Tetch chin (some call it ‘big’; thoughtfuler callers call it ‘strong’), and for the men, palisade-like cheekbones and bosomy layrnx. I couldn’t believe it and when I started gaping at him dopey- and dewey-eyed both, I’m sure he thought I couldn’t believe how gorgeous and garnie he was and that I was in some simplehearted and — minded way trying to pick him up. Wearing the same lemon yellow T-shirt Daddy wore in the notable, although what he was doing entering this snotty-chic office building in it is mystery utero-nummary. Maybe he had run all the way from his fancy hum in the city with his briefcase strapped to his back and only a minute before at the park exit taken his pants out of the case and put them on over his jogging shorts, knowing he could get away coming into the building in the shirt but please-not-sir the shorts. Because he had a dapper pair of pants on, sneakered feet — those are okay to change out of in your office, half the building now using brisk walking-to-work-and-back as their daily exercise (with about one a month, we learn in the health and crime reports of the building newsletter, dropping dead on the street from it or breaking an elbow or kneecap or getting robbed and/or raped) — and was carrying the unaforementioned monogrammed aforementioned briefcase that I doubt Daddy would have carried or owned, even if it had been given to him by Mom (‘and,’ you said she always added, to make us feel good, ‘the girls’), who I’m sure wouldn’t have had it monogrammed and in fact probably would have had it roughed up before she gave it and nearly imperceptibly scratched. Did what she added make us feel good? But I should move on with this before I lose it, or even more than I normally, already, minds, etc…. You know the photo I mean? Daddy, with his head wrenched around neckparoxysmally, and his arms, holding us to his thighs, as thick as my thick thighs but unlike mine, looking hard as … thirty seconds went by and no better simile would come up. Daddy smiling contentedly, you laughing maniacally, me crying heartbreakingly, Mom I bet clicking what she thinks could be the pic-of-her-genetrixness jitteringly, hope filling her sleeves. But the man: looking ten years younger than his age, just as Daddy did in the pic: openhearted face, long body lean and straight, weightlifter’s chest, arms and neck, so actually his build a bit bigger and bulgier so ultimately uglier than Daddy’s, since Mom’s said he only did situps and things and never lifted weights, gummy smile (our drawn gums, not the kind you buy), and holding, instead of two contrasting kids in just about every way but their sex, gums and chin (mood, hair, eyes, nose, clothes, size, thighs…) the revolving door still for me, other left-or-right holding the briefcase. CON the monogram acronymed. I continued to couldn’t-believe-it and finally busted ‘I swear I’ve no designs on your body, con sir, so disalarm yourself if that signal went on, but you look almost exactly like, which is why I’ve this dippy-pussed look of dumb-foundment and foundling-findment (don’t I wish I said all this) on my what a look’s usually on, my father.’ He said ‘Put that on the screen for me again?’ and I said ‘My father; you look just like him almost to the size of your quatriceps, and that’s no lie,’ and he gave me one of those ‘I’m sure I don’t look that young even if I’d like to think so’ lines and I said ‘No, petty please, don’t compliment me or whomever you’re complimenting. You’re the spitting image of him, as my father sometimes said of other people and other times said his father liked to say, and then added a couple of times, something he said his father never did — all this, by the way, I got from my mother and my sister Hearsay — she’s from the eastern branch of the tree — and that last bad add said out of a slight disquiet over meeting my father’s spitting image, so flopped, though more likely never had a shot—“And that has nothing to do with spittle, drivel, drool or slaver and the likes.” ‘ I assume,’ he said, never beating a blink when I actually did say some of these things, ‘by your tone and tense and some of the words used and your expression that went with the last few, that your father’s dead.’ We were through the door and inside the lobby now, had been since I first noticed his acronym, heading for the elevator bank. ‘Did I? Yes I. Must’ve I, at least, for darn, he’s gone, poor mon, for sure. No, digressive I, for plain toot is he is and I never saw him as he was and I miss him bad, real badly, Con, really. But the resemblance, you to him. Well—’ An elevator opened. He said ‘Hey, what’re my doing here? I belong at the thirty-six-to-fifty-third-floor bank. I must have got totally absorbed talking to you. Nice meeting you, miss,’ and tipped the invisible peak over his brow. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘The resemblance. And there are a hundred other elevators at this bank for me to take. Or I can take the express to the seventy-eighth and walk down three flights. Or even take your elevator to the fifty-third and catch another one there to my floor. Well, it’s remarkable, yours and his — the faces, in many ways your bodies — to say the least, and to say even less than that, we all must look exactly like one other person in this world, even identical twins and triplets and such, other than their looking like the other sibling or siblings in their set. And if we look exactly like a set of identical twins or triplets and so on, then like two or three or all the way up to six other people, if there are identical sextuplets who have survived. Seven, even, if there were ever, or are now, rather, since I’m talking about this happening in the same time period with some overlapping of course, surviving identical septuplets I think they’re called. Eight? No, it doesn’t seem possible, has ever happened, whatever a set of eight is called. And a set of identical eighttuplets, I’ll call them, looking exactly like another set of eight of any time period, but without scientific tinkering I mean, or even identical septuplets looking exactly like a set of quintuplets, and so on? No, impossible, has never happened, period, though there might be a set of identical twins who look exactly like another set of twins, and almost certainly have been if we don’t keep this to a single time period, or even triplets with twins or maybe even with triplets or quadruplets, though I’m no expert on these matters so don’t take my word for it. I’m losing myself here, and possibly your interest, with my slapalong speculation of improbable pairings and things, and we haven’t much time. So yes, he’s dead, my father is, to get back to it, even if neither my sister nor I believe it. We think he’s hiding out or something — perhaps a prisoner — in Cuba or some country near here like that — an island, but one we, this country, hasn’t much to do with publicly but is very concerned about for political or strategical reasons or things like that, which is why there’s been no word about him or efforts to get him out. It could be our country even knows something about him but isn’t letting on for its own interests, though that’s really farfetched, but then who can really say?’ I won’t go into Con’s expression by now, though he obviously wanted to get away from me, if just to finish getting into his business clothes, maybe take a shower first — all in his office or one of the health clubs or cardio-fitness centers in the building — and start work, and for what should be obvious to you, I didn’t want to lose him. It’s a very big building, with a dozen entrances and several restaurants and cafeterias and many underground and exterior and interior aboveground shops and a double movie theater and even a post office and its own zip code, and I was afraid I’d never see him again even if I looked hard for him in it for the next few years. ‘Anyway,’ I said to him, ‘we feel he’s alive someplace — why a nearby isolated island-state I can’t rightly say, or can’t come up with anything right now — and that he’ll eventually get back some day, if just through our dogged wills and mental exertions for him.’ ‘Much success with it,’ he said, and then ‘Talk to you again perhaps, and have a nice day,’ and I said ‘Yes, have a nice one, and good morning,’ and that, my dear sister, for the most part, was that. When I got to the office, or really in the elevator going up, I said to myself, or aloud in the crowded car without even knowing it, ‘Oh Daddy, wouldn’t it be nice if it was true what I told your beefy lookalike downstairs? We’ve been aprayin’ and ahopin’ for it for so long and only wish there’d finally be some sign from you that you’re on your way. By boat, by train, by magic motorbike if you wish — you name it, and for me, even come in a dream.’ Sometimes I think we’re a tiny bit cracked going on about him like this, don’t you? Everything I said to the man. All this time spent on it in just this letter? Jeez, other surviving kids after this long a spread have virtually forgotten their pas, with maybe every so often a vivid to vague to somebody else’s remembered memory returning, but fleetingly, nothing life-intrusive, his influence on them mainly hereditary. I think — you know what I think? — I think we ought to toss out every photo and letter and book and memento and so on of him, from him, about him, left by him, by him — the works. Because those are what might be keeping us back or tied in so. Seeing them, bumping into them, where we begin inventing and imagining things. And if that doesn’t work, to get rid of whatever things of his Mom’s kept too. Steal into her house, chuck ‘em all out. She wouldn’t even know, or much care if she found out, since she never goes back to them, or for his books, takes them off the shelves, while we see them every time we’re there. And if that doesn’t work, to get rid of every book and thing of his we know someone other than Mom owns. And then go to the major library here and with a flick of some master computer terminal switch find out on the monitor what libraries across the country, university and otherwise, his books are in. And maybe through another flick, what libraries around the world have his books, though he never sold much of anything or got any critical attention overseas, did he? And check all these books out — spend a couple of years doing it if that’s what it takes — and get rid of those too. And by placing ads in the appropriate trade journals, find out where his books might be in all the used book stores and whatever remains in the remainder stores and distributor warehouses, and buy them and get rid of these too. And also, get a list of every rare book dealer and see if they have them and buy all of them no matter what the expense and destroy these too. And if that doesn’t work — if he’s still managing to influence our actions and so forth — he still does with you, doesn’t he? — then to place an author’s query in the Times book review section and other such places saying we’re writing a book, or to make it believable, a monograph or dissertation about him and need all his letters and correspondence of any sort and anything they might have of him — magazines with his work and newspapers with reviews of his work and interviews and articles about him and first editions and autographed copies of his books and anything else of him or of his like photographs and galleys and even old hats and clothes he might have given away or left behind and someone’s still using or saved, which we’ll promise to reimburse them for the postage and send back special delivery express and heavily insured — and dump all these too. Go to prison for it if we have to, but first making sure we got all his books out of every prison library too. And if that doesn’t work, then we should just give up thinking it’s any of these things influencing our odd behavior regarding him and to form a group of two for group therapy to work his influence away or just to see why it’s still there so. Or maybe we should do that first, avoiding all the expense and hassles and time put in and so forth of getting rid of everything we can of his. Anyway, what else is new with you, just to change the subject? No, because I’m deeply interested and always have been. Oops, suddenly must flit. Tingaringing and bingalinging and beginning of inter-inner office commingling besides the coffee and morning roll cart clink-clinging down the corridor, which if I don’t make a move for fast will be past my door. ‘Hey Jake,’ I just yelled without seeing him yet and only the tip of his cart, ‘a black coffee and plain danish as usual with maybe a few almond shavings which fell off some of the almond danishes on the tray — and don’t tell me they didn’t if you do have almond danishes today — sprinkled on top. Ah, just give me an almond danish and sugar with my coffee this time, and cream, or milk, or whatever you got that passes for them — I aim for change.’ See you soon, Dachshund. At least me hopes.”

Olivia sits on the steps in front of the house. “Come in,” Denise says. “No, I’m not coming in. I want Daddy to ask me to come in.” “Daddy can’t,” Denise says. “Get him then.” “I can’t get him and you know that, Olivia.” “Yell into the backyard for him to come around front to ask me to come in.” “I can’t do that either, much as I’d love to.” “Then up to the roof if he’s on top working there or in the basement if that’s where he is.” “Those are two other things I can’t do, sweetheart.” “Call him up then if he’s not around and tell him I’m waiting for for him to ask me to come in and I won’t come in unless he does that.” “You know that’s impossible too.” “No, I don’t know that. Why should I know it? I’m not coming in till I hear Daddy ask me to. Or till I see him park the car and get out of it or even from the car window point for me to go in. Or till he shouts at me from way down the street to do as you say and get right in. That he’ll paddle my fanny if I don’t. That I won’t be allowed any ices after dinner if I don’t. That he won’t read to me or let you read to me before I go to sleep. When he does something like one of those I’ll come in. I’ll come right in. I’ll zoom in. So fast neither of you will even see me come in. You’ll stand on the porch or the street or from the car and wonder where’d she go? Did she go in or is she still around the house or maybe hiding someplace near but not in? Because nobody could have zoomed in that fast. Or I’ll run to Daddy first if he’s in the street or walking up it or the walk or in the car or just getting out of it, but wait first to make sure no cars are coming. Or just run to Daddy if he’s already in the house. From the back he might have got in when we were talking here. Or from the front when we weren’t looking. Or through one of the windows upstairs. He could have been in a tree all this time and swung down from it to the roof and then into the window when we didn’t see him because it was a back window or we were talking or just never looked up there. Or he could have been in some secret place below the basement we don’t know about or in a closet or some hiding space in the house only he knows how to get into and only now came out of to show himself in the window or on the porch or even came out of an upstairs window to the roof to yell something like ‘Hey look-it, I’m up here.’ Then I’ll be in but only then will I come in, not before.” “Oh my poor darling,” Denise says and comes out and sits on the steps with her and takes her hands and puts her forehead against hers and a car passes and a man walking two different kinds of dogs waves at them while he passes and Denise nods to him and says to Olivia “We’ll wait till either Eva wakes up or your father parks the car or walks up the street and shows himself or yells to us from the roof or the tree or any of the other things you said.” “No, I don’t want to, I want to go in,” and pulls her hands away and sticks them under the bib of her overalls and gets up, goes inside the house and slams the door. It doesn’t make a bang and she slams it again and it does. Eva wakes up crying. “Shut up, shut up, I hate you, you little fuck, everyone just shut up for good,” Olivia screams. “My poor darlings,” Denise says, walking up the steps.

Eva, Olivia and Eric are on a beach trying to drag a rowboat into the water. “This thing will never budge,” Eric says. “My father could make it budge,” Eva says. “Here she goes again,” Olivia says. “No, let her, what?” Eric says. “My father was so strong he could lift it on his back and carry it into the water. He’d need both arms and it’d be heavy but he could do it.” “I’m sure he could. Or push, even, or at least drag it into the water by himself, but I can’t, honey. I’m simply not as strong as your father was.” “As my father is. My father’s very strong.” “As he is, then. As you say. I’ve heard of his physical exploits — how strong he was, I’m saying.” “She knows what exploits are,” Olivia says. “You don’t have to teach it to either of us. I know the word and I’ve told her the word.” “I didn’t realize that. For you see, I didn’t know that word till I was twice your age, maybe three times. How old are you? I’m only kidding. I know how old. I even know how old both of you are put together. A hundred-six, right? No. But good for you — both of you for knowing so many big impressive words. Like ‘impressive.’ You know that word too, right?” “Right.” “Sure, just as my father knows all those words and more,” Eva says. “He knows words that haven’t even been born yet. Like kakaba. Like oolemagoog.” “He does? He knows those? Wow. Very impressive. Anyway, I’d hoped we got past that subject. I said that to myself. But if we didn’t, some men are just stronger than others. That’s a fact. I’d be the last to deny it. You both know what ‘deny’ means, I know. And some men are smarter than others. And kinder and nicer than others and have more hair and so on. But I bet no man has more than two arms. Anyone want to bet?” “My father’s stronger, nicer, kinder than others,” Eva says, “and much much more than that. He’s taller than most others. And handsome. Much more than any others. His photos say so. Others say so.” “Well that’s a good thing for a man to be,” Eric says. “For an older woman to be too,” Olivia says. “That’s what Mother says.” “Good. She knows. She’s smart. Me, I was never considered handsome. That should come as no surprise to you two, as it doesn’t to your mother. Not handsome even when I was a young man, an older woman, a small piggy, or even now as a fairly not-so-young-maybe-even-old-hog. Most of that was supposed to be funny. Why aren’t you laughing?” “Because it wasn’t funny and we’re talking about someone else now, right, Olivia?” “I don’t know.” “Daddy. All that he is.” “OK,” Eric says, “111 bite. Meaning, well, just that I’m all pointy ears and curly tail uncoiled and extended snout — I want to know. What else was he? Is he. Sorry. But tell me.” “Funny,” Eva says. “He’s more funny than anyone alive. Sometimes people died laughing at things he said. But really, with big holes in their chests and all their bones broken and blood.” “Yes, that’s true,” Olivia says, “the streets covered with broken laughed-out dead bodies, for funniest is what he is and always was. And liveliest too. A real live wire, our father. You’re excellent, Eric — honestly, this is not to go stroke-stroke to you. And lively and smart, but not at all handsome, and kind and wonderful in some ways and we love you, we truly do, even if what Eva said and how she acted just now, but you’re not livelier than our dad. No sir. Our real dad was live-ly! Oh boy was he. A real live wire. He was also so sad. We shouldn’t leave that out if we want to be fair. A real sad wire. ‘Mr. Sadwire’ we should’ve called him, right, Eva? If you could have talked then. For you couldn’t even say three words in a row that made sense. No sentence-sense I used to say about her then, Eric.” “I could so say sad wire.” “Hey, stop a moment, for where are we?” Eric says. “Was? Is? Which one is he?” “Is,” Eva says. “Daddy’s definitely an is. And sometimes when I hear from him, like I did just yesterday, I say ‘Daddy Livewire, Daddy Sadwire, how dost your farting grow?’ Because that’s what he also does best — just ask Olivia.” “That’s right, she’s a true bird, we have to be fair,” Olivia says. “He was probably the world’s greatest most productive farter for more years in a row than anybody and still is.” “Is for sure. The whole world knows of him. He’s been in newspapers, on TV. People have died from it everywhere, and not happy laughing deaths. In planes and parks. Hundreds of dead bodies in your way sometimes. Flat on the ground, piled ten-deep sometimes, black tongues hanging out, their own hands around their necks. Vultures in trees all around but refusing to pick at them the smell’s so bad. And much worse. I won’t even go into it more. Like whole cities dying, dogs and cats too — not a single breathing thing left alive. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Rats always survive. But ‘Killer Dad’s been at it again,’ I always say to Olivia when we see this, and that time we walked through that ghost city. It doesn’t hurt us because we got natural, natural… what is it again we got, Olivia?” “Impunity. Immunity. Ingenuity. That’s us. We never even smell it when we’re in the midst of it but we can see when we see all this that it can only be he who did it.” “You girls are really funny today,” Eric says. “Inherited from him, no doubt.” “Oh no we didn’t. He inherited it from us, didn’t you know? Something strange happened in life when we were born. But everything he’s best at he got from us, or almost. We’re sad live wires or lively dadwires or just mad lovewires. That’s because we brought up our father and are still doing it yet. Now that’s a real switch, isn’t it, Eva, bringing up your own dad? How’d we do it?” “I’m not sure, but that’s for sure what we’re doing. We didn’t want to, we had our own lives to bring up, but we had no choice, right, Olivia?” “No, why?” “No, you.” “He was left on our doorstep, right? Came in a shoebox with a note glued to it saying … what?” “It said ‘Feeling blue? Nothing in life’s true? Cat’s got your goo? So do something different in your loo today. Bring up your own dad. But don’t leave him in a shoebox for squirrels to build their nests in on top of him. Take him out, brush him off, give him a good cleaning. Treat him as good as you would your best pair of party shoes.’ Wasn’t that what it said, Olivia?” “Or was it a hatbox he came in? Put him on your bean against the sun, sleet and rain and your brain will seem much keener.’ No, that wasn’t it. ‘Treat him as gently as you would your own mentally…’ I forget everything it said. But we did. And I know it was some kind of box.” “A suggestion box. A lunch box. ‘What’s inside is nutritious and suspicious. Open hungrily and with care.’ And when we’ve brought him up all the way, Eric, I’m afraid the sad news is you’ll have to move out. Because he’ll be moving back in, all grown up then. Because no bigamists allowed in our family, right, Olivia?” “Right, Eva.” “So?” Eva says. “So maybe in yours, Eric, it’s allowed, but not in ours. Family honor. Horses’ code. New York telephone directory. We’re very sorry. Unbreakable rule. But let’s stop, Eva. I’ve spun out and so have you. And we’re not being nice to Eric who’s been so nice to us. Renting this boat. Helping us push it into the water. Doing most of the work. Probably getting a heart attack from it. Dying for us just so we can have some summer fun.” “Hey, don’t worry about me, kids. Let it out. Have it out. Thrash it to me. Money and abuse are no object. Listen, I know how you’re both feeling, but you have to know I also of course wish he had never died.” “He never did, how can you say that?” Eva says. “Whatever. And easy as it is for me to say this after the fact and much as I would have missed if he had lived — I’ll be straightforward with you — I didn’t know him but have heard so many wonderful things about him that I only wish I had.” “Had what?” Olivia says. “That he can’t be replaced. By me. I know that. Never deluded myself otherwise. And that I wish I’d known him.” “So, it can be arranged,” Eva says, “can’t it, Olivia?” “Let’s stop — really. We’re spoiling our day and being extra extra lousy to Eric.” “OK, he’s dead, heave-ho, hi-heave, what d’ya say, Joe, bury the problem? for what I want most now is to get out there to fish, splash and row.” “Well,” Eric says, “it seems we’ll have to wait for a couple of strapping guys to come along and help us or come back when the tide comes in. Anyone think to bring that card with the tide times?” “Daddy will come help,” Eva says. “Sometimes it only takes one and he’s the one. So hey, hi, Daddy of mine, come and pull our boat into the water. You’ll see. I’ve wished. Daddy come now,” and she sits down hard in the sand, puts her thumb in her mouth and sucks it while she twiddles her hair in back and looks off distantly. “Eva, get up, get up quickly, you hear me?” Olivia says. “You’re scaring the shit out of us.”

Olivia’s on a hilltop, alone, blue sky, warm pleasant morning, no clouds, slight breeze, strong smell of clover in the air, faint buzz of bees in the wild flowers around, perfect day, nothing but trees, hills, bay and sky in view, picks a flower, smells it, smells sweet, holds it up and says “For you, father dear. I used to love picking and giving you flowers, making you bouquets, especially out of the wild ones with a few pretty leaves on the outsides of it making it look like a bridal or more like a bridesmaid’s bouquet. So here’s one more, ‘on the house’ as you used to say,” and throws it up. He shouts out “Got it. Thank you, my darling sweetheart; thousand billion thanks. I love you, my sweet münch. I take this flower and hold it to my chest. I take it and kiss it. If I wanted to be funny I’d say I take it and eat it. OK, I eat part of it, the tastiest petal and most digestible. I push it into my face. I put my nose so deep into it that some of the flower gets up my nose and tickles it and makes it tough for a moment for one nostril to breathe. I sneeze because of the tickling and maybe something in the flower. And finally I put the flower between my shoulder and chin — hold it to my shoulder with my chin — and keep it there. It’s a flower from you so that’s why I love it so much. It was picked with feeling. Hell, it was picked by you, meant for me, so that’s enough. When this flower dies a little a little of me will die too. Nah, not as bad as that. What should I say then? When it dies completely it’ll be dead completely, that’s all, so what else is new? but my love for you — well, we don’t want to get even hokier here, do we? No we don’t. So I’ll just say — I’m saying, in fact — thank you, thank you, you’re so kind, good, gentle, delicate, sensitive, clever, I’m so lucky, kiss kiss kiss. And it’s not my own hand I want to kiss either. Beautiful and daring too. What a kid.” She closes her eyes, squeezes them tight, clenches her knuckles. “Fucking shit piss ass pus,” she says.

Olivia’s asleep, he’s watching her from a few feet away, comes to her, gets on his knees and whispers into her ear “Can you hear me, darling? Is my voice getting in? Say no if you can’t, yes if you can. Nod then. Grit your teeth, growl. Do the old blink thing, three for whatever, four for whatever. Scowl, hum, quickly lift your brow. A sign’s all I want. Now I’ll shut my mouth — it can be done, I promise you, just listen or watch — and hold my breath and you say or give it. The sign, I mean; something.” “Yes,” she says without opening her eyes. “You know I loved you, don’t you? I don’t have to go into a long song and dance—” “No, don’t, I know,” face up, eyes still closed, head in the middle of the pillow which is right in the middle of the top part of the single bed, hands clasped on her stomach under the quilt, legs tight together and straight down to the end of the bed. “You holding some flowers in your clasp?” he says. “No, why, because I look as if I’m dead?” “Just lightening things up a bit; trying to; making talk. But God forbid. Never dead. Never you. What a thing. You’re just resting. I used to lie in bed like that, same way, but as a means to getting to sleep when I was having trouble sleeping, or trouble dropping off. Once asleep I slept. And you can, that way, when it’s successful, almost feel different parts of your body dropping off. Not almost — feel them peeling off. ‘Good night, feet,’ I used to say, when they went. Toes never went first; both whole feet always went together. Then ‘Good night, legs. Good night, waist. Sweet dreams, fingers. Nighty-night, neck,’ chin and so on right up the body and face till it worked its way to my brain. Then, if it got that far before I fell asleep, there’d be a click and I’d be out.” “I’m not lying here like this for that reason, and even unintentionally it’s never been successful. I’m doing it because it makes me feel peaceful and helps me to think.” “I can’t sleep either,” he says, “thinking how I might have hurt you sometimes.” “I can sleep, but hurt me how?” “Physically a few times — shaking you so hard when you were very small that I heard your bones crack as they do with an osteopath. Slapping you once or twice or even more than that — hands, once your cheek, other places, your butt — right up till you were past five. But verbally hurting you is what I really mean by hurt. Saying stupid rotten things. Also using sneers and snubs or just standoffish silence as weapons. Saying ‘Then I won’t talk to you.’ Or ‘ Then I don’t like you.’ Or ‘You little brat: fuck you then.’ Or staring at you as if you were a piece of human shit someone wanted me to pick up or just an idiot. Not often but enough. And then, not that I could have helped it, leaving you so early in your life. Relatively early in mine too, but that’s not the important thing here. That hurts me the worst. What it must have done to you. I know what it did, so why go into it?” “Sleep, Dada. It’s better for both of us.” “Sleep how? For a very long time? Past your own life? No, I’ve got to stop thinking that. But sleep for how long, my darling? You want me to go away forever then?” “No, appear, disappear, come back when you want — all that’s your prerogative — but maybe not as often. I love you, don’t worry, but having you here so often is just a little too much for me at times. You see that, don’t you?” “I see it and I understand the problem. But you understand my problem too, don’t you?” “Yes. Or I think I do, but let me make sure. What is the problem? And if there is one, how can it compare to mine?” “The problems are incomparable but mine still exists. The problem’s that I can’t stand being away from you for very long, nothing you don’t know. From your sister too, but you a little more so since I knew you so much more. I have to see you both, in other words, is the problem. If I don’t I go almost crazy. Sad with craziness, crazy with sadness. Both. Deeper, believe me, sometimes where my mind can’t even reach. Sometimes I’m at the breakdown stage in my head, so much do I want to see you when I know it’s too soon after the last, and that’s when I try to hold myself back most from coming, knowing what it does to you. So I think of seeing your sister, but I know what it does to her too. So I see you because I know you can take it, bad as it might be, better than she.” “I understand it then. It’s what I thought. But what can I tell you? Only that you have to think of my feelings too.” “I do, I do, what do you think I’ve been saying here? Too many times you had that problem of not listening to what people were saying, especially me, and especially when I was making the most sense or wanted something especially done, so for you to hear. ‘Olivia,’ I’d say, my voice with each time getting sharper, ‘that’s the third time I asked you to come to the table’ or ‘to clean up that mess.’ And a minute later: ‘Olivia, Olivia, this is the fourth and bloody well better be the last time I’m going to ask you to come to the table’ or ‘to clean up that mess.’ And you’d still sit at your little child’s table, doing your cutouts, or making a book, or talking to your stuffed animals, or building or drawing or just daydreaming but pretending not to hear me because if you did acknowledge hearing me you’d then have to take yourself away from whatever you were doing, and it would just tick me off. ‘Olivia, goddamnit,’ I’d say, ‘do you want me to shout? Because I’m getting there and you know how I can shout. Then what? You’ll say “You’re always exploding at me” or “getting hotheaded” or “cross,” and probably start crying, and I’ll say, disturbed by your crying, but still “And you didn’t deserve it every one of those times and this time too?” ‘No, what am I saying? You’ve been listening. And if you haven’t from time to time it’d be natural, since you’re in bed with the lights out and it’s late and you’re probably getting sleepy or have been sleepy for a while and maybe even been nodding out.” “I’m not, I haven’t been.” “Anyway, it’s got to be me again saying things meanly and crossly and so on, but doing what I was always good at, right? But mostly trying to get you to agree with me to let me see you more than you want or can take. I’m sure I could have said that shorter. But I’m telling you, my darling, lots of times I only come to you when it starts killing me from being away from you and I can’t stand it anymore or something forces me to you no matter how hard I force myself back.” ‘Then I have to say that from now on you’ve got to think of my feelings even more than you have, and to try even harder to force yourself back.” “I will. Much harder. Hard as I can and more, a lot more, though what’s to guarantee I’ll be able to, and if able to, have some to total success? No, I will be able to — I’ll force myself till I am, stay at it, think of nothing else but, etcetera, resist, and resist more, and so forth, unabridged diligence and every trick in the book. And if I can only come back to you once every other month, let’s say—” “Much too much.” “Once every three months then—” “Still too often, I’m afraid.” “Six months then, if that’s what you’d prefer — but seeing you like this, speaking to you when I come back or once every two or three times speaking to you if that’s what you’d prefer—” “It would be, I’m sorry. Maybe once in every four.” “Then done, good, don’t worry about it, because it’d be more than worth it to me. Worth it how? Worth all the effort? Worth all the killing-can’t-stand-it-pains-resistance-more-resistance-going-crazy and so on, I mean. It should be, at least. And if you change your mind and want me around even less than that, or talking to you like this less than that, or talking to you any old way — mumbling, lisping, sputtering, susurrating, anything you’d want less of — than I’d have to do what you say and try even harder there to pull it off, isn’t that so?” “If it’s what I’d want, yes. Sorry again but that’s the way it has to be.” “So I’ll do it; glad to. You watch, I will. But just know that when I’m not around you I’m almost always thinking of you.” “Try not to do so much of that too. It’s no good for you. I’m sure it usually leads to you wanting to come here and everything we’ve both said that goes with that. So try to sort of forget me too.” “You’ve done that with me?” “A little. I’ve had to.” “OK. If that’s what you wish, OK. In that I’ll forget you more than I have, I’m saying, which you probably know isn’t saying very much.”

Olivia meets a man with the same name as her father. When he phones to see her again she says no, “even though I did think you were interesting to speak to and pleasant to look at and under any other circumstances I would have enjoyed seeing you again. But you’ve the same forename as my father. It would be impossible. I’m trying to forget the old guy, in a way.” “Then what better way than going out with a man named Howard? You’ll forget him through me.” “You sound a lot more overconfident than I like or noticed the other night and you also don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Maybe I am and don’t. I’m sure I am and don’t. I often am and I often say things I think I mean and three hours later wonder why I said them and what did I mean. But for you I’ll change — not only how I am but also my name, now how about that?” “You couldn’t have known, but all those remarks — saying things you don’t mean and maybe just for the sounds of them besides all those beguiling rhythmic effects, big quote unquote in there and also that name business — are exactly what my father would have said or done. He was a joker. He kidded about just about everything, besides trying to be a shocker, stunner and charmer with words, spoken and scrawled.” “Then I won’t change my name. I’ll change yours. Or you can change yours to Howard and I’ll be Olivia, though you can call me Ollie for short, or just call me Shortie, or Short for short. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m saying again and three hours from now — three seconds, even — I’m thinking right now what did I say and why’d I say it? — I’ll again think what did I mean, or did I already say that? I think I did. I know I did, so why my pretending thinking-oblivia? I mean oblivion, Olivia.” “Even your word pranks and speech patterns are like his. Repeating, explaining, digressing, questioning, requestioning, quick-switching, going over everything he said about everything and then wondering if he might have missed an insignificant detail or two, and then three or four, and probably in the process infuriating or fatiguing or infuriating because he was fatiguing everyone he’s speaking to. No, your name is Howard, my father’s name was, I want to forget the name Howard for the time being, or something. This: I just don’t want any man I go out with to have that name, since any man I go out with could end up being a man I’m interested in and then seriously involved with and then ultimately the man I might think of being married to, and since I for certain don’t want to be married to a man named Howard, I can’t go out with you.” “I don’t see it.” “Don’t you? It’s not screwy or complex. It’s just the way it is, despite all my efforts to make it other-is, and that’s that I can’t say or think of or even read or anything like that the name Howard without thinking of my father, something that’s not going to change by going out with a man named Howard.” “How about Howie? I’m serious. I hate the name Howie but you can call me it, but only you, remember that. You introduce me to relatives, say ‘This is Howard.’ Call me on the phone though, you can even say ‘How.’” “He hated the name Howie too. That’s what my mother said.” “I don’t like the name Howard either, but if I went by the name or whatever you want to call it of H.J. or something — it could only be H.J., unless I changed my middle name to one with another initial — it would seem phony and therefore worse.” “He also didn’t like ‘Howard,’ but no — not Howard, Howie, How, Ho or even H, since I’d know what that H means and other people would still refer or write to you by your given name.” “I love you, want to marry you, marry me yesterday, let’s have children last year and this, grandkids the next, sibilate our silver gilded annuity the supper’s coming upchuck — Listen, what do I have to do other than turn myself into a full-fledged fool, which I’m ready to do for you, in duplicate, to see you for coffee? For tea then. Tea without the teabag then. Just the water, cold, in a glass, at a luncheonette counter of your choice. And just one glass, we’ll share it, I’ll even leave a profligate tip for the counterperson who brings it, and then I’ll go. Or two glasses of cold if you wish. But I’ll say good-bye right after, shake your hand and go. Or no shake or good-bye. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets and my mouth closed. Or only I’ll drink the water, out of one glass or two, and you can just watch. Or don’t watch. Look the other way, at your shoes, the clock, tick-tock. Or watch your watch. You don’t have a watch, I’ll get you one. Two watches, three, one for around whatever part of the body that isn’t a wrist, since I can’t stand the ones with a pin or clip. Or don’t even come inside. Stand outside, but at least walk a half block with me to the luncheonette, which is all I ask. And I don’t even have to drink the water. I can just stare at the glass for a few seconds, maybe just ask for an empty glass but still give a huge tip, and you can be doing what you want outside, watching or not, and then either of us can go.” “You’re really asking too much. To see me you’d have to die, which is certainly not what I’m asking for, and be reborn to around your present age with any other name but the one you have now.” “And if I die and happen to be reborn with the name Howard, what then? Coincidences like that have happened. Travesties, you can say. You can, I can — us both. Tragedies, rather, but let’s not go that far, what do you say? Just give me another name this second and I’ll be nothing else but that name for as long as you like. Honestly, what name would you prefer me to be? Lionel?” “If I actually wanted it, Lionel would be fine.” “Not ‘final’? OK, Lionel. From now on I am. Lionel, Lionel. Hey, I’m beginning to like my new name, so thank you very much.” He hangs up, phone rings fifteen seconds later and she picks it up. “Don’t tell me,” she says. “Hello, Olivia? This is Lionel, remember me? Tall, withery, walks like smoke unfolding, talks like folds unsmoking, rosy eyeballs, cozy nose holes, stovepipe legs. My voice is a trifle disguised, so maybe you don’t recognize it. But it’s Lionel calling, Lenny or Lionel. No, not Lenny or Len. Really, terrible names, undistinguished, somewhat lummox, and which wouldn’t even suit me in a baseball game. Lionel. Good plain Lionel, but how’s by you? Long time no peak.” “You nudnik. All that’s exactly what my father would have done and probably said.” “I know what he would have done and said. I am your father, that’s why I did and said it. I’m back. But I love you like a lover, not like a father. Or rather suit you like a suitor, not like a vest. For a father doesn’t want to fall flip-flop for his daughter and marry and have kids by her and grandkids by their kids, if he’s an upstanding man, an opprobrious father. Hey, how about that? Big words your father misuses, your suitor dissutures, like calling himself scur-a-lust and pusillan-i-must when he means foursquare and a fifth snared and six will get you a collar. In other words, where he doesn’t mess around with his suit buttons, pocket flaps, lining, lapels and button holes. But God, what am I doing? Being subhuman, nonruminant, unfeeling, forgive me, for what I really should have said was I’m sorry and how long ago and only if you want to tell me, what from? And please don’t say that’s exactly what he would have said and with that same soft sympathetic timbre after that long silly insensitive monolo I gave.” ‘It’s true. But let’s forget it. It’s absolutely no use.” “Did he die of happenstance? Certain circumstances? In his own arms? As my father used to say of his two younger siblings who died when he was five, of old age? Now you know where I get most of this from. And I know I’m not being funny but I have to keep you on…. No response to that?… Listen, I want to go out with you, don’t you hear? Am I to suffer because my folks named me after my mother’s brother who died six months before I was born? He got smacked with some shrap. Few pieces left of him are buried overseas in a soldier’s grave he shares. Is my mother to blame for forcing my father to go along with that name, and is he to blame for letting himself be forced? I could have been Abel. Nice name? The right initial? That’s what they planned, Abigail or Abel, till my uncle got scrapped. I forget what H-name I was to be if I’d been a girl, but hardly matters. But would you have seen a guy for just coffee or water or an empty glass whose name was Abel?” “The name alone wouldn’t have stopped me.” “And my mother didn’t want ‘Howard.’ Her mother pleaded with her to. Was still distraught, of course, over her only son’s death, so said ‘His loss was bad enough and almost killed me, but I’ll die for sure if you don’t name your boy Howard.’ Is my grandmother to blame for pleading that to my mother, and before that, for naming her son ‘Howard’? And is the original Howard — original as a name as far as my mother and I know, since there’s no record of it ever being in the family — to blame for dying before I was born? For letting himself be drafted, let’s say. For not dodging it, though who knows if in his dodging he wouldn’t have been run over by a car or train, or caught, died very quickly of something in the stockade. So my grandmother got his name out of a phonebook. Opened it up, went down the columns of Smiths and came up with Howard and stopped right there. Or continued going if she didn’t already have a girl’s name. ‘Hortense’ I now think my mother settled on from the phonebook for her girl’s name if she couldn’t convince her mother to accept Abigail.’ Maybe we should blame AT&T. So my mother went along with my grandmother. She was a good daughter, devoted, and didn’t want to be in any way the reason for her mother’s illness or death. Qualities like that should be highly prized. Even still, I should phone her right now and say ‘Mom, you never did such a wrong thing in your life, so far as I know and which I’m only now realizing, as naming me what you did. Because of it, and let’s not even talk about what I’ll be missing out on, you’ll be out a beautiful intelligent daughter-in-law and if this woman and I would have had it in us, two to three fine grandkids.’ I’d love to call her up. She’s dead and I only wish there was a phone for her where she is so I could call her every day as I did when she was alive. I don’t know why she never called me except when I was coming over and she wanted me at the last minute to pick up a lemon or carrot she needed for the dinner that night, or the afternoon paper that had some lotto game in it she didn’t want to miss, or a carton, and if I wouldn’t do it, just a pack of cigarettes. But all right, no time for gripes, wouldn’t you say?… But whenever I did call — listen to this — every day except when I was away in some place like Europe or Asia, where I actually saw my namesake’s grave. Taken care of very impressively. The U.S. does a tip-top job when it wants to and puts it all together, or at least for its military dead. But she’d always say when I said ‘How are you?’ on the phone, ‘All right, though, I guess.’ She was never ‘great.’ Not even ‘good’ or ‘not bad.’ Things could always be much better, she was telling me, maybe by my calling twice a day in the States and coming over more and at least once a day on my short-to-long out-of-country stays. Or maybe if she admitted things were pretty good to OK that day she thought I might cut my calls to every other day. I wouldn’t have done that and I saw her as much as I could. Could tolerate it, I’m saying, and also knew, even if she thought she thought otherwise, how often and how long she could tolerate me. Anyway, a phone call to heaven, we’ll say, would make her life eternal more enjoyable, I suppose, and also let me know by her being near a phone that life there wasn’t so strange and scary to her and if it was she’d say.” “Truthfully, Howard, and I’m sorry, but why are you bothering me with all this?” “Because I’m trying to impress upon you some of what I think are my more positive qualities. So far I feel everything I’ve said has come out mealy-mouthed and against me. That I was a good son, caring, responsive, and that maybe I even have some intelligence and imagination, qualities you might think all right. Good sons often make good husbands and fathers, it’s said, or at least the chances of it happening should be slightly higher. And if the man’s also to some extent intelligent with a little savory flair, even better, would you agree?” “Who can say?” “Also that I looked after people — not just my mother. And not just helping old or infirmed people across the street and small but important things like that. But I’m interested in them, what they do and so on, how they get along without sight, and such, and though I didn’t go into that before, there it is. That’s going to work against me too, I just know it. But I’m not ashamed of any of this either. And she was generous with money and encouragement to me when I needed it — everyone falls into financial and emotional holes — when she didn’t have to be with the money, since I was old enough to pay my own way, and she really couldn’t afford it. I suppose I paid it back in attention and real filial concern, and actual helping out, like laying down rubber treads on her basement stairs and winterizing her windows each year. And by ‘emotional’ I don’t mean disturbed in any way or bizarre. That’s why I tagged the ‘savory’ to the ‘flair’ before, which you probably got, along with, because of my intentional mispronunciation of savory, the double meaning. I got sad sometimes, like any sane natural person does periodically. So I didn’t change my name when I got to legal age, though wanted to. Lots of times through my youth other kids made fun of it. ‘Howard Howitzer. Howard Whore.’ Stupid stuff but still upsetting. I’m sure Howard was once a popular name even in this century — I know kings used to have it, or maybe that was Harold — but when I got it it was out-of-date and just too formal. I didn’t change it because by that time, though my grandmother had long succumbed, my mother had got used to it of course and didn’t want to be calling me something different suddenly, she said. Abel’ I was going to change it to, simply to undo what’d been undone twenty years earlier and because to me it was a stronger-sounding and more desirable name, but let’s forget it. And by desirable I’m not saying ‘Oh come to me, I’m gorgeous, romantic and magnetic besides worth a fortune,’ but just a better if not more appropriate name for me. Able, capable, effectual, all of which I am. Not joking. It’s something lots of people scorn or feel threatened by because it represents a certain versatility and adaptability to life and even a flexibility with it, but don’t let me get started why I think all of that’s to the good. It is and it isn’t but mostly is. But I was where? Please — that’s what I’m driving at without trying to be pushy — please try to forget your father for a minute and my personal name liability and think a little of the possibilities of a half-hour with me. One stinking little coffee’s all I’m shooting for. Even rich and aromatic, but what could be the harm? And I can say that ‘harm’ question after all I’ve just said, right?…. Come on, Olivia, right?” “You can. What do I care? And as for your rambling on too long, you’re very much right there.” “I don’t remember saying that. I said ‘Don’t let me start’ or something, and about something, but I forget what. What’s good, what’s bad—” “Please, already, shut up. And it’s not that my father’s on my mind constantly, you know, which I’m sure I’ve said. It’s simply that I want to have him on it less.” “All right. Agreed, in toto. So do I, and I’m not being facetious. That’s why I said a half-hour. Maximum. Solely. Fifteen minutes could even do for me. A quick coffee, half of it milk so we can actually drink it in that time. And Monday, what do you say? I can be persistent and unrelenting but I know when a spoon’s thoroughly licked, so I won’t hammer away at it any longer. You say no now, it’s no and no for good. And I was only joking before about marriage and children and loving you and water and empty glasses and phones ringing on my mother’s bed table in heaven and so on. I’m — most people know me not like that but as a reasonable conscientious person, practical, effectual, as I said, plenty of common sense. I have to be in what I do and also conduct myself civilly. My company would lose customers by the droves otherwise. People with piles of money to play and lose have a sixth sense about detecting eccentricity in people who speculate for them. But I do want to have coffee and maybe some cake with you. Sandwich or soup if you like. Wine or beer with the sandwich, or even go to dinner with you. Take you out. Nothing fancy but nice. I’m a stocks analyst, by the way. Was your father a stocks analyst or involved with stocks in any way?” “Hated it. No.” ‘Thank God. What’d he do?” “Never mind.” “You’re right. And I didn’t bring up I’m a stocks analyst to say that I do all right. I don’t do all right, quite truthfully, or not as well as I could with what I know, but that’s not and could never be the point why I do it. I don’t even like what I do that much, so it’s even more a mystery why I do as well as I do, or maybe it’s the answer. But just when you think you have the answer to something you don’t, right? Or that’s been my experience, so I’m not a very over-self-confident creature either. But I’m wholly unsuited for my work and would like to do a dozen other things, including serious pottery for a living and sitting home for the next ten years and reading every book I’ve ever wanted to read but never had the time to and opening my own health food restaurant, but gourmet stuff with me as chef, but you need the principal as well as the interest for that — you’ve heard that one. But OK, enough there too, and can I say it’s all right for dinner, we’ll say, Monday night? Of course ‘night.’ Dinner, or is it supper, is always at night. ‘Dinner’s the one that makes you think twice. But this is ridiculous, for suddenly I think it’s supper that some people if not whole sections of the country use as a word for lunch and others use for dinner. But nothing else but that — dinner, supper or even lunch, if you’d prefer. And then, we see it isn’t right for either of us—” “It won’t be. We can see that now.” “Don’t say that. Put a curse on it, of course it’ll turn out bad. What I’m saying is if we’re both bored flat in seconds, though I know I could never be with you or anyone else, even with someone who didn’t say anything. Because even saying nothing would provide me with interest why the person isn’t saying anything and is it because of me or the restaurant, let’s say, or what? The environs; the weather. What I might remind that person of, for instance, though there I’m only talking about look-alikes or act-alikes, not names. Anyway, that we can’t even be acquaintances — and just listen to this common sense talking — we’ll call it quits without any farther dramatics, OK?” “Oh shoot. I feel you broke me down where I can’t say no. For that’s what I want to say. Maybe for the quick coffee you spoke of, just so I’ll say to you ‘Howard, Howie, How’ till I get it out of my system for now. That’s not it. What is? And why’d I even give an equivocal yes? Crazy of me. I’m afraid I’ll have to radically change my mind now, Howard.” “Too late. You said it. Don’t take it away. It’s bad to forswear. And what time? And don’t worry. I’ll be one-tenth the talker I was today, so you’ll have to do most of the conversing while I’m doing the eating and staring. Sorry for that, I know you don’t want to hear it, and where should we meet? It’s yours to designate. Hey, good word again, right? Oh, sorry again for pretending to sound like a dud. Because I can use the long words with the best of them — I got a liberal arts education, as they say — or almost the best. Like my being such a long-winded prolix lexifanatic bombastic fustian pedantic euphuistic loquacious — and I swear I’m not looking at a thesaurus while I say this — garrulous nonsensical ludicrous ill-devised — I love that one, ‘ill-devised’—unreflective egregious simpleminded — I’m looking for a good one now to end it — prodigiously tropological — I can’t find it and don’t even know what that last word means; it just came to me, snap, in my head-ignoramus onomatomaniacal-obsessed windbag buffoon fool.”

Olivia writes several poems about her father. Last one goes: “Dear father, padre, in your box, with your holey socks, oh father whose heaven was art (that can’t be new but was true for him), marroon muff were you formally buried in? former young lit tough’s the rep you’re to be stuck with? what’s it mean? what it seems, curly thin-skinned hair, most in back and growing out of your shoulders like furry epaulets (boy that’s bad so nix the similets), hair info according to those who know your photos, black all that for thought of you broken down and disinterred by vermin and rats worse than the thought of you dead. To be truthfully true for once, the night is night and blue and I am blue and night without the living u, I mean the loving u, no hoax or reflection intended. Mirror, scissors, rocks. Enough, this stuff’s, rough. What it means, what’s it seem? Further, larder, sucks.” Poems like that. She’s a little high. Drank half a bottle of wine at dinner before she sat down in front of the typewriter. More than a little. Before that a scotch sour while she cooked. Before that, over the newspaper, last of last night’s bottle of wine, which wasn’t much. Didn’t know she was going to sit down. In fact, was heading for the bathroom and then bed. Didn’t know why she sat down or what she was going to do there. “Well here I am” she said. “Might as well turn on the light. Might as well remove the typewriter cover. Might as well try out the keys to see if they’re still stuck. Tap-a-tap. Drier air must’ve upstuck them. Write something? Ah, come off it, you know I can’t write. Letter to the editor protesting the president. A love scene. A death vignette. A poem. You used to. First thing that comes to your head will be the first thing that gets written down, unlike all those other lackluster pieces of the past. The past: “When I was a girl of seventeen, I bit my nails till they were clean.” The past: “Roses have bled, poses are you.” The past: “Evanescent is deceit…” This time do it sponton-asally, fontly, fabuloosely, rapsofollicly, graspberries, doodlewarts. She tears all the poems up, dumps them, most don’t make the can. Shouts as she scoops together a handful “Oh frick, bloody you write them — you were the typewriter. But no blood or fugs. Just write one she pleads.” Looks at the typewriter. Nothing happens. “Oh of course.” Puts paper in and stares at it. Still nothing. “That’s funny. The keys aren’t moving, words aren’t appearing, and it’s originally your typewriter too, left in impeccable condition, thanks, though not since then professionally cleaned, sorry.” Gets up, gets the wine, sits in front of the typewriter and drinks from the bottle, several healthy belts. “I’m going to get smashed and sick but I don’t care. No work tomorrow so I can lose a day. But what about that? You want your little kid getting smashedly sick? Then type, darn ya. A poem, no time for a tome. But no threats. Jest a quest if nothing else, something you did effortlessly. Say, I should’ve got all that down. Could’ve been the start or major part or even the whole of my poem. ‘Jest a fest’ I could’ve titled it, or A Poem, No Tome.’” Puts paper in, machine jams. “Oh of course.” Rips all the paper out, little torn pieces she has to scratch out, puts more paper in and waits. Nothing. “Spontofontly then.” Types “Hair’s a mess, evening’s overdressed, my face a pudge, new moon needs a nudge, a loan, a tome, my drinkdome for a poem. Why must I write in rhyme all the time? Teendrone throwback. Sky’s not blue anymore but I still am, blue-who. When I was a whelp and you walked me you always held my hand. ‘Carry me, daddy dog,’ I’d sometimes say but you said ‘You’ll break this old cur’s back.’ Some nights when I was supposed to be asleep I imagined that. You collapsed, back broken in two. I’d cry. I’d caused it. My disjoined done-for dad shot through with pain. ‘Soft and small,’ you said, ‘my paw fits around yours like a big mitt,’ and then you’d kiss it.” Pulls it out, tears it up, holds the pieces over the can and drops them; most fall around it. “Screw ‘em, let ‘em rot.” Puts paper in and types “‘Simplest said gets the best results,’ you’d say, so type me, dear old cur, a poem to show you’re really around.” Sits back and stares at the typewriter. Keys start moving, words appear on the page. Bing. One poemlike line done, paper shifts two spaces down and over to the margin on the left. More words. All by itself. Bing. Bing. Typing much faster than she ever did, then stops. She rolls it up so she can read it. “In my box, with my hollow (more apt) sox (that’s my way, shorter and stronger and then a long explanation about it), maroon muff (watch your spelling, deartest… oops, tupical typo ((there too)) when you’re tired and out of pract), curly thinning gray hair just about bald (I forget precisely what you wrote in that last poem but I know I had qualms about the description: too opaque, thus fake), the night is black and black and I am rabble and rats and stink like cat piss and ants and worms, all cradlerobbers and all without my loving you, seeing you, drinking like a fish even (blowing it here), stinking and sinking like one too (actually blew it after the cat piss). What’s it mean? Hey, I should talk, for who the heck cares? But we’re in touch at last, by golly, I mean ‘at least’ and maybe the last, bite our tongues, and any way’s a good way if we can’t have it the only way, got it? I don’t think I do but drat’s all. Must paddle back. Life’s a hoe. Got my metaballs all botched up. So what. Just over and out, babe, over and out.” She waits; nothing else. She types “Come back…. Then tomorrow night when I’ll be straight?… Then straighten out some of what you wrote?… I want clarity, you supposedly always insisted on clarity, and in my state I can’t take anything hazy or vague, so maybe just to correct what seem like a coupla misspells?… Then thank you, love you, don’t want to push you, goodnight?…” Takes the page out, kisses it, bathroom, pees, does her teeth, bedroom, undresses, puts the paper under her pillow, head on the pillow and is reaching for the night table light switch when she passes out.

It’s his seventieth birthday. Actually, last Tuesday was but not everybody could get off from school or work. Eva flew in from one state, Olivia from another, they picked up their mother and drove to the cemetery. Olivia’s infant daughter is with them. They called Jerry and he said he’d meet them. “Bring the prayer book,” Olivia said. They stand in front of the grave. Jerry says the prayer book was in his coat pocket but must have fallen out along the way and shows them the hole. He brought three very large black umbrellas, “cemetery umbrellas, which I’ve collected from some of the fancier funerals I’ve gone to recently, though I think two of those they wanted them back,” and distributed them. “I wish you all had got to know my other brother and my sister,” he says. “I know this is an odd way to start, especially in this weather when you almost wish you were inside your family mausoleum. But we don’t meet much and I never feel enough’s been said or felt about them in front of other people so I thought I’d give them a little due before I forget to. Really sweet people, and talented, sensitive. Readers they both were; advanced thinkers for their ages. Possibly I’m exaggerating for Vera, for she was always so handicapped from such an early age that sometimes she couldn’t even turn a simple page. I forget if she even liked to have books read to her. I know a pile of them piled up as gifts for her. If she did like to be read to I’m afraid we were all probably usually too busy to except my mother. I wince now when I think of the things we gave her to entertain herself. Leather lacing, for instance, to make scissors holders and coin purses and things for keys. Then she gave one of them to you or you asked for one or were asked by your mother to ask for one or for her to make you one and you said ‘Great work, great.’ But what they both could’ve amounted to we don’t even have to say. Anybody could see that for Vera in her preschool photographs before she first took sick. So alert, open eyed. Also in the last ones when she was around postgraduate age, though why we took them I don’t know, when she was on crutches, then crutches and neck and back braces because she had so little bone back there to hold up her neck, I think it was. Then bedridden, bed sores, eighty pounds, next week it’s seventy-five. She seemed like a big empty piñata whenever I picked her up so my mother could change the bed under her or get the potty out without spilling when it got too filled or stuck. I guess we took the photographs because she was smiling, and who’d want to do anything but encourage that? And also that she thought she looked, all in black and black eyeliner and much brushed and I think dampened-down hair covering her forehead and cheeks and some of her eyes and certainly the front and back neck scars — these pictures when she was on crutches — kind of chic, street-smart and exotic. In one bed photograph, which my mother I just remember kept forever on the pegboard above her own dresser, she had her hand up holding an exercise bar, was in a wrinkled hospital gown, though this was at home, and by ‘wrinkled’ I’m not making any criticism of my mother, but the same eyes, look, hair, big clearheaded smile. Black stockings too with the crutches to give her atrophied legs a fuller look, I suppose. And black sunglasses sometimes both in her photographs on crutches and in bed, maybe to make her look sultrier but I think just as much to hide these very dark circles around, by this time, her crossed eyes. Anybody here feel I’m talking on too long or I’ m depressing you or your feet are getting soaked, though those umbrellas should be stopping that, let me know or maybe just go back to the cars. No apologies needed. I’d like to stay and finish. So, it was enough to kill you, those two. That they died, in their late, for him, to mid-twenties for her, and then when Howard went it was like being slowly tortured before you were slowly killed. Scratch that. Too literary and not even accurate as a comparison. Whenever I try those I flop. Vera had the tougher of the two lives. I’m talking about her and Alex, and I promise to be quicker and less winding. No childhood almost, while he of course had much more than that. He went to regular school, college, worked as a newsman, saw lots of the world, was starting to be a serious creative person, was once even engaged, I think. Anyway, he knew women, had jobs, got drunk, moved around. She died much too early, which I can say despite all her ordeals and such for twenty years, which might’ve made me say ‘Come and get me already.’ Even cripples and people confined to hospital beds can find companionship and marry and have children if it’s not with someone who’s permanently bedridden too. Possibly I’m wrong there, meaning they can, though no doubt with help. I’ve an image of her on the floor once, or maybe this was Howard’s or Alex’s memory and whichever one told me it told me it a few times. Must be, since I would’ve been too old to have the reaction I’m now going to convey. And I suddenly remember something which did indicate she was thinking ‘Come and get me already,’ or at least once, but it’s not what I’m going to say right now. She was on her back and banging the dining room floor hysterically with her heels and hands and shrieking that gives you temporary deafness and her hoarseness. ‘Shut up,’ Alex or Howard said, ‘I can’t think’ or ‘do my schoolwork’ or something. I don’t remember the last part, just the ‘shut up.’ And my mother said to him that it was only a tantrum, let her have it, she deserves it, something like that, and no doubt comforted her, but I think Vera continued to bang and cry. She did this a few times, supposedly, none, I can remember, when I was around, and one time did much worse, which is the time I meant about ‘Come and get me already’ Years later, when she was thirteen or fourteen — I was away but Alex or Howard sent me the newspaper clipping — she tried to jump off our apartment building roof and a fireman swung around in a sling and grabbed her. That was the newspaper shot I got, but with the story all wrong. In it they said she was ten, up till then a cheerful neighborly girl, with no seeming meaning to kill herself, and so on. But I’m trying to illustrate something here. Bring it out. What? That the tantrum — that’s right — also the suicide try, of course — was because, as my mother explained to Alex or Howard that time, she was so sick of being sick and having no life and going to the hospital every three years or so to be operated on and coming back months later sometimes looking and feeling worse than when she left and being a half-inch to an inch shorter each time and not smarter, her brains drugged duller, scars here and everywhere, a tracheotomy tube in her at home that would last like the last one lasted for months and then left with the tube hole that never seemed to close. It was so ugly. A hole, in your throat, which you always walked around with; just awful. I could barely look at it and for the most part she didn’t cover it with anything like a Band-Aid, and I don’t even know if she was supposed to. She was sensitive to its looks, you could see that, her eyes always following your eyes and going downcast when you took a squint at it, but maybe she was told to keep it exposed so it could heal faster. My mother, by the way, used to clean the gook out of the tube, and with hydrogen peroxide, I think, dab around the hole. She called it the worst job of her life, suctioning it, and not just because it was her daughter. Gagging work, she said. So, compared to Vera — compared to my mother, even, and that job, besides losing a few kids — we’ve all lived richly, even Alex. Scratch that too. Too sermony, that ‘because of this we should feel that’ and so on. But I should move on before you all drown while you’re dying of boredom. I think I’ve already said that in almost the same way, today or some day close. I think I’ve already said almost everything a few times or at least twice. I’m not complaining, just saying, but every statement and phrase of mine, including this last one, is beginning to sound too familiar. Anyway, I suppose you know — I know Denise does — how your father felt when Alex disappeared so unexpectedly…. No, that’s not the way to start it — so formal — and I can’t even talk anymore. It’s not that I’m choked up. I actually am, but it’s mostly that I’m too tired. I’m in good shape for my age, even if that’s not saying much. But this day’s been too tough for me, driving here from who knows where, and I better remember later if I want to get home, and just getting my mind set for it. It isn’t easy being the oldest child and then the only survivor and also seeing the place where I’ll probably be dropped into shortly, even if it’s beside them and even if I think later my wife and later still maybe one of my kids will be beside or near me, which doesn’t help much to think about either. So, the end. Thank you for coming, and just ‘God love you’ to all our relations in the graves here — don’t know how else to put it — Momma, Dad and the rest of you, which I think we can say amen to to clinch it, OK?” “Amen,” they all say and he says “If you’ll still excuse me, I think I’ll drive home rather than to whatever you’ve planned to do,” and folds up his umbrella, goes to his car in the rain without responding to two of them saying “I’ll drive you,” gets in, doesn’t turn to or look back at them though they’re all waving and saying good-bye, and drives off.

Olivia prays. “Dear God, please don’t let my father have pain wherever he is. Any pain, in any part of him. From his toes to his head top to out to the tips of his fingers and penis and nose. Whatever part and wherever he is. Dear God, please just do that for me and I’ll do anything you say and want for the rest of my life forever, I promise. Please, please, thank you.” She turns over in bed and hugs Talking Bear. If she hears her mother walking or putting away dishes or turning a page, she’ll cry she wants her. Wants her for what? It has to be good or she’ll get mad. For water, to make peepee, or she’s still having trouble sleeping, thinks she’s getting a cold. She listens, hears nothing. She listens for Eva in the next room. If Eva cries or talks to herself or taps on her crib bars or wall or bangs her feet against them, she’ll call for her mother and say Eva’s keeping her up. She hears nothing. Why’d Eva get to get one more story read to her than she tonight? Tomorrow night it’s her turn to get more. She had so many other bears she loved more than Talking Bear but right after her father died he became her favorite. Why’s that? Talking Bear was brought back from some place her father had been, the only bear he gave her just by himself. She never thought of that but now she knows. When her mother said before “Just rest in bed and think, if you can’t fall asleep, but no getting out of it,” would that be something interesting she could tell her mother she thought? She thinks so, but it wouldn’t be a good enough reason to get her here to tell her. “The other bears tell me my father isn’t somewhere still alive,” she says to Talking Bear. “Is that true? Should I believe them or you?” “Believe me,” Talking Bear says. “It’s best for you. I am closest and mostest and I always tell the truth and all I do is think of you. That’s my job.” “But the other bears all together, when they’re together, say the same thing and know much more than you. They know more than anyone. They know almost everything there is to know when they’re all together.” “Then believe them. I won’t be hurt. I say ‘If it is good for you, it is good for me.’ I say this every night before I go to sleep. Right before the last wink awake, so I haven’t said it yet tonight to myself.” “What about if I don’t believe any of them when they’re all together, or you? If I just find out for myself?” “That could be the best way. If you can find out and if you know before you start looking that you might be able to find out.” “If I don’t know whatever it is you said, that last thing, and if I can’t find out, what should I do?” “I don’t know.” “The other bears all together would know, but I can’t get them all together now for them to tell me. I’d have to get out of bed. That wouldn’t be hard. I can inch out. I can move quietly. The door’s shut. There’s a rug on the floor. I could get some of my bears. But for the rest of them I’d have to leave the room. I might even have to go to Eva’s room if she took some when she wasn’t supposed to, but I don’t think I’d have to go downstairs or outside. What I’ll do, if I can’t find out about my father from here, is believe what makes the most sense.” “That’s a good way too. If you can’t find out for yourself or you’re not able to, believe what makes the most sense.” “Or the best sense.” “Or the best sense. But if I were you I’d believe me. I tell the truth and I also know. I am for you.” “But no matter what, the truth is if he is still somewhere alive but doesn’t or can’t let me see him anymore, I’ll be very sad.” “That’s why I’m here. To help you in things like that. You can ask me how if you want.” “How?” “You’ll have to give me time to think…. You can throw me up and down and try to catch me. You can kick me and I won’t say ouch. You can squeeze me while you sleep or are feeling sad. If you’re away in a car someplace and I’m not with you because you forgot me or you couldn’t find me, you can know I’m home waiting for you and wanting you to throw me or kick me or squeeze me while you sleep or anytime you’re sad. Lots of ways. We can think of many. It’s something we can also do.” “How should I start to find out if he’s alive or really dead or really alive or near here or what?” “You can look for him. I haven’t seen him for a long time, maybe as long as you, but I hear he’s around. You can ask me how I hear this.” “How?” “You’ll have to give me time to think…. I just hear it, there isn’t any reason how. It’s something I can do. Or we can look together for him if you want. In basements, outside behind bushes, in backs of bottom drawers. All the places you haven’t looked. If we don’t find him or we can’t, because he’s too big to be there, in a drawer, we might find a sign of him. Or you can speak to the bears. If they know everything, they might know where to look. I won’t be hurt.” “They said he isn’t alive. When I said you said he is and I think he is and I want to find him, they said the one thing they don’t know anything about is where to look. Missing bears they can help me find. People they can’t. It’s just something they can’t do and now they don’t even try.” “Then we are in what your father used to call a spot. But go to sleep. Maybe in the morning you’ll have your answer. Maybe I will. Maybe it will just appear. A paper we pick up that has a map showing where he is and how to get there. Something that was once a piece of scrap paper but now isn’t. Or something that is and always was a map. Or we might see something written on a wall in this room. A message written in light from the outside or being written while we watch it on the wall.” “I don’t know how to read.” “You don’t know now but maybe tomorrow you will. Or maybe you’ll be able to read just that. You know a few words. The message might just be in those words. ‘Red, blue, dog, gray, go, he, girl, green,’ and some others, and we’ll figure it out. Or maybe I’ll even know how to read by tomorrow. Listen to me though. What I say is true. Maybe in the morning everything you want to know or what you need to know it, like reading, will just happen or appear.” “That’s what bears always say. ‘In the morning. Tomorrow.’ They’re good up to a point. After that point, they’re not. It’s always that way. And always when they’re most sleepy.” “If it’s always that way, then it’s always that way. Ask anyone. Though that doesn’t mean it will always always be that way. And if it is always always that way, then it doesn’t mean it will always always always be that way. But go to sleep. It’s not because I’m sleepy. Just maybe you’ll know in the morning as I say. Or maybe I’ll know. Or maybe all the other bears and us together will know, something we never did once. But maybe it will probably not be so. If that’s so, what?” “I don’t know. What?” “Let me think…. I don’t either.”

Eva does a series of paintings called Memories of My Father. One shows her father sleeping behind her mother. Another shows him sitting on a toilet seat folding a newspaper in half. Others: squeezing lemon juice for a pitcher of scotch sours, mailing a bunch of manila envelopes in a post office, pushing the two girls in a shopping cart at a supermarket, paying for takeout food in a Chinese restaurant, haranguing her mother across the dining room table, peeling an avocado seed for planting, fork-feeding the two girls simultaneously, kissing her mother while holding on to her bottom, digging his knuckles into his temples, looking at several photos of his father, helping his mother downstairs, putting a record back into its jacket, filling a pen, cleaning a typewriter key. Eating, exercising, cooking, slicing, typing, reading, driving, raging, sneezing, aimlessly peeing, winding his watch, brushing his teeth, grating a carrot, unpinning her diapers, filling her baby’s bottle with milk, in a hospital dying. Brown tweed suit, button-down blue shirt, light gray tie. The family stands above it staring inside, Eva on a box, Olivia on tiptoes, his mother crying. He looks healthier there than in any of the others. The paintings are exhibited and get lots of attention and reviews. The gallery sells the lot. Two are bought by European museums, one by a prominent Japanese art collector. Most of the drawings for the paintings sell too. Newspaper article, long critiques in art publications, two-page spread with reproductions of some of the works in a popular newsweekly, interviews. “I feel awful,” she writes Olivia. “First, that I didn’t keep even one for myself. That’s because I couldn’t make up my mind. ‘Daddy in the Tub’? ‘Daddy Showering’? ‘Daddy Shaving the Back of His Neck After Giving Himself a Haircut’? When I finally chose the tub one, it was just being bought for the most money, even if it was one of the smallest and no better framed than the others. The gallery owner said to me ‘My dear, we must pay expenses and keep peachy relations with this particular buyer, who’s already begun to sock away funds for the most expensive work in your next show. Choose another,” but by then admissible bids were being made for the other two, and the few remaining I didn’t feel merited keeping. Secondly, that I didn’t offer you whichever one you wanted for nothing. Especially the one of you and Daddy holding hands and he with your backpack over his shoulder as he walked you down the hill to school. I got you both from behind. You seem to be looking at a squirrel in a tree running. I think it’s a good one. Now I’ll probably never see it again, though I’ve some like slides of it. Also, that I should be on my way, or already made, as one idiot critic put it, and partly because of Daddy. What about all the paintings I did before? The Laughing Mom series. Bombed quietly. One-dimensional, that gallery owner kept being told. They didn’t get the joke—’Say “Cheese”’, even though I know you can’t float a whole show on one pun — or see, as we say, the new nuances in them, among other delusions. No reviews, one sale, and I think that one to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Iris, who still haven’t unpacked it because they want me to believe someone I didn’t know — possibly a hotshot influential art collector — bought it. It wasn’t you, I hope, since half the sale went to the gallery, another ten percent to the gallery for announcements, hangings and cheap opening-night crackers and wine in paper dentist cups, and the rest she’s still promising me. Besides, I’d have given you any two Moms you wanted. Best thing about that gallery is that it dropped me flat. That’s what I need most to get into and go on with the next series. As it is, I’ll probably have to start debasing my present success and maybe give away half my earnings to old age homes for artists to start anything new. But what’ll more likely happen is that the Moms will now sell. They had some good things in them, but everyone seems to think the Father ones were more lived than the Moms, though technically as virtuous. But all the scenes in the Mom paintings I experienced and all the ones in Father I made up. I had nothing to paint from because I had no memories of him. Just photos of different sorts and groupings, and I wasn’t going to reproduce blown-up versions of those. They’d be so cold, except perhaps my reaction to them, and it’s also been done to death before. You should have painted the Father series. You showed lots of talent once. It’s all I can remember of you for years. Drawing, painting, tracing, coloring, cutting out and pasting things together to play with and for collages and mobiles, designing and illustrating your own books. Or we could have done Father together. You giving me your head snaps and telling me if I’m getting them on the canvas right. And dabbing here and there and even splashing all over the place if you wanted, for I’m sure you’re a better artist dormant than I am active and that it’d all come back to you in a flash and with an intelligence and feeling my works lack. And then with paintings, if it’s really bad or there’s a serious mistake, there’s little you can’t cover over and change. Now it’s too late. They’re done, bought, hung, insured, guarded by guards and alarms and maybe even attack dogs in some places. And many probably can’t be located and, if I wanted to, destroyed, since some collectors think announcing they’ve a collection is like asking for a major break-in. And somehow I don’t see myself doing alone Olivia’s Memories of Our Father. Though who knows? Since after I do a series on you and a shorter one on Grandma and an even shorter one called Other Relatives, a Bad Marriage, a Number of Lovers and Some Friends, I won’t have any place to go. Maybe sculpture. That’d get me doing something new. Though suddenly I see myself sculpting bigger-than-life-size bas-reliefs of all of us, starting with Mom just giving birth to you, and Daddy, in this same scene, in hospital gown and mask and holding you in his arms and weeping voluminously, a moment, Mom’s said Daddy called, the happiest in his life.”

Olivia’s in the city to give a paper. Her husband and two children come with her to see some sights, go to a few art museums and a recital and play. On the last day of the conference she says “I’m going to skip the rest of it. How many seminars can you go to? I’ve learned all I’m about to learn before what I’ve learned starts depercolating. And I’ve made enough new contacts and seen more than enough old colleagues and friends, and I need to relax and enjoy myself a little before we head home. This might seem an odd way of doing that, but I’d like to drive out to the cemetery to pay respects to my folks and Grandma and Uncle Jerry, as I haven’t been there for years.” She doesn’t know exactly where it is or even the name of it. “It’s in Suffolk County, I know that. I remember we’d drive through Nassau County on the expressway and then see an entering-Suffolk-County sign. Or maybe it’s the other way around, but we’ll know which counties we’re leaving and entering when we see that sign. And that the cemetery’s about ten exits past that sign and called something like Brookside or Breitenbrush or Baron Birch or Beth something — but I’m sure it starts with a B. If we drive out on the Long Island Expressway — the road you get from the Midtown Tunnel, or off Vandam Street, I think it is, after you cross the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge — Tm sure I’ll recognize the exit sign for the road or route number to the cemetery in whatever county it is that had that you-are-entering sign, or it could even have been a you-are-leaving. One thing I remember distinctly is that there was a service road alongside the expressway going east just before the turnoff and then a couple of sod farms along the two-lane road to the cemetery and a number of cemeteries down that road, though I’m sure the farms are gone now. Anyway,” she says to the children, “you’ll see some of Long Island for the first time, and of course where your closest relatives on my side are buried, if we get there. And we can stop for lunch at a fish place on the Island and maybe even go to the ocean later. I don’t think you’ve seen the Atlantic, except from a plane, have you?” They start out, half an hour later pass the entering-Suffolk-County sign — she says it looks like the same one from years ago and seems to be in the exact same place — but for the next fifteen exits, no service road or familiar landmark or road name or route number on an exit sign that she’d follow to the cemetery. “Is it possible they’ve done away with the service road? It was about a mile long. I remember there was a famous-make — I can’t think of the name now — cosmetics corporate headquarters on it, or maybe only the plant, but that seems to be gone from around here too. I thought the route to the cemetery would all come back. That I’d just go from A to B to C, once we left the city, but there’s nothing left out here to bring it back, or else I’ve completely forgotten everything but the entering sign in ten years, or however long it’s been. I should just look it up.” They stop for lunch at a diner off the expressway, she looks in the phone directory under Cemeteries but doesn’t recognize any name, and after several calls to different places she locates Eva. Eva can’t remember the name of the cemetery or what exit it’s off of or the town it’s in or even if the name begins with a B. “To tell you the truth, I think D. David something. Or Dav, Duv, Darien — no, that’s a town in Connecticut. One of Uncle Jerry’s children might know. If only the other uncle and aunt hadn’t died so young. There’d be a bigger pool of cousins to draw information like that from. But I’m terrible. Most times I can’t even remember either of our grandfathers’ names.” Olivia calls one of Uncle Jerry’s children and he doesn’t know the name or where the cemetery is, except for it being on Long Island and somewhere off an expressway—“I remember you went right for a long ways once you left the off-ramp of the expressway”—and says he’s ashamed to admit that he hasn’t been out to it since his mother died. “I doubt my sisters would know either. They’re even less interested.” “Who keeps it up, if it is kept up?” and he says “Our grandfather bought the plot long ago for practically nothing, I remember my dad saying. Then he sold off a few parcels of it, it was so big, making back twice what he put out for the entire thing, and paid the cemetery enough money to keep the plot mowed and clean for about seventy-five years. Dad told me I’d only be called — or one of us, meaning you and Eva too — if one of the monuments fell over or the plot was vandalized in some way or the town wanted to move the graves to some other place in the cemetery to make room for more town road or something. Maybe one of those things already happened and the cemetery has changed hands and the new owners don’t bother with that kind of notification anymore. Or the old owners don’t or they tried to reach us but we’ve all moved around so much that they’re now waiting for us to notify them where we are. But with vandals and such is the only time we’d have to pay something, till after the seventy-five years when we’re supposed to take over the maintenance costs. But by then, which of us will care, right? We’ll all probably be buried elsewhere — I know I’m going to, and not just because there’ll probably be no room at the family gravesite — so I’m sure our kids won’t be interested in it either.” “As for caring about it,” she says, “I suppose that depends when those seventy-five years are coming up. And as for my kids’ interest, maybe that’s one of the things I’m trying to stimulate today by coming out here with them, though I think I just thought of that. But you sort of hope, no matter where you’ll be buried or they’ll be living, that they and even their children take care of this site so it doesn’t become a little forest, don’t you? Because some places in very old cemeteries, and I’m talking mostly about European ones now, just look so sad and ugly.” “I’ve seen them on my trips there but never felt anything bad about it. They even looked kind of interesting, all packed in very tight and overgrown. Listen, if that’s the outcome, because of whatever it is, historical or indifference, you face it.” She goes back to the table. “Maybe we passed the cemetery exit, she says. “Anyone mind if we drive back to that entering-Suffolk sign and then come back this way again till we reach, say, the turnoff to the Fire Island state park? Deal is, if we don’t see any roads to the cemetery, we’ll go right to the ocean.” She asks her husband to drive this time so she can watch the exit signs and service roads more carefully and anything else that might help them get to the cemetery. They drive back, turn around, about five miles past the Suffolk sign she sees a little sign on a road off the expressway that says “Wellingham National Cemetery” and has an arrow on it. “That could be it,” she says. “Not the national cemetery but the road with maybe a few other cemeteries on it, including ours.” They exit, drive along that road—“No service road near it, sod farms on it, but it could still be the right road — just widened threefold because of the increased traffic on it or just crooked politics well say”—and see a cemetery. “It doesn’t look familiar, nor start with a B. But it’s the right religion, not a national cemetery, and on the same side of the road ours was and the approximate distance I figured the road to it would be from the expressway exit and the expressway would be from the Suffolk County sign.” They drive in, her husband goes into the office, comes out shaking his head. “Nothing even close to a Tetch here,” he says. “But there are two more nonnational cemeteries on this road, and three or four exits farther on the expressway is a Meldana Boulevard with about five cemeteries on it and two that start with a B, one of which is called Beth-El. Does it sound familiar — cemetery or boulevard?” “The Beth part of it does, but let’s try the two on this road first.” Both are the wrong religion. They go to Meldana Boulevard, pass the first cemetery—“Starts with a B, all right, but the wrong religion, so why even bother with it?” The second cemetery’s an annex to the national one before. The third cemetery’s on the other side of the road than the one she remembers was on. “Let’s check it anyway. Right religion, no B, but my memory could be wrong on that account and also which side of the road it was on. And they could have changed where the main gate was, making the back part of the cemetery the front part now, simply to make it easier entering or they wanted it off a much wider and even grander road like this one.” They drive in, no Tetches here, though there is a Titch, the office worker says. He looks up the name in a book: Randolph and Evelyn, parents; Carolyn and baby Arthur, children. They drive past the next cemetery to Beth-El. “I’m almost positive this is it. Right side of the road, religion, the Beth — even the ‘El’ is coming back to me now, I don’t know why — and the main gate looks familiar and it’s not that farther away from the Suffolk sign than where I thought the cemetery would be. Let me see if I can find the plot on my own. I’d prefer that, just coming on it, and even just to see how good my once-great memory still is, rather than going to the office and given directions to road L, lane six, row double-A, plot 117, and so on.” She directs her husband to where she thinks the plot is. They get out. No Tetch tombstones or benches there. “I think it’s over there, actually,” pointing to a place several rows away. “To the left of that tall pointy stone…. The breeze,” as they’re walking to the plot, “is just about what I remember it was like from the times I used to come here with my mother and Eva and a couple of times with my first husband. He didn’t want to but knew how important it was to me for him to come. Also how shaky I’d be driving back alone. It must be the flatness of the place and the openness that creates it, this breeze all the time. Really, almost everything looks the same, but with a lot more graves around — all that over there was just empty grass. And that grove of trees along the boulevard there was a lot shorter.” They reach where she thinks the plot is. No Tetch there. “Let’s go to the office,” her husband says. “Even if the gravesite’s somewhere around here, we can look and look like this for hours and I don’t think we’d ever find it.” “I have to go to the ladies’ room anyway,” she says, “and I’m sure the kids do too.” She doesn’t recognize the office but doesn’t think she was ever in it. The office worker looks up the name Tetch in a book and says it isn’t there. “Titch, Tutch, any name like that?” Olivia says. “What I’m suggesting is that in the last few years or so — if this book was entirely reorganized, for instance, which I think it would have had to have been, at least worked on a little — there might have been a typographical mistake.” The woman looks. “No name even near it. ‘Tisch,’ in fact, is as close as it gets.” “Could you give me their first names please?” The woman later tells them that seven exits farther on the expressway, “almost to where the island forks, or perhaps a bit after it, is Cranberry Road. Just count off the expressway exits from the Meldana entrance. I don’t know the exact expressway exit number, but at seven get off, go right on the overpass and then straight for half a mile or a mile — I wish I could remember what route number it is — and you’ll hit Cranberry. If you get lost, ask around for Cemetery Road. That’s what it’s more commonly called, though not officially on the maps, it has so many cemeteries on it. Eight, maybe nine. After that, the cemeteries are mostly isolated. An eighteenth-century cemetery here, an old slave cemetery there, one for Chinese fieldhands someplace from a long time ago, one even just for artists, and lots of modern ones of every religion and denomination, but all by themselves.” “Tell me, is there a directory for all the cemeteries on the island of the people buried in them?” Olivia says. “No such thing.” “For the county then or a directory only by religion?” “Nothing like that.” “Cranberry Road doesn’t sound familiar,” Olivia says in the car. “But let’s try it. If it is near where the island forks, then we’ll be fairly close to Fire Island State Park, I think, or even the Hamptons. Or Montauk, which can’t be an hour’s drive from that exit. If you’re going to see the Atlantic for the first time, that’s the place to see it from. Giant cliffs, hidden inlets, all very dramatic and, if they haven’t done their best to ruin it, quite beautiful. Heck, I could even be tempted to stay over. Off-season rates now, so it shouldn’t set us back too much. Even if it does, what do we care? — we’re sort of vacationing.” “Stay over how?” her husband says. “Our luggage is in the hotel. We’ve paid dear for that suite.” “So we’ll buy a few toothbrushes and clothes. Things we’ve needed and can use after today. And if we don’t, it’ll be like camping in. But it’s one night I’m talking about, and it’s just lousy money.” “Listen, Cranberry Road can’t be the one your cemetery is on. It’s got to be a good twenty to thirty miles past where you thought it was. It’s impossible, it’s unrealistic, it’s lots of things.” “OK, no Montauk overnight. But what more do we have to lose — half an hour at the most — by driving down Cranberry Road? If no cemetery looks right — we don’t even have to get out of the car — I’ll quit.” They get on the expressway, count off the exits, follow the woman’s directions, can’t find Cranberry Road. They stop at a service station. “I never heard of it,” the attendant says. “And you live in the area, or know for sure there’s no Cranberry Road nearby?” her husband says. “I’ve been here almost all my life.” “Cemetery Road’s what it’s also known as, we were told,” Olivia says. “I never heard of that one either. There’s a cemetery on Deepdell and another on Indian Fort and that’s it for miles around here, except for some backyard family grounds and under-the-tree things and a pet cemetery that costs more, I heard, than for a person.” “I give up then,” she says to her husband. “This never would have happened, you realize, if my grandfather hadn’t been such a perfectionist in seeing to the maintenance costs so long beforehand. We should appreciate what he did, I guess — saving us the time and expense — but what did he think, that my father and Uncle Jerry wouldn’t have taken care of it? And his two other children, if he did all this before they died? From what I know, all of them were every bit as conscientious and meticulous about things as he, but maybe not as wily with the buck. Maybe that’s it. It was too good a financial arrangement to pass up then. Or the maintenance contract also covered the plots he apparently sold off because his own was so large, giving them even added value, but I’m being unfair to the man. I’ll find the cemetery though. Not today, of course. Information about it should be among my mother’s papers, though I don’t even know where most of those are now. Or my cousins might turn up something, or Eva, but I doubt it. She’s always made sure I kept the important documents — that she’d lose them. But something has to be around somewhere — on the burial certificates for my parents, if there are such things. There have to be and officially recorded; you can’t just put a body into the ground. Or the rabbis for their funerals, if they’re still alive and I can remember their names or where we got them from. Dad’s I’ll never remember. Too far back. Mother’s I got from a friend of mine — Liselotte — who married her, so shell know or have it on her marriage license. Or Uncle Jerry’s kids could give me the names of the minister and rabbi who did the services for their parents’ funerals. Then I’ll fly back alone — make a special trip for it and rent a car at the airport and drive straight out here and leave stones, enough for all of us since we’ve all in a way been out to see them, and on all their graves, aunts and uncles also. I think I owe them that. I don’t owe them anything — I simply want to do it. I also want to see how the plot’s been kept up after so long. And if it’s deteriorating in any way or not kept up in the way I think it should be, to give the cemetery additional money to maintain it better.” They drive to the ocean, park, take off their shoes, roll up their pants and hike up their skirts and wade in the water and sit in the sand. Then it gets too cold for them and they return to the car and drive back to the city. As they’re approaching the Midtown Tunnel Olivia shouts “Mount Zion — it just came to me; but the next time.”

One memory keeps coming back. They’re on a bench. It’s summer, Maine, they’re eating fruit bars. He isn’t. He’s drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup, the cap on with a triangular hole he tore out of it so he could drink without spilling. Black coffee. Some sugar in it. One pack, which he emptied into the cup, twirled the coffee with a wooden mixing stick — this isn’t part of the memory but from other times when they were on the same bench, doing almost the same thing — which he then licked the coffee off of and put into his pocket to later put into the cook stove for kindling. “It’s pure wood, why waste it?” he said that time or another. He didn’t do it with their ice cream or fruit bar sticks because they were too messy. “Something new,” he said earlier that summer in the store where they got the fruit bars and coffee. “I take sugar in my coffee sometimes. I never liked it that way before, but I do now in the afternoons. Maybe I don’t eat enough during the day and my stomach’s hungering for food, so the sugar. Anyway, the coffee wouldn’t taste good now without it.” But in the memory they’re only on the bench. The bench runs the length of the red windowless left wall of the general store. The wall faces the road that leads to the private road they live on. Their house is about two miles from the store. A little more than two, her mother used to say. “‘Two point one miles on your odometer to the private road on your left,’ we used to tell first-time visitors and UPS drivers, ‘and then between.3 and.4 mile to our house on the private road. If you come to Alleluia Farm on the public road’, we also used to say, ‘you’ve passed our road, so turn around and.6 mile from the farm’s sheep shed you’ll see our road on the right. If you don’t know what a sheep shed looks like or missed it, then just about.3 mile from the ninety-degree arrow will be our road. If you end up at the public docking area, that’s as far as you can go and it’s 1.7 miles from the commemoration plaque of some 1812 War British ship shelling down there back to our road.’” They’d rented that house for a number of summers, at least five before she was born. They rented it the following summer also, so this memory doesn’t keep coming back because it’s one of the last good ones of him. There were lots of good ones, that summer and others. Bad memories too, plenty of them. But no memory of him comes back nearly as much as this one. Her mother didn’t want to rent the house the summer after the following summer. And the next summer, when she felt she could go back to it without being reminded so much of him and affected incapacitatingly by those memories, it was already rented to the people who had it the previous summer. Those people continued renting it for several summers and then bought it, something her parents and then her mother had wanted to do for years and the owner always said they’d and then she would get first crack at. He didn’t give it nor even tell her it was up for sale, but by then land prices there had boomed and she wouldn’t have had the money. But the bench. They’d just come out of the store. The last thing he did inside was pour his coffee from a pot in the automatic coffeemaker-water boiler on a table to the right of the door. That’s what he always did when he was with them and had coffee. The table, with a linoleum cloth, also had a serve-yourself hotdog apparatus, which they used a few times that summer but not that day, the cooked franks in the hot water compartment at the top of the apparatus and the New England-style rolls in the compartment at the bottom. Mustard, relish, ketchup, minced onions, teabags, sugar and sugar-substitute packs, plastic utensils, styrofoam cups in two sizes, were also on the table. Also a microwave oven for cooking hamburgers and barbecued-beef buns and grilled-cheese sandwiches kept in a refrigerated case to the right of the table. And mixing sticks, pepper and salt shakers and packs, probably paper plates, but she doesn’t remember that. He always got the small-sized cup. Napkins and a little sign about the possible health hazards of microwave ovens when they’re on. “I drink too much coffee as it is,” he said a few times. Before he got the coffee he got them their fruit bars. When he was also buying groceries there, which her mother said they kept to a minimum because the store was so expensive, he got those first, then the fruit bars, then paid for it all including the coffee and had it bagged, or bagged it himself if he was in a rush and the kids were under control or he just felt like doing something energetic or helping out, then got his coffee. “There can be a system to almost everything,” he once said or said in different ways a number of times. Sometimes Eva disappeared and he’d say “Eva, Eva” and glance around and then shout “Eva, Eva” and run to the door and open it, look outside, run through the aisles till he usually found her sitting on the floor with some items she took off the shelves in her lap or around her. “The coffee I like to get last,” he once said, “because I like it very hot so I can drink it for about as long as it takes you to eat your fruit bars. If you noticed, we almost always finish at the same time. Also because,” or something like this, “I don’t like carrying it around the store while getting you fruit bars and while I also might have groceries and sometimes even Eva to carry. Ice-cold things like fruit bars I don’t like to have start melting before we leave the store, but you also have to make some kind of compromise in almost everything too. So better they start melting a little than one of us gets burned from my coffee.” The fruit bars never melted that much before they got out of the store because they didn’t melt quickly, for one thing, and for another, it rarely got that hot inside or outside the store, and there was also never that long a checkout wait in the store, possibly because he always bagged his groceries whenever they got both groceries and fruit bars, but she doesn’t remember that. He slid open the freezer case that had the bars, ice cream pops and bulk ice cream and things like that. This is how it just about always happened. She raised herself to look in. Eva tried to raise herself, then held her arms up and he usually picked her up for a few seconds so she could look in. Sometimes Olivia tried to pick Eva up to look in. When he slid open the freezer case he always first told them, if they had their hands on the lid which they usually did, to take them off so they wouldn’t get pinched. He once said he got pinched by one of these lids when he was a boy and it hurt terribly and gave him a blood blister. He had to explain to her what a blood blister was. She probably screwed up her face. It sounded very ugly. She probably thought of the blister for days, imagined it several times bigger than it was. “How did you get rid of it?” she probably asked him. If he said he broke it with a needle or by squeezing it hard, she probably screwed up her face even tighter and said something like “That’s disgusting, I don’t want to hear any more about it,” and for days probably thought of him trying to break the blister with a needle and by squeezing it and the blister breaking and blood all over his hand. If he told her he left the blister alone, which is what she should do if she ever got one, and that it went away by itself that way, which is probably what he did say if she asked him how’d he get rid of it, she probably said something like “That’s what I’d do anyway but where does the blood go if you just leave the blister alone?” “What flavors are there again?” she usually said after he slid the lid open and she looked inside. “I always forget some of them and some of them look alike — red ones especially — and there are always new ones or they change.” “Today they have strawberry, raspberry, banana, coconut, lime, no lemon today, cantaloupe, watermelon and something called mixed berries, which is a new one to me but I suppose we can both guess what it is.” “What?” “Mixed. Everything. All the berries.” “Any other flavors?” she usually said. “There are others from other brands, but they have artificial everything and natural nothing besides too many of the numbered colors, so choose only from the ones I gave.” “I like coconut a lot but I think I’ll have strawberry today.” “Me too,” Eva always said. He got the bars out, handed them each one and told them not to start opening them till they got outside on the bench, paid for the bars and coffee, got the coffee, sugar, several napkins, mixing stick, and they went outside. He always held the door open for them and helped Eva down the step. If someone else was going in or coming out, he kept the door open, for up to a minute sometimes if that person was lame or carrying a baby or that far away but it was obvious he was coming to the store. “Don’t hurry,” he’d say if that person was hurrying to the door now because he was keeping it open for him. “I’d hate for you to trip or something worse as a result of my saving you this slight physical effort.” Actually, he charged everything at the store, she now remembers, except for something like the local weekly if that was all he was buying, or if he was alone and only buying coffee for himself, for instance. She doesn’t know when that would have been since when he went to the store he either went for groceries or for a few dollars’ worth of gas when the tank was very low or to get them a treat after a trip to the town library or a swim at the lake or he made a special trip from home with them to get them fruit bars or ice cream pops and himself coffee, and usually those times to give her mother an hour or more alone to work or rest. They went outside, sat on the bench. This is where the part that keeps coming back begins. Not the part about buying fruit bars and coffee. Nor sitting on the bench and tearing the tops of the fruit bar wrappings with his teeth to open them. First she and Eva would usually try but they were never successful at biting a hole in the wrappings or just pulling the wrappings off. Nor pulling the wrappings off after he bit through the top parts nor handing the bars back to them. Nor going around to the front of the store to put the wrappings and empty sugar pack into the trash can there, but before going saying “Don’t get off the bench while I’m gone.” Saying it sternly. “Olivia, make sure Eva stays seated and you stay seated close beside her.” For cars were parked near the bench, some of them pulled almost right up to it, a few times the front fender was over it, so he didn’t want them standing up or even stretching their legs out when he wasn’t there. Now that she thinks of it she doesn’t know why he left them there like that. If Eva had wanted to get off the bench, she either wouldn’t have cared that much or wouldn’t have been able to stop her. Sometimes she hated Eva then and wouldn’t have minded if she was in a situation where she could get hurt or even killed, she remembers thinking. She also didn’t like to physically stop anyone from doing anything and also didn’t feel she had the strength to. And Eva, though she wasn’t even two then, when she really wanted to do something was very stubborn and strong. He was taking chances, not being careful. She doesn’t remember anything bad happening from it, and he always ran around to the trash can and back, so it was only a matter of seconds, twenty, thirty. Why did he think he had to get rid of the trash so fast? Fast like that, yes, once he got up to go, but why get rid of the trash and so little of it so soon after they made it? Anyway: from the time he came back and sat. The coffee, when he ran to the trash can, she thinks he always left on the bench but a few feet from them, if nobody else was sitting that close. If somebody was, or rather two people on either side of them, then she doesn’t know what he did with the coffee when he ran to the can. He couldn’t have run with it. But this part. Eva was on his left — he’d sat down between them — she on his right. He once said, sitting down between them this place or another, “I like sitting between you two because then I can hold you both at the same time,” and squeezed them into him. But starting with this. They’re both licking their fruit bars. He’s picked Eva up and set her on his lap. He’s pulled Olivia so close to him that her ear’s pressed against his rib cage. His right arm’s around her. His chin’s resting on Eva’s head. His other arm’s supporting Eva mostly from his elbow up while his hand brings the cup to his mouth to sip from. It’s a fair day, they’re all in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and probably sandals. They’re looking straight out. No cars are parked in front of them so they have an open view of the road, house across it, trees in front and around the house, blue sky, little white clouds. Occasionally a car passes, stops at the main road if it’s coming from the point, directional signals flashing either way, but it doesn’t seem to distract them. Eva’s leaned back against his chest. He kisses her head. Olivia’s nestled into his body, top of her head wedged into his armpit, his hand stroking her head. He takes his chin off Eva a few times to kiss Olivia’s head. But mostly his chin on Eva’s head, Olivia nestled into him, the girls licking, he occasionally sipping and kissing, all three of them not saying anything and just looking straight out. That’s all there is to it. It went on for minutes. She doesn’t know why it stayed.