I have some things of hers. Piano books I can’t play. Her metronome. Her collection of Lee jean labels, her old Seventeens, her Lives of Girls and Women, and her Lady Schick. My dad and I used to have heart attacks when the phone rang but not quite as much any more. We’ve become a little sluggish. The phone hardly ever rings. I mentioned that fact once to Ray and he said that didn’t mean people weren’t calling us.
I think that is exactly what it means, Dad, I told him. I worried that he was hearing voices. Then I worried that I wasn’t hearing voices.
One weekend, we were both sick with the flu, we lay around the house the entire time hardly moving, hardly talking, and the phone didn’t ring except for once on Sunday evening and it sounded like an alarm and Ray said: Whoah, sensory overload. He said I laughed too hard at that one, that my reaction discouraged him from future attempts at humour because I’d either (a) built him up to a standard where he’d be too paralyzed to perform for fear of failure, or (b) been insincere. He told me that he thought my laughter was tinged with desperation. That I so lacked stimulation that any little thing would set me off inappropriately.
Hey, I said, you’re a lot of fun. I love the way you don’t analyze simple moments to death and he said what simple moments. And then, the way he does after confirming that life really is all about pain and suffering, he cheered up. He spun a disc. He played table football with me. He polished his shoes. He turned up the volume on Hymn Sing.
After Tash and Trudie left, The Mouth of Darkness came over to pray with us and told us we couldn’t live in crisis forever. Right Nomi? he said.
I wanted to say no, I thought I could with very little effort. He stuck his arm out and said shake? It was like putting my hand into a bowl of warm mashed potatoes or a freshly pissed diaper. I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to.
He slapped my dad on the back and my dad’s face froze into a grimace he’d been trying to pass off as a jocular grin, the manly type.
Well, he said, I need to check the level of softener salt in my tank but I do appreciate your visit that’s for sure.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t even a lie. My dad did need to check things like water softener the way other people needed blood transfusions. He checked and double-checked things all the time. He was the kind of person who secretly took his pulse at various points throughout the day. Two fingers held flat on the inside of his wrist. Yes, hmm, still here, well. I had mixed feelings about it. Oh, it was disconcerting, yes. Often instead of hello he’d say to me: Oh good, you’re here. The gap between our feelings, his and mine, on that particular point was immeasurable. But again, I was never entirely sure what he meant by here.
I like to sit on my driveway and push the melting asphalt around with my fingers. Sometimes I buy bags of little fake seashells and stick them in there. I like the cracking sound when a car drives over them. I can imagine I’m in some Latin American capital where they celebrate good things with random gunfire.
My dad came riding up on his Red Glider and said what are the youth of today up to, and I said how could I possibly know the answer to that question.
Well, he said. He reached into his pocket and then held his hand out to me and said here, have some chalk. It resembled a cigarette. When I was a kid I ate chalk and clay and sand, if it were a fine grain. I was one of those people. I only ate white chalk. There was so much of it around the house. I tried the coloured stuff but it had an oily taste. I also tried paper, but didn’t enjoy it.
My dad gazed into the neighbour’s yard. Looks like the little girl’s got herself a new two-wheeler, he said.
We say bicycle now, Dad, I said. Or, sometimes, bike. He put the front tire of his Red Glider into a concrete stand by the garage, took the pant clip off his leg and saluted me before going into the house. I had never seen him salute before. Were we saluting now? Was this some new playful thing we were doing now? God, Ray deserves a better daughter than me. He deserves Laura Ingalls Wilder saluting him back exuberantly, clicking her heels even, and saying oh, Father, and gazing at him the way a daughter should. I took the chalk and wrote in tiny, tiny letters on the driveway: Dad, don’t think I’m not saluting you when I’m not saluting you. And then I scuffed it out with my foot before anybody would see it.
I used almost the entire length of the driveway to write my favourite quote in chalk. LIFE BEING WHAT IT IS, ONE DREAMS OF REVENGE. It’s by Gauguin.
My neighbour came out to look at it. She’s an unhappy housewife with the flattest ass I’ve ever seen. Swaths of fabric allocated for a person’s butt billow emptily around hers like a sail. She walked slowly up the driveway, reading out loud in a voice like a little kid just learning how to. Then she said Go Gwin, eh? I said Gauguin. She asked me how I would feel living in a house with all primary colours. I said I didn’t know. She said seriously, how would you feel, so I said not great I guess. Then she folded her arms and looked at me and said: It. Sucks. Bag. Really, I asked. That bad? Hey, she said, where’re you from? Crazyville? I smiled and nodded. What do you call those colours, she asked me. She was pointing at our house. My mother called them salmon and sky, I said. Tash called them flesh and vein. She hated them. Well, said my neighbour, what do you call them? I looked at my house and shrugged. I don’t know, I said. I’ve never thought about it. She left and I surveyed my chalk work. I realized I enjoyed the sound of my favourite quote more than anything.
I never dreamed of revenge.
I sat on the driveway pushing tar into the cracks until I was in a shadow I couldn’t move out of. I walked to Abe’s Hill, the big pile of dirt on the edge of town named after the mayor, and smoked a Sweet Cap and watched the dusk move in and the lights come on in the faraway city. The magical kingdom.
The lights of the city came on, slowly at first, and then faster, like they were giving in, like the people in charge of turning on the lights were thinking all right already, it’s dark, let’s just get this night over with.
When I got home I found a book on my crate next to my bed. It was The Screwtape Letters. My dad had written something inside it. For Nomi, that it may inspire, love Dad. I thought: Letters from Satan?
My dad’s favourite writers were C.S. Lewis and W.B. Yeats. He said they were deft wordsmiths. He once told me he enjoyed the sensation of being pulled along by the mysterious fullness of initials. I whispered thanks Dad and then stared at my Christina’s World poster.
I lay on my bed thinking about Travis, about his large-pored green hands and his favourite combinations and the way he always reminded me to signal when I turned. Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you’re going. But there’s nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.
I put on Tash’s Keith Jarrett record and watched the needle wobble around and around, six inches from my head. I liked the way he moaned when he played the piano. I decided to like anybody who would allow their moans to be taped and distributed to the world. I wanted the world to hear my moans, I thought. And then realized that I would have to also learn how to play an instrument brilliantly. Wake up to the fact, I said out loud. I don’t know why. I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.
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