by Lisa Samson
He’s all of Hort I have left, you see. I’ve changed the apartment, launched my career, switched from flats to high heels. Solo remains the same, and he still laughs and laughs when we remember Hort together, and he still cries. Solo still cries.
The summer of my fifteenth year, Mom, Dad, and I stopped midtrip from Virginia Beach to Baltimore at a stuffy old inn on Route 3. By the time we were shown our seats in that old house built in the 1700s, we almost fell to our knees in thankfulness for the umpteen layers of paint that most likely kept it all from crashing down atop our heads.
We opened the menus, large cardboard covers with gold tassels, and Dad began to laugh. When my father laughed it seemed as if the entire room were dying to join in.
“Look at number twelve.”
Smothered chicken.
We giggled.
And then our waitress arrived: stoic, crabby, German.
“Vud you like to order?”
Oh heavens. I could see it coming before Dad uttered one word.
Smothered chicken, a crabby German waitress, and my father. If a combination more destined for impish trouble exists, I’ve yet to find it.
Dad pointed to his menu. “Smothered chicken? Truly?”
The waitress, reminding me of a matron at an orphanage in a book by a Brontë, merely blinked.
“How awful for the poor bird.” Dad set down his menu, leaned on his elbow, and twirled his hand in that artistic yet manly fashion. “I mean, I can see strangling it, chopping its head off, or even hitting it over the head with a shovel … but smothering it?”
He waited for a response.
Nothing. Dad kept eye contact.
“Really? Smothering it? That poor chicken never did a thing to hurt anyone, did it?”
Her expression more concrete than a lingering slab of the Berlin Wall, her lips barely moving, she said, “Are you ready to order?”
Mom covered her mouth with her hand, I jumped up and ran to the bathroom, and Dad ordered a club sandwich, taking great pains to assure himself that the turkey had been killed quickly and humanely.
I want to mean something to somebody again. I want private jokes that reach back into the fabric of life and pull a thread from near the beginning of the bolt. I want history and hilarity wrapped up into something plush that will warm my chilled torso, knowing that more is being woven. And more and more and always more.
Georgia
Planes frighten me these days.
So now here I sit at Union Station on the ancient wooden benches, the waxy marble floors and high ceilings amplifying the pounding of everybody’s heels. I’m trying to read something that’s good for me, a book Sean left behind years ago, but I glance up at the board every thirty seconds to see if my train has arrived.
I’ve read the same paragraph ten times now.
And what did this Thomas Aquinas know about imitating Christ anyway? He was a monk! They’re not really tempted like the rest of us, are they? Walking around with heads bowed, hands folded in their sleeves, copying Scriptures, singing chants, leaving their wives behind in Baltimore while they cloister themselves from the world can’t possibly allow much space for sins of the body.
And am I really headed to Lexington?
I sat on these benches years ago waiting for my grandmother to come home from a train trip out west to see my aunt Bette, Mom’s youngest sibling, the mother of my cousin Fairly, before she had Fairly and moved back to Baltimore. She’s dead now too. Almost everyone is dead now.
Mom and I arrived at the station early on a sunny summer day, most likely in August, and I climbed all around these high-gloss benches, sliding longways across the tops, slipping down the curved wooden arms to land on the floor. They were the closest things to church pews I ever knew at the time, and even now there’s something sacred here in the idea of people traveling to places more important than where they find themselves.
I dig my fingernail into the varnish now as then.
We eventually explored the snack shop, where she bought me a small box of Nabisco chocolate chip cookies, the kind where the cookie on the box sported cat ears, face, and whiskers. Why do we remember these things? And how much would I pay for a box of them, eaten beside Mom, right now?
The slats on the board rotate, and I look up again. Yep, it’s here. The train to DC, then on to Chicago; then I’ll take a bus from Chicago to Louisville, then down to Lexington. Why I am doing this instead of flying for an hour is beyond me now. How silly can a woman be? So I drag my old suitcase across the floor, down the iron steps, and wait with strangers on the platform.
There’s nothing like riding on a train. I’ll admit they don’t travel along the scenic areas of the cities through which they speed, but more’s the charm. I wonder what it was like when hobos loitered near the tracks? when drunks lingered a few stops farther down the line, nothing to live for with the Depression and all? Something about the Depression has always intrigued me. These days, while we may not be deprived of material possessions with our nice cars and houses, we certainly are deprived in how we live among one another. We live in relational Hoovervilles, always waiting for the other person to do the reaching out.
I’m the perfect example.
But UG knows a little bit more about how to live than I do. Maybe I’ll get better at it in Lexington.
Bus stations disappoint me every single time. Here you long for something out of a movie: people bustling about with a full basket of business, an atmosphere of time gone by, when folks dressed up to travel, stored their food in iceboxes, and swept their front stoops every Saturday morning. But that’s the airports’ job these days. I hate it. The big beasts burp you out to the curb all the more quickly, providing no incentive to dillydally in the past.
Lexington hides under a mantilla of fog, and cars roll past me on the street, their passage sounding like zippers—up, down, up, down. Soon I find myself in a cab driven by a woman with short, spiky blond hair, leather wristbands, and tattoos. Middle twenties, I guess.
Grrr!
“Where to?”
“540 East Fourth Street.”
We’re on our way, and thank God, she’s not blasting her way along the streets as though someone bolted jet engines onto the car. I truly hate that. But then, this isn’t New York or anything, is it?
“Cool place you’re going to. You know the guy who lives there?” Her voice fills the space, deep and resonant, yet husky.
“My uncle lives there.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah.”
“Geoffrey Pfeiffer?”
“Yep.”
“Small world.”
“How do you know him?”
“Long story. Maybe for another day. Let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be driving this cab if not for him.”
“He got you the job?”
She barks out a laugh. “No! He kept me alive.”
Oh. We drive along, and I’m feeling more embarrassed than I probably should. “You lived here long?”
She nods. “All my life. Give or take a year here and there.”
“Are there a lot of people in Lexington who look like you? No offense.”
Her eyes crinkle in the rearview mirror. “What? The tough yet somewhat artistic type? None taken, by the way.”
“Yeah.” I laugh.
“There are some. Let’s just say I’ve found it works for me.”
“What do you do when you’re not driving a cab?”
“I act some. But I do radio voice-over work mostly. Oh, and I was in this really weird play last year. They had us all wear bright white, slather white greasepaint on our faces and hands, and jump around on a glaring white set. Blue lips too.”
“Sounds strange.”
“You said it. Especially for Kentucky. There’s a theater at the library that pretty much is anything goes. My favorite so far was Act Out’s Southern Baptists Sissies.”
I look out the window. “How come you never tried to make it in a bigger town
?”
“Who said I didn’t?”
“Was it bad?”
“Let’s just say I came home even less of a person than when I went. Seems to me that’s just backward.”
We’re in what seems like downtown now, old houses queued along the streets. No row houses like those in Baltimore. Most of these have small yards and a tree or two.
I tap the window. “Look at those long skinny houses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.”
“They’re shotgun shacks.”
“Huh?”
“They’re called that because you can stand in the front room and shoot a shotgun clear through to the back. The rooms are lined up one behind the other.”
“Ever been in one?”
“I live in one. There’s a bunch around the corner from your uncle’s house, on Ohio Street. They’re all over.”
“Cute little town.”
“Oh, wait till you walk around. Our route isn’t going through the nicer sections. There are some nice old sections. Maybe someday …”
Yeah, there’s always a someday tucked inside everyone, isn’t there? But maybe someday what? Tattoos and spiky blond hair won’t land her in a house in the nicer section, will it?
But what if some rich entrepreneur came along and got to know—
“I’m Georgia, by the way”
“Alex.”
—Alex for who she was inside, and said, “Don’t care about the hair. Don’t care about the tatts,” and whisked her off to his place on—
“What are some of the nicer streets?”
“West Second. Broadway. Gratz Park.”
—West Second, where her every need was met and she was loved just exactly for who she was? What if that happened?
Would she go?
I kind of think yes.
I’ve got to give my cousin Fairly credit for capturing a dream. She married an older guy, defying all conventions, because she really loved him. I haven’t seen her since before Hort died. I’m not exactly in any position to offer comfort or guidance.
And if she knew the truth about my relationship with Sean, why he actually left me for good, she’d probably disown me.
I guess I wouldn’t blame her.
Clarissa
The little girl pulls out a pad of paper and begins to color a picture. For Granddaddy Man. A few days ago, after he pushed her on the swing, he brought some hot chocolate outside in pretty blue-and-white mugs. He said, “Warm insides make cold outsides almost nice.”
She agreed.
They sat and drank their hot drinks at the picnic table near his kitchen door, and when Clarissa’s mom woke up and called to her, Granddaddy Man introduced himself and wow, was the mother different! “Of course Clarissa can come over and do crafts. She’s so lonely—her father doesn’t pay much attention to her, you know, and I’m working all the time, it seems.”
Granddaddy Man actually lets Clarissa use a penlike iron to write her name in wood!
He had to go to the doctor today, so she’s going to draw him a card while the mother screams at the father as he gets home.
“You can’t leave a five-year-old home alone so you can go prowling around.”
“I wasn’t prowling around, Phyllis.”
The little girl decides to get herself some milk before she starts the card.
“You must think I’m short a brick. I’m not an idiot.”
“I won’t leave her tomorrow. I just needed to get the oil changed. Leonard was probably home if she needed something.” Oh, Leonard. Leonard the Granddaddy Man. But he was at the doctor’s!
“And you couldn’t possibly have taken her along. Let me see the receipt.”
The father slams out of the house. The little girl sets her milk on the counter and tries to run up to her room, but the mother shoots out an arm, takes the little girl into her arms, and sits on the couch.
Reggie comes home from school. He’s the son of Phyllis’s brother Alan. Reggie is always telling Clarissa that he’s been here four more years than she has.
“You know I love Clarissa more than I love you, Reggie. I always wanted a little girl. She’s so pretty.”
The little girl squirms to get down; the mother’s arms constrict like a wire twist tie, tighter, tighter. She squirms more and feels the crack of the mother’s hand against her baby thigh. So the little girl doesn’t cry. The little girl stops moving.
She hears TV Mom’s car in the driveway but doesn’t dare to climb down. Leonard the Granddaddy Man will be glad to see her even if she doesn’t come over until tomorrow.
Georgia
I’m feeling jingly inside at seeing my uncle. The music I’ll hear, the restaurants we’ll visit, the down comforter, a thousand books lining his walls. His coffee and homemade rolls. If I wrote a composition about my uncle, I would have to compose at least three movements to reflect his various tones.
A composition? Who am I trying to kid? Those days are about as gone as boy bands.
Alex the cabby pulls over for a funeral procession, and I try to snatch a good look at the mourners’ faces as they pass us, but the sun glares off the windshields.
Funeral processions weigh more once you’ve buried someone you love.
I can hardly believe Gaylen Bishop grimly made his way off the planet almost two years ago. But I still turn on the news every once in a while and expect to see him, with Big Ben towering in the background.
“Big Ben’s not so big, Georgie,” he’d say when I was a child. I wish I’d had the guts to ask him to take me along.
Sometimes life throws something your way for which you had fully prepared. Or at least you think you did. But it’s not the nice soft lob you expected. It’s a fast pitch you can’t even see, let alone get a nice piece of. And your reaction feels so completely different; you shake your head, try to gather your feet beneath you, and pray you don’t drive into a tree some dark night when the temptation strikes.
What I suspected the night before I buried Dad came true; I never went back to the Grotto.
The thought of getting up in front of people, like my father did every day from various places around the globe, sped up my heart, weighed down my stomach, and clouded my vision until dread formed like dough inside of me, raised by my fears, punched down by the little hope remaining, and raised again by my fears.
How could I do that? Just get up and … play? Who really wants to listen to some half-baked church pianist-organist playing the same old things every year? And as much as I liked “Shout to the Lord” when I first heard it, who can wallow in that kind of predictability, world without end amen? Why isn’t a jazz waltz tempo heartily embraced by the believing masses? It is without a doubt the most joyful tempo ever created.
Fairly
We couldn’t afford extracurricular lessons, so in ninth grade I saved up babysitting money to enroll in a furniture-reupholstering class at the community college. I was hooked.
So, I admit it. The feel of the fabric, the curve of the wood, the smell of it all, well, call me a drip or what have you, but I kept saying to myself, “I love furniture. I love furniture!” And soon I was sketching my own designs, checking out scads of books from the library. Great, square, slick books on modern design ushered me through the gates of heaven, and I began sketching on everything I could, searching to recreate the peacefulness those pictures allowed my soul to find. Such simplicity, such cleanliness, such order.
Naturally, Dad pronounced it fabulous. “A designer in the family. Pretty soon you’ll be designing for Knoll!”
And I understood what he meant! I felt so proud.
Mom sparkled, delighted.
So off I went to Parsons in fabulous New York City and learned everything my ultrahip professors threw my way, gathering it to me like ripe peaches. My taste became so discriminating, I realized the unremarkable qualities of my own creations, something I’ve found rather amusing since. I assembled roomfuls of others’ brilliance, sometimes doing a little design dall
iance of my own when something needed to be built on-site. And fresh out of school I went to work for a communications company, designing executive spaces and even apartments for employees coming in from around the globe. The job provided me with a budget far beyond anything I’d imagined.
It wasn’t until after Hort died that I realized I was a good bloodhound, the fresh scent of a rare find easily reaching my nose. Being in on the kill at an auction house or (less frequently, but generating five times the buzz) walking by a thrift shop and seeing a Karuselli chair for forty dollars made every day feel like I’d been handed back a math test with “A+ 100%” scrawled across the top.
A better feeling than anything Braden’s ever offered.
My life has seemed set for so long.
And I do like it that way, really. I subconsciously vowed to live the grand life when I sat down in my first Egg chair—tenth grade, Jocelyn’s Finds: A Rare Furniture Place, Fells Point. I remember the cans and cans of corned-beef hash Dad fried up for supper, pretending it was ambrosia. I remember going to the Goodwill and praying I wasn’t picking out something one of the upperclassmen’s mothers had donated. I remember redoing them with different buttons or trim or tie-dye or reconstructing them altogether just to make sure no one recognized them for the castoffs they were.
Oh yes, Bette and Rodney were great parents, but a dollar only stretches so far, doesn’t it? And they lived high on the hog of good deeds. I don’t begrudge them all they stood for, and I’m not angry because of their sacrifices to make the world a little more just and a lot more beautiful. But I paid my price.
My recent trip to London was brilliant.
Maybe I’ve bolstered up enough fortitude to fly down to Kentucky. Won’t Uncle G be surprised?
“Solo!” I called from my desk in my den. “Are you in need of a coffee break as much as I am?”
“Yes, I am!” he called back.
“I’ll make us some!”
“Oh no, no, no. Let me!”
I can’t make a good coffee to save my life.
He appeared five minutes later, two cappuccino cups in hand.
I pointed to the Eames leather couch. “Have a seat.” And I sat on the other end.
He took a sip. “There’s nothing like a coffee.”
