Lithium for Medea

22

My father was sitting up in bed. More of his head dressing had been removed. His eyeglasses fit easily around his ears again. He looked gray, worn and weary, a granite mountain being ground down. He was reading the sports page.

THEY MADE ME WALK AGAIN.

“How did you do?”

I TRAILED THE FIELD. NEXT STOP CALIENTE.

“You’ll have a long rest, Daddy. Come back fresh.”

SAW PTLAND ON TV LAST NITE.

“How was the game?” I felt myself smile. In the beginning my father had refused to watch television. He said the noise made him dizzy, made his eyes hurt.

WALTON BEST EVER SAW. WORTH LIVING 4.

We considered this in silence. Francine had pulled the blinds open. It was still morning. I was thinking if I could just take one shot, I could wake up. If I could just have one shot, I would feel the train start to move through me. I could careen wildly down black tracks and stream through gullies, my fists and teeth grinding like engine parts and my body weaving, swaying with the motion, the sudden hard curves. If I could just have one shot my lungs would become steam and my heart would start pumping. The train would begin running through a day gigantic and borderless. My heart would pump painfully, insanely, providing the rhythm, the many sharp wheels. I could reel into noon and bellow down thin tracks, thin black metal grooves like twin rows of tiny black stitches.

If I could just take one shot, I could be riding that train. With one shot, I could be the train. I would wind around a ridge and plunge through a valley. The train. Yes. An express. Yes. A runaway with no one driving. A train that just kept going, going. Silence would be smashed by the black whistle shrill at some indifferent station where moths coughed in an arc of light. I would pass the familiar scattered bits, smoky magnetic ruins in their own riptide. I would glimpse them from the window, partial, drilled with neon, while steam curled like white fingers reaching out of a grave.

BAD SCARS. I LOOK LIKE A CRAZY QUILT.

“We’ll find a way to cover them. They won’t show when you’re dressed.”

WILL TELL PEOPLE AM VICTIM OF PLANE CRASH.

“Sure. You could do that,” I said.

And I was a train reeling through noon. It was a train from my childhood. There was a train station near our house in Philadelphia. My bedroom windows faced the train station. I had starched yellow curtains. At dusk I would watch men climb the low hill to their houses, newspapers rolled up under their arms. A parade of men returning to make everyone safe and warm.

Our house is gray stone and brick surrounded by a low wire fence. The Murphys live across the street. Their father is a drunk. Tommy wants to be a priest, he’s sixteen. Then there is Teresa, Paul, Billy who talks funny, talks like he ate worms. And Caroline, the youngest, my friend.

Caroline wears a white dress and veil and goes to a different school. I tell Mommy I want a white dress and veil. “No dice,” Mommy says. Caroline takes me with her to church. She baptizes my rag doll. We want to be nuns, black-gowned princesses promised to God with his glorious stained-glass eyes and chimes. I am going to name all my dolls after saints. Daddy sends me to bed without supper.

Then I am big in the soft snow, bundled up with a scarf and mittens in the center of the blizzard-sheeted street. The roofs are white, the whittled branches and buried cars. Even the train tracks below the hill are white. I won’t let Caroline Murphy hold my doll. She says I stuck nails in God’s hands. I tell her Billy talks funny because he eats worms. And Caroline says my father eats stones. She knows. She heard my mother tell her mother that my father had stones inside him, that he went away to get shot at by a big blue gun. His stones were growing like a bucket of big black worms.

It is dusk. We are watching the 5:57 train, impossibly black in the snow, nun black, briefcase-leather black, black as the felt around my father’s wide-brimmed winter hat.

I leave Caroline standing alone on the corner. It’s cold. The train is my signal, the time I must go home. And I’m running, the ground icy. Daddy has the first cancer then and can’t talk or swallow. And Caroline Murphy is six years old. She is about to step off that curb above the train station. She is about to step into the icy dusk street, the world whitish. The truck. And later the driver will say he felt a small bump. He thought he had a flat tire. That’s what made him stop.

My father is upstairs. He is lying under piles of covers. Everyone is screaming. Someone is pounding on the big wooden door, shouting, “Where’s your girl? Where’s your girl?” Mommy wraps me in her arms and rocks me, rocks me. And they are shouting, “There’s a run-over girl. Get a blanket. Get a blanket. She’s dead.”

Daddy comes downstairs. He looks as if he’s screaming but he can’t talk then, coughs blood, lies under blankets in bed all day. His toolbox is getting dusty. Mommy brings him lunch on a tray and he throws the food down and calls it garbage, garbage. Now he’s pulling me close to him, against his old wool bathrobe. He’s crying. I never saw Daddy cry before.

Then it’s kite season. And something terrible is happening. My bedroom windows faced the train station. I had yellow cotton curtains. Caroline Murphy was dead. Below, the backyard is numb gray. Mommy planned to plant it. Mommy wanted tulips. But something happened.

There were lilac trees on the street, maples, sycamores, elms. The houses were surrounded by low wire fences. And she was bringing Daddy lunch on a tray. I collect clay models and fossils. I study the transformation of a butterfly and think, how is it possible? That big man my father is turning back into a little boy.

“They’re lighting candles up and down the street for him,” my mother says into the telephone. “The superstitious bastards.”

Why is everybody lighting candles? Is it some kind of birthday? Where is my father? Why does she leave me alone all day? And I am dragged screaming to neighbors, the ones who light candles. And where is the birthday cake? The food they eat smells funny and I’m yelling, no, no, I don’t want any. I want Mommy and Daddy. They take a box out of the closet. It opens into a little bed. I am given a blanket that scratches. People are sleeping near me, I can hear them breathing. I stare into the night, terrified.

I know I am safe. But when I close my eyes I suddenly think of being beaten, eaten. And terrible things are crawling across the black circle inside my head. Should I tell Mommy? But Daddy has gone to the hospital. Preparing for the inevitable, she cancels my piano lessons. I stamp my small feet and grow pale, the blood drains and what does it mean? What does it mean?

“Just sit nice and quiet,” Mommy says. “Look out the window. Let Daddy try to sleep.”

We are riding on a train. It cuts a path to the Pacific. I witness the breathless rage of sunset when the bridges were consumed, the maps and borders. And the train runs in a tight circle powered by atomic fuels, radium and cobalt. Blue jewels, radioactive beams like a stream of blue asters, clusters of blue agapanthus.

And the train is an express. No one is driving. It just keeps going. It is powered by atomic fuels. It can grind its clipped metal wings forever while I ride in my window seat, crisscrossing the childhood I carry with me like stage props in a trunk.

Maple leaves. My sled. My kite. The cool sense of birth before the first snow and Mommy standing me at a window, saying, see it now before the tire scars, see it spread over there, falling in the streetlamp glow, a golden halo, and you are my daughter, my angel. Flowers pulled from the yard of a priest who chased me halfway home in an August of fireflies dying in jam jars. The run-over girl, the stain in the street and my six-year-old heart already shut. I never cried, even though she crossed that dusk street to play with me. There is a train rumbling down thin metal grooves like fine rows of black stitches weaving through the edges of the wound, the contagion of my girlhood. The train is running in a tight circle powered by atomic fuels, radium, cobalt. Blue jewels and pansies pressed between the pages of a book. The train is running in a circle over and over past the hosed-down stain of Caroline Murphy, the red patch in the street, my heart already shut, the strange neighbors, the blankets that scratched, my father spending entire days in bed under woolen blankets in an August of fireflies dying in jam jars.

SAW DR.

“What did he say?” I needed a cigarette. I needed a shot. I was too cold, too hot, half asleep and jammed wide awake. My age was unsolid. The geography unsolid. The world was swaying, decaying.

TOM. TRY 2 EAT.

“They’re going to put you on solid foods? The graft must be working, right? He looked under the bandages?”

PINK. NEW SKIN.

“I knew you would make it. Ever since you got up and shadowboxed death.” My father looked at me oddly. “Do you remember?”

My father shook his head as if trying to clear it. He shrugged his shoulders, noncommittal.

R THEY SENDING ME HOME 2 DIE? I THINK OPER. WAS

FLOP.

“You mean you think the doctors are lying?”

My father nodded his head. Nothing spurted in a red stream from the crevice in his neck. The sunlight was streaming thickly, silkily into the room.

“Do you think you’re really dying and they’re just jerking you off? Getting the room ready for another stiff? Pretending and hoping for a miracle?”

BINGO.

I wanted a shot. I wanted to feel strong, warm, capable. The day was a set of train tracks. With one shot I could be atomic fueled. I could steam through gullies. I could tunnel dry clutter from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, from Berkeley to Venice, the tight circles of my life, the black tracks like rows of tight new stitches.

My father was staring at me.

“You always said life was a grab bag, a race for cripples, a six-thousand-dollar claimer. But one of them has to cross the finish line. And you know what separates a hero from a bum? An inch. A nose under the wire.”

I SAID THAT?

“Yes.” I LIED.

“It doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that you pulled it. The inside straight. You’re going to live.”

I HATE YOUR CARD METAPHORS. INACCURATE.

“You get the idea, though?” I could feel something beginning. It had power and warmth. I was pacing, staring out the window down to the lawn covered by lacy white flowers. It could have been a snowdrift. The hills to the north and east were snow-capped. It was the kind of day when one could consider the possibility of resurrecting the dead. All the dead. And if I counted Picasso as the first and the old man with the mandolin as the second, who would be third? My father? But what if I counted Caroline Murphy as the first? Then Picasso would be the second. Then Mr. Gordon would be the third and that would be enough.

U LOOK SICK.

“I’ve been sick, very sick. But I’m starting to get better.” TALK ABOUT SICK. SAW YOUR MOTHER THIS A.M.

“What happened?”

THOUGHT AFTER 20 YRS W/CANCER NEED SLIVER STAKE 2

STOP ME. WAS WRONG. FRANCINE WORSE THAN CANCER.

It was an old joke. No matter what he was talking about — inflation, Dodger hitting, the county fair cripples they sent down for the Del Mar meet — Francine was worse. I took a deep breath.

“Daddy, I know you’re going to live. You’ll go home.” Back to your perpetually balding ivy, your fruit trees, your patch of pastel sanity in the soft pinkish heart of West Los Angeles. “The doctor said you can drive your car. He said you might even talk again. But I’ve got to leave for a while.”

U WANT 2 SPLIT NOW???

My father wrote the note quickly. It was a black scrawl. It was a kind of black track in white snow. And if I counted Caroline Murphy as the first and Picasso as the second, then Mr. Gordon would be the third and it would be over.

I stared at my father’s note. I didn’t say anything.

BAD TIMING DONT U THINK??

I nodded my head in agreement. And when was it ever the right moment to leave a father?

My father looked down at the floor. There were sun patterns now, spokes of sharp light, a kind of shadowy knife.

I looked at the man in the bed. I was the daughter. We formed a chain. We were letters in the original alphabet. In the beginning there was A as in Adam. A man. In the beginning there was man. He was given Eve later, an afterthought. And everything she did was wrong. She stumbled out the rib cradle wrong. She had an affinity for the forbidden. And she became rage and red, autumnal and partial as an x-ray. She became a dream thing and evil. She sang on rocks and made ships crash. Woman. I am not whole, never whole. The one with the hole. I am the daughter. And when is it ever a good time to leave a father?

DONT LEAVE ME NOW.

I walked to the window. I could see the red roofs of houses stuck like rows of red steps across the hills. It was the yawning mouth of spring, fists of red hibiscus, the sun punched open above ripening lemons. On the lawn below, white flowers were lacy, intricate, crocheted.

A nurse entered the room. She told my father it was time for his walk. I draped his bathrobe across his shoulders. He took small broken steps. His legs were weak, rubbery.

I matched his steps. Suddenly I thought of women hobbling on ruined feet. In China they bound the feet of women. It was the custom there for a millennium, quite a lasting tradition. At age three the soft girl flesh was sealed in special sheets. How they stank in summer! A necessary preparation for the woman stink later. The nights were torn by girl children screaming in their sleep as the bones caved in, as the flesh decayed, as the toes fell off.

The mother stumbling on her crippled stumps cautioned at the crib be thankful the earth coughed crops that year or you would have been drowned. You must be tamed, carried on a litter like a trophy that breathes. You cannot trust her. The forests are filled with madwomen hiding in caves, eating grasshoppers and howling.

My father was leaning against my shoulder. He was gasping for breath. Sweat had broken out across his forehead. His knees were trembling. And what the hell was I mad about, mad about?

His face was flushed red with strain. We had walked halfway down the corridor. The nurse helped my father turn around. We began walking back.

I wanted to explain to my father that one day I had accidentally limped to a window. I saw the road below filled with refugees. It surprised at first, the sheer number of women hobbling. They were selling everything. The linen hooks. The porcelain hooks. The checkbook and children hooks. All the hard evidence, Daddy. They were chewing off their ankle chains with their teeth. They were willing to chew off their feet. Understand, Daddy. The women have been to the quarry. And scraped the mountain clean.

I helped my father back into his bed. He reached for his writing pad.

WHERE WILL U GO?

“I don’t know, Daddy,” I said. I thought of the white tequila sun to the south, creamy and stinging. Sun of the permanent noon and warm harbors, fish smell and gull shriek thickening into jungle and sky under green vines, a crawling grid. I will be windswept, windsong, wingborne, reborn and tossing starsick into shimmering yearning of new, of clean. I will be windchime, sublime in the struggle away from drumbell of loss, loss and pierce into the other, the greater.

“You spent years on the road, Daddy. You know how it works. Things happen.” If you are without anchor, the wind matters. If you are naked, implements of survival appear. Logs will float and stretched skins will catch the winds. I will invent fire, clans, names, boundaries.

My father’s eyes had darkened. He lay back on his pillow, lay very still. He was gray. He was granite. He was the father, fundamental, the beginning. He was the dealer. He was the house. He made it all happen. He struck the first match and the world blazed and spun in circles around his great yellow eye, the sun.

HOW WILL U TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF?

“I’ll trust the intangibles. The most important thing is balancing class and condition. I’ll check times against tracks. I’ll remember California tracks are always fast and cripples run six in one ten and change. Look for Kentucky breds, weight shifts, bandaged horses, hot jocks, the obvious. Try to differentiate between honest and artificial class slips. Remember it’s always hard moving up. Check the past works but don’t rely on them. They only run as fast as they have to.” I looked at my father. “I’m going to try to go the distance.”

U HAVENT SHOWED MUCH FORM. U R ERRATIC. CANT

FIND THE WIRE.

“Condition has been a problem. I haven’t been in good shape.”

FACE IT. U R A CONFIRMED QUITTER.

“There have been some equipment changes. I’m racing without blinders. I’ve been away a long time. I’m fresh. And I’m carrying much less weight, Daddy. I’m an overlay.”

LIFES GONE SO BAD. U. FRANCINE.

My father seemed to sigh. He was granite. He was the mountain with rocks falling down. He was lessening, chipped. Then he began to cry.

“What do you want?” I asked, my voice soft, a mere rustle.

I handed my father his pad. His pen had fallen to the gray enamel floor. I picked it up. I was his issue, both more and less than chattel. I was his necessity, his step into unborn generations, the first rung on the ladder to the millennium. I was the moment forced into form, the passion of his manhood, an intrinsic and overwhelming measurement.

WANT IT ALL BACK. YOUTH. DREAMS. CIGARS. WOMEN.

HORSES. START OVER.

“Doesn’t everybody?” I asked. I realized that I did. Maybe everyone wanted it all back. Maybe the only difference was that a few really had a chance. And maybe once someone realized that, it gave a certain edge. I am twenty-seven years old and a pine tree my age knows more. Still, with some equipment changes, the blinders off, the long rest, and a lot less weight …

I walked down the corridor. I didn’t look into the room where they kept the morphine. I didn’t look into the little green cubicles with their newly made beds, their empty nightstands, their hunger to kill. That didn’t matter anymore, either. I didn’t look to the side or behind me. I just kept going toward the sunlight. There were a few last-minute details.