Love & Darts (9781937316075) (6 page)

Do you wake up blaming an insidious enemy for your flailing
arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Do you wake up in a place unable
to cope, understanding that some enemies never show their faces,
would rather die than let you have a chance at a fair fight? I hate
these demented shadows we cast ourselves with paranoia, self-doubt,
and fear. I don’t know if we hide them or they hide us. You’re you,
Daddy, but where’s the dignity gone?

We are combatants, but how?
Integrity, autonomy, and free will; my God, what transient jokes.
Those shadows cower even if we won’t succumb. There’s no definitive
mark of the divisions between us, between you now and who you once
were. I don’t know what you call our overlap—solidarity, communion?
Or. Just call it a lifetime of memory. And give me some image to
assign to these few shared successive hours. I don’t care what
image. A photo album will work. An old reel of 8 mm film will work,
too. Or, yes, sure, a little postcard, a painting of seagulls dive
bombing for breakfast. Yes, that will definitely work. Wedge it in
the bathroom mirror frame. Forget about it. No. Don’t. Please
don’t, ever. I don’t care. Not everything can be objectified. Just
hand me a father to have forever when arbitrary things like
misinterpreted train schedules force submission.

But. Take all of that, that whole thing, and wrap it
into one big image. Something enough, you know. Something bold and
beautiful for both of us. Like maybe there’s some kind of skyward
woman. Yeah. Grace of not-God. Not a ghost. Not a mermaid. But more
than an apparition she is out somewhere in the fields singing to
herself with everything you never told us. She is limber in her
work and asks only for rain. I don’t know who she is. You never
really said. But I don’t need to question things that help. What I
know is, when she’s here, with you, with me, the wraiths recede.
They go as soon as they hear her mandolin.

And so what if anyone knows my father is not my
father anymore—except that he is, but changing.

Just after dark, on a bike, in September trees seem
whiter than black but fading. We cannot wait to get past the
present. Except that then he will be gone. There will be only photo
albums. No 8 mm reels of film. No big, beautiful skyward woman. So
I am coming home to be there, readied for the grief. I sort
memories. There are backyard memories, kitchen memories, piano
bench memories, Dairy Queen memories, hallway memories, front yard
memories, memories from his work, memories from my school. Finally
I walk into the bedroom, Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and find a few
accessible memories there. With one foot on the floor, asleep
before dinner, Dad is stretched out on his back taking a nap in the
half-light. Thousands of times he lay like this. His image is
etched somewhere deep in the everyday meld of what seems right,
good, and just. I will never see him that way again. The house is
sold.

I hear her holler from the fields, “Keep it in the
same tense, Missy.” And I laugh as the time twists over its Möbius
swirl. It is all now and all removed from time as well. He is lying
on the bed at home. He is lying on the couch. He is lying on the
cot at Riverhead. He is lying on the floor in the living room. You
say they are memories. And so be it. But what part of life would
you choose to be most vivid when he is lying in a nursing home,
dying? The past is certainly present; it’s what I choose.

I hate to think you wake up unsure. Do you know what
is happening, Dad? Do you blame an insidious enemy for your
flailing arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Sometimes I sit here,
seven hours apart, thinking of you there, in that chair that gets
sterilized twice a day. But then I think of you there in the orange
chair in the living room at home or sitting in a chair at our
kitchen table grading papers. You had slow times then, didn’t you?
So that eases the burden of how slow your time is now.

She strums a G chord. “Keep it in the same tense,
Missy.”

It is tense.

For some reason, the idea of your
dying bothers me less than the fact that you will never again pour
a bowl of Cheerios, top it with Quaker Honey Granola, two spoons of
sugar, and milk. You will never have a dripping nose while
shoveling snow in the driveway. You will never raise your eyebrows
and smile after tickling my feet. You will never stand between me
and the television at the most crucial point in a plot. You will
never stamp your feet inside the door after coming in from the
weather. You will never look skyward through countless vultures
spiraling down on an updraft while driving seventy miles per hour
on the interstate. You will stop looking for a Cooper’s hawk up
high.

How long the days seem to me sitting here, seven
hours apart. No one talks about distance anymore. Everything’s a
matter of time travel. There are silent conversations we all have
with each other, with the wraiths, with the big, beautiful skyward
women. Those conversations are just prayers, I guess, requests for
understanding, dreams of being understood. I remember several days
after the snows a mess of thistle seed and tiny sparrow foot prints
at the base of the backyard feeder. The light was heartening. Do
you remember when you cut the tops of the spruce trees for our
Christmas trees? Those strange trees. In that morning snow light
over thistle and sparrow footprints.

They say it’s not really genetic.

That maybe you soaked it in. There
are your hands in the lamplight, the veins and tendons and length.
Do you think this disease came from those years of washing your
hands in the formaldehyde that brought corpses to the lab? I
remember you laughing, scaring me by pulling a dead cat up out of a
plastic barrel. There must have been fifty dead cats in there all
submerged in preservative. You probably shouldn’t have just stuck
your bare hand in there like that. It’s that kind of thinking that
brings the wraiths. So I stare like you taught me to stare. And she
is there again, singing. She is bent over her work and dutiful to
the land. She pulls and works the fields. And she does not mind.
And she knows what I never will know about you. She must. Someone
must. You cannot go without someone knowing. Who is she? Who have
you told your stories to, Daddy? Where can I find her?

But she’s not telling. She sings, “Come and follow
me. I’ll make you worthy. Come and follow me. I’ll make you fishers
of men.”

They say people, place, or thing. Fine. And the
people hurt. And the places hurt. And things hurt. Your bird books.
Your telescope. Your driving lessons. Your camera. Thoughts of your
lawn-mowing shoes and red Heifer Project International hat. Your
black socks. Your watch. Your desk chair. Those great scissors in
your desk drawer. The tools. The shed. The paint. All of it. All of
the integuments we knew of you.

I imagine you so often. Awake and afraid. Asleep and
unknowing. A moment of awareness and more and more hours of
nothing.

They told me the name of this thing you have, as if
it mattered, as if I might want to know what exactly was happening
and how.

If it were anyone else, I would have looked it
up.

Give him a break, God. Let him be spared too much.
Wherever he is, let him hear birds and see wildflowers in the
ditches along the way. Make his journey quick. Do not betray him.
He has worshipped this world’s beauty for seventy years. Let him
be. Give him his freedom. Give him his peace. Give him his dignity
back in our memories. Let him be. Just leave him alone. Leave him
alone.

And yet I laugh at that phrase. Our culture’s most
protective phrase is so devastating. “Leave him alone.” We jump to
the defense, but what do we say? We say, “Leave him alone.” Where
is the hope of a connection? Where is the promise of a
relationship? Where is the unified front? It must not be. Leave him
alone. The most courageous phrase we can utter is for another to be
left and to be the only one around.

So true underneath. So horrible in the living
out.

But She is there, Dad. Don’t
worry. She is waiting with some kind of release. She sings and
mends her nets. She works the fields of the sky and undoes the
doing up. She must not be afraid, like I am. She must not be buried
alive by this, like I am. She must already know. So I trust her. I
have to. Become your own time of
leave him
alone
. Become your own beautiful way. And
even if I’m left alone I will be with you tiling the floors,
painting the doorjambs, picking out Christmas trees, sweeping the
gravel off the driveway, trimming the juniper bushes, and watching
so many birds fly.

Men vary. There are those who move into this world with a
blithe confidence. And there are those who, like myself, are weary
at the neck of the hourglass.

I’m waiting for my lover in the pebbled
courtyard of our fifth-favorite restaurant. We chose it not because
it’s cheap but because it’s close to his work.

I hate iconic, banal shit like my father’s
dying. Part of me even hates this May blue sky.

I am aware of my own presence so much
sometimes. It’s like I’m here, I’m me, but I’m also this
self-consciousness, this constant kind of correction. Self-control.
Self-discipline. Self-awareness. All of it right here under this
pecan tree. And not only here. Everywhere I go it goes—walking,
working, even going home. Especially going home. I just keep
cutting away what’s unacceptable and expressing what others will
tolerate, can handle, will accept, will love—well, will at least
not criticize.

Today is a clean day that makes you want ice
water and a swim of absolution. Above me—not just me—there is one
of those full blue skies that you always want to remember in
November.

On days this gorgeous it seems possible to
capture the beauty of that kind of atmospheric blue. Wouldn’t it be
nice to keep some bit of it, some twist, some lovely description of
the sky, some transcendent pleasure that transports you deeper,
further, and with ease? Go ahead and try. Try to keep some of the
sky for days when crappy gray cloud cover obscures the light. You
won’t possibly be able to remember this much blue. You cannot hold
any great sky in your mind for long. The frustration of the attempt
is too much. In November you’ll just get pissed off doing your best
to envision a May sky.

Don’t bother with any duality of the
material and the mind. What’s the point? Let the blue sky go. Get
rid of it. Get rid of it and the memories of your dad listening to
The Allman Brothers Band in the basement. Get rid of the lyrics
that keep coming back:
‎
Turn your love my
way.

Don’t do it. Don’t let him win. Don’t let
the world’s pressure separate you from who you are. Hold on. Stay
here. Don’t give up. Not again. Even if you were the second
inadequate person in your father’s righteous world.

The blue sky is unrelated to the material
you and unrelated to your dealing with your immaterial dead dad
shit. Grief is nothing. Your father’s dying without knowing the
real you is nothing. It does not matter.

Prove it?

Fine. But can it be done? Can any of this
leftover love-like destruction be rationalized?

Because first off: The lovely, spring blue
sky is not unrelated to material you because you're breathing it;
you're alive inside of all that air. Fine. So. There's a real
interaction there that cannot be denied.

Secondly: That May blue heaven is not
unrelated to immaterial you because the color of the sky affects
your mood. It lifts your spirits when you're dealing with your
dead-dad-grief shit.

Just get over it and cope. Plenty of people
have secrets.

And this suffering is only like clothes. So.
Get up; put on your shoulds.

Something is in conflict. You’re sitting at
a table under a pecan tree, the sky is cheering you up, but you
shouldn’t be cheered up. Press your arm over your eyes. Stay with
the appropriate grief that makes you a better person. You need the
gravity. You need the sadness. You need the import. There are
shoulds for everything, especially now with all this dead-dad-grief
shit. Don’t you dare feel the wrong emotions right now. This is no
time to enjoy the expanse of a blue above and beyond who and what
you are.

You most need the situation to make sense.
If a tragedy has occurred, it should be tragic. You should feel the
tragedy of an unexpected death. Your father’s unexpected death is
tragic. You should not be filled with joy, with gladness, with
thanksgiving, with relief, with finality and freedom. Something is
wrong. Amiss.

And don’t whisper anything long-suppressed
like, That’s what happens when the abuser dies.

You cannot admit gratitude, satisfaction,
glee, or any spirit of karmic vengeance. That would be wrong. And
yet. What you feel is that whole fantastic May blue sky filling you
with renewed life.