Invisible Fences (6 page)

First 

He dressed Mom in one of the nightgowns she’d ordered from the Home Shopping Network, a cheerful floral pattern that struggled to offset the weak, dusty blue pallor of her face. Dad insisted we flank her on each side and practically carry her to the front door before the paramedics arrived.

She wasn’t as heavy as I expected—but then, she hadn’t eaten much over the past few days. 

Turned out her flu symptoms had developed into double pneumonia. On top of that, she had an irregular heartbeat—possibly congestive heart failure.  

How strange it was to see her in a brightly-lit hospital room. A frail elderly man occupied the bed closest to the window (Dad’s insurance policy only allowed for a semi-private room); the man kept the curtains drawn aside and the blinds open. Different nurses hustled in and out during my visit, and Mom seemed not to mind the attention. 

I visited each of the four days she was in the hospital. If Dad was there, he’d go to the cafeteria for coffee or a snack, to give me time alone with her.  

The day she died, she still had a clear plastic mask over her mouth and nose, with oxygen tubes to help her breathe. She had to move the mask aside anytime she wanted to speak. 

I did most of the talking. I even switched TV channels for her, like Pam and I used to do in the old days. She’d nod and hold up a weak hand when I reached a program she liked. 

After a while, I sat next to her quietly. She drifted in and out, her eyelids heavy. Then both her hands moved slowly to the plastic mask, and I turned the volume down on the television and leaned closer to her face. I could hear the strain of the elastic bands, the scrape of plastic against skin as she slid the mask aside.  

“I’m sorry,” she said.  

“What for?” I responded. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” And I patted her hand and kissed her forehead. 

• • • 

Pam came down for the funeral, of course, and Aunt Lora as well. Most of the Graysonville attendees were from Dad’s school, or his group of card players. A little under twenty people in all. A respectable-sized crowd, I guess. 

We’d had a bit of confusion about the viewing. Initially it was to be closed-casket, since Mom was such a private person most of her life. Then Dad saw the job the morticians had done, and he thought she looked good. “Leave it open,” he said, which made me a little angry. I sat with Aunt Lora for most of the two-hour viewing period. 

“Your mother was smart,” she told me and Pam. “I used to check my homework against hers, and she was always right. And she knew electronics. When I needed to hook up my VCR, I called her and she talked me through it better than the damn customer service at Best Buy. That picture is crooked.” Aunt Lora leapt up from her seat after this last comment and crossed the viewing room to a framed landscape print. She nudged the bottom right edge of the frame to make the picture even with the hatched pattern of the funeral home wallpaper. 

Pam and I looked at each other and tried not to bust out laughing.  

• • • 

“You know, I promised myself I’d never step foot in here again.” 

“I figured as much.” 

Pam bent down and scraped her finished cigarette against the edge of the concrete porch. I hadn’t let her smoke in my car on the way from the funeral parlor.  

She’d emailed a few pictures, but it was strange to see her in person. Her hair was shorter than she’d worn it as a kid, but still thick, her natural curl matted with gel into shiny waves. The style seemed old-fashioned, almost business-like, to match her charcoal jacket over a blue open-collar shirt.  

It was easier to talk with her on the phone. No awkward pauses, unsure where to direct my eyes.  

“Where’s…?” My voice trailed off. 

“Sondra. I asked her not to come.” She took a deep breath, exhaled loudly. “Let’s get this over with.” 

“Sure.” I pulled out a separate key ring with a tiny LED flashlight attached (a free gift after some over-$50 Home Shopping Club purchase). Turned out I didn’t need the key: behind the screen door, the front door was unlocked. That never would have happened while Mom was alive. 

I stepped into the foyer and held the edge of the door for Pam. She paused at the entrance, then put her head down and pushed forward. Her body trembled as she passed the threshold.  

Then, nothing.  

Pam was struck by it too, I could tell. The hollow atmosphere of a house that, for twenty years, had never for a single moment been empty.  

I didn’t want to leave the hallway, step into that awful, cluttered, uninhabited living room. 

“She would have called one of our names by now,” Pam said eventually. 

“Yeah.”  

Our own voices seemed to break the spell. I led the way; my feet had worn a familiar path along the foyer tile and into the flattened green-and-mustard shag carpet.  

The heavy curtains were pulled aside from the windows, shades lifted. Dust, surprised by sunlight, hovered like drunken gnats. Nothing had been cleaned or removed, but some of the newspaper stacks had been dragged away from the front of the couch and lined up against the wall. Several UPS boxes, pushed to the front of the room, covered the television screen.  

The couch seemed untouched. Two cotton towels lay over the sofa’s ridged fabric, which Mom had declared as too scratchy to be comfortable against her bare legs and arms. A memory of our mother’s shape left a depressed outline in the cushions beneath the towels.  

“Dad always blamed this clutter on her,” Pam said. “We’ll see how long it takes him to clean things up.” 

Mom’s phone was still perched on the end of her rickety TV tray, with several outdated issues of
TV Guide
next to it. A yellow recipe card box held pens, pencils and Post-It notepads. A newspaper section was folded back on the Jumble page, circles filled in for three of the four words.  

“Look at this,” I said. Beneath the table were two small cartons made of rugged black plastic. They were snapped shut at the handle, like toy briefcases. Mom had written my name on a sticky-note attached to the top case, Pam’s name attached to the other.  

I handed Pam her case and lifted the plastic clasp on mine. It was some ridiculous thing called a “LightDriver”: a flashlight with a tool-attachment node on the opposite handle. Snapped into compartments on the inside of the case were three rows of tiny screwdriver and wrench attachments. Even with my limited knowledge of tools, I could tell the design was flawed. The flashlight would shine in your face instead of on the worksite while you tried to use the screwdriver at the other end. Peggy on Home Shopping would say how great it was to have all these tools in one convenient place, the “Items Sold” counter would click higher and higher, phones ringing off the hook in the background, and most people would think, “What idiot would waste money on something like that?”  

I started to cry, and when I looked at Pam she was crying too. 

• • • 

We were there because Dad had asked us to stop by the house. He’d uncovered some of Pam’s things—“Maybe worth something on eBay”—and gathered them in a box in her old bedroom (now better known as junk storage room #3).  

As reluctant as Pam was to revisit our parents’ home, it gave us a chance to get away from the funeral crowd. After the viewing, there was a reception at the house of one of Dad’s card-playing buddies. We were expected to attend, but could use the house visit as a stalling tactic. 

Pam walked down the hallway, carrying her tiny “LightDriver” briefcase at her side—a comic addition to her business-like attire. I followed her into her room on the left. 

There was barely space for both of us inside the doorway. Pam’s twin bed was still in the far corner, pointed away from the window, but it was impossible to reach it. Boxes covered the bed, some with paperback books, others with vinyl albums and cassette tapes. Examples of my father’s handiwork covered the floor space—wooden shelves, dressers, and oversized storage chests shoved tightly together in an abandoned spatial puzzle.  

Pam’s box was balanced on the edge of an open-top wooden crate filled with kitchen appliances (including a toaster-oven, an old-style coffee percolator, and two waffle irons).  

“Oh, these will make me a fortune,” Pam said. She reached down and pulled out a shoebox, the bottom of it stained with water damage. Inside were her baseball cards. The ones on top were too worn to interest any serious collector; further down in the box, the cards were warped, stuck together, and coated with mildew.  

Also in Pam’s box were a few of my things from the Maryland house: matchbox cars (rusted), and my plastic robot and bendable Major Matt Mason spaceman. 

“What a bunch of crap,” she said. She tugged at a red corner of fabric tucked deep in the box, then pulled out and unfolded a wrinkled felt pennant for the Washington Senators. Pam had rooted for the team for a few years after we moved out of Maryland, but then the D.C. owner sold the ball club to Texas. She tossed the pennant and shoebox back into the larger box. 

A gold-painted frame was flush with the back side, picture facing the cardboard. “Don’t tell me…” Pam lifted it, and turned the portrait around. “I can’t believe he put Jesus in here.” 

It was a “floating head” picture, Jesus with eyes slightly upturned, his face surrounded by a shimmer of light. In my youngest years, it hung in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. At the end of each day Pam and I were called in to sit on the edge of their bed, fingers interwoven and facing the picture for our nightly prayers. 

“I wondered whatever happened to this guy,” I said. 

“I think after Jamie died, Mom took it down.” Pam slid the picture back in the box, the frame askew and one Jesus eye peering over the top of the shoebox.  

“Remember the ‘glow’?” Pam asked, miming quotation marks in the air with hooked fingers. 

I shook my head. 

“You were pretty young. Dad used to tell us if we did an extra special job of saying our prayers, the picture would glow. You know: a sign of Christ’s approval.” 

I didn’t fully remember, but as Pam spoke I caught the texture of a wish, a child’s wonder.  

“You asked me once if I saw the glow,” Pam said. “I could tell you tried pretty hard for it: saying the prayer in the right order, concentrating on each word, remembering at the end to bless our relatives and neighbors and the babysitter. You looked disappointed, so I told you it was just Dad’s trick to help us pray better. That pissed you off—at me, not at Dad. You always believed Dad’s stories.” 

I thought then of my younger self, four or five years old, striving for some sign of approval from a dime store painting in a gilded frame. Would the halo shine like neon? Would Christ’s entire face brighten, light stretching away like lines from a cartoon sun, heating the painted frame into red-hot metal? None of it happened.  

“I was pretty gullible, I guess.” 

“Maybe,” Pam said. “He let Mom die, you know.” The comment seemed to come out of nowhere. I wouldn’t normally expect Pam to stand up for our mother. Of the two of our parents, Mom did the most to push Pam away. Every weekend night of my sister’s high school years, Mom yelled at Pam from the couch: she insisted Pam abide by an unreasonable 10 p.m. curfew, then screamed criticisms at her the instant she pushed in the front door after midnight.  

“Blame me, too,” I said. “We should have taken her to a hospital sooner.” 

“I’m not talking about now,” Pam said. “All those years, ever since Jamie died. When Mom wouldn’t leave the house. Dad was letting her die. It just took a while.” 

As Pam spoke, her words felt like the truth. 

Soon, Maybe 

A commonplace about long-married couples was that once one of them died, the other would soon follow. There was a morbid undertone to Pam’s “See you soon, maybe,” when I dropped her off at Birmingham Airport after Mom’s funeral.  

Actually, Dad seemed to bounce back easier than I expected. He added one extra day of card-playing to his weekly schedule, continued with substitute teaching, and plastered community bulletin boards with ads for his woodworking service (these days the flyers, supplemented with color Clip Art, were coughed out of his former school’s laser printer). 

Dad found lots of things to do, including a scratch-built wooden deck for the backyard. He never actually threw away any of the junk in the house, but he bought large plastic containers to organize things in, and a daisy-wheel label maker to mark each bin. The entire inside of the house was a work-in-progress, without any real progress being made.  

He decided he wanted a dog. “Your mother wouldn’t let me have one after Atlas. Too much trouble. Too many germs.” Several weekends, I went with him to PetSmart or the Humane Society, but he never quite found one to suit him. In the meantime, he built several prototype dog houses of different sizes. Each time I visited, it seemed like there was a new dog house in the back yard.  

I counted four of them back there the day of his stroke.  

• • • 

“Dad?” 

His television’s volume was turned up, making me strain to hear him. He was using a speaker phone that came pre-installed in his new living room recliner. I knew something was wrong: I usually initiated our phone contact these days, to the point where I suspected he’d forgotten my home number. 

“Nathan, where are you?”  

“My apartment. Right where you called me.” 

“No, why aren’t you here?” 

Maybe he only wanted me to meet him for some project or another. Another futile shopping trip for a new dog. “We didn’t make any plans, Dad.” 

“It’s Saturday. Your mother’s expecting you.” 

His speaker phone caught a sudden blare of music from the television. A woman’s voice drifted under the music, and I told myself it didn’t sound like Mom. 

“I’ll be right over, Dad.” 

• • • 

Although Dad didn’t scrub things spotless as Aunt Lora had, he followed her technique of clearing a path from one usable island to another. His bathroom, his side of the bed, one section of kitchen counter and one uncovered place setting at the table. The living room chair, and the woodworking station in his garage. 

He was in the new recliner when I got there, and looked up at me with a surprised expression. The chair was gigantic, with thick arms and puffy cushions at the back, layered like rolls of fat. My father looked shrunken and weak in the new chair, his formerly stocky frame now thin after the removal of sugar from his diet. I wondered how he’d maneuvered the massive chair into the house.  

He lifted an open package of sugar free caramels from the floor beside his chair. “Want some? Tastes just like the real thing.”  

I waved the package away and tried to speak gently. “Why’d you call me?” 

“I didn’t.”  

“You did.” I pointed to the arm of his recliner. “The phone compartment’s open.” 

“Oh. I don’t really know how to work that darn thing yet.” 

Two blue plastic bins sat open on the couch, surrounded by newspapers. Tape labels stuck to each empty bin said NEWSPAPER. “You mentioned something about Mom.” 

He tilted his head as if he were thinking, then I heard the wet sound of him trying to unstick a piece of caramel from his upper plate. “Let me show you something out back.” 

Dad stood up, keeping his balance by gripping each arm of the chair. He started to head toward the kitchen, but his left foot seemed planted in the floor and he walked in a circle three times. Then he sat down again. 

I pressed 911 on the speaker phone. 

• • • 

Dad tried to talk over me while I spoke to the dispatcher. “I’m fine,” Dad said. “I could drive myself, or have my son take me.
If
I needed to come in.” I cupped my hand over the disconnect switch, and Dad’s finger tapped on my wrist a couple times as I repeated the address to the operator. 

I certainly could have driven him myself, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince him to get inside the car. 

“I’ll call them back and cancel it,” he said after I hung up. His arms pulled close around his stomach. In the large chair, he looked like a child.  

“Too late,” I said. 

While we waited for the ambulance, I stepped into the kitchen for a moment of solitude. I looked out the back door, counted the dog houses. 

• • • 

The elderly get prompt attention, even in a small-town emergency room. They hooked Dad up to an I.V. and a heart monitor right away. He fell asleep on the stretcher-bed, and I waited with him in the curtained-off area until the on-call doctor showed up.  

“It looks like you’ve had a ‘mini-stroke’,” the doctor said. She looked mostly at me, but spoke loudly enough for my father to hear. “Probably nothing too serious, but we’ll need to keep you overnight for more tests. Okay?” 

I nodded.  

• • • 

When I drove back to the hospital the next morning, Dad was gone. 

That is, he’d checked himself out the night before. As soon as I’d left, he called one of his poker buddies for a ride home. 

He was back in the arm chair when I went to confront him. 

“I was fine,” he said. “I had a mini-stroke just like this last year.” 

“Last year? Why didn’t you tell me? Or Mom?” 

“Oh, I wasn’t going to tell your mother. No need for her to worry.” 

• • • 

I visited more frequently over the next few weeks. Dad was often lucid, but would sometimes drift into confusion. He’d pause over the kitchen counter, as if thinking about which cabinet he wanted to open. “Dad?” I’d say. “Dad?” No answer, but in a few minutes he’d be his usual stubborn self again. I tried to talk him into hiring a part-time nurse, but he said the house wasn’t “ready,” and argued he didn’t need a nurse. 

“Well, why don’t you call a cleaning crew in here,” I said. “Clear out some of this junk.” 

During a few of his confused episodes, I wondered what would happen if I started arguing back at him, saying every angry thing I ever wanted to say. After all, it wouldn’t hurt his feelings: once he snapped back to normal, he’d already have forgotten what we talked about. 

One afternoon as we sat at the kitchen table, he looked right at me and started to carry on a conversation with Pam. “Your brother doesn’t understand,” he said. “Nate thinks everything is so clear cut.” 

That’s when I yelled back. “Pam’s not here, Dad. I’m the one who stuck around. She left home because of you, because you let Mom sink into herself and almost drag the rest of us down with her. Pam’s the one who blames you for Mom’s death, not me.” 

Silence followed. He nudged his half-empty coffee cup and his eyes seemed to follow a gentle ripple in the dark liquid.  

When he looked up, he was Dad again, as pleased as if I’d just arrived at the house. 

“Hello, Nathan,” he said. “Let’s go in the garage. I’ve got a story to tell you.” 

• • • 

Some of the junk near the wall was pushed against the tracks for the garage door, jamming the mechanism so the door stayed half-open. A few boxes and RubberMaid tubs had forced their way into the driveway since my last visit. A wedge of daylight stretched beneath the opening, filtered by slats of unfinished wood, a bookshelf without a back, and an upturned Formica table. It was bright enough that Dad didn’t bother to pull the metal chain hanging from the uncovered light fixture in the ceiling.  

And dark enough to set the mood for my father’s final cautionary tale. Aside from a few stripes of light across his legs, Dad’s figure seemed gray and muted. Although his voice had a slight old-man tremor, its volume commanded attention. We stood amid the workshop tools that formed the subject of his story, and at strategic moments, he would rattle a toolbox, or shake the metal frame of an upright buzz saw. The tight quarters of the junk-crowded garage pressed me to stand close to him: we were the same height, but as his story progressed, my father seemed to lengthen slightly, like a late-evening shadow. 

The first storyteller of my childhood was back, and I listened. 

• • • 

Once there was a young boy [my father began] who grew up in a neighborhood much like this one. He lived in a modest-sized home, full of many memories. So many, that they pushed him into a smaller space, almost like life had forced him into a box. 

His big house became as small as the apartment you live in now, Nathan. 

This boy was critical of everyone around him, but that meant he had to be critical of himself, too. He didn’t always like himself. 

That might be why he had the accident, as if he’d subconsciously decided to punish himself.  

He went to his father’s garage, where he’d been warned not to play with the electric tools. He turned on the drill press and the disc sander, and they made loud buzzing and screeching noises. Then he placed a fresh blade in the jigsaw, perfect for making careful cuts in thin strips of wood—the same machine people use to make the precise, interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He pressed the red power button, and the machine roared to life. 

But he didn’t have a thin strip of wood to cut. Instead, he pushed his left index finger against the blade. Cut the finger off before he’d even registered what happened. 

The finger wiggled on the work surface of the jigsaw. It rolled on its side, and the knuckles curled—either from reflex, or from the vibration of the saw’s motor. The finger seemed to beckon him closer to the saw, as if asking the boy to cut himself up some more. 

His screams were drowned out by the hum of the jigsaw, the buzz of the drill press and the screech of the disc sander.  

The boy was sorry for what happened; he hadn’t intended for things to turn out this way. So he turned off the machines, cleaned up the garage, scrubbed away every trace. He wrapped the severed finger in a paper towel and brought it into the house. He hid it where nobody could find it. 

Then he forgot where he’d put it.  

Do you see the point of the story, Nathan? We all cut parts of ourselves away, but we never lose them. Things stay with us—souvenirs with memories attached. We can’t always choose what to keep, what to throw away.  

• • • 

So ended my father’s only attempt at allegory. At first the boy in the story was clearly intended to represent me, a veiled criticism of my safe, sheltered life, with the finger-chopping as a clumsy Freudian jab at my decision not to have children. Then the story seemed a general meditation on regret, as Pam might regret leaving her parents’ home at 18, or as those parents might cling to bitter-sweet recollections of their other lost child, Jamie. According to the moral my father supplied, it was also the story of a man who, near the end of his days, tried to explain to his son why neither he nor his wife had been able to throw anything away, each object in the house a potential container for a hidden, forgotten, yet precious memory.  

The story’s logic didn’t hold up under scrutiny, but it had its own grotesque persuasive power. I believed in it, exactly the way I’d believed in all my Dad’s stories as a child.  

His story complete, my father’s head dropped slightly. He turned to walk inside, but then looked at me as if unsure where to go. “This way, Dad,” I said, and pressed my hand gently against his shoulder to guide him into the house and back to his armchair.  

• • • 

“Pam. It’s Nathan. I need you to come home again.” 

• • • 

I was the airport shuttle for Pam and Aunt Lora. My aunt went to the Stoney Mill Inn, where she’d stayed seven months earlier, and Pam got the fold-out couch at my apartment. Sondra still hadn’t come with her. “We broke up, I think,” my sister informed me.  

Dad’s viewing drew a bigger crowd than Mom’s had. A few former students showed up; several former and current teaching colleagues; a handful of his regular woodworking customers; the expanded circle of card players. About sixty in all. 

As the on-site relative, I’d been responsible for most of the planning. Essentially, I followed the decisions he’d made for Mom: I used the same funeral home, the same priest, the same message on the prayer cards. Same style of casket, open during the viewing.