by Joanna Scott
Are you still with me? It’s dark out. I’m back from basketball practice. I’ve been coach of our JV team for twenty years, and we’ve never won a game. Ha. But we have fun. And I always make sure that my players understand why gyroscopic forces help a body in motion maintain its original direction. I like to sneak in education when I can. I was thinking about something earlier. Today I talked with my students about the 180th meridian of longitude, you know, the international date line. I explained that if we cross the date line heading east, today changes to tomorrow, but if we head westbound, we go backward, back to yesterday. One student asked if that means we have to do everything we did today all over again. I said no, the day is new, even if we’ve already been through it. I didn’t say that I like to imagine what would happen if we really did get the chance to avoid making the same mistake twice. Since I started talking to you, I feel like I’m heading westbound over the 180th meridian. Just by putting down in words what I remember, I can almost convince myself that I can change what happened, you know, turn left instead of right after the intersection, and save everyone a lot of trouble. If only I’d known then what I know now, to borrow that cliché. Except in my case, there’s nothing I would have done differently. Well, almost nothing. But it will be a while before I get to that part. I hope you don’t mind that I spend some time filling in my background. So yesterday I’d begun telling you about the day my father died. That morning he’d been found washed up on the beach, and the sheriff’s deputy arrived at our house to break the news to my mother, then asked her to come with him to identify the body while I waited at home alone. I was telling you about that. I, um… hey, did you know that a walrus sleeps in the water in a vertical position, with its head floating just above the surface? I always thought this was interesting. In the first dream I had about RB after his death, I saw him floating offshore, his head bobbing above the surface. I jumped in and swam out to him. He was asleep when I got there, and I had to shake him to rouse him, to wake him up. I wanted him to tell me what he was doing there. But all he did was give a great big yawn and go back to sleep. He wouldn’t wake up, but I did, obviously, I woke up. We celebrated my twelfth birthday the day after we buried him. It was June and me, along with the waitstaff at the Roslyn IHOP, who stopped what they were doing and gathered around my table to sing. There were burning candles stuck in the bundled pigs in blankets. I remember that they were the trick candles, you know, the kind that flare back up after you blow them out. Funny the things we remember. And do you ever stop and wonder about things you’ve forgotten? Wonder and curiosity, yeah, they’re important. I’ve forgotten whether I ever saw my mother cry. She must have been broken up by my father’s death, I’m sure, but what I remember is coming out of my bedroom into the kitchen and watching June pounding on my father’s portable typewriter, his old Smith Corona. I asked her if she was writing a book about RB, and she nodded without looking up, I remember. But it turned out that she was writing letter after letter in an attempt to cash in on RB’s life insurance policy. The initial inquest, you see, ruled that my father had drowned himself, so June didn’t have a legal right to the insurance money. But she demanded a review of the inquest, and, and the original ruling was overturned, and my father’s death was ruled accidental. Even then, the life insurance company kept stalling, yeah, it took three lousy years for them to pay out the claim, but when they did, wow, a hefty fifty thousand dollars came to us as a single check in the mail one day. Geesh. My mother opened the envelope and held the check up to the light and said here’s the book about RB, here’s the story of his life. I was fifteen years old by then, and I just thought the whole thing was a joke. I have a clear memory of that moment, with my mother bending toward the lamp like a plant toward light while I was sitting there, I happened to be watching an ice cube melt in my water glass. I remember thinking there were two things that were impossibly strange, my mother and the ice cube. June was strange because she thought my father’s whole life would fit on a small piece of paper, and the ice cube was strange because it didn’t raise the level of the water as it melted. Um, so, well, anyway. I didn’t understand my mother. She’d kept herself busy since RB’s death. Between her job at the IHOP and her wrangling with the life insurance company, she hadn’t had a spare moment to think about anything else. She hadn’t taken the time to miss RB. She hadn’t noticed that I was growing up. And she didn’t realize that she had exhausted herself. I was plenty angry with June, and for years I figured she was a money-grubber out to make good on RB’s death. I’ve since come to understand that her fight with the life insurance company was not about the money. It was her attempt to honor her husband. You see, she discovered that he had life insurance only after he died. He’d taken out the policy and made the payments in secret during the last five years of his life. It was his plan, I guess, to provide for his family, and in this sense June felt an obligation to get the insurance money. But when the check finally arrived, it didn’t come with RB alive, of course. The check had been drawn because RB wasn’t alive. RB was dead, and the check announced the eternity of this fact. In place of RB Boyle, we had fifty thousand dollars. That was the value of RB’s life — fifty thousand dollars. Really, he’d earned the money in a wily scheme. With June’s help he’d played one last trick on the system by dying. This was his big ha-ha, his revenge for the injustice dealt to him in life, and now that it had all played out, RB was gone forever, and June’s work was done. Well, what do you think of this story so far? I’d promised to explain why I did what I did to your mother, why I left her in the lurch. Given my stated purpose, all I’ve told you so far probably seems irrelevant. But I think it’s important for you to know how I spent my early years, if only to help you understand the man who would go on to fall in love with your mother. Does this make sense? Are you still with me? What happens when you tell a story that no one hears? It’s like blowing air into a tire. You inflate the tube with gas, the molecules pelt against the walls of the tube, the pressure inside the tube exceeds the pressure outside the tube, and yeah, the tire is inflated, ready to turn. Or not to turn, if it’s never used. Those restless molecules just keep on with their crazy pelting dance. Listen to me, I’m rambling, it’s late, and I have to grade papers and catch up on the news. Maybe I should remind you that you can turn me off whenever you feel like it. You can decide whether to keep listening.
Dear Sally, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’re still listening. I feel emboldened. That’s a word I’ve never used before, not aloud, at least. But I’d convinced myself that you would only ever despise me. You know, your grandmother liked to tell me about you, and before she passed away she told me that you want to write, she said you’re trying to write a book. I wonder what it’s about. Huh, I passed a bookstore yesterday and saw in the window a pile of copies of a book called Drop Those Alfredo Pounds. If you want to write a bestseller, write a diet book. Or how about a book called The Germ Police? I could help you with that. People are concerned about germs these days. This hasn’t always been the case, you know. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an essay ascribing fever to an invisible something, and he was ridiculed. But that was the nineteenth century. I like to look for any evidence that we’ve made progress. And then I see the latest statistics about endangered species, and I despair. Well, we could write a book together, you and I, about how to fight germs. Or maybe we could write about building a greenhouse. I don’t know, that’s always seemed to me a topic that would interest people. Either way, we’d make a bundle! Okay, I’m kidding. Anyway, I was telling you about what happened after RB died. Mmm, well, I hung out with my friends Deano Colletti and Tony Minastronti, we called him Minestrone, Stroni for short. We were a bad lot. While other boys our age were conditioning themselves for the football season, we were smoking pot and getting drunk. Once when I was fifteen I spent a night in the holding cell at the police station — this was shortly after June got the check from the life insurance company. We’d stolen a case of beer out of a garage an
d set out walking down the street. I know, we weren’t the brightest bulbs. A cop pulled up, just our luck. Deano and Tony were bailed out by their parents that night, but June didn’t come get me until morning. She wanted me to spend the night in the holding cell in hopes of teaching me something about the consequences of my actions. I didn’t learn much. My poor mother. Well, to move on, I turned seventeen in 1964. I hardly saw June. She’d quit her job at IHOP after the insurance claim paid out. But she had to use a good chunk of the money to pay our debts. And anyway, she couldn’t stand sitting around the house doing nothing, so she got a job as a waitress at the Red Lobster in Huntington. She took every double shift they gave her. She was so busy she didn’t even know that I’d stopped going to classes. When the school sent a letter home, I forged a letter back from June that explained I’d been diagnosed with mononucleosis and could my teachers please send a list of homework assignments for the month, which they did, and which I didn’t bother to complete. I don’t know why they let me graduate. For Christ’s sake, I graduated early, a semester early! And then in January of 1965 I took Pig and visited my brother, Phil, in Buffalo. June didn’t mind me going, or she didn’t let on if she minded. She gave me a load of money to share with Phil. She said we should live it up. So that’s what we did. Phil already had gone through the money June had sent him the year before. He’d bought a truck and a snowplow for himself and was trying to get his own plowing and hauling business up and running. Plus he’d been getting ready to marry a girl and had put a down payment on a house. That’s where he was living when Pig and I arrived in Buffalo, in a rotten little ranch house on Tonawanda Street. His fiancée had broken off the engagement, and he’d sunk pretty low by the time I arrived. When it snowed he’d go out to plow, but the rest of the time he sat in front of the TV. I sat with him the first month I was there. We drank beer and watched TV, we ate pizza and wings and fed the leftovers to Pig, we got fat, we got depressed, we went through the money from June. She wired us five hundred more, we went on drinking beer. In March there was a storm, we must have gotten three feet of snow over a weekend, and Phil was too lazy to take the truck out, so I did it for him, I followed his map and plowed all day Sunday and into the night, and at two in the morning I came back and Phil was gone, I mean really gone, along with his clothes and his radio. He’d left the TV and the stereo behind for me. There was a note on the kitchen table explaining that an old girlfriend had stopped by, not his ex-fiancée, another girl, she had a car and invited Phil to drive with her to California, and he said sure, he was ready for adventure, and as soon as he’d settled I could come and join him. I remember Pig had eaten too much of the leftover pizza and thrown up on the couch, so I had to clean that up, and then I went to bed. I was exhausted. I was woken the next day by the phone ringing, it was June, even before I answered she was yelling in my ear that they’d found Phil, they’d found Phil, but I didn’t understand, I, I, I didn’t think Phil was lost, I’d seen him the day before, Sunday morning, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Hmm. I think that was the only time I heard June raise her voice. What she meant was that the police had found Phil’s body, along with the girl’s, in their car at a rest stop on 90, both of them shot up, shot in the head from behind and in front, like they’d been surrounded and executed at close range. No one was ever charged with the murders, but my guess is it was the girl’s boyfriend. It turned out she had a boyfriend, and what I still believe is that she was running away from him, that’s why she came to Phil, so she’d have someone to run away with, but they only got as far as the rest stop on 90 just east of Erie, Pennsylvania. That boyfriend, in case you’re wondering, he’s some bigwig, works in the banking industry. Well, thanks to him, it was my turn to go to the morgue. While June headed to Erie in a bus, I went to confirm that the male victim found in the Mustang along Interstate 90 was indeed my brother. You know, I remember watching a TV show later that day, a documentary about, about of all things a juniper tree, a six-thousand-year-old juniper tree that had been found growing on a ridge in the Sierras. Now whenever I think about my brother, I think about that tree. This was ’66, I mean ’65. After we buried Phil, I stayed on in Buffalo while June went back to work in Huntington. I didn’t get around to selling the house for a while. I enrolled as a part-time student at Buffalo State, and I supported myself with my brother’s truck, hauling in the warm months, plowing in the winter. It would be a long time before I met your mother, nearly nine years before I met her and fell in love. Those nine years, there’s not much to say about them. It took me nine years to graduate from college, I graduated with a degree in biology, with honors, summa cum laude, if you can believe it. I had an idea I might go to medical school, but no, it didn’t work out. I got a job driving for a moving company. I saw every state in the Union, except Hawaii, Alaska, and, for some reason, Kansas. I never drove through Kansas, I don’t know why. So anyway, the company ended up moving its headquarters an hour east, to the city you call home, and since that was my base I spent more time there than in Buffalo, though I wasn’t happy about it, since I had friends in Buffalo, but that’s how it was, a few years after the headquarters moved I decided to sell my brother’s house. There wasn’t much to take in after the mortgage was paid off, but by then I’d graduated from college. I signed up for the long hauls and crisscrossed the country in my rig, and when I wasn’t driving I was living in rented rooms and hanging out at Jeremiah’s on Monroe Avenue, you might know the place, that’s where I met Larry, who knew Tom, who was the boyfriend of Phyllis, your mother’s friend. That’s where I met your mother, at Jeremiah’s on Monroe. I remember, I remember there was a thunderstorm while we were driving down Monroe. By the time we got to the bar the rain had stopped, but the trees were still dripping, and the gutters were running. I remember listening to the sound of water running through the gutter as the door opened and out of the bar came Penelope Bliss. I’ll tell you about falling in love with your mother, but now, it’s late, I’ve gone on, haven’t I? I’ll close here, but I promise to follow up, you’ll hear more if you keep listening.
Dear Sally, I had a dream last night, I dreamed of you, I dreamed I saw you crossing a hotel lobby, you were pulling a suitcase, and I asked if I could come along on your trip with you, wherever you were heading. You didn’t know me from Adam, but you said sure, why not, come along. But then the lobby was suddenly full of people milling around, and you disappeared in the crowd, I couldn’t find you anywhere. I woke up feeling lost. You know, it makes me think of the common advice that following a stream downhill will eventually lead you back to civilization. Yeah, you can follow the stream through marshlands and forests, you can batter your way through alder and willow, and then, surprise, the flow might very well end in an isolated pond and you’re still lost, you’re lost worse than ever. Well, that dream last night, it was only a dream. I’m in between classes right now, I’d better get ready, so you’ll find a pause in the tape. I’ll be back later in the day.
I was telling you about my dream, and before that, about your mother. The way life changes, think about it, think about that feeling on a roller coaster when you’re barely moving at the top of the rise and then you surge toward the bottom of the downgrade. That pit in your stomach, you don’t feel it because your speed is so fast but because your speed is changing so fast. You’re at the age where life changes fast, it’s thrilling, isn’t it, you don’t have time to worry about the future, you just go and go, chugging up to the top of the hill. I used to love that roller coaster there by the lake. You must have ridden on the Rabbit, the Jack Rabbit, if it’s still in operation, though it might not be, it was a rickety wooden thing when I was young and that was thirty years ago, more than thirty years. I remember the first time I rode on it, I was with friends, there were five of us and I ended up being the odd one out, so instead of sitting with one of my buddies I had to sit with an old lady, my God, a very old lady, she must have been ninety, and she said she had been riding the Rabbit once a year every year, ever
since its first year in operation. That first year a fireman stood up in his seat and was killed when the train went through the tunnel. The old lady told me about that, I remember, just as our train started to move, she told me about the fireman getting killed on the Rabbit, and then she said, I’ll never forget, she said, I hope you don’t mind if I scream. And boy did she scream. We both screamed. Ha. The next time I rode on the Rabbit was with your mother, that same summer, the summer of 1974. I was going to tell you about meeting your mother. I met her that summer at Jeremiah’s. Ask her if she remembers meeting me. Don’t tell her I told you to, but go ahead and ask her, see if she remembers. Maybe she won’t want to remember. Does she ever talk about me? God, she was gorgeous, with her eyes, her blue eyes beneath the domes of those wide lids, and her hair, it was the early seventies and she had long hair, she wore it with the front ends pulled back and held in a clip. She was nearly as tall as me, I’m five nine, she was, she must be close to that, I think. What can I tell you about your mother that you don’t already know? I wonder if you find her as hard to describe as I do? Well, it’s no secret that she was a real beauty with those silky curls, red curls, and her blue eyes always open so wide, as if she were trying to see everything at once. I used to like to watch her watching others. She paid attention, she looked at the world with interest, with wonder, that’s a better word, with wonder and curiosity. And when she found a worthwhile cause, she’d throw herself into it. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a saint, she had her own streak of wildness, yeah, she liked a good thrill. She liked to ride on the Jack Rabbit. She had a quick temper, it’s true, but she was just as quick to laugh. Does it ring true to you if I say of your mother that she seemed to experience life with more intensity than most? Honestly, the only time I remember seeing her bored was once in front of the TV during a sportscast of a golf tournament. She had no patience for golf. I remember she balled up her sock and threw it at the TV, at the sportscaster. And I swear that guy looked surprised when the sock bounced off the screen, like he could feel it, he could feel the sock hitting him in the face. We laughed so hard, we couldn’t stop laughing. When she laughed, I remember, she used to thrust out her tongue, she’d squeeze the tip of her tongue between her lips. We spent a lot of time laughing together, your mother and me. I can tell you it felt good to be with her. But how to describe what good means? I’d never felt it before and never since. Your mother was the love of my life. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that. I had a decent marriage, more than decent, I loved Donna, it was a different kind of love, but I loved her. And I have two wonderful daughters from that marriage. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. Your mother, though, she came into my life at a time when I expected nothing. I’d lost so much by then, my father, my brother, and that spring my mother got sick. I didn’t realize how sick she was. I think she was worn down, worn out. She’d told me she had the flu. When I talked to her on the phone she’d start coughing, sometimes she couldn’t talk through her coughing and would have to call me back. When I saw her in May, she looked okay, she was still working, but she had that cough, and then in July I got a call from her friend, who told me she was in the hospital. Your mother came with me to visit her. Your mother. Penelope. Penelope Bliss. I don’t know how I would have gotten through that summer without her. I don’t know how I’ve managed without her for thirty years. More than thirty years. Ask her, will you, if she ever thinks about me. Don’t tell her why you’re wondering. Is she still so angry with me that she would refuse to let me speak directly to her? I wouldn’t blame her. No, I wouldn’t blame her. Well, I’ll stop here. There’s more to say, of course, but I’m late for an appointment. I’ll be back soon.
