by Kelly Fordon
“I thought you said you were asleep.”
“I was afraid when I couldn’t wake up. It felt like the really bad kind of morning when you just can’t drag yourself out of bed. And then I realized I couldn’t move.”
“Huh.” Corinne didn’t know when she had ever been more furious. “You’d think after all those downward dogs . . . Hell, I’m the smoker. I’m the one who can’t hold a plank for five seconds. I’m the one who should have dropped dead. Not you, Iron Man.”
Oona nodded again. “You’re joking,” she said, gravely. “You do that.”
“We do that,” Corinne said, jabbing her finger at Oona and then at herself. “We do that! Or we did, anyway.”
Oona nodded again. “I think I should go now,” she said.
“Bye-bye.” Corinne waggled her fingers. “See you on the flip side.”
When Corinne returned to her chair, Dan suggested they all take a couple of minutes to meditate. The other participants closed their eyes, possibly trying to block out the light.
“Let’s hold hands,” Dan said.
“You know what?” Corinne said. “I need some air.”
When Corinne reached the dock, she lit a cigarette and stared out at the water. The shorebirds hadn’t budged.
“You’re going to have to move on at some point!” she yelled. A couple of the smaller birds flapped their wings at the noise, but in the end, they remained nonplussed.
It had all been so ludicrous, but strangely, she did feel a bit better. Sitting across from Oona, the shaman, with that crazy, empty look on her face, it had occurred to Corinne that she and Ethan had been like two shorebirds in a long line of shorebirds—on the surface it would have been impossible for Oona or anyone else to pick out a characteristic that set them apart. But Corinne knew all the identifying features, behaviors, sounds. Their thing—whatever they’d had—was worth a whole class. It was worth a study. She took a few more drags and then crushed out her cigarette.
She felt energized. She would go back inside and ask for her turn doing the Constellation Work. She would place every single one of the therapists on the stage. One would be Ethan peering out the window, and one would be Ethan standing like a monument in the middle of the room, and one would be Ethan toppling the other dominoes, and one would be the Ethan who was just sitting on the couch laughing along with her.
She imagined circling the room pointing to Bryce and Gretchen and Estelle and Ruby:
You be Ethan and you be Ethan and you be Ethan.
Jungle Life
When my father started forgetting things—the name of his favorite restaurant, whether he’d paid the gas bill, how he’d ended up in Victoria’s Secret way out at the Oakland Park Mall—we took him to Dr. Gray, who gave us that familiar devastating diagnosis. Before we left his office, he caught hold of my arm. “I always tell the kids this: Think of his mind as a library on fire. Take advantage of the time you have left.”
He suggested I interview my father and record it.
I was twenty-one, my father sixty-six. He hadn’t married until he was forty-three, long after his brother and most of his friends. Given my age and the plight of the world at the time—it was the height of the Gulf War, and my friends and I spent every night huddled around the TV—I latched on to his World War II stories from the Pacific. I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t pay much attention to the rest. Years later, I did go back and review the tapes for subjects that were becoming pertinent to my own life: marriage, kids, business concerns. But at the time, like most guys my age, the battle tales fascinated me.
We always took a back booth at the Cozy Diner during our recording sessions, and now I’m sorry. The background noise—music, clattering plates, Maureen the waitress’s raucous laughter—made some parts of the recording unintelligible. My other regret is that I didn’t use video.
Looking at my white-haired father hunkered over the table in his Cleveland Indians baseball cap and windbreaker, it was hard to fathom that he had been in New Guinea when he was my age, living in the jungle, picking off body lice, and trying to keep his feet from molding.
For our first four recording sessions that was all I got out of him: jungle life sucked.
“We all had this foot fungus, gosh did it ever itch. If you left your shoes on the floor of your tent, by morning they were covered in mold. And then there were leeches. You’d come back to camp and they’d just be stuck to you like huge jelly pods. We didn’t have toothpaste; my gums were so sore that drinking water was painful. One time I used this leaf for toilet paper and my rear end oozed for weeks.”
The fifth time, when he started up on bugs and culinary anomalies, I stopped him.
“But did you ever actually do anything?” I said. “Were you ever in combat?”
“Sure, sure,” he said and took a sip of his coffee.
Just then, Maureen appeared with the #1: two scrambled eggs, rye toast, and hash browns for one dollar and ninety-nine cents.
“Who ordered this?” he said.
Maureen glanced at me, her penciled brows arched. We’d been ordering the exact same thing every Saturday for as long as I could remember.
“You did,” I said.
“Oh.”
He took his fork and poked at the eggs. Then he picked up the toast and turned it over, examining both sides. He never told me that the meal was as new to him as the stories in that morning’s edition of the Saline Gazette, but it was clear from the look on his face. Now, I realize how terrifying that must have been for him.
“So, the combat?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“You know, Dad, I’d like to hear about that. I’d be interested in that.”
“Well,” he said, “I spent the fall of 1944 in the jungles of New Guinea.”
“We got that far.”
“We were fighting the Japanese, and when I landed in New Guinea, the fighting had been going on for quite a while. In fact, my understanding was that for all intents and purposes we had already won. Nevertheless, every so often, they’d send two or three of us out into the jungle on scouting missions.
“So, one day, I was sent in with a guy named Stanton. I hardly knew him. All I remember is he used to crack us all up lighting his farts on fire. Anyway, we were headed up the Kokoda Trail. We walked for about an hour slashing our way through this thick, coarse undergrowth with our machetes. The grass was seven feet high in places, and that boggy ground just sucked you down. It smelled horrible. There were times the climb was so steep I had to hold onto roots and pull myself up the path. When we finally broke through to a clearing, we were covered in leeches.”
“You’ve told me about the leeches,” I interrupted. I didn’t want him sidetracked again.
“I still remember how beautiful it was there,” my dad continued, “just a wide-open field of ferns. Electric green. And the butterflies! Every color under the sun. It was so peaceful. I remember thinking, ‘I could stay here forever.’ The sunlight was pushing through the canopy like fingers.
“Anyway, we picked off the leeches. Then we sat down to rest against two trees. Stanton was sitting across from me. We were both dozing, and the next thing I knew there was this strange noise. A high-pitched squeal like a cat held upside down by its tail. I looked over at Stanton. Turned out he was making the noise. He was staring straight ahead. Frozen. A large knife protruding from the trunk about an inch above his head. Looking across the clearing, I saw nine or ten tribesmen staring at him. Spears and knives pointed right at him. I didn’t think. I just reacted. I got up, grabbed my machete and ran. Didn’t have a clue what he was doing, just kept running, couldn’t stop. They didn’t come after us. There was no noise behind me, and before I knew it, I had reached camp. After I finished telling the guys what had happened, there was this thrashing from the bush and out comes Stanton, terrified. He didn’t say a word when he saw everyone, just leaned over and vomited right there on the spot. Afterward, he refused to speak. He just walked past everyone, went into his te
nt, and never came out again. I never saw him again. I suppose they shipped him home at some point.
“But,” he added, “the thing that stuck with people—the thing that still sends a chill up my own spine—is that when Stanton emerged from the jungle, his hair had turned completely white.”
“That isn’t possible,” I said.
“I know it, but it’s true.”
He said he wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.
My recorder suddenly turned off. I asked him to wait a minute.
While I was fiddling with the tape, he coughed and said he was sorry I had to witness his “descent into dementia.” I mumbled something about being sorry he had to go through it. I felt horribly panicky and had trouble meeting his eye. Maureen was pouring Father Andrew’s coffee. A couple of my buddies were devouring pancakes over in the corner. When they saw me looking over at them, they waved. My calf muscles started twitching. I had to hold onto the table to keep from popping up out of my seat.
“You know,” he said, pushing away his uneaten breakfast. “They say that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but I haven’t always found that to be the case. I suppose you’re better off holding on to the way we used to be. When I get really bad, pretend like I’m already gone.”
“Dad!”
“I’m serious. Remember the good times,” he said. “Forget the rest.”
“OK. OK,” I said. “Tell me about the car dealership.”
When he got back from the war, he worked for a Ford dealership, and just before I was born, he bought the owner out. While he talked, I thought up a long string of questions: his years as county commissioner, how he met my mother, winning Saline Man of the Year. Anything to keep him from going morbid on me. Now that I’m older, I’d give anything to do that whole conversation over again.
The next time we sat down, a week later, I said, “OK. Let’s get back to the war. You were telling me about the jungle. Remember? About the time you and Stanton were doing recon.”
“Right,” he said, leaning toward the tape recorder. “He was a great guy. Probably my best buddy. We’d been together since Hawaii. In fact, we’d been together so long we even had this dog back on Maui—a German Shepherd named Scout. We were always going to go back and get him.”
He stopped and gazed out the window. Maureen brought over our plates. This time he didn’t seem confused by the transaction. He talked while he ate, which is why this section of the recording sounds garbled. I transcribed it that night so I wouldn’t forget what he said. How he ate while he was telling this story, I’ll never know.
“We had just crossed this enormous mountain range. We were covered with leeches, and we were starving, and we’d gone from freezing to death at the top to neck deep in swamp on the way back down. We had to follow these steep ridges all the way up, and I remember one time this guy named Ralph Donaldson slipped and then we all slid down, must have been one thousand feet. It took us about eight hours to climb back up. All the while, people are sick and dying of malaria and dysentery. We were the walking dead. The food! They gave us these tins of Australian bully beef that nearly killed us all. By the time we reached the other side, we had lost a lot of steam and a lot of equipment. When we got there, we thought there were maybe fifteen hundred of them, but we found out later there were more than six thousand. And they handled the terrain better. They built these bunkers that we could never see until we were right on top of them. We used to have to crawl around, and when we found one, we’d jam a hand grenade into one of the firing slits.
“One time I went in with Stanton. At that point we thought we were seven or eight miles from the Japs. It turned out we were wrong. Anyway, we were cutting our way through the jungle, and we came to a clearing. Out of nowhere, a shot rings out and catches Stanton in the chest. I looked around, but I couldn’t see anything. Next thing I know, bullets are raining down on me, so I turn and hightail it back to camp. Later that day, I led everyone back in. When we got to the clearing, we simply circumvented it, and that way we were able to ambush them.”
“What about Stanton?”
“Well, we found him in the bunker.”
“He was dead?”
“Oh, yes. I knew he was dead. They hit him square in the chest. That wasn’t the worst part.”
“What could be worse?”
“It’s hard to even say it . . .”
He pushed his scrambled eggs around on his plate.
“They’d eaten him,” he said.
“What?”
“I remember vomiting right there on the spot. I wasn’t the only one either.”
“That’s unbelievable. What did you all do . . . after that?”
“I looked for a letter for his wife, any personal stuff, but there was nothing. They probably burned it all. Then we had to figure out what to do with him, and for a lot of reasons, we couldn’t move him. We were weak from sickness and hunger ourselves, and well, we didn’t want to attract more of them. I said some prayers over him, and when we got back to camp, I wrote to his wife and his parents.”
“That’s a far cry from the story you told me before,” I said.
“I told you this story before?” he said.
Later that spring, my father became incontinent and took to wandering the neighborhood at night searching in the shrubs for some “thing” he could never remember when we found him. My mother and I took him to the Mt. Carmel Nursing Home one hot day in late May. That summer, I helped her clean out the house—not just his bedroom—the whole house. Visiting my father, my mother was candy cane sweet, but at night she tore through the bureaus and closets upending drawers and emptying cupboards, raving about everything from the Channel Four weatherman’s earring to the high price of coffee to the scratchy sheets my father complained about at the Home. Her rage had no parameters.
One night she even called Carnival Cruise Line and lit into them because they sent several pamphlets advertising the cruise my parents had planned on taking when she retired.
By mid-August, we could have been living at the Holiday Inn. There was no sign that we had ever inhabited the house. I joked about putting a packet of soap in the bathroom and sticking a vacancy sign in the window. I couldn’t tease so much as a smile out of her.
All that last summer of my father’s life, I thought about Stanton. Which story was true? Every time I visited him at the Home, I tried to find the right moment to bring it up. Often, I came in to find him sitting in his pea-green armchair, staring out the window. When I sat down opposite him, he’d say, “Hi, how are you?” with a big inflection on “you.”
It reminded me of the greeting you might get from a celebrity or a politician who knows he’s met you before but can’t quite place you. Even after the generic welcome, I sat there hoping he would reemerge. Usually if the day started out poorly, things only got worse. His favorite exclamation was, “That’s baseball!” which he sometimes shouted over and over until a nurse came in and sedated him. A couple of times when I told him to stop, he started yelling even louder just to annoy me, as if he were a six-year-old taunting his older brother. On these occasions, my mother fled to the cafeteria. For my part, I often looked into the mirror over his bureau half expecting my own hair to have lost all its pigment.
He had been in the Home for two months when I finally intercepted a cogent moment. He was sitting in his chair talking to a big, tattooed Hells Angels–type janitor about the Cleveland Indians. He seemed to be following the conversation.
After he left and my father had asked about my mother’s cat, Reggie, I figured it was now or never.
“Dad,” I said, “do you remember Stanton?”
“Stanton?”
“Your friend . . . from the war?”
“Why would you bring him up?”
“You told me about him, remember?”
“Me? I didn’t . . .” He leaned forward in his chair. “She sent you, didn’t she?”
“Who?”
“There was no letter! Tell her to leave me alone.”
“Who?”
He covered his face with his gnarled hands. His shoulders began to shake. Not even a minute had passed since I’d brought up Stanton, and my father was distraught.
“Dad, forget it. I’m sorry I said anything about it.”
He rocked back and forth. Small noises rose from the back of his throat. I was sure a nurse would come in and yell at me. I got up from my chair and went over to him, laying a hand on his shoulder. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Dad, forget it. It happened so long ago.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” He wiped his right eye with his index finger. “He was my best friend. I should have gone back.”
The Devil’s Proof
In the mid-eighties, I attended an all-girls Catholic preparatory school in Washington, D.C. Safety, both corporeal and spiritual, was the nuns’ number one priority. Nothing was going to happen to any of the girls on their watch. Every morning after we arrived, the security guard we had nicknamed Gollum locked the wrought-iron gate with an enormous key that hung from a thick rope around his neck. Then he hobbled with his skeleton head cane back to his security post, a small brick building in the middle of the parking lot, where he watched various sporting events until the end of the day when it was time to set us free. If it had not been for his German Shepherd, Rolf, he would never have noticed when we made a break for it.
Despite the nuns’ vigilance, by sophomore year most of the girls in my class were schooled in the romantic arts. The ones who said they had “gone all the way” were the same girls who knew how to apply makeup and arrived at school Madonna-chic, striding down the corridors in alluring, scornful packs. During study hall, they offered tutorials, and the rest of us—naïve and mortified by it—listened with rapt attention. Decades passed before I realized the fact that they omitted the more diabolical encounters probably meant that despite their sophisticated veneers, they were every bit as unschooled as me.
I was young for my grade. The fall of my junior year, I was still fifteen. My parents were battling at that point, effectively separated. They refused to get divorced for religious reasons, but my mother had opened a travel agency, and she told everyone that “field work” set her apart from the competition. Her numerous trips meant that she was gone about twenty weeks out of every year. My father spent the nights when she was in town living in a guest room at Congressional Country Club way out in Maryland. When she was out in the field, he moved back home to take care of me.
