The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (22 page)

“And so I kept tough on her, didn’t give her any breaks. Pretty much all her balls were on the table and I had three left. She told me she was leaving and I said, hey, come on. Don’t be a poor sport. But she left, Ida, and I didn’t follow her—if I had tried to she wouldn’t have let me, do you understand? And so I stayed, had a grand old time
feeling like I was, you know, ‘integrating with the locals.’ Some idiot was impressed by my being a newspaperman, the stories I told him, and he gave me, I kid you not, a hat and a steak. He was a meat delivery guy and his truck was out back, went out there and got me a steak and gave me the hat off his head. Don’t know why about the hat, still.”

My father laughed, here, and it was the closest to the hoot he once famously produced I’d heard in a couple of years, until he remembered what story he was telling, exactly.

“But Ida I stayed ’til last call. I don’t really remember the walk home, quite, but I know I had the mind to put that steak in the freezer and crawl into bed. And that’s it. I remember vaguely that I was looking forward to telling your mother about this guy, about him insisting I take his meat and the hat, that I knew she would laugh at what an asshole she’d been to leave and what an asshole I’d been to stay and get so tossed. I remember planning on a big dinner for the three of us the next night—even though your teeth weren’t ready yet, I remember thinking, yeah, baby’s first steak, and smiling at the future memory.

“Only, Ida, I didn’t hear her. I was sleeping off the cheap whiskey the steak guy bought me and I didn’t wake. The only time in her life your mother actually needed me, actually called out for me, and I didn’t hear her.”

I was touched that my father had come to me and not Julia. Touched that he saw me stable enough to take this, digest
it, and still love him; touched he was still able to laugh about the hat and the steak; touched by how clearly I was a combination of the both of them; touched by being a part of a real live, honest-to-goodness family made of bloodlines and shared genetics who did not up and go whenever they felt like it except when death gave them no choice. When I went to respond, though, my father stopped me.

“Dear heart,” he gasped, “I shouldn’t … I shouldn’t have talked like that so long. Gets my blood pressure high and my heart sad. Tired, now. I’ve got to get off the phone, okay?”

He sounded panicked. I wanted to tell him I loved him and ask where Julia was, whether he was all right, but he was already gone. I almost called back several times that night, but part of the deal between us was that mostly we pretended the other was fine—it helped us believe it to be true about ourselves.

I was replaying this conversation for perhaps the twenty-second time that day when Jackson arrived. He was dressed far too well in clothing I’d never seen before, and it pained me to think of him in that dressing room across the country, turning his cheek under the flattering lights, strolling out to show Shannon the precision of the wool slacks and the softness of the sweater. We locked eyes and I was the first to break and turn, but he crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me, and I let him. I remained in the pocket between his shoulder and chest too long, taking pleasure in the fact that his scent had not changed.

There were still three hours before the Ceremony of Life Julia had planned. Jackson suggested a walk and I obliged, seeing as Julia’s buzz was pretty thoroughly terrifying and evidence of my father was everywhere. We walked past the park where we had smoked pot for the first time together, in the rain under the shelter of a slide long gone and replaced with one of bright plastics; cut through the playground and kicked the sand in defiance. It was bright and ninety degrees and the moments rippled into the next unnaturally. Sensing my discomfort, Jackson pulled out a pair of sunglasses and placed them on my face, and under their costume my eyes became oceans. We didn’t speak as we crossed by the picnic tables, although Jackson did stoop to see whether the words he’d engraved with his knife remained on the underside of one of them, and though he didn’t tell me what he was looking for I knew what it meant when he nodded with satisfaction.

Like always, we were headed for the river. It smelled especially strong in the heat, and we walked the lengths of the docks sneering at the tourists, who were out on the decks of their yachts on chairs of stretched pale pink linen and cherrywood. My father had always joked about buying a shitty boat to park next to theirs, naming it
Privilege
and barbecuing discount chicken wings and publicly drinking the cheapest beer available all day long and being just unyieldingly friendly to all of them.

Instead of talking about my father, though, Jackson and I talked about him. About how he started having sex with other people and not coming home to Shannon and telling
her the sleepwalking had started again and he didn’t know where he’d been those times she woke up to find him gone. About how she’d been unbelievably forgiving and sympathetic and offered to give up sleep to watch over him or maybe find them a house in the country and invest in very complicated locks. About how she had listened and nodded while he talked about me and asked questions and tried to believe his reflections on our disintegration were healthy, even integral. About how when he started pushing it and even going so far as to steal Shannon’s car in the middle of the night and fuck this bartender with a long black braid in the backseat and purposefully come all over the upholstery and feign complete wonderment, Shannon just, well, took it, and started buying literature about sleep disorders and highlighting the texts in neat, cheerfully colored lines and joining online discussion groups. About how finally he slept with one of her best friends, a blonde with decent breasts but a slight limp from some growth disorder or another, and while following this instance he offered no apologies or excuses or displacement of blame, Shannon even tried for a little while to convince herself and him that he had slept through it. And so when he got the news about William, he said, that seemed like a pretty good reason to pack up and return to the familiar part of the country.

Ida, he said, upon waking from his story, I miss you. And I couldn’t say anything, because he’d offered the words I’d needed for so long, only now they seemed hollow and extra, now they floated in front of us with neither a home nor a future.

W
hen I had implied I was maybe too weak to plan the whole thing, Julia offered wholeheartedly to undertake the task, and I agreed. She consulted me, of course—which kind of flowers, how did I feel about having the ceremony on a boat, was there anything else I wanted to include—and I replied in short answers, stressing only that I wanted all the guests dressed formally, as if for a grand party. She made a little noise with her throat and began to point out something or other but gave up, and I told her, for the first time, that I loved her. She released a warble
coo
and emphasized that she loved me as well, and I thought of her decades ago framed by the sunlight in their kitchen with the phone cord wrapped around and around her fingers, her morning hair still gnarled in the back where she’d slept on it and her wrapping her robe tighter and tighter around herself and rejoicing in new and tiny folds of warmth. About how she had run away to Mexico, once James and Jackson were grown, bought a surplus
of bright-colored dresses and went dancing, realized that was all she had needed, really, and come back to Madrone Street and moved in with my father.

Julia must have read somewhere about the flowers and the baguettes; it was too bizarre an idea (especially given the context) on its own. She asked James and Jackson to poke the holes with a large serrated knife and invited me to put the bouquets inside them. The wind from the bay bit the back of my neck and I shrugged and trusted her, though in truth the whole loaves of sourdough bread made my mouth water and I wanted to fill myself with them instead of their sliced counterpart on the slightly swaying snack table. It was supposed to be the opening event, us his official and unofficial children placing the bread in the water. But the flowers didn’t stay upright, and the waves beneath tugged at the stems and deconstructed the bouquetlike quality above, and everyone in attendance stopped watching and thumbed the memorial pamphlet once again or excused themselves to the small bathroom beneath the deck, where the smells of cleaning products and years of brine played equal parts and the toilet roared when it flushed.

Here my memory fails me. I know I was handed the ashes and I know I looked to James and Jackson and they both nodded encouragingly. I know I strangely felt the need for proper etiquette and looked out at everyone and thanked them for coming. I know I expected something much finer and winced at the coarseness and the clumps of what must have been bone; I know that James and Jackson
each put a hand on my shoulder blade for each parent I was now without; I know that on the drive home I insisted we stop for the authentic saltwater taffy that tourists pay top dollar for and Julia falsified enthusiasm; I know I stuffed my face with the ocean until I was so thirsty I couldn’t imagine a time I hadn’t been and remembered something my father used to say with a mirthful twist of his lips when a lightbulb when out: “It is until it isn’t.”

I asked to sleep in his room. Julia kept insisting that if I even slightly did not feel up to going through my father’s things that she would of course keep them safe. It was unspoken, but Julia wanted to go on fingering his neatly hung sweaters and alphabetized books, imagining the names of people in boxes of photographs she’d never seen before, and so when I said that yes, I might like to wait, she beamed and squeezed my shoulder. And so I resolved to leave all the proof for future perusal, mine the memories later. I found myself more interested in the utilitarian or recent objects he’d left behind, anyway: the razor that still held his hair, the keys he had turned in the sticky lock not four days ago, the Post-it he had placed on his bedroom mirror that read, inexplicably:
AND WHERE
WERE
THE ALLIGATORS
?! a private joke with himself I would never understand.

I sat on his carefully made bed, feeling the firmness my father had slept on, looked at the ceiling he’d memorized with years of insomnia. On his bedside table was his wallet, the same he’d used for years. I found his most recent video store receipt, noted how well-worn his library card,
removed the store of photos from their bulging plastic envelopes. My mother covered in yellow paint in our kitchen, grinning and holding the roller as if it was a trophy; Jackson and me as toddlers naked in a bathtub with bubble beards; his mother and father in 1940s church attire; James and his Godzilla in our front yard, looking ominous and not interested in the camera; every school photograph I’d ever taken. Hidden away in the folds were even more pictures: friends dead for decades, a face I recognized as a Frenchwoman he’d had a torturous affair with by the name on the back. I looked at every business card and unfolded every piece of paper. One, a scrap of a legal pad that I took at first for another private reference or corner of his brain, featured a bullet list with accompanying value symbols, names, and email addresses, and I understood quickly that these were the identities of the people who’d bid on Jackson’s work. I returned everything else hastily and entered the living room, where James was sleeping with Jackson on the small futon. I nearly woke them to share my discovery, but instead I got in between their bodies and waited, stiffly, to understand what had changed with the departure of my father. As if feeling my warmth through their dreams, they made small adjustments, turned to me in increments that were small until they weren’t—
it isn’t until it is
—until both had draped their limbs around mine so intricately that I couldn’t move if I tried and I fought off sleep vehemently, determined to appreciate what they gave me without my even asking.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must first give thanks to the memory of my father, a writer who always encouraged me to find the right words. I wish to also acknowledge professors Logan Esdale and James Blaylock of Chapman University, for giving light and time to the tiniest saplings of this; my mother, for carrying laughter and wisdom in her purse, and Ben Marsh, for sharing the weight; James Pittmann, for gifting me an escape and an anonymous space in which to write; the community of Fayetteville, Arkansas, for receiving me with such kindness; Brent Hoff, for helping these characters find their way home; my agent, Victoria Marini, for finding me and fighting for me; Jerry Delacruz, champion of the late-night heart-to-heart; my editor, Corinna Barsan, for breathing grace onto these pages; Isaac Fitzgerald, an unyielding cheerleader from the first; Olivia Harrison, a reliable source of laughter and love since preschool; Lucius Bono, who came to the rescue more times than I can count and composed missives that fed me; Jessica Brownell, for
adopting me and holding my hand; Gabriel Magaña, the kindest of cowboys; my sister, Vanessa Penn, whose dance upon my life is immeasurable; the town of Petaluma, a place impossible to forget; and the city of San Francisco, which generously lends itself to stories.