As the plane began its measured fall back towards the earth, she felt her stomach turn. Though she’d never taken it off, she noticed that the seatbelt sign was once again lit, but it did little to reassure her. And as she closed her eyes in order to avoid conversation with the flight attendant who was still peddling peanuts and soft-drinks down the cramped center aisle, she remembered the day she took the training wheels off of her bicycle, the day she found her mother’s journal, the day her father left forever.
On nights when their parents fought, she’d slip silently into her little brother’s bedroom where collectively they’d scramble to hide the trucks and toys that they’d learned were, in some ways, easier to throw than words or fists. She couldn’t remember a time when they spoke or cried about it. They simply did this thing that needed to be done and then together they’d crawl under the covers and wait. In the dark, she’d count the beats between the lightning and the thunder, measuring the distance between themselves and the storm, all the while trying to match her own breathing to his -in the hopes that in such rhythms sleep would be the first to find them.
But that night she’d heard her name.
All her life she’d been reminded of how she’d been named for a famous actress. People would ask her if she knew of the woman who she’d only ever seen in black and white -in a film whose title bared their portrait. In her early life such comparisons were delightful. She loved the way they repeated her name before asking the inevitable questions. She’d smile and shift from foot to foot, her cheeks warm with a gentle, blushing pride. But as she grew older, people forgot about the actress, as they do most things from their parents’ generation, and in doing so, they forgot about her and their shared name until she forgot too.
Her father’s voice, like the rest of him, was loud and menacing. When he said her name, she could almost hear the letters as they crashed to the floor. She didn’t wonder if she’d only heard it by mistake or if perhaps he was saying it only in passing conversation. She knew she was meant to hear it and that she was meant to follow it to where he was waiting.
In the seat in front of her a small child, who had thankfully slept for the entirety of the 6 hour flight, was now poking his head up over the top of the seatback – just long enough to catch her attention before quickly hiding himself again behind his makeshift parapet. In a moment he’d repeat this maneuver and she smiled softly as his giggles floated, like perfectly round soap bubbles blown past the seatback that separated them and just above her head before popping gently against the ceiling. Turning her attention out the window, she could see the blurred specks of the place where she’d grown up slowly coming into focus.
As she entered the room, she could see the evidence of their battle. A mixture of smoke and sweat and booze hung in the air, gathering like a funnel cloud around her father, who stood in the eye of it, his legs spread slightly apart, his fists balled into flesh and bone hammers. He seemed to her to be one part gunslinger and one part the mythical John Henry: a deadly mixture of power and unpredictability. Her mother, meanwhile, sat on the opposite side of the room, her legs and arms curled up beneath her. When she reached him, her father knelt down on one knee, placing his hands on both her shoulders. It was an awkward and unfamiliar gesture of reassurance made all the more ineffective by the fact that, even at half mast, he loomed over her – his breath hitting her forehead as he spoke.
“Your mother wants me to leave,” he said flatly. There were no pleasantries or gentle steps building up to the place where she would have to jump.
Not knowing what to say, she concentrated on the details of his mustache, which prevented her from seeing his mouth as he spoke. When she’d been younger, he’d allowed her to pick crumbs from it after dinner – a throwback to some ancient primate grooming ritual. She’d giggle and try to say the word: “mustache.” But somehow, it always sounded prickly and foreign as it left her mouth, much like the thing itself on those rare occasions when he’d kissed her goodnight. Once, she’d asked him why he had it, and in one of those half jokes that linger long after they’re meant to, he’d said it was because he was a big and fuzzy monster underneath. She’d believed him.
“She said you want me to leave too.” It was a question, though nothing about its tone or punctuation would have hinted as such.
Her breath quickened and her eyes moved from the black veil that shielded him, to her mother, whose own eyes were goring into her from across the room.
She knew the two answers before her. And she understood the consequences of each.
The truth was, she wanted him to leave. She hated the way he stomped across the floor when he walked, shaking the pictures on the wall and very rugs beneath her. She hated the way he slammed doors and cabinets, announcing his every movement to the house as though they were meant to be interested in everything he did. But most of all, she hated the way he turned her mother into something less than what she was: a weak and sniveling thing who often, on nights like tonight, would end up crawling into the bed next to her two children, not for comfort, but for protection.
“Is this true?” This time he asked, spitting the words into her face.
“Tell him,” she heard her mother plead, although no such words were spoken.
His grip on her shoulders tightened.
“No, daddy,” she said weakly and before the last word had even left her lips, he’d released her, turning his focus once again on her mother, who she could no longer see.
Someone over the intercom spoke of connecting gates, arrival times and picking up luggage. And though they were still far from reaching the ground, the whole plane seemed to rustle in anticipation: the woman next to her was fiddling with a pile of cosmetics from within her massive faux leather handbag; the teenage boy across the aisle was hurriedly closing up his laptop, while the ever flitting flight attendant encouraged people to follow rules that even he didn’t understand. All about her, people shuffled within the confines of their tight containers convincing themselves that they’d not completely atrophied as a consequence of their journey. For a moment, she found herself living within the frames of a music video from her childhood, reading the silent inner monologues of the strangers she was trapped with, which seemed suddenly to be written in shaky subtitles across their chests. She wondered quietly if they could read hers.
The next morning, she woke to find her mother sleeping on the couch. When she and her brother went out to play, they noticed that their father’s car was gone. For a moment, they tried to puzzle it out, but coming up empty, the detective work began. Sneaking back into the house, past the sleeping sentinel, they crept into her parents’ room. The bed was untouched. Their father’s closet door ajar. Its contents missing. She looked at her brother who was either too young or too afraid to understand. Gently, she shooed him back outside to the comforts of sky and grass and the waiting neighborhood children. But she remained, alone in what had been their room.
She’d told him that she wanted him to stay. But he’d left anyway.
Directly across from her, a long chest of drawers leaned awkwardly against the wall, stooping on one side, resting heavily on a squat stack of books where its proper legs had long since gone missing. Atop the thing, on the low end, something caught her eye. A worn, spiral bound book. It wasn’t particularly old or worthy of notice, but something about its tattered corners and dull, faded cover made it look as though it was meant to be hidden away in a box on the top shelf of someone’s closet or tucked between the mattress and box spring of the bed in some rarely used spare bedroom. To her, it looked uncomfortable and embarrassed in the openness of the room, and like some lonely traveler recognizing a member of his own tribe, she was drawn to it. Flipping through its pages, she instantly recognized her mother’s handwriting. The staid rightward slant, the frantic cursive, made all the more anxious by the tremor of a shaking hand. Somewhere near the middle she found the last entry: a recounting of the events from the night before. Her eyes soaked in the words, many of which she’d never seen before. But as she quietly mouthed out each syllable, she could feel the rage and sorrow and disappointment laden in each whispered word and she understood what they meant. She searched the page for her father’s name, but the things her mother wrote weren’t about him. They were about her.
Despite the flight attendant’s earnest admonishments, most of the passengers were up and grappling for access to the overhead bins long before the plane’s wheels had finished screeching along the runway. The two brightly dressed women from the seats behind her, who had only just met, hugged falsely and promised to “keep in touch,” while a man several seats away, who had complained loudly about the lack of meal service throughout the trip, searched frantically for items that had managed to escape his carry-on bag and roll cunningly down the length of the plane. After hours in restraint, the air bristled with revolution. But she remained seated. It had been sixteen years since she’d last seen her father. She wasn’t quite ready to get up yet.
She placed the book back where she had found it. Within it there were days and weeks and even years of her mother’s life laid out before her like a map, holding the key to some secret treasure, but somehow the one entry had been enough. After awhile, she found her way to the garage and the bicycle she’d been given the Christmas before. It was pink and white with a wide, yellow banana seat and a woven plastic basket hooked to the handlebars, both of which were dotted with brilliant, multi-hued flowers. She’d cried the morning she got it and had refused to ride it for weeks after. Neither of her parents could understand. But she’d seen the way her brother’s bike had gotten dirty and scratched only hours after having removed the bow, and hers was simply too beautiful to let that happen. Eventually, of course, she’d relented, but much to her father’s dismay she’d remained unwilling to remove the white-walled training wheels that were designed to keep her from falling. Several times he’d scowled at her from beneath his mustache, threatening to take them off without her permission, calling her a coward and telling her to “dry up” the inevitable tears that punctuated such conversations.
She looked at her bike. They were still firmly affixed to the back wheels.
For a long while, she thought about running away. She had no idea where she might go or even why exactly, now that her father had left, she still felt that she too needed to leave. Instead, she searched her father’s tools for the right size wrench to fit the bolts that held the small, round, plastic bits of security to the side of her bicycle -until at last she set about removing them. When she was finished, she walked her bike to the big hill at the end of Legion Way. She looked down the black straightaway, the pavement glistening in the summer heat. Climbing onto the bike, she gripped the asphalt on both sides with the bottoms of her sneakers and held herself at the edge of the precipice for a long moment before finally closing her eyes and letting go.
In comparison to the plane, she found the air in the terminal to be nearly as confining. People huddled together in joyfully globbed masses, hugging and crying and laughing, blissfully unaware of the scattered array of lost faces, like hers, that shifted uncomfortably between, separating one reunion from another. She adjusted the straps of her backpack nervously and continued walking, hoping he would see her before she saw him. The years that had past between them began to flash before her eyes. In that time, unless someone asked, she’d never mentioned him and even then she’d simply said, “I never knew my father,” a statement that, like the man itself, seemed to live somewhere between the truth and an outright lie. She wondered if in that time, he’d come to rely on similar mechanisms when faced with questions about his children. She wondered if there had been times when he’d found it easier to simply deny the boy who had grown up to look and be so much like him. Or if sometimes he found himself pulling a faded school photograph from his wallet that contained just a shadow of the girl who had, until now, refused to see him at all.
And then… there he was.
Facing him, she felt no different. No older, no taller, no smarter, no stronger. And yet, he looked nothing like she remembered. His once massive hands now fumbled nervously in front of him. His thick, dark hair had grayed and thinned. The years seemed to have made him smaller somehow, and as the distance between them shortened, she realized they were precisely the same height. This was not her father. And yet she knew him. She knew him the way a mother knows her own infant’s cry among a sea of others. This was hers. He belonged to her and she belonged to him. For the eternity of a few seconds, neither of them spoke. Then he smiled, and in that moment she realized his mustache was gone. Perhaps he’d shaved it years before, or maybe the morning he knew she was coming. Maybe this morning. But where it had been, now laid a mouth she had never seen before, and when it opened, it revealed a slight gap between his front teeth that matched her own. She smiled back.
I really like this one, jennifer.
Moments like "his fists balled into flesh and bone hammers" Paint quite wonderful pictures. We know what to think about him, and about her, and we know why.
Again, the calm(ing) manner in which we are allowed to recognise some things, and wonder about others, works perfectly.
Andrew
posted by: lindy (reply)
post date: 06.12.06 (8:58 am)
Thanks for making me get all teary eyed, J. My father tumbled out of Andrew's picture too. But I was too much of a coward to tell the story. Thank you for this rather delicate piece to an ever-compelling puzzle.
You asked me why I kept that old story and we spoke at length of old teachers and of comments left reeking (of bullshit) in red ink on the page, and of the need, that so often grows out of such cruelties, to topple the self-righteous and sound our barbaric "I told you so" from the tallest tower of even the smallest publishing house.
If I had it with me now, though, I'd fling the spiral bound disaster from the window along with a few bits of bread for Mr. and Mrs. Duck. Of course, in the morning, I'd likely send a search party of insecurities out to go look for it. But for tonight, at least, I no longer need it.
Remember when we mused that his would become a place where people could gather to sit around his notebook, lingering awhile in silence, or chattering and giggling at stage right (as we so often did) before finally leaving behind the stories that just naturally tumbled out? Then you smiled and winked and said "consider it done"? Remember?
I continue to be amazed by the things that tumble out of them.
~~~~~~~~~~~
When I was a little girl I had a collection of several old disney storybook records. These were the actual 33 1/2 speed albums that told the story of some Disney tale complete with an album cover/sleeve that folded out into a book that you could read along with as the record played. I had Bambi and The Jungle Book and Mickey and the Beanstalk, along with several others. I loved those things and listened to them until the quality of the recording on the albums had been reduced so much that the narration was nearly completely drowned out by the sound of what could only be described as frying bacon. They were old and dusty and fragile and my little brother colored all over the books/dust-jackets rendering mowgli and thumper all but unrecognizable. However, despite these set backs I did manage to learn quite a few things about beanstalks... and here's the thing about beanstalks, L: A beanstalk is really something of a map. If you follow it, you'll find the thing you're looking for. That said, I imagine that should I follow your particular beanstalk, dear, cowardice would be the last thing I'd find waiting for me a the other end.
Thank you coming here and reading and talking.
Such things are vital.
Few people stop by here anymore... and even fewer stay long enough to read the things I pin upon these walls... but those who do nourish me with their kindness and gentle generosity. I'm glad you've found your way back to this place and that you decided to linger for a few moments. What's more... with comments like these, I'll never go hungry. Thank you.
j
posted by: hangman (reply)
post date: 06.13.06 (9:38 am)
Beautiful story, thank you so much for sharing it. :)
Thank you for stopping long enough to read it; I'm always grateful for the company.
j
posted by: Cutter (reply)
post date: 06.14.06 (3:15 am)
When I saw the drawing on The Jongleur's blog, I really was speechless. I couldn't come up with anything to say about it. It disturbed me. It made me think of things, perhaps, that I'd rather not think of.
Your story captures that, somehow. Perfectly.
That in the end, the moustache was gone, was the perfect "happy ending". I felt relief. That damn moustache...
The picture and the story simply belong together.
Incredible.
posted by: lindy (reply)
post date: 06.14.06 (7:04 am)
Reply to: juniperflux
Now your -comments- are getting me all teary eyed. Ack. How could I forget. I wonder what ever happened to SpleenGirl and S.I.M.S. - oh, and that rather mysterious EmptyPseudonym guy - he was quite something. Trouble makers, the lot of them, but they were ever so much fun to have around. The occassional tail feather still gets ruffled, but I guess there aren't any martyrs or heros around to spout their pious intentions or to call in the troops these days, so the fire stays somewhat contained. :)
It's very true that ams' drawings are such that people come by, look and wonder, often leaving because they feel they can't say anything worth gracing the same page. No doubt, he'll wave off the compliment, but it's true. It happens a lot.
Your stories put words along side such creations, allowing others to feel a little more compelled to come forward and comment. I think your stories help people put words where before, they were speechless. Apparently, I'm not the only one to think your talent significant enough that it warrants further exploration.
"When I saw the drawing on The Jongleur's blog, I really was speechless. I couldn't come up with anything to say about it. It disturbed me. It made me think of things, perhaps, that I'd rather not think of."
I understand those feelings.
It took me awhile to work through what I needed to say, not to mention find the courage to say them... but thanks to a little gentle prodding from the artist, I finally managed to muddle through.
~~~~~~~~
I know you sometimes have to ration the time you spend online along with the words you leave sprinkled here and there. The fact that you chose to spend a little of that time with me today is really most humbling. Thank you for your thoughts. They are always welcome.
I've always had a fondness for troublemakers, myself... and frankly, I think I'm better for it.
"It's very true that ams' drawings are such that people come by, look and wonder, often leaving because they feel they can't say anything worth gracing the same page."
I couldn't agree more and yet, it's funny and more than a little telling that the two of us nearly always felt that our two cents were well worth listening too.
*shakes her head*
The truth is, I've always felt that one of if not *the* thing that separates someone who can merely draw from a bonafide artist is that the latter's work inspires a narrative within those who stop long enough to look. That said, there's a body of work that's growing as result of what ams inspires in others and that's a truth that is rather difficult to "wave off."
~~~~~
My mother used to have a magnet that hung on the refrigerator that said "never fry bacon in the nude." Genius.
j
posted by: Miss Spleen (reply)
post date: 06.19.06 (7:30 am)
As the plane began its measured fall back towards the earth, she felt her stomach turn. Though she’d never taken it off, she noticed that the seatbelt sign was once again lit, but it did little to reassure her. And as she closed her eyes in order to avoid conversation with the flight attendant who was still peddling peanuts and soft-drinks down the cramped center aisle, she remembered the day she took the training wheels off of her bicycle, the day she found her mother’s journal, the day her father left forever.