by Jacob White
This notion of back halls and back offices I had derived likely from my little bungalow’s brown paneling, linoleum floors, and stained ceiling tiles. It had been I believe an office of real estate, so an office in fact—my bedroom in fact a back office proper in some dead year. Day and night my dog, too, wandered these rooms, ticking across brittle linoleum, lost to her own back halls and back offices or to mine. On occasion we would meet in a doorway and try awkwardly to dodge each other before turning back the way we’d come.
How long had we been bunkered away? This slipping loose has been happening, it occurred to me. I should write a poem.
The stars have been let go . . . of
But it was me. Me let go of. A person named Peanut once let me go from this warehouse job and I laughed. It’s inventory, I said, you just have to show up. You can be drunk.
But Peanut was acting under soberer agency than he knew. The joke was not his joke nor a joke at all. I peeled out across the warehouse lot and Peanut watching just got smaller in the rearview, and it was like in 2001 somehow—I had been swatted into space, where nothing’s funny anymore.
This inability to keep track of inventory—of boxes, wrenches—what I had thought a superficial confusion—gave way under those skittering stars to a real, foundational confusion. It hit me then: my brain was marbles. My talk the clacking thereof. This was permanent. The linoleum had felt buckled and curled under my toes, the water like lukewarm plastic. I was never going back in there.
Seeing stars so far off yet still undeniable. To see something that far off and at the same time to believe, to believe that thing exists—it drove me crazy as a kid.
Space!
Space and the stars slipping around in it. I beheld stars as a child. I beheld stars once on a cold Christmas Eve. They were very far and still. My eyes watered, my ears sang with cold. Everything was still. Beheld: what a still, holy word.
Where is my dog?
8. Out With Father
“The food was good, the service was bad.”
The waiter nodded and was withdrawing before any of us quite understood Father’s words, and Father went on with his story about Barney Mendel, resuming the lewd joke about Barney Mendel’s wife that always accompanied stories of Barney Mendel and that the waiter, depositing the check at Father’s elbow, had attempted not to interrupt.
The waiter was Greek and in his fifties, heavy with close-set eyes, and it was as he attempted to withdraw his arm that Father, also in his fifties, had softly touched the waiter’s cuff, staying him until he could clip off the clause about Barney Mendel’s wife, then leaned back, turned the full of his dazzling, melted blue eyes up at the semi-prostrate waiter, and said not uncheerfully, “The food was good, the service was bad,” before resuming the bit about Barney Mendel’s wife, then the Barney Mendel story proper—the remark to the waiter a grace note of sobriety that held it all together.
The remark was just beginning to uncoil in our heads—Mother’s, Sister’s, mine—as the waiter withdrew, nodding—neglecting to clear the dessert plates yet apparently unperturbed, his rotund and tautly tucked belly fairly whistling back through the dining room, head erect and alert to his duties, jacket flapping.
After all, Father had not said, “The food was good, the service bad,” which would have been pettily dismissive. Nor was he boorishly emphatic: “The food was good. The service was bad.” There was no tight, patronizing grin; rather, his face hung loose with an undwelling, collegial frankness as he barked gently, “The food was good, the service was bad.”
Here, I thought, is a man who’s won his terms with the world. Between his years of being crass and cunning and his years getting his corners knocked off, he’s managed a square fit, plugged in firmly to a deep structure functionality that allows him to plot poor service in a long game that renders moral judgment and piss-anting useless and the problem itself but a bolt to be tightened. During the exchange, it felt as if the two men had stepped briefly into the boardroom of their generation and shut the door: Let us move forward in this world, one says over the conference table, to which the other nods, then lights a cigar.
Years later I was driving my father to the doctor and we passed by the restaurant, closed now for over a decade. I asked if he remembered taking me there for my sixteenth birthday. Reposed awkwardly in my unfamiliar sports car, he hung to the handle above the passenger door, straining to see out over his high-hung arm. He swallowed. “How those spics kept it going long as they did,” he said. “The fish was poisonous.” Then later, as the doctor was explaining the new dosage, Father interrupted, saying to me, “I’m not one of those people who remembers birthdays, you have to understand.”
9. The Days Down Here
I begin, then, with the house. Before we moved in last summer, an elderly couple had lived there. They lived there over thirty years and nobody knew them. They were alcoholics, it turned out. They were serious alcoholics, insisted the neighbor as he told my wife the story. Not the clownish sort forever making spectacles of themselves at club galas, nor even the sullen kind one occasionally sees alone in the middle of the fairway, whimpering curses and flinging the weak quicksilver of an iron across the dusk. No, these two had been darkly focused on their affliction and did not distract themselves with cocktail parties. They were not neighborly. One rarely saw them: occasional glimpses of slips and pajamas and pale limbs passing windows with the industrious hunch of rodents. Then one day the old woman was floating facedown in the pool. She had tried, it was somehow determined, to catch her cat.
“This must be Hammond,” said the neighbor, Ted, as I walked over to where he and my wife stood at the edge of our front lawn. I had been sweeping out the moving van. Ted took his eyes off Jean for a moment to shake my hand, and then continued.
A week later, he remembered, he saw the old fellow riding a bike down their street. It was sunny. It was spring, said Ted Forester, who had been out front spreading pine straw. He’d stopped to watch the old stranger—he hadn’t seen him in years—round the corner back toward the house. Ted took the opportunity to wave as the fellow passed. But perhaps the loss of his wife was too freshly upon him, or he was not yet as reacquainted with riding the burgundy bike as he’d seemed, for he regarded the young neighbor with pale, clear eyes but did not raise a hand from the handlebars. He passed by Ted and, turning into his driveway, caught the curb with his front tire, fell, and split his head open in the gutter.
Ted’s wife was crossing the street to join us. Now everybody could be introduced. Barb Forester asked where we were from; Ted, realizing he hadn’t, flinched with embarrassment. Scranton, I told her. Barb nodded at me, then squinted beyond my shoulder as if trying to spot the road that had led us here. “Pennsylvania,” Jean added.
“Pennsylvania, of course,” Barb said. Then, carefully, “So. Retiring?” They were a good twenty years younger. I was sixty-one, my wife fifty-nine.
Before I could respond, Jean nodded.
I brought Jean down here because she had spent a lovely, lonely summer on this lake as a little girl, and because she was dying and I’d never done anything grand or foolish for her. Back in the forties this peninsula had been all pine and hardwood, veined by two or three roads of cool blue gravel. In one of the deep-set fishing and hunting cabins had lived Jean’s grandmother. Jean often said the most vivid memory she had in life—and here sometimes she ribbed herself with a dry laugh, for she who never took nostalgia seriously seemed always surprised by the lavish jewel of this memory—was running in and out of her grandmother’s screened porch that summer, myrtle leaves and lake sand stuck to her feet, her grandmother sitting on the porch mending winter clothes. She said that around noon the mourning doves came in like slow honey.
After our doctor told us the chemo had again failed, that the stuff had spread beyond her ovaries, throughout her abdomen and into her liver, I spent the winter phoning a Lake Wylie realtor from my
office at the quarry. I used the grandmother’s name to try to relocate the old homesite. Through this realtor I learned the peninsula had been developed thirty-five years ago into a private community and that property values were now falling off because its custom homes and country club facilities were dated. Eventually the realtor had found the lot—now a terraced waterfront property occupied, as it turned out, by the Foresters’ house. But a house across the street had just come on the market. He mailed a photograph. The place cost everything we had.
Ted and Barb’s steepled house rose behind them; through its many bay windows, the lake beyond it glittered.
“We brought our son, too,” Jean was telling the Foresters, but they seemed not to connect this announcement with Zach, who walked up behind us shirtless, his pale, black-haired chest sweaty. He was wearing the gray Dickies and dust-white boots he’d worked in at the small quarry I ran for thirty years and had just sold. Zach was nineteen and handsome, but a bit severe in the eyes and, like me, new to neighborliness. He shook the Foresters’ hands.
That morning we’d descended a Piedmont hill and driven onto the lake’s bridge, concrete joiners galloping beneath the moving van. Jean, sitting between Zach and me in the cab, brought her hands to her chest and said, “Oh, there it is still,” pointing across the boat-buzzing lake to the South Carolina shore at a peninsula terraced with half-million-dollar homes. She clasped our forearms, and at that moment I believed I’d done the right thing.
As if coming to, Ted Forester apologized for the story of the house’s former owners. Barb gave him a hard look—You told them? (Many months later, during one of the weekly dinners they invited me to at their house, Ted brought up the story once more, again apologizing for it. It had just spilled out, he said. He hadn’t known. She looked so damned healthy, he said.)
The Foresters walked back through their aggressively landscaped yard, Zach back toward the boxes in the driveway. Jean and I turned toward our new home and crossed our arms in a gesture of solidarity. The house sat huge and shutterless. In the driveway rested the yellow moving van, chalked with highway dust, and our trailered Monte Carlo with its salt-pitted bottom. Jean said, “Hammond, this house is too big!” and then broke the stillness of the street with one of her easy laughs, tossed aside like a dishrag, and I knew we’d made it through.
Our place remained from the neighborhood’s first generation of custom homes: it was built of asymmetrical segments and its vertical siding was painted, like all the neighboring houses, some unnameable earthen hue—a taupey gray. The wide-lapping, intersecting slopes of its roof suggested the repose of an accomplished life, but its upkeep—the smoke-yellowed ceilings, the bathrooms’ greened brass fixtures, the rotting doorjambs, the dead bulbs—exhaled many dismal years of resignation. And the yard? Fronting the eighteenth tee, the old couple’s black tangle of a backyard had long blighted the crescendo effect the club encouraged along this hole. Other neighbors obviously took pride in the dramatic function of their yards here, and they must have made a point to spend hours each spring weekend planting verbena, dahlias, and geraniums, cropping cycads and imperial pampas grass, encompassing the tee within a sort of botanical stadium. But our house—there is no denying it—was a blight. The tree limbs were so dead as to look scorched; leaves buried the two back patio steps, scalloped the patio itself, and lay like a bunker net over the small pool. The rising shrubs made the house look as though it were actually sinking. Within days of our arrival, neighbors would drop by with cookies and express a frank eagerness for us to repair the yard.
Not just everything we had, but everything we would ever have. Yes, I begin with the house. With this story of dying elders. With the prospect of a few months. With the sight of our son stalking miserably through the calf-high lawn in his size thirteen steel toes, picking up toys left there by the Foresters’ girls—eight and ten, and on the swim team. Jean standing before it all, loosing that old laugh of hers.
“What an awful story,” Jean said in bed that first night in the house, the darkness around us new and tentative.
“It’s likely made up,” I said. “Invented. You know, out of some need to make it humorous. I mean, the old lady chasing her cat, the old man flying headlong over his handlebars—it’s slapstick.”
“But brains in the gutter? Who does he think he is, telling me such a story? I’m old enough to be his . . .”—she looked at me from her pillow, and I could make out the blacks of her eyes, thanks to a dull amber streetlamp. Cicadas whirred outside. Neither of us could sleep.
I waited. This coverlet chatter carried in it, still, the pretense that we were retiring south together. We were having trouble letting the act go.
I looked at the ceiling. “I’ll stay clear of the bike.”
“Hammond!” She began to cry. I kept my eyes on the ceiling. I didn’t hold her. To do so would have been to admit to the darkness around us, to how far we were from home, to how small her body had gotten. To the strangeness of this place, its absence of history or hope.
I patted her hand. “Easy. We might all still be alive tomorrow.”
But her fingers hooked mine in a hot animal grip.
Learning to sleep here took time. We were used to a darkness absolute and whispered-through by the wash of truckers across the valley, downshifting along the high ridge of I-81. We were used to our popping beams and the worrisome squeak of our porch swing and hanging planters, to Zach clearing his throat in his room above us—a cool constellation of sounds. But sound did not travel in this new house. A heavy cloy of quiet held the air, a pressure. Outside, locusts thrummed against the humidity. Zach’s room was way off down another hallway. We were relieved to find him in the kitchen that first morning. Shirtless and sweaty-faced, he’d already mown the front lawn. It was the mowing that had awoken us.
We all stood in the kitchen for most of a minute, somewhat at a loss. Zach glanced at each of us uneasily and sipped water from a plastic mug. The distance we stood from each other across the commodious kitchen had, actually, the effect of embarrassing intimacy. The blank space asked us to define ourselves in a way our morning routine in the old, close kitchen had made unnecessary. “I got to get a job,” Zach said wryly.
At this moment, tired and disoriented, I felt suddenly unprepared for this house and its spaciousness. A summer cabin up in the Finger Lakes would’ve been better, surely.
“Needs an island in here,” I said, walking across the kitchen toward Zach, holding out my hand for the plastic gas station mug in what felt like a grasp for fatherhood itself. In Pennsylvania the green and gray mug had long been a source of competition within our family: its lid didn’t leak, and we were always irritably retrieving it from one another’s cars. It rode with us in the cab all the way down here, and all the sodas we’d bought were communal. “You got to do nothing this summer,” I said, “but enjoy yourself.” I sipped the tap water. “That goes for all of us. We’re going to resuscitate this house, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves.” I took another sip. No such plan had occurred to me until I was actually speaking the words. But it seemed to make sense.
“Oh yes,” Jean said, accepting the plastic mug, whose size eclipsed most of her face. “Let’s party.”
Later that morning, Zach and I raked leaves three winters dead into piles while, at the edge of the backyard, Jean swung a rusted machete at black vines and briars and chest-high weeds that obscured the golf course. She’d found the military-issue tool under a workbench in the garage. Sweat slicked her neck. “Easy, girl,” I’d say every now and then. She’d ignore me and hack more fiercely—a petulance new to her character in the past six months, a desperation I didn’t yet take seriously. This was only weeks before her cheeks sallowed and sank, before her eyes turned to pitch.
“Easy.”
Zach walked over to his mother and, given the machete, hacked at a high-up vine she couldn’t reach and then handed it back. He was a natural worker,
and I worried about him here in this sprawling repose of fairways and retirees. Instead of going to college the year before, Zach had stayed on at the quarry, which pleased me for a number of reasons. But he had no friends, really; he’d been living with us. I guess it’s something Jean never forgave me for.
There was no reason he should’ve come down here with us, other than the reason. His very presence was a reminder. Neither of us had long with her.
“Not looking so hot yourself, Winston,” my son said, referring to me as he had at the quarry by the Winston Racing painter’s cap I wore. Jean hated the cap. She would reach to pluck it off me first thing whenever I walked in from work, evenings, and give my bare scalp a sticky pat. Yet she hadn’t chastised me for wearing it in front of the Foresters the day before; she’d only smirked up at the thing as we walked back toward the boxes in the driveway. She was letting some things go.
Over her shoulder, Jean said, “Go get some water, Ham. You’re thirsty.”
I did. I was.
In the kitchen my vision was splotched from the sun; my head throbbed from the humid southern heat. The plastic mug was outside and our glasses were boxed up, so I leaned under the faucet. I gulped greedily, though it was some deeper coolness I wanted. Like the sudden puff from newly split mountainside—“mountain kiss,” quarrymen called it. Fills your chest like the cold of an ax. And even as I thought about the quarry, about how strange it was I would never again see that massive space, I felt a draft slip from the basement door. Instinctively I walked over, opened it, and felt for the banister.
The basement was six hundred square feet with cinder walls. Two window wells limned the musty stillness and silvered its slick-mottled concrete floor. The smell of damp, iron-rich clay hung thick and frank. That afternoon, my face pouring with sweat, I clomped down the basement’s unsteady stairs and found there a cool cofferdam beneath the heavy-lying summer above.
