by A. E. Kaplan
Sure.
Plus, Ian says he’ll talk to Mom and Dad about Davis tonight. When the golden child speaks, the parents must listen, says me.
Maybe bring him for wine flights? You should show him your essay. It’s good.
There was a pause for a minute, and I figured Ed had gone off to do something else, but then he texted, Hmm, I will consider.
The first text from Zip said: I made you a present. It’s waiting at the Michaels in T’ville with your name on it.
The second: I knew you’d want it. Since I know you so well and all.
Then: They open at ten.
Then: Really, go pick it up now.
Then: You’re drinking wine with Ed, aren’t you?
I grabbed my keys and edged through the front door, without saying anything to my dad, who was still reading. Then I changed my mind and called back, “I’m going to Tolerville for a bit, and then to hang with Ed.”
Without turning around, he said, “Be home for dinner.”
“Yeah. Seven-thirty?”
“Seven,” he said. “We’ll eat early.”
I didn’t really know where to look for Zip’s thing at the Michaels. I went to customer service, and the tired college girl at the desk looked at me like I was crazy. I’d started to walk away when she called, “Try the framing department.”
I found the framing department in the back and gave my name to the guy who was working there. “Oh, right,” he said. “That was a rush order. Your girlfriend was real insistent we get it done by today.”
“My sister,” I corrected. He handed me a giant rectangular thing, wrapped in plain brown paper, about three feet tall and two feet wide.
I started to tear at one of the corners.
“Oh,” the guy said. “She wanted me to make sure to tell you not to open it until you get home.”
I groaned. And Zip claimed the theater was not for her.
“Also, that’ll be $46.02.”
I pulled out my wallet and laughed. Of course she’d left me to pay for it. I actually might have been disappointed otherwise.
I barely managed to fit it in the backseat of my car, and I winced every time it rattled against the door on the way home.
Alone in my room, I unwrapped the paper, slowly at first, then faster, once I saw what it was.
It was my mother’s painting.
I could tell it wasn’t the real one. It was a copy that Zip had gotten printed on a canvas from the file we’d found at Patuxent. I leaned it against the wall next to my bed and stood back to take a look.
It was every bit as awful as it’d been on my computer screen, writ large. The colors were all wrong, and the shading was terrible. But then, in the large format, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. In the bottom right corner, there was the hint of a profile. A whiff of hair, a nose, an eye.
It was me.
I was transported back to all those afternoons, before she died, when I’d sat in the kitchen and watched her paint. And while I’d been watching her, she’d been watching me. My memory was her memory. She hadn’t only been painting a pot of flowers, a loaf of bread. She’d been painting a moment that we had together.
I thought, maybe the knowing I was after wasn’t a thing. Maybe there was no kernel, or maybe there was, or maybe the way you got to it was by moments shared. Maybe when two people have the same memory, that’s the closest you can get. The mystical experience of other people.
And I remembered something else.
I’d snuck into the kitchen to look at the painting while she was in the bathroom or something. I was drinking chocolate milk and got right up close to the canvas, and then I sneezed all over it. I was so upset, thinking I had destroyed her masterpiece, and I tried not to, but I cried. And she came up behind me and hugged me, and told me that I’d improved it because now it was a mixed-media piece, and I had no idea what that meant, so I cried some more, and then she said, “Tom, I loved you when your diapers leaked on me and your nose ran on me, I love you when your knees bleed on me, and I love you when you sneeze chocolate milk on me. Always remember that. I would rather have you than any painting.”
I touched the tiny brown droplets next to the painted teapot. She could have painted over them, easily. But she hadn’t.
I hung the painting on the wall over my bed.
I headed outside, then reconsidered and doubled back into the garage. There was one last thing I needed to do before I met Ed.
My mower could barely handle Minnie and Allison’s front lawn, but I smiled as I cut a path through the foot-high grass, one sixteen-inch strip at a time. I couldn’t plant a flag in the middle of the yard. But I could still make the house part of the neighborhood again.
Inside, my father read his love letters. Outside, the whirring of the mower and a chorus of ten thousand cicadas were the only sounds for miles.
The first time I encountered Beowulf was in my ninth-grade English class, in our unit on early world literature. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, we were only given a few excerpts rather than the entire epic, which were wedged between parts of The Iliad and a PG version of Gilgamesh. There were also some really excellent illustrations, one of which showed Grendel eating someone like a drumstick, and another that showed Grendel’s stalwart and formidable mother looking exceptionally stalwart and formidable. I can’t remember if there was a picture of the dragon or not.
I do remember, though, feeling quite sorry for Grendel. The poor fellow is happily minding his own business, living in his lake with his mother, when Hrothgar and company show up and ruin the neighborhood. Grendel doesn’t seem to have the option of moving: he hasn’t got a car or a horse or a goat cart, and he has no homeowners’ association he can appeal to. He’s stuck with these inconsiderate bastards who keep him up all night with their drunken carousing until one evening, thoroughly fed up, he arrives at one of their parties slavering with rage and eats everyone.
To be fair, that last bit may have been overkill, but sleep-deprived people are known to be cranky.
Anyway, our class moved on to whatever story was next, and I didn’t think about Beowulf again until many years later, when it occurred to me that it might be interesting to adapt it to a modern setting and tell the story from the point of view of poor, misunderstood Grendel. Since Beowulf is mostly a story about feuds (the Danes vs. the Grendel family, Beowulf’s father vs. the Wulfings, the Danes vs. the Jutes, the Danes vs. the Heathobards, the Geats vs. the Swedes, the Dragon vs. the Geats, etc., etc., etc.), this was the kind of story I tried to tell. But the project fizzled; it just wasn’t working, for some reason I couldn’t pin down. So I gave up.
Sometime later, I came across Seamus Heaney’s really excellent modern translation of Beowulf (seriously, if you haven’t read it, you ought to), and I realized my problem. Beowulf is not only a story about feuds, or even a story about honor or the Norse code of chivalry, though all of those things are important. Beowulf is a story about memory. About legacy. Beowulf, more than anything, wants to be remembered. When he’s nearly defeated by Grendel’s mother in the second act, we’re treated to a rare personal insight: alone and unarmed at the bottom of a lake, Beowulf’s life flashes before his eyes, and he thinks not of his friends or his family or some buxom Geatish sweetheart. What he thinks is, If I get out of this, I’m going to be really famous.
Why does he care? Because his laundry list of awesome deeds will be what gets him respect from the other Northmen, and also because it will be all that’s left of him after he dies. Beowulf doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Leaving a legacy behind is the only way he can conceive of some measure of immortality. It is, as Beowulf says, “his best and only bulwark.”
So there was my story: a story about loyalty and blood feuds, but also about memory and its intrinsic ties to intimacy, about how the memories that get dredged up involuntarily can be even more powerful than those we seek out, and about how memory can be a curse as well as a blessing.
Hwæt!
To the unknown poet-author of Beowulf, for creating a story that still resonates a thousand years later, and to Seamus Heaney for his amazing translation and introduction. Also, to Samuel Beckett for absurd quotability.
To my mother, supreme critiquer, fixer of plot holes, and haver of ideas involving police scanners.
To my father, for lessons in storytelling, and for teaching me the meaning of reading widely.
And to my husband and children, for sharing memories with me.
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