by Will Walton
He had my hand trapped, so I tried to use the other. He squeezed my hips. “Easy, easy,” I said.
“You are so hot, Avery
Fowell.” He kissed
me.
Pal had me make him a playlist once. That’s like a collection of songs.
(it’s an older crowd, by and large, which is why I explain)
He loves Beyoncé
(awkward slip)
(the present tense)
loved
(even more awkward)
I notice headlights from Gia’s car pulling in, to drop Mom off.
“Do you need to go?”
“Nah, Mom will just assume I’m over here with you.”
“No, I mean, sorry, Luca, but I think you should go because Mom might need to come talk to me or something. Like, it might be better if you’re not here.”
“Oh, I’ve got you. I understand, of course.” He left like he came. Through the window.
Down the hallway, the shower came on. I was surprised she didn’t come talk to me immediately. At least to bring me my pain meds, which were somewhere. In the kitchen maybe? But maybe she thought, because my light was off, I was asleep.
I wouldn’t call out for her. I decided this could be a hurt I could use later in life, on a beach, somewhere. Maybe a retreat. If she didn’t bring me the pain meds from the kitchen. The
time my mom, an alcoholic, crashed our car and injured me. Forgot to bring my pain meds, how I lay awake all night hurting.
The bad news: I lay awake all night hurting. Someone knocking on the door, next morning—“Ave, are you decent?” It was Luca. He was joking.
“Yeah.”
When he opened the door and walked in, his mouth fell open. “Ave, you don’t look good. Are you okay?”
“Pain pill.”
He ran to go get it.
“Mom!” He was calling out. For Gia. For his mom, not mine. He got the pain pill. When he came back in and I took the pill and drank water, he started rubbing my shoulders.
“You’re here,” he said, “you’re right here,” as though he were tugging me back from somewhere. They had brought me a wheelchair. Gia borrowed it from their church. No deadline to return it, but like the books of poems, it would have to be returned, eventually.
It had a note tied to the arm: Get better soon, probably left for a previous user.
Luca helped me get in, to stretch my leg out. Gia was making breakfast in the kitchen. Mom was awake now. “Gia, please. You’re helping too much.”
“Oh hush, you know those hens make eggs faster than we can eat them. Get a cup of coffee, sit down.”
Luca pushed me by her. “Morning, Mom,” I said.
“Morning, Kris.”
“Oh good, Saint Luca’s here too—it’s a party! Say, how about we cut the charity act short for the moment, y’all, and just leave your donations in the offering plate on the way out.”
Mom always had a barb ready.
Gia cracked an egg against the frying pan and a deep yellow
yolk slid out. “Bye,” she said. We were ungrateful. Luca
whispered, “I had better go too,” and he followed her out.
Mom grabbed a wooden spoon and stirred. Then she cracked another egg. The eggs were small and brown with dark freckles. She cracked another. It didn’t make any sense. Everyone was leaving. Who was eating?
I saw Gia on the sidewalk through the kitchen window, speaking to Luca. He turned back to look at me, through the window.
I knew what was happening. A tattling.
Gia crossed the street to Pal and Babs’s house. Babs answered the door and folded her arms. They stood there talking a while.
“Pal!” Babs called. I saw the shape of her mouth. (“Pow!”) It wouldn’t end well. I pushed, wheels forward. Rode across the linoleum. “Bye.” I mimicked Gia. Mom broke ice from the ice tray into a glass and pretended she didn’t hear me. A knock came to the door; she wouldn’t hear that either. Turned on the garbage disposal. Pal was knocking. She knew and I knew, and she wouldn’t hear it.
“Kris! Kris! Open this door!”
Meanwhile, at the bathroom door, I was thinking, I got this.
Pal broke through the screen door of the back porch: The back door was unlocked, so that’s how he got inside. He whisked past the bathroom door and didn’t see me. In the kitchen Mom slammed the door to the dishwasher, which she one time, drunk, fell into:
Afterward, tiny injury marks had dotted her legs—“Get out, Dad.”
“Krissanne, what is going on?”
“You literally broke into my house, Dad, oh my God. Look at my screen!”
“Krissanne, you cannot do this anymore!”
“Oh, glass houses, Dad!”
Because Pal used to be a drinker too.
(“used to be,” “a drinker”)
Especially in the days after my grandmother died.
It had gotten to be a problem.
Mom marched past the bathroom and didn’t see me. When Pal followed her: He saw me.
I had toppled the wheelchair by accident to a slant against the sink, and it jammed inside the doorway. “Partner, what happened?” I hadn’t peed myself, so that was lucky, but it embarrassed me how he lifted me. Like I was a kid, setting me on the toilet seat: degrading:
so that I couldn’t be grateful, could only be hurt. (Sorry, Pal.) I asked him to
leave. He kicked the wheelchair. “Piece of crap.”
“It was my fault,” I said, “not the chair’s.” Meanwhile Mom was calling out for us. She walked right past the bathroom again—
“Where did you go?”
“We’re in here,” Pal called. “Just a minute!” But she stepped inside the doorway anyway.
“Mom, please! Some privacy!”
And so then she and I were shouting, and meanwhile I was on the commode, not because I was using it, but because I couldn’t get up. “You-do-not-tell-me-what-to-do.” She clapped it out. It had the same cadence as when you read Green Eggs and Ham. It morphed into something like a pep rally chant: “I am the mother, I am the mother, I am the mother.” And it worked in the way some sad stories work, if I tell them from far enough away. I can distort them and accent the absurd. I can spin them sort of funny. So I took myself out of it, enough that I could see it, see it more than feel it, to make it funny. So I could laugh at her, right in her face. The sharpest tool I had. The cruelest thing I knew to do. She was already behind me—I was exiting the scene. For a moment I had known her better. How to hurt her worse than she could anticipate. It was the line at the end of the prayer where the pastor rumbles, “Lord, if we love You, let us cry out—” and the whole congregation applauds, “—amen!”
It was a lot like last time. Babs brought over dinner for us, which she and I ate in my room, while Mom and Pal had a serious talk in the kitchen. Babs brought a meat-heavy Southern meal this time, so I was only eating potato salad. “You need protein, Avery. You need meat.” But we didn’t eat meat, neither Mom nor I, and Babs knew that. End of story. Then she started in on The High Tides, Low Tides Retreat:
“You know, it gets its name from a Bob Marley song. They believe in spending time outdoors, no phones. It sounds exactly like the kind of thing she will love, which doesn’t mean it’s cheap, unfortunately, but …”
Babs had canceled a cruise, she told me, so that I could come live with them while Mom was gone: just for a month or so … I was tuning her out, to a song Sia wrote but didn’t record.
“We’ll put you up inside the garden room” … “Shine bright like a diamond,” I was humming … “Shine bright like a—”
“Want me to put some music on for you, Avery?” She
put her hand on my shoulder. Like we were on that beach at The High Tides, Low Tides Retreat: that
video: pixels & sand: water & sun: & people: all white, white so terribly: big font & bad sky.
1.
/>
Today
is the day!
Grainy: sad:
2.
I pull on dress beads
some bracelets she never wore
and scarf I one time will wear to
one art school or another &
I will put on heels some rouge
well maybe no rouge.
Wait a second.
This is not my gay fairy-tale.
This bathroom is bare!
Who will I be today when she left me
so practically
NOTHING
to
work with!
That day, we checked our horoscopes for the month of June. Mom’s said hers was a bad month for travel; mine said it was a good month to make friends. We both laughed.
On the front lawn: saying goodbye, she nearly toppled me, hugging me. I was propped up by crutches. This is traumatic for both of us, I thought. “Kris, be careful,” Pal said, and I wished he hadn’t. It was fine. Why put it in her head that she can’t even say goodbye right?
When they were gone I lowered myself into the flowerbed. Babs sat next to me. The pine straw between us dead enough to be ash.
“Has she ever flown before? Mom?
“Much less by herself?”
“She will be fine, sweet Avery,” Babs said. “I promise.
“I changed the sheets inside the garden room. Best room in the house, and believe me I know. It’s the only one you can’t hear Pal snoring from.”
But I hated the garden room. It was dank and always dark, and it creeped me out, and it smelled bad.
I said thanks, anyway.
3.
Oh this one is more like it
Chanel No. 5 oh yes, oh please
and flower petals to dry my
eyes, oh flowers,
you are
FAKE!
Tell me:
in whose synthetic
felt
cloth
dream
DO YOU BELONG?
4.
In order to aid in prolonging the life spans of: copper plants, dead nettle, yesterday-today-and-tomorrow plants, &c.,
I must keep the shade drawn in the garden room for every 2.5hr/3.
Every three hours in the garden room, I was allowed to un-draw the heavy terry-cloth shade, purple. For only one half hour. It took me a while, but I got the gist.
I had a book light.
“No one’s making you stay cooped up in here, partner,” Pal said. Oh okay, so maybe it was a tactic! Maybe they were trying to smoke me out of there or something. Get me walking, exercising my knee. The threat of “carbon, not monoxide, poisoning”—crafty!
“You seem a little agro,” Luca said one day. “No offense.” But I’d been reading the Plath and the Sexton, so, “I’m just in a weird headspace,” I said, “I’m sorry.” He had brought me some quinoa and kale and a new mix: Songs About, But Not Commonly Played At, Weddings:
Tracks: 1. “Death of an Interior Decorator,” Death Cab for Cutie, 2. “Speak Now,” Taylor Swift, 3. “Today,” Joshua Radin, 4. “Wedding Bells,” Coldplay, 5. “White Wedding,” Billy Idol, 6. “Wedding Song,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It was short, so I could tell he’d made it in a hurry.
“Thank you, Luca.” We didn’t kiss. I worried something was off. When Pal came in later, he asked what my book was about—Ariel by Plath.
“Well, there is a lot in it about being a mom and being sick with depression and—” I realized I should have just said “hooks” and “tulips”; I tried to recover.
“Honestly, it’s mostly about hooks and tulips. That’s basically it.”
“Plenty of those outside. Hooks in the shop, tulips in the garden. Just right outside—”
5.
“Let’s walk to the shop, get some vitamin D.”
“I’ll do it for you, Pal. Won’t do it for me.”
“You really think I can make it all the way to the shop?”
“I sure do.”
“But it’s all the way across the yard! And it’s down a hill!”
“You can do it, partner. Just one step at a time.”
Babs said, “One … Pal, are you helping me?”
“Yes.”
“Two.”
They were little brick steps.
“Three.”
I could have sworn there were only four of them.
But there were actually five.
“Fi—”
I went swinging myself over that last step like it was the ground.
“Partner!”
“Avery!”
(crunch)
(crunch, crunch)
(someone chewing a mint in here)
(who chews a mint at a funeral?)
I think Pal liked pop music because it was fun to listen to, and it was an escape—Pal went through some dark emotional times as y’all know. He lost his wife to cancer. He had periodic health troubles. Of course he didn’t only like pop music. He also liked jazz and blues and soul. He had depth. His favorite musicians were John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. He loved B.B. King and Elvis. He loved Donny Hathaway. He loved Roberta Flack. He loved music and fishing, and he liked movies. His favorite movies were The Searchers and Rebel Without a Cause, both of which he showed me when I was fairly young, maybe too young
(people laugh)
and which opened up whole new worlds to me.
His favorite books were A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean and The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton. The Compleat Angler was written in the eighteenth century, and is about making the discovery that you’re never alone.
A River Runs Through It is about the depth of an individual’s love for his family, and all of the complications that come from such a deep love.
Pal loved his family. He loved
(I take a breath)
my mom and me
(breath)
and since I can’t sing any of the songs I’ve mentioned, and since it wouldn’t be worth it to summarize any of his favorite movies or books any further, and since I don’t know very much about fishing, I’m going to share a poem that Pal showed me.
A scuppernong vine woven on a thin metal wire stretched from the roof of the back porch to the roof of Pal’s shop. Make a zip line. Easy. Take a rolling pin, pass it over the top, grip down, drop, roll, and fly.
I asked if I could go back to the pain pill for the night.
Me: “Also, what am I crushing?”
Babs: “Some impatiens.”
Me: “I’m sorry.”
Pal: “We’ve got extra-strength Tylenol. You can have that. How’s that sound?”
Me: “
It sounds great, Pal.”
Babs: “Avery, do not be sarcastic with your grandpa. He doesn’t get it.”
Me: “I’m sorry about your impatiens, Babs.”
We were all pumping adrenaline. They picked me up. Set me back in the wheelchair. A sudden shock. Took my breath away. Pal wheeled me to the garden room. “A tiny extra bit of vitamin D for you anyway, huh?”
He was trying to make peace. He sat down in the metal chair next to the open bag of topsoil. The chair joints squeaked. Blue tarp lining the floor rattled.
“You know, I’ve been trying to remember this poem I loved, used to love, probably. Would still love, about a fish. But I just can’t seem to—”
“Do you remember who wrote it?”
“I can’t. I might have to go look it up on the computer.”
It’s called “The Fish.” It was written by the poet Elizabeth Bishop.
(one nod of recognition—Ms. Poss)
Pal loved this poem.
Pal returned later with the poem. He had printed it out.
“Now read this and tell me this ain’t a great poem.” He set it on the bedside table, beside a fern.
6.
“Your last ibuprofen,” Babs said before bed. “It’s bad for your liver.” So I dreamed in several ways about my body failing.
In one dream, I was at the supermarket and noticed some of the meat there was my own. I woke up.
7.
Sylvia Plath was in the room with me. She put a finger to her lips. Help me, she said, so I got out of bed.
She offered me a roll of duct tape. We need to seal the doors, she said. We don’t want what’s in to get out; what’s more, we don’t want what’s out to get in!
Why? I asked. What’s out there?
Tulips, she said. Lots of them, and believe me, I know what it’s like to be trapped inside a room
