At night in the hospital, after Tamar went home, I read the dictionary.
Chary. [ME, sorrowful, dear, fr. OE cearig sorrowful, fr. caru sorrow] 1. archaic: dear, treasured. 2. discreetly cautious: as a: hesitant and vigilant about dangers and risks. b: slow to grant, accept, or expend syn see cautious.
Do you see what kind of a word chary is? It means something and its opposite at the same time. You can be slow to accept a compliment and slow to expend one, and the word chary will fit either side of your personality. You can be discreetly cautious about danger and risk, and at the same time treasure something dear to you. All these meanings are related.
The old man would have been able to see that immediately. The old man was an expert at seeing the relations between things.
They left it to Tamar to tell me. She waited until we were in the car.
“Buckle up,” she said.
I buckled up. Then she reached around me and pulled out my safety system. She strapped on the bungee cords and wrapped the other belt around me.
“Ma?” I said. My throat still hurt and my words were whispery. But one word isn’t worth writing down. She could tell that I was asking her why she was strapping me into my safety system.
“Ma?”
Tamar started the car. While I was in the hospital she’d fixed the nonopening passenger door. I noticed right away. There was an indentation in it, as if she’d kicked it or taken a hammer with a towel wrapped around it to my door. She’s taken towel-wrapped hammers to things before. So the finish doesn’t scratch, is what she said. But the door worked now. I pointed to it.
“Thanks Ma.”
Her hand moved to the steering wheel as if she were going to push the lever to “D,” but she didn’t.
“Clara,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows. Raised eyebrows give you a look of inquiry. That’s something I’ve noticed. When you’re being chary with your words, but you want to indicate interest in what someone is saying to you, if you want to let them know that you want them to keep on talking, then all you need do is raise your eyebrows. It worked.
“Clara,” Tamar said, “the old man died in the fire.”
No mincing words with Tamar. She is a woman who is naturally chary with her words. I watched her words go scrolling by the bottom of my mind, then I fell. You can fall in a car. It’s possible. What happens is that you sag, and if there’s not a complicated system of safety belts and bungee cords to hold you up, you fall right onto the floor of the car. Right into the pit.
The old man died in the fire, the old man died in the fire.
It sounded like a nursery rhyme.
“Are you sure?” I said. I had to whisper.
She nodded. Her hand was in front of my safety system, helping to hold me up. Then her arm came around the back of my head and neck and clamped onto my shoulder. She kept nodding. Ahead of us the parking lot of the hospital was scattered with cars. They shone in the sun. It was a shining winter day, three weeks after they brought me to the hospital with burned lungs. Tamar’s hand came up and tried to touch my hair, but my hair was gone. Burnt off.
There had been some of it left in the back of my head, but when I looked in the hospital bathroom mirror I knew that I should cut it off. I cut it myself, with nail scissors that the nurse with curly brown hair gave me when I told her my toenails were getting too long. I did not lie to the nurse. My toenails were in fact getting too long, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be using the toenail scissors that the brown-haired nurse gives you to cut only your toenails. You could also use them to cut hair. Why not? Both hair and toenails need to be cut. The relationship is consistent.
I stood in front of the bathroom and gathered as much of my leftover hair as I could and then chopped it with the scissors. Nail scissors are not the best kind of scissors to cut hair with. They don’t have long enough blades. You have to keep sawing until finally all the leftover hair is chopped off.
If you’re missing your eyelashes and eyebrows, if for example they’ve been singed off in a fire in a trailer belonging to an old man, then you’re better off with no hair on your head either. This is what I believe to be true. Tamar’s hand didn’t know what to do when it touched the wisps of hair in back of my head, so she put it back on my shoulder. She was still nodding.
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did they bury him?”
She nodded. If someone’s buried, they’re dead. They’re truly dead. It came to me that I had never asked the old man if he wanted to be buried or cremated.
“Did he want to be buried?” I asked Tamar. But it was a useless question. It was a question without an answer. How could Tamar possibly know if the old man had wanted to be buried?
“I don’t know,” she said.
That’s Tamar. She does not lie.
“Where did you bury him?”
“In the Sterns Village Cemetery.”
“Does he have a headstone?”
“Not yet but he will. The Twin Churches are raising money to get one for him.”
Her hand was still on my shoulder. I felt myself rocking in my seat. You can rock in the front passenger seat of a station wagon. It’s possible. But you might not know you’re rocking unless your mother has hooked up your safety system and all the bungee cords are holding you in tightly. When you push yourself forward you can feel them pressing against you. That’s how you know you’re rocking. I kept whispering despite my throat.
“What will his headstone say on it?”
Tamar shook her head. “George Kominsky, I guess.”
“Georg,” I said. “It’s not George. It’s Georg.”
She nodded. She was either shaking her head or nodding, nodding or shaking her head.
“You’re just like everyone else,” I said. “Aren’t you? You don’t even know his real name.”
She looked at me.
“You don’t even know how to pronounce his name. For all you care, the old man could have been named Clifford.”
Still looking.
“Everyone has a name,” I said. “Everyone deserves to have his name pronounced the way it should be pronounced. But people don’t know. People don’t care.”
Her fingers pressed into my shoulder bone and then let go. Pressed and released. Over and over.
“They do, not, care,” I said. “And that’s the whole problem.”
She pressed and released. Her arm made no movement to put the lever into the “D” for drive slot. I know a lot about driving. When it comes time for me to get my permit, I will be a quick study. That’s what my fourth-grade teacher used to call me, a quick study.
Tamar wasn’t going anywhere. I could tell she was going to sit in the car, with the motor on and me strapped into my safety system, as long as it took. My throat was raw and my words were whispers. Still, she wasn’t going anywhere. So I asked my question.
“Did he die because of me?”
There. It was out there. It was a question out in the world now, hanging in the air between us. The words were out of me. They existed on their own.
“He died trying to get you out,” Tamar said.
“I killed him, then.”
“He died trying to save you,” Tamar said.
Then she took her hand away and put the lever into the “D” position. She took her foot off the brake and moved it onto the gas. The cars in the parking lot winked and blinked in the sunshine. It was winter sunshine, too bright. Painful on the eyes.
“We’re going home,” said Tamar. Then she put on her blinker and we started up Route 12, out of Utica, heading into the foothills.
When I was very young, when I had first thought of my death row question, I had asked it of Tamar.
“Ma, you’re on death row. How would you rather die? By electric chair or lethal injection?”
“Neither,” Tamar said.
“But if you had to pick.”
“I don’t have t
o pick,” Tamar said. “Therefore I shall not pick.”
She never answered my question. I myself have never answered it either. The day I asked it of the old man, I had my answer ready: lethal injection. That used to be my response to my own question. Injection wins out over electric chair any day. It wasn’t even a real choice, it seemed to me. But that’s what I know now, and that’s why I can never ask that question again. It isn’t a choice. You don’t get to choose.
Did the old man get to choose? That’s what I wonder about. When he came up to the trailer, and saw Tamar screaming, and saw the people all holding her by her feet and arms and legs so that she wouldn’t go running into the fire after me, did he choose?
The choir director told me that the old man had a plastic Jewell’s Grocery bag in each hand. They spilled when he dropped them.
“What was in them?” I asked her.
She gave me a look, but she answered anyway.
“I don’t remember everything, but there was a bag of sugar and a can of ginger. A quart of milk, which spilled when the carton broke.”
“Dairylea milk?”
“Yes, Dairylea milk,” the choir director said. “I remember the orange flower.”
Tamar was screaming like a crazed person. She was a crazed person. That’s what the choir director told me.
“I have never seen your mother like that,” she said. “She was literally out of her mind. There was a look on her face that I hope never to see again in my life.”
Tamar wasn’t around when the choir director told me that. The choir director also brought me a green rubber frog.
“Something to keep you company,” she said.
An orange balloon, a green rubber frog. The world of my childhood is behind me, and I have put away childish things, but you can’t tell people that.
“We were all trying to hold your mother back,” the choir director said. “There were at least six of us holding her down. The next thing we knew George was past us and running up the steps of the trailer.”
Not George. Georg. But they don’t know. They never knew.
How could the old man have been running? His feet hurt him from the frostbite that he got when he was seventeen. If you didn’t know the story, you couldn’t tell that his feet hurt him. But when you knew the story, and you knew that when he was seventeen he was caught in a blizzard that killed his little brother, and that he had to walk for two days to find his way out of the woods, then you could tell how much his feet hurt him. All his life, his feet hurt him. But no one who didn’t know the story would know that about the old man.
The choir director squeezed the green rubber frog. It squeaked.
“Oh, I didn’t know it squeaked,” she said. “How cute. And then the next thing we knew the window in the middle of the trailer was open, and you came sliding out of it. He must have found you and opened that window and heaved you out.”
That window was the bedroom window. The window in the middle of the trailer was the window above the old man’s built-in bed with the built-in drawers below. The old man used to lie in his bed and look out the window at the night sky. I know this because three times, Tamar and I drove past Nine Mile Trailer Park before dawn on our way to the State Fair in Syracuse. Each time we passed the trailer park, I looked out just at the right time to see the old man’s trailer. Each time, his window was open and the curtains were pushed aside. It was still nighttime. The old man was still asleep. That’s how I know that he went to sleep looking out an open window at the dark night sky. It would have been filled with stars some nights. It would have been streaked with lightning sometimes, or invisible through rain. There is a chance that once in a while, the old man would have climbed onto his built-in bed, looked out the window, and seen the heavens pulsing with the Northern Lights.
“And the next thing we knew, there you were. Lying in a snowbank,” the choir director said. “We let go. Tamar got to you first.”
And the next thing we knew, and the next thing we knew, and the next thing we knew. The choir director kept saying that, as if every one of her memories was a surprise to her.
The old man must have crawled through the trailer on his hands and knees until he bumped into me. He would have known it was me by my foot hitting him on his lowered head, or the feel of my hand under his crawling hand, or maybe the smell of burnt hair. That’s a smell you can’t not know. He must have picked me up, stood up, and pushed me out of the window.
Did he try to crawl out after me? Did he make it up onto his bed and then be overcome with smoke? Or did he just crumple back onto the floor once I was out the window?
The choir director had her arms out like she was directing the choir. While her eyes were still shut I took the green rubber frog and threw it under the bed.
Did the old man hear Tamar screaming my name? Did he know that I was still alive, and that they would revive me? Did he know that even then the Floyd Volunteer Fire Department was nearly there, and that the men would jump out and put the oxygen mask on me and take my pulse and make sure I wasn’t dead, and that then the ambulance would come and take me to Utica Memorial, and that Tamar would stay in a chair next to my bed the whole first three days?
That’s what the nurse with the brown hair that was shorter on one side than the other said.
“Your mother sat right in that chair for three whole days and nights,” the nurse said. “She wouldn’t even hardly leave the room to pee.”
What I want to know is when they got the old man out. Did the firefighters go in there and try to save him? Did anyone think of the old man?
Mr. Jewell came to see me a few days after I was home.
“I was walking home,” he told me. “George’s place was on the way so we walked back together. He waited for me to close up, that’s why he was a little later than usual. You must’ve thought he was inside, because we both saw you run on in there.”
Mr. Jewell put a paper bag that said “Jewell’s Groceries” on the bed next to me. I opened it. A can of ginger, a can of tuna, a bag of egg noodles, a small spiral notebook.
“When George saw you run in there, he started running too,” Mr. Jewell said. “He dropped his bag and they all spilled out.”
A spiral notebook? I took it out and turned it over. Red, flimsy, flip-top. Fifty miniature lined pages.
“I wanted to give them to you,” Mr. Jewell said. “I know he was your friend.”
“Thank you,” I said.
After he left I picked up the little spiral notebook again. Why did the old man buy it? What did he plan to do with it?
I will never know.
I thought of things that weren’t going to happen anymore because the old man was gone, such as biscuit baking. I had told the old man my pioneer recipe for biscuits. Pioneers carried their recipes in their heads. I know this because I once wrote a report on pioneer cooking. It was a true report, I researched pioneer recipes in the Utica Library. It’s hard to find pioneer recipes; they were passed down mother to daughter. Daughters learned by observing and practicing. They were apprentices to the art of cooking.
Take some flour and cornmeal and rising and some good fresh lard if you have it. Rub it between your fingers till it’s crumbly. Add some salt. Cut into rounds. Bake, covered.
“‘Rising’?” the old man said. “Baking powder, that must be.”
“Must be,” I said.
“And lard. We used to use that. That was all we used to use. That, and butter.”
He sifted even though I told him not to.
“Did the pioneers sift?” I said. “They did not. They had to pare down to bare essentials before they headed out west. Was there room in a covered wagon for a sifter?”
He said nothing.
“There was not,” I said. “A sifter is not a bare essential. You shouldn’t be using one.”
The old man got a stick of butter from his miniature refrigerator.
“Halt!” I said. “Did the pioneers have butter?”
The old m
an started cutting butter with two knives.
“Nay sir, I think not!” I said. “Where’s the good fresh lard?”
He smiled at me. That was rare from the old man. Smiles were not his forte. The old man finished rolling out the dough, then he took one of his three water glasses and pressed it into the dough. Each round he placed on a pan that he had already greased. They didn’t take long to bake. They would have been much harder to bake over an outdoor fire. You wouldn’t be able to regulate the temperature. You’d have to use a regular frying pan with the lid on it. They’d be burned on the bottom and maybe underdone on the top. That would be an authentic pioneer biscuit, I thought. Not a perfect round biscuit.
Still, the pioneers would love their biscuits. After a day in the open air, walking behind the wagon in the tracks left by the wheels, or riding one of the ponies off to the side, or leading the cow by its halter, those biscuits would have been delicious. Nothing would taste better than an authentic pioneer biscuit, baked in a frying pan over an open fire. There would have been no leftover biscuits in a true pioneer camp.
The old man was the master and I was his apprentice. That’s the way they did things in the olden days, and that’s the way the old man and I did them. These are my terms, not his. I don’t know if the old man knew the words master, journeyman, and apprentice. I don’t know if his English was good enough to know those sorts of words.
I observed him. I used to watch his every move.
Under cover of darkness, the old man and I used to go out. We escaped from Nine Mile Trailer Park and headed out for scavenging night. Possibility was there, waiting for me. An old colander with only one of its three little curved metal legs was there. You would think that someone had known I was coming, and left it there, bagless, unboxed, so that I would be sure to see it. It was the kind of colander that they still make, that they have been making for all eternity—a round metal bowl with holes in the shape of stars punched all through it, propped on three little curved metal legs that are screwed into the bottom.
Two of the legs were missing, and the colander was tilted. It was a lame and punch-drunk colander.
I held it up to my face and pushed my nose up against the bottom of the bowl. My face was encased in colander. It smelled cold and clean, like clean metal. Someone must have washed it before they put it out for the trash. Maybe they debated before they put it into the trash. Maybe they thought, there’s got to be more use in this colander. Maybe they tried to make little legs for it to stand on, so that they could continue to use the star-shaped-hole colander. It might have been a going-away gift from the owner’s mother, or a wedding gift from fifty years before. But because the owner of this colander did not understand the art of metalworking, they were unable to fix the colander.
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