We headed back to the Econoline and I cleaned up the baby’s breath from the driver’s side. I had plucked it out at the last minute – why clutter up the magnificent roses. Flackette was a big fan of the gypsophila, but I was more in line with the English Garden school. It was indeed a “gyp,” a filler, watering down the moonshine. I palm-dozed the delicate, already starting to dry, flowers into the center of the seat - on top of the two brown cowhide oranges.
We drove back from Brookline, most of the way, in silence. It was an okay silence. Not the silence of I-wish-somebody-would-say-something silence. Nietzsche, I think, said something about a good wife was somebody you could talk to after the erotic dried up. I’ll take a wife you can sit in silence with, without undue tension. Tone was a good wife.
The road was twisty-turny for the first part of the ride back and we passed a sign: GET YOUR FIREWOOD EARLY THIS YEAR. Entrepreneurs. Who’s gonna buy firewood on such a blistering day. I glanced over at Tone. He was already glancing over at me. But we didn’t say anything. Discipline is good. I was thinking about the accompanying radio spot, “All you Abrahams out there, heading to the hills with your little or not-so-little Isaacs. Get your firewood now.” Tone was thinking, “We’ve got all the firewood we need right at the house. Momma loves the smell of a piney fire.” I didn’t really know this, of course, but don’t you ever imagine what your friends are thinking? How else you gonna get to know them? They’re not telling you everything - there’s a whole unmeltable iceberg beneath that placid surface. Yeah. It was a hot day.
And then the next sign. KNIVES SHARPENED. I kid you not. This time, the Tonester glanced over and raised his eyebrows. It was a good silence. We were both on the look-out for the next sign. I was hoping for DODGE RAM FOR SALE. Not really sure what three-of-a-kind Tone was hoping to draw. I was sure he was playing, though.
I started thinking about the explosion of roses on Mr. J. And his voice, not unlike Tiny Tim’s I supposed, “God bless you, sir!” I think Tone and I both were glad it was ambiguous, that it could have been intended for either one of us. But knowing Mr.J, emerging from his years of silence, it was probably meant for the entire hallway. “Bless us, every one.” And his gorgeous white shirt red-smooched with 48 kisses from a daughter somewhere in Paris. Probably asleep right about now, and the Eiffel Tower watching over her like a nanny dressed in grey. I took a drink from the drink from the 7-Eleven. There was just a touch of ice left and a faint taste of the soda remained.
----
I drew FRESH EGGS. Going for a new meld.
I remember my Daddy telling me about his snow-white German shepherd. He killed a neighbor's chicken. There was no denying it - there were white feathers all over the backyard like there had been a wild pillow fight and the pink-red snout of the dog. And the neighbor shot my daddy’s dog. The wound blooming red in the white fur like cherry syrup in a snow cone. The dog crawled under the front porch to die. Daddy was twelve years old. Everything happens when you’re twelve, or thereabouts. It’s all just figuring out the rhyme scheme from there. And the machinery of all this new body hair that you really didn't need to comb.
He wouldn’t drag him out, so he crawled way back under the porch himself, so he could push the precious body out before him. It was just more - what was the word - reverent that way.
“I took off my undershirt before I crawled back. We kept our coal under there, and that would’ve been the end of that shirt.” His voice was shaky and soft.
We drove back from Brookline, most of the way, in silence. It was an okay silence. Not the silence of I-wish-somebody-would-say-something silence. Nietzsche, I think, said something about a good wife was somebody you could talk to after the erotic dried up. I’ll take a wife you can sit in silence with, without undue tension. Tone was a good wife.
The road was twisty-turny for the first part of the ride back and we passed a sign: GET YOUR FIREWOOD EARLY THIS YEAR. Entrepreneurs. Who’s gonna buy firewood on such a blistering day. I glanced over at Tone. He was already glancing over at me. But we didn’t say anything. Discipline is good. I was thinking about the accompanying radio spot, “All you Abrahams out there, heading to the hills with your little or not-so-little Isaacs. Get your firewood now.” Tone was thinking, “We’ve got all the firewood we need right at the house. Momma loves the smell of a piney fire.” I didn’t really know this, of course, but don’t you ever imagine what your friends are thinking? How else you gonna get to know them? They’re not telling you everything - there’s a whole unmeltable iceberg beneath that placid surface. Yeah. It was a hot day.
And then the next sign. KNIVES SHARPENED. I kid you not. This time, the Tonester glanced over and raised his eyebrows. It was a good silence. We were both on the look-out for the next sign. I was hoping for DODGE RAM FOR SALE. Not really sure what three-of-a-kind Tone was hoping to draw. I was sure he was playing, though.
I started thinking about the explosion of roses on Mr. J. And his voice, not unlike Tiny Tim’s I supposed, “God bless you, sir!” I think Tone and I both were glad it was ambiguous, that it could have been intended for either one of us. But knowing Mr.J, emerging from his years of silence, it was probably meant for the entire hallway. “Bless us, every one.” And his gorgeous white shirt red-smooched with 48 kisses from a daughter somewhere in Paris. Probably asleep right about now, and the Eiffel Tower watching over her like a nanny dressed in grey. I took a drink from the drink from the 7-Eleven. There was just a touch of ice left and a faint taste of the soda remained.
----
I drew FRESH EGGS. Going for a new meld.
I remember my Daddy telling me about his snow-white German shepherd. He killed a neighbor's chicken. There was no denying it - there were white feathers all over the backyard like there had been a wild pillow fight and the pink-red snout of the dog. And the neighbor shot my daddy’s dog. The wound blooming red in the white fur like cherry syrup in a snow cone. The dog crawled under the front porch to die. Daddy was twelve years old. Everything happens when you’re twelve, or thereabouts. It’s all just figuring out the rhyme scheme from there. And the machinery of all this new body hair that you really didn't need to comb.
He wouldn’t drag him out, so he crawled way back under the porch himself, so he could push the precious body out before him. It was just more - what was the word - reverent that way.
“I took off my undershirt before I crawled back. We kept our coal under there, and that would’ve been the end of that shirt.” His voice was shaky and soft.
“Good thing it was all downhill. I drug him on an old sheet my momma used to tear strips from to tuck into the door cracks in the winter. About half of it was left, but she wouldn’t miss it.” He buried him at the bottom-most slope of the yard beyond his momma’s purple irises. The slope that eventually extended on into other yards and across the road paralleling the river - down to the muddy Saluda. “People got baptized in that river. Further downstream from the mill. They came out dirtier than they went in. At least on the outside.”
And then he just stopped talking. And the portcullis came down in his eyes. As an old man, he had remembered that cold summer day out of all the days. It was, clearly, from his point of view, the defining moment of his entire life. For some people, that’s something done in front of other people: on a stage, a playing field, an operating room. For him, it was this unobserved moment. Lonesome. Devotion. Duty. No recourse. Keep the shirt clean. I was surprised he shared it, tell you the truth. I usually call Father Father. But in this memory, he got to be Daddy.
So, while I was headed down these rabbit paths, I had Tone - as first navigator - thinking about oranges, and infidelity, and rage, and repercussions, and concussions (faked ones anyway), and ruling the world, and M.C. is only partly (so harmlessly) mad, and old men with jungles of red roses exploding on their chests. He got to think about that one, too. We needed some intersection, I figured, when we came out of the tunnel of love.
It was a safe silence. Sort of like Job and his visitors, early on. For seven days they sat with him. Then they blew it. The voices of the men I knew, including me - the voices that I remember. Are voices of longing. Women. The ones that adhere. Are voices of completeness. I don’t need you. I kept wondering when I’d be able to come up with a grand unified field theory of electrons and men and women. And not just these random scattered thoughts triggered by stupid roadside signs. Where was the bouquet of clarity, that gathered up the scattered stems, that was pretty to look at all the way round, 360 degrees of thirst-slaking goodness.
Maybe that was why we strew the bridal aisle with rose petals. It’s not celebration. It’s warning. This is what your life will be like: strewn, dispersed, exiled. And if you didn’t get it the first time (inside the ceremony), we’ll hit you with the rice after it’s all over. And the rice isn’t even pretty and it has no scent at all. Just impotent seed.
And then your kid sister snuck back into the sanctuary after it was all over and scooped up some of the petals and saved them in a baggy. And they ended up molding because there was too much moisture. Had to throw them away. You gotta have desert conditions for the best sake-keeping.
---
“It’s not always this magical, is it?” Tone finally broke the silence. It wasn’t that he was less disciplined than me for sure. More courageous probably. Or, more generous. Maybe he saw the tears sneaking down my face and was giving me cover. Nice thought, anyway. I was ready to claim perspiration, just in case.
“Nope.” I knew that he was talking about Mr. J. “Not always this magical, for sure.” I turned on the radio for more cover. And slurped on the last of the melted ice. “Sometimes it’s pretty awful.”
“What was your worst delivery ever?” We were coming out of the clouds now.
“Not sure it was the worst, but I’ll tell you about the first time I remember taking flowers to a stranger.”
Tone reached up and changed the station. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I delivered my first flowers to a local radio announcer. I was 16, I think.”
“In love?”
“Yep. Her radio persona – thought it was her real name at the time – was Stormy. The station had a whole flock of plays off of this. The Weather Girl. Stormy Weather. The JazzWinder.” Pronounced with a long i. “They had an artsy streak, for a rock station in a podunk town. Took me a long time to figure that one out.”
“The Hindu Jasvinder? Thunderbolt?” I’m taking Tone with me the next time I’m on Jeopardy or facing a dissertation committee.
“Great voice. A mix of Lauren Bacall and Billie Holiday and an imagined Sappho as a chaser. I listened to her for years and finally plucked up the courage to make my move.”
“What kind of flowers?” He actually sounded interested. A good trait to nurture for sure. Note to self.
“So, I picked three daffodils from my mother’s daffodil patch – there were a total of four. So one was left. Didn’t want to clear them totally out.”
Tone looked over. He was thinking: Your mom was gone by then, right? But he didn’t say it.
“Yeah, my mother had been gone about 3 or 4 years then. But the flowers kept coming up every spring. Didn’t have to tend them at all. Just had to deal with the earth mother neighbors and well-wishers and do-gooder visitors who would condole with me by saying something like, ‘There’s the spirit of your lovely mother.’ I had these great fantasies about strangling them - at least one of them - and mailing various pieces of their peasant dress around to the others as a warning.”
“That’s cold, man.”
“I guess. Maybe not cold enough. So I walked, had no car, to the bus station, rode across town, hopped off, and just headed toward the radio tower while she was ON THE AIR. It was a cold day. Some time in the early spring I remember.”
“Did a buddy go along?”
“Nope. No ride-along or witness on that one. Good thing, too. I left the pathetic 3-flower bouquet with a goofy note (‘An Admirer’ or something along those lines) with the receptionist. She told me I could exit through the back and take a peek into the sound room through the glass window, to my left I think it was.”
“So Stormy was actually broadcasting at the time?”
“Yep. Wasn’t I a regular Don Juan? Meet the maid where she works - milking the cows, or walking with the sheep in the meadow.”
“Yeah, you’re a poet.” The tone wasn’t complimentary.
“So the receptionist didn’t even look up when she told me what to do. Apparently this is where the grade school kids traipsed through to see radio-in-action. So, I traipsed toward the back of the very low ceilinged building toward the glowing red-on-white EXIT sign to catch a glimpse. I left the flowers and the card on the counter and headed down the corridor. The woman still didn’t look up.”
“That’s focus, baby. Or, total boredom.”
“Maybe the same thing. So there was the glass. On my left. Like an aquarium I thought. No way she knows I’m the daffodil stalker yet. But I don’t dare stop. Drive-by peek. She will be the one with the earphones, talking into a microphone. I look and…
“And?”
“At the time, I really didn’t have anything jaded or sarcastic to say.”
“So what did you see? Did she see you? Did you wave? Salute? What?”
“Let’s just say this, Tone. Sometimes your imagination is just way better than the real thing.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Well, here’s the deal. She called herself Stormy because she looked like a well-weathered sailor. The-Middle-Aged Woman and the Sea.”
Tone was a gentleman, so he was trying - very gallantly - not to laugh. But Tone almost bust a gut. And his eyes were watering now.
I was devastated, confused, and benumbed. No movie star. No singer. No Greek poet. She did have a great voice, though. And I could still hear it, didn’t even have to hold a seashell up to my ear.
And then he just stopped talking. And the portcullis came down in his eyes. As an old man, he had remembered that cold summer day out of all the days. It was, clearly, from his point of view, the defining moment of his entire life. For some people, that’s something done in front of other people: on a stage, a playing field, an operating room. For him, it was this unobserved moment. Lonesome. Devotion. Duty. No recourse. Keep the shirt clean. I was surprised he shared it, tell you the truth. I usually call Father Father. But in this memory, he got to be Daddy.
So, while I was headed down these rabbit paths, I had Tone - as first navigator - thinking about oranges, and infidelity, and rage, and repercussions, and concussions (faked ones anyway), and ruling the world, and M.C. is only partly (so harmlessly) mad, and old men with jungles of red roses exploding on their chests. He got to think about that one, too. We needed some intersection, I figured, when we came out of the tunnel of love.
It was a safe silence. Sort of like Job and his visitors, early on. For seven days they sat with him. Then they blew it. The voices of the men I knew, including me - the voices that I remember. Are voices of longing. Women. The ones that adhere. Are voices of completeness. I don’t need you. I kept wondering when I’d be able to come up with a grand unified field theory of electrons and men and women. And not just these random scattered thoughts triggered by stupid roadside signs. Where was the bouquet of clarity, that gathered up the scattered stems, that was pretty to look at all the way round, 360 degrees of thirst-slaking goodness.
Maybe that was why we strew the bridal aisle with rose petals. It’s not celebration. It’s warning. This is what your life will be like: strewn, dispersed, exiled. And if you didn’t get it the first time (inside the ceremony), we’ll hit you with the rice after it’s all over. And the rice isn’t even pretty and it has no scent at all. Just impotent seed.
And then your kid sister snuck back into the sanctuary after it was all over and scooped up some of the petals and saved them in a baggy. And they ended up molding because there was too much moisture. Had to throw them away. You gotta have desert conditions for the best sake-keeping.
---
“It’s not always this magical, is it?” Tone finally broke the silence. It wasn’t that he was less disciplined than me for sure. More courageous probably. Or, more generous. Maybe he saw the tears sneaking down my face and was giving me cover. Nice thought, anyway. I was ready to claim perspiration, just in case.
“Nope.” I knew that he was talking about Mr. J. “Not always this magical, for sure.” I turned on the radio for more cover. And slurped on the last of the melted ice. “Sometimes it’s pretty awful.”
“What was your worst delivery ever?” We were coming out of the clouds now.
“Not sure it was the worst, but I’ll tell you about the first time I remember taking flowers to a stranger.”
Tone reached up and changed the station. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I delivered my first flowers to a local radio announcer. I was 16, I think.”
“In love?”
“Yep. Her radio persona – thought it was her real name at the time – was Stormy. The station had a whole flock of plays off of this. The Weather Girl. Stormy Weather. The JazzWinder.” Pronounced with a long i. “They had an artsy streak, for a rock station in a podunk town. Took me a long time to figure that one out.”
“The Hindu Jasvinder? Thunderbolt?” I’m taking Tone with me the next time I’m on Jeopardy or facing a dissertation committee.
“Great voice. A mix of Lauren Bacall and Billie Holiday and an imagined Sappho as a chaser. I listened to her for years and finally plucked up the courage to make my move.”
“What kind of flowers?” He actually sounded interested. A good trait to nurture for sure. Note to self.
“So, I picked three daffodils from my mother’s daffodil patch – there were a total of four. So one was left. Didn’t want to clear them totally out.”
Tone looked over. He was thinking: Your mom was gone by then, right? But he didn’t say it.
“Yeah, my mother had been gone about 3 or 4 years then. But the flowers kept coming up every spring. Didn’t have to tend them at all. Just had to deal with the earth mother neighbors and well-wishers and do-gooder visitors who would condole with me by saying something like, ‘There’s the spirit of your lovely mother.’ I had these great fantasies about strangling them - at least one of them - and mailing various pieces of their peasant dress around to the others as a warning.”
“That’s cold, man.”
“I guess. Maybe not cold enough. So I walked, had no car, to the bus station, rode across town, hopped off, and just headed toward the radio tower while she was ON THE AIR. It was a cold day. Some time in the early spring I remember.”
“Did a buddy go along?”
“Nope. No ride-along or witness on that one. Good thing, too. I left the pathetic 3-flower bouquet with a goofy note (‘An Admirer’ or something along those lines) with the receptionist. She told me I could exit through the back and take a peek into the sound room through the glass window, to my left I think it was.”
“So Stormy was actually broadcasting at the time?”
“Yep. Wasn’t I a regular Don Juan? Meet the maid where she works - milking the cows, or walking with the sheep in the meadow.”
“Yeah, you’re a poet.” The tone wasn’t complimentary.
“So the receptionist didn’t even look up when she told me what to do. Apparently this is where the grade school kids traipsed through to see radio-in-action. So, I traipsed toward the back of the very low ceilinged building toward the glowing red-on-white EXIT sign to catch a glimpse. I left the flowers and the card on the counter and headed down the corridor. The woman still didn’t look up.”
“That’s focus, baby. Or, total boredom.”
“Maybe the same thing. So there was the glass. On my left. Like an aquarium I thought. No way she knows I’m the daffodil stalker yet. But I don’t dare stop. Drive-by peek. She will be the one with the earphones, talking into a microphone. I look and…
“And?”
“At the time, I really didn’t have anything jaded or sarcastic to say.”
“So what did you see? Did she see you? Did you wave? Salute? What?”
“Let’s just say this, Tone. Sometimes your imagination is just way better than the real thing.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Well, here’s the deal. She called herself Stormy because she looked like a well-weathered sailor. The-Middle-Aged Woman and the Sea.”
Tone was a gentleman, so he was trying - very gallantly - not to laugh. But Tone almost bust a gut. And his eyes were watering now.
I was devastated, confused, and benumbed. No movie star. No singer. No Greek poet. She did have a great voice, though. And I could still hear it, didn’t even have to hold a seashell up to my ear.
-----
We finally got back into town and I pulled into the Burger Chef.
“You’re not dragging me into Burger Chef again, are you? This is almost child abuse.”
“Let’s just see if Clara is working.”
“You know her usual schedule by heart anyway.”
Tone was right. I did know it by heart. Truth be told, she sounded like my mother. Or, I imagined she did. Or what I remembered of Molly. Or some intricate mixture of both. How pathetic is that? The speaker would crackle on, and she’d ask, “What’ll it be, love? The regular?” Sometimes I would just park opposite the ordering sign just to hear her voice over the two-way intercom thingy. Full disclosure.
“Let’s just pull over a minute before heading back to the shop.”
Tone knew what I was up to. I rolled down the window. And his. The day was getting cool enough, just barely, that I could get away with it. If the law thing didn’t pan out, he’d be a great crisis counselor.
“Good thing I don’t mind the heat,” said Tone. Not sure if he was being sarcastic, or just gently signaling he knew what’s up. Either way.
Flack had a voice addiction, too, thank goodness. He was always getting seduced by this wholesaler in Seattle. He’d stay after closing because of the time difference so he could talk in private. After the order would come in about a week later, he would freak out when he got the invoice: “Who ordered all this stuff!” But he couldn’t help it – the Flackette whose dad had bankrolled the whole operation in the first place, his better third he calls her (since his geometrical and proportional sense is all out of whack), wasn’t exactly the warmest fish in the ocean. So, the pathetic Flack would talk for hours on the order line, 800 number, buying up goo-gaws and going into debt, so he could hear that voice he had fallen in love with. Though I despised him, I felt a little sorry for him at the same time. We were comrades in arms. Each at our forward listening posts, trying to dial out the static.
It’s calling misery loving company.
---
“Shouldn’t we be getting back?”
“Sure. Let’s go.” I cranked the van and we headed for the shop. It was moment-of-silence time again, apparently. And I’m off chasing rabbits again. Rabbits around churchyards. Tone deaf little bunnies around scores of little churchyards.
For about 2 years, starting when I was about 10, we went to every church within striking distance. That meant 20 miles. Trying to find a place. Father sitting in the swing or in the rocking chair. Always listening to a radio. Safe at home. Me and Momma braving the elements: Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Church of God, you name it. Almost always late. Always the “visitor.” Sunday morning. Sunday nights. Wednesday nights. This desperate attempt to find a home. On the night services we’d lurk outside the door until the first hymn started – people usually stood up for that one apparently – and we’d slip in.
The lady with the kid. Was she married? Unmarried? Divorced? Widowed? Hester Prynne? Tess of the d’Urbervilles. They were way too ignorant to be thinking the last two, I thought years later. She knew all the hymns. I’d fumble around trying to find the hymnal. Where was it? Under my pew? Under the pew in front of me? In the rack? Was the hymn printed in a bulletin? We didn’t get a bulletin. But while I was dutifully looking for music, Momma was unfazed. Her alto voice clear and strong. Never needing the words.
Most places, the folks in the pews in front of us would begin to sneak a peek back at us. Not that she was singing too loud. Or out of tune. It was they just couldn’t deal with the harmony. And their own singing was breaking up. It was pretty awful sometimes. But by this time in her lonesome quest Momma was pretty calloused by the gossip and the looks, so she just kept singing. In perfect tune, rhythm, and volume. It was a brave and indicting performance, week after week after week. For me, I was proud and embarrassed at the same time. We’d slip out at the end, avoiding the meet and greet at the door, and she’d begin selecting another church for the next week’s heartache.
After I turned 13, I never set foot inside a church again. Except to get married. And to deliver flowers for the next lovely couple or the next grieving family. And sometimes both at the same time.
We finally got back to the shop. Cleaned out the back of the van and went in. I tossed the baby’s breath in the trash can out back before heading in. Flack was in his office and nobody was out front. The phone rang.
I picked it up. “Flack’s Flowers.”
“We’re trying to reach Antony.” What was that accent?
“Pardon me?”
“Antony. Is this Michael?” Sounded like “Mish isle.” I was slow, I admit it. Didn’t everybody call Tone Tone? It was my universe after all.
“O, you mean Tone.” What a jerk.
“We’ve heard many things about you.” I’m a jerk and this voice is being gracious. And royally we. And we're totally out of cadence because of me.
“I’ll put him right on.” I hand the phone to Tone and disappear into the back of the store until he finished up.
“So who was that? Mother? Aunt? Sister?”
“Theresa.”
“Mother Theresa?”
“Funny.” Tone delays like the great actor he is. He could tell I was (what is the word) intrigued, interested, smitten even. And he was enjoying every second of it. Tone says, “Sister Theresa,” and I am hopeful of a unified theory, a gathering of scattered things, a boat back from Elba.
And Tone flashes the Tone smile at my silly adolescent grin.
The imagery about the dog was hauntingly beautiful and sad all at the same time...
ReplyDeleteDear L.L.
DeleteThanks for dropping by again. Yes, there's some major heartache in this section. Hope all is well on your end.
Peace,
B.R.