Breakfast
Someone who looked exactly like my father was blowing like a walrus to cool his Nescafé. Whereas my father knows exactly how to flick two drops of tabasco sauce onto his eggs, hitting the yolk and not the white, this “person” fooled with the bottle, turning it upside down and smacking the bottom. He made an entirely bogus moue when the red goo glopped out.
My father’s slippers are velvet, inherited from his father, and they sniff at his heels and follow him around like dogs. The stranger had jammed his feet, whose hairiness and ropy sinews deceived no one, all the way into “slippers” that were clearly rejects from Bargain Barn.
Brahms was playing in another room. My father is a musician so he never listens. He must tune it out or it will take him back to the fatal mistake. But the new father not only listened, but nodded his head and tapped his fingers, way off the beat.
Yet my mother entered and kissed that man without a trace of revulsion. Traitor! When she served me, I looked everywhere but in her deep conniving eyes.
It was raining in the window with a fury I had ever seen before. Then it was snowy, windy, sunny, sleet and hail. No warning of a tornado, so my pulse raced when I watched a little coiling wind like the spring to a flashlight gather up the drifting leaves, They tumbled upwards, stem over crest.
Secretly, I fed the little pork links on my plate to the dog. I could feel his heart beating under my chair, thudding wildly, in panic or triumph. Was he about to die?
It was Tuesday, Tuesday with no Wednesday to follow, no Monday to precede. The hour hand on the clock whirled like a propellor, so fast it stood motionless. The second hand inched forward, unbearably slow.
The tap went drip, drip, drip, moment, moment, moment, peanut butter, jelly, orange juice. Turn the spigot and it’s a continuous flow. Tyrannosaurus Rex, King Arthur, childhood, old age, Mars and Venus, Magellanic Cloud.
Behind my father, the seams of the wallpaper don’t quite meet.
* * * * *
The Summit
You know how one mountain hides another? Mount Baker hides Mount Henry? One tree hides another, except for the birch? That was my father. The father who poured me hot spattering milk in a tin cup-–he hid the father who caressed me awake me from a dream-–and that father obscured the one who yanked my arm and commanded, it’s time!
We started up that steep track and the child I never shall be kept dawdling, intentionally sabotaging the expedition because it thrilled him beyond his ability to bear–-my shoelace is undone. My ankle hurts–rub it. But not there!
That child was concealed by another who marched up bitterly–-if you don’t care that I can’t breathe, I don’t care either! So what if there’s a stone in my shoe–-you think you’re the only one who suffers? And that child was replaced by one who gulped cold water from his father’s cupped hands.
When we came to the mountaintop, I saw the final father, who hides all others.
And I saw every one of the mountains–Tabor, Hor, Moriah, Ararat, Ebal. The Gihon River snaking between them. Valleys of black loam, orchards, all the villages: Canaan, Bethpage, Goshen, Jericho. We could even hear their faint bells.
We ate. Hard-boiled eggs, raisins, black bread, an orange. A small fly, that had made it that far, that high, into that solitude, flitted around us like a moth, too exhausted to buzz. When I killed it, my father looked away. That was the last father.
* * * * *
The Red Bike
A dusty Schwinn exactly my size was leaning against a tall scraggly pine. ‘That’s no one’s, left for anyone. Can I have it?’ I said. What a mistake to ask. ‘It belongs to another child,’ my father said.
All that summer we walked hand in hand down that road that smells of moss, dead sunlight, cinnamon, mucilage, and old man’s sweat. Always the bike was still there. Always my father’s grip was too tight and I had to hop to keep from being dragged upward.
Once I just dug in my heels and pointed. ‘The pedals have shifted,’ my father suggested. He was lying. A father has the powers of observation of an acorn.
Then it was fall. He was gone. The bike was still there. I ride it now. Just as I imagined, it’s rusty. Even the bell makes a rusty sound in the bare woods. It takes my full weight to turn the wheel. Only the reflector truly works, shining with its own red light, but it’s behind me, so I can’t admire it. I’m stuck in low gear. If I try to back-pedal, the chain will slip, and no one will come running out of the pines, no one with his pliers, his wrench and can of WD 40, and kneel on the cold earth to fix it.
This is beautiful and heartrending. Thank you.