Home: Part 13

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Do not expect anything, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

January 1982

 
The rain began the day after our wedding, and it continued for two weeks. Our small apartment often seemed more like a cave than a home: dark, musty. It was only during this type of weather that my leg sometimes bothered me, though neither I nor anyone else could explain why. My parents and assorted doctors attributed it to "growing pains" when I was young. "There's nothing there to grow," I once said to my father after one visit to a doctor.

"Maybe you're dancing too much when I'm not home," Kathy said one night as we ate dinner at a small Formica table beside the window in the kitchen. 

"Yes, dancing," I said. "Mrs. Miller would love that, wouldn't she?" Mrs. Miller, who lived in the apartment beneath us, seemed especially sensitive to even the slightest of sounds or vibrations above her. After she complained numerous times to our patient landlord, Mr. Baxter, Kathy and I had learned to be as soft-footed as we possibly could. "She's been here a long time," Mr. Baxter told us.

"It's my fault, you know," my father told me after I'd gotten fitted for a new prosthetic. We were driving home from the clinic. It must have been early spring, because I remember that the snow on the ground seemed tired of being there: dirty, crusty on top, melting at the bottom.

"What is?" I asked.

"The leg."

"Your fault?"

"My genetics. Or my bad ones. Bad genes. My dad's brother, your great uncle Rick, had a left hand that was little more than a claw. From birth."

I had never considered actually blaming anyone for my leg, though I was getting to an age when I felt like I wanted to blame someone. Maybe my dad foresaw that and felt like he had to say something. Years later I would feel my own guilt as I thought of how he must have carried that burden.

"It's just half a leg," I said. "I've been okay without it."

So, during those two weeks of rain, I limped more than usual. Kathy would massage my thigh hoping to help. "You're strong to put up with this," she said as we lay in bed.

"No," I said. "I am not strong. I'm just used to it."

"I think you are strong. You've put up with this for a long time. I'm sure it wasn't always easy."

"My parents didn't coddle me," I said. "They mocked me when I complained. They threw things at me when I fell down. My sister would hide my crutches when I was bouncing around on one."

Kathy laughed. Even in the dark apartment I thought I could see her eyes as we listened to the rain's tattoo. "You have such a cruel family!"

"Assholes, each and every one of them," I said. "But I forgive them now. I'm a better man."

"You're a fucking saint!" she said.

And we lay there in the darkness, and the rain continued.

Home: Part 12

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Do not expect anything, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

January 1982

 
On our wedding night, which we spent in a Radisson Hotel, Kathy and celebrated with room service and small bottles of liquor taken from the room's courtesy bar. "This is for getting married," Kathy said as she handed me the bottle of Smirnoff. "And the Jim Beam is for my birthday. I'll drink this." It was a simple celebration. I liked that about her: a tendency toward understatement. We lay in bed and kept the television on all night, though at some point all we could watch was visual static or test patterns. 

In the morning: a Continental breakfast that Kathy had ordered while I was still asleep. I awoke to her sitting on the side of the bed. She was staring down at me, smiling.

"You're pretty when you sleep," she said.

"Pretty?"

"Yeah. Pretty." She kissed me.

I liked looking at her and thought I could do it forever. Her eyes, what had first attracted me to her, were almost gray and perfectly symmetrical. "I'm not sure I want to be 'pretty.'"

"Oh, men can be pretty. Sit up." She handed me a cup of coffee after I'd arranged the pillows as a backrest. "Don't spill. It's hot."

"I like being spoiled," I said. The cup was close enough to my bare chest that I could feel the coffee's warmth.

She lifted her own cup and touched it against mine. "To us," she said.
"To us."

Home: Part 11

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Do not expect anything, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

January 1958 

My father hit my mother only once, as far as I know. He didn't drink, but he was prone to brooding silences that occasionally ended just at the edge of violence. With me, over the course of my youth he crossed that edge more often than I ever revealed. 

Superman ended just before dinner time, just after my father returned home from the Sears Roebuck where he was currently in charge of major appliances. He enjoyed his job, I always believed, and he seemed to enjoy taking me to work with him on weekends when he went in early to "get things in order." At the table that night, though, he was happy about nothing: not the casserole, not the biscuits, not the canned green beans. Cindy and I sat on one side of the table, our parents on the other. Tiger was under the table, and my father kicked at the dog with enough force that Tiger cried out and scrambled out of the room. 

"That's nice," my mother said without emotion.

My father didn't say a word. I saw his arm flash out, the fork slipping from his fingers and clanging against the wall. Then, the sound of flesh hitting flesh, and something connecting with something less hard. My mother's head jerked back, and she made a sound not unlike Tiger's when my father had kicked him. I didn't know what to do. Beneath the table, Cindy's hand squeezed my knee. My mother's upper lip had started to drip blood, and she blinked her eyes as if to make sense of it all. My father's hand was now a fist, and he looked down at it where it lay on the table. My mother reached into her mouth and pulled out half of a tooth. She set it on my father's plate, wiped her mouth with a napkin, then rose from her chair and left the room.

I suppose it was a time when men thought they could--or maybe actually should--do such things without fear. They could kick dogs, they could hit women, and who even in such a small town would care? The neighbors and friends would know, but nobody who really mattered.

"Finish eating," my father said. "Your mother works hard feeding you two."

For years afterward, whenever my parents argued, I sensed that my father had become afraid--not of my mother, but of what he might do. If voices became loud, my mother would raise her upper lip to display what he had done, perhaps mocking him or daring him to strike again. He was always the first to back away from the argument, throwing up his hands and announcing, "I guess that's just the way it is, then."

Sleepless in bed that night I listened to Tiger whimper and snore, and I wondered what world he was in. My bed was just beneath the window, and toward dawn I finally rested my chin on the sill. I could smell snow. Tiger bit at his paw, then lay beside me and put his head beside mine. He must have smelled more than snow. I heard footsteps in the hallway: my father getting ready to leave for work. A few minutes later I watched as he dusted light snow off the car, then backed slowly into the street and turned toward the highway. The car's tires crunched against deeper snow. When he was out of view, I closed the window and settled into my bed. My palm hurt where half of my mother's tooth pressed into my skin.

Home: Part 10

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Do not expect anything, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

July 1974

 
I awoke. For a moment I did not remember that I was inside the airplane. My forehead was wet with perspiration, and I caught vestiges of a dream in which I was lost in Subic City, trying to find my way back to the hotel before curfew as the traffic closed in around me. I settled in my seat. Through the window I could see little more than darkness and the lights on the wing. 

I thought about Narcie. I had told her that I would return soon, and that I would find her somehow. I suddenly was not convinced that I'd been lying to her. She had heard lies from many men before, so she probably knew better than I did about what about me was true. 

Unbuckling my seat-belt, I slid out of my row of seats and stood. Nearly everyone on the plane seemed to be sleeping. Inside the lavatory I wiped my forehead and face with a damp paper towel and stood with my eyes closed for a moment as my legs adjusted to the plane's motion. When I got back to my seat, I closed my eyes and tried unsuccessfully to relax into sleep. When I had changed planes in Honolulu, I had sat at the bar for nearly two hours after getting through Customs. From the table I had found a seat near a window, I could see planes landing and lifting off, and for a brief moment considered not boarding my flight to San Francisco but instead staying in Hawaii for a while. I have always been somewhat prone to loneliness, even among friends and family, and the fatigue of travel often exacerbated the feeling. There were, really, few reasons to head home, and the sequence of martinis I was enjoying at the bar made things that much worse.

Now, somewhere over the Pacific between Hawaii and California, I leaned my head against the plane's bulkhead and stared out the window. Someone a few rows ahead of me snored softly. A stewardess stopped in the aisle. "Do you need anything, Sir?" she asked. 

I liked her well-trained smile. "Perhaps some water, please," I said.

"I'll be right back." She headed toward the rear of the plane. When she returned, she handed me a cup of cool water.

"Thank-you," I said.

"My pleasure." Then she was gone, walking away from me.

Intermission

What follows is commentary on the work of fiction (Home). This is mainly filler because there isn't much else going on, fiction-wise.



So far, in nine segments, Home is proving to be a challenge and is perhaps a bit too ambitious for someone of my abilities. As usual--and to the detriment of the work itself, I believe--I have worked without either a plan or a net. Spread out over the decades, the story is still trying to figure out where it is going and how it will end. The characters, too, are trying to find how they fit in and who they are. In the latest segment, which takes place on Thanksgiving Day, a few characters introduce themselves, and the relevance of the ending (dialogue, really) started to become clear to me a few days after those sentences were written, while I was riding my bike somewhere I didn't have to worry about navigating through traffic. They were actually written when I was alone in the silence of a cabin in Northern California, where silence is both good and welcome.

The way the work's timeline is developing, though, makes me realize that I'm going to have to start keeping notes not only about what's been written, but what will be written. Rather than developing literary flashbacks, I'm trying to keep each storyline simply play out across time until they finally come together at the end. 

More intermissions to follow, I'm sure.