“What are you so happy about? Thinking of your grandchildren with the twelve toes?”
She doesn’t flinch. An iron woman.
When I close my eyes, which is rarely, I see our daughter when she was fourteen years old, with skin just beginning to go pimply and no expression yet on her face. I see her walking up to Sadie and asking her what she should do with her life now she’s filling out, and my darling Sadie, my life’s mate, telling her why not marry a freak; you got to be a beauty to find a man here, but on Mars you shouldn’t know from so many fish. “I knew I could count on you, Mama,” she says, and goes ahead and marries a plant with legs.
Things go on like this—impossible—for months. I lose twenty pounds, my nerves, three teeth and I’m on the verge of losing Sadie, when one day the mailchute goes ding-dong and it’s a letter from my late daughter. I take it by the tips of two fingers and bring it in to where my wife is punching ingredients for the gravy I won’t eat tonight.
“It’s a communication from one of your relatives.”
“Oh-oh-oh.” My wife makes a grab for it, meanwhile punching CREAM-TOMATO-SAUCE-BEEF DRIPPINGS. No wonder I have no appetite.
“I’ll give it to you on one condition only,” I tell her, holding it out of her trembling reach. “Take it into the bedroom and read it to yourself. Don’t even move your lips for once; I don’t want to know. If she’s God forbid dead, I’ll send him a sympathy card.”
Sadie has a variety of expressions but the one thing they have in common is they all wish me misfortune in my present and future life.
While she’s reading the letter I find suddenly I have nothing to do. The magazines I read already. Breakfast I ate (like a bird). I’m all dressed to go out if I felt like, but there’s nothing outside I don’t have inside. Frankly, I don’t feel like myself—I’m nervous. I say a lot of things I don’t really intend and now maybe this letter comes to tell me I’ve got to pay for my meanness. Maybe she got sick up there; God knows what they eat, the kind of water they drink, the creatures they run around with. Not wanting to think about it too much, I go over to my chair and turn it on to brisk massage. It doesn’t take long till I’m dreaming (fitfully).
I’m someplace surrounded by sand, sitting in a baby’s crib and bouncing a diapered kangaroo on my knee. It gurgles up at me and calls me grandpa and I don’t know what I should do. I don’t want to hurt its feelings, but if I’m a grandpa to a kangaroo, I want no part of it; I only want it should go away. I pull out a dime from my pocket and put it into its pouch. The pouch is full of tiny insects which bite my fingers. I wake up in a sweat.
“Sadie! Are you reading, or rearranging the sentences? Bring it in here and I’ll see what she wants. If it’s a divorce, I know a lawyer.”
Sadie comes into the room with her I-told-you-so waddle and gives me a small wet kiss on the cheek—a gold star for acting like a mensch. So I start to read it, in a loud monotone so she shouldn’t get the impression I give a damn:
“Dear Daddy, I’m sorry for not writing sooner. I suppose I wanted to give you a chance to simmer down first.” (Ingrate! Does the sun simmer down?) “I know it would have been inconvenient for you to come to the wedding, but Mor and I hoped you would maybe send us a letter just to let us know you’re okay and still love me, in spite of everything.”
Right at this point I feel a hot sigh followed by a short but wrenching moan.
“Sadie, get away from my neck. I’m warning you….”
Her eyes are going flick-a-fleck over my shoulder, from the piece of paper I’m holding to my face, back to the page, flick-a-fleck, flick-a-fleck.
“All right, already,” she shoo-shoos me. “I read it, I know what’s in it. Now it’s your turn to see what kind of a lousy father you turned out to be.” And she waddles back into the bedroom, shutting the door extra careful, like she’s handling a piece of snow-white velvet.
When I’m certain she’s gone, I sit myself down on the slab of woven dental floss my wife calls a couch and press a button on the arm that reads SEMI-CL.: FELDMAN TO FRIML. The music starts to slither out from the speaker under my left armpit. The right speaker is dead and buried and the long narrow one at the base years ago got drowned from the dog, who to this day hasn’t learned to control himself when he hears “Desert Song.”
This time I’m lucky; it’s a piece by Feldman that comes on. I continue to read, calmed by the music.
“I might as well get to the point, Papa, because for all I know you’re so mad you tore up this letter without even reading it. The point is that Mor and I are going to have a baby. Please, please don’t throw this into the disintegrator. It’s due in July, which gives you over three months to plan the trip up here. We have a lovely house, with a guest room that you and Mama can stay in for as long as you want.”
I have to stop here to interject a couple of questions, since my daughter never had a head for logic and it’s my strong point.
First of all, if she were in front of me in person right now I would ask right off what means “Mor and I are going to have a baby.” Which? Or both? The second thing is, when she refers to it as “it” is she being literal or just uncertain? And just one more thing and then I’m through for good: Just how lovely can a guest room be that has all the air piped in and you can’t even see the sky or take a walk on the grass because there is no grass, only simulated this and substituted that?
All the above notwithstanding, I continue to read:
“By the way, Papa, there’s something I’m not sure you understand. Mor, you may or may not know, is as human as you and me, in all the important ways—and frankly a bit more intelligent.”
I put down the letter for a minute just to give the goosebumps a chance to fly out of my stomach ulcers before I go on with her love and best and kisses and hopes for seeing us soon, Lorinda.
I don’t know how she manages it, but the second I’m finished, Sadie is out of the bedroom and breathing hard.
“Well, do I start packing or do I start packing? And when I start packing, do I pack for us or do I pack for me?”
“Never. I should die three thousand deaths, each one with a worse prognosis.”
It’s a shame a company like Interplanetary Aviation can’t afford, with the fares they charge, to give you a comfortable seat. Don’t ask how I ever got there in the first place. Ask my wife—she’s the one with the mouth. First of all, they only allow you three pounds of luggage, which if you’re only bringing clothes is plenty, but we had a few gifts with us. We were only planning to stay a few days and to sublet the house was Sadie’s idea, not mine.
The whole trip was supposed to take a month, each way. This is one reason Sadie thought it was impractical to stay for the weekend and then go h ome, which was the condition on which I’d agreed to go.
But now that we’re on our way, I decide I might as well relax. I close my eyes and try to think of what the first meeting will be like.
“How.” I put up my right hand in a gesture of friendship and trust. I reach into my pocket and offer him beads.
But even in my mind he looks at me blank, his naked pink antennas waving in the breeze like a worm’s underwear. Then I realize there isn’t any breeze where we’re going. So they stop waving and wilt.
I look around in my mind. We’re alone, the two of us, in the middle of a vast plain, me in my business suit and him in his green skin. The scene looks familiar, like something I had experienced, or read about…. “We’ll meet at Philippi,” I think, and stab him with my sword.
Only then am I able to catch a few winks.