July 2, 2017

4th of July at Home

          The dogs lie in the passageways, idle as exercise equipment.
          I am not a dog owner, really.
          My covenant to them is three, sometimes four, walks a day. I scrub the soiled door mat, become giddy at treat time, and sit on the floor of the large, ivory kitchen alongside them as they pant and stretch. They lie pointed toward me as if I were Gandhi, about to speak. But I am only a fair weather hugger—I cannot fill those empty cups, those bored, patient eyes. Why do they look at me?
          I am alone in a house in New England.
          I am the newcomer at church.
          I am the nice man in glasses, walking his dogs.
          I am an alcoholic, foreshortening my life bottle by bottle, breathing in the poison of a lifetime of articulate disapprovals, postponing the dishes, making myself laugh.
          I'm too busy hugging myself.
          I've read that Natalie Wood, in fact, deftly paddled and steered the dingy that windy night and succumbed only yards from shore. 
          I need there to be a God, a Lord of the middle-aged, of those who strugglealmost successfullyto forgive themselves their trespasses, their idiosyncrasies, the rosy, affluent scorn of old lovers' faces in 5 a.m. dreams.
          Ten summers ago my uncle died in this town, and I had to buy a fleece jacket for the unseasonal cold. Today the sun bakes the macadam, and I lay my palm on it before the dogs cross, like a young mother tests a baby's milk on her wrist.
          At the same spot, we stop and I stare at the old white house rising from the driveway: so elegant and cool in its necklace of ferns. Who could have guessed a decade later I'd live in same the town, removed like a polyp from the big city—I don't miss it. But will anything be the same after this summer, living so close to my beloved island but barred from it? Smelling the ocean but never seeing it.
          Stuck in town.
          When Gary finally comes, will we fall back into our usual walk around the block, its familiar scents and threats?
          Down Elm and up Pine.
          One more time before bed.

April 18, 2017

Pennsylvania Summers

          When I was 10 I'd lift an arm protector from my grandmother's ancient furniture and marvel at the bold rectangle concealed beneath. Brick-red and ivory and Hunter green—the stitched bouquets freshly picked, tight as Braille.
          The many summers had bleached everything, leveled the surface, and it was difficult to find secrets—but not impossible—when I was 10.
          Conversations overheard from another room were franker, had a different tone, but never do I remember anything said about my father—or my mother.
          The calf skin of his Oxfords was brittle, and the shoulders of his sports coats sagged on their hangers, but my grandmother's eyes moistened when I appeared, downstairs, in the stuff.
          The present and past had a collegial relationship in the large old house, telling different versions of the same stories but never sitting down to the table togetherat lunchtime, when bees gorged on fallen plums at the end of the yard and bluebirds rocked the wooden houses hung on the clothesline posts.
          It was hard to get my grandmother to talk about the past as she folded maraschino cherries into angel food batter or rubbed knuckles of delicates together in Borax in the bathroom sink.
          But I sat on the lid of the hamper and watched—when I was 10.
          When storms came through we all gathered in her bedroom—so habitually that I wondered if they were visible anyplace else. Cathedral tall, the single window in the room faced north, its sheers turning to neon in the darkness as we counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder.
          Butter, milk, eggs, and bread—the crust breaking away from the loaf in golden sheets—came to the house, but no chums or old girlfriends of my father ever did, and his fable was never interrupted by evidence, or the bawdy corroboration of a war buddy—even though I was only 10.
          My grandmother still drove out to pick string beans or raspberries, angling the huge old Buick precariously on the side of the dirt road, and we pulled up to orchard stands for peaches, the engine never entirely cooling down in the July afternoon.
          The hub caps, like chrome chef's bowls, came off as she drove, and I'd have to run back to get them. The steering wheel was large as a yacht's, with a stentorian, musical horn. The smell of the interior—of old car—if you have not known it can be compared to nothing else. 
          It persisted in the airless darkness of the garage—when I was 10.
          

January 13, 2017

Inauguration Day

          However that happened ... he's there ... and let's go says Nicole Kidman.
         I liked her in "The Others." I wondered why Tom Cruise let her go—so peachlike and tiny waisted, a perfect doll.
          So I tried to imagine them fighting in the car, avoiding each other on weekends, drinking separately, secretly. Why lay an ace down upon the table? Is one so confident of winning the game that lovers—with their morning scent, their habit of draping a leg over yours on windy March nights, their dull prurience and fascinating innocence—can be discarded?
          However that happened ...
          My face, map-wide and shapeless, a pancake of worry, looks like it has been dropped from a great height. My clothes don't fit. Something is pushing outward, like a baby's fist, just below my right rib. I push it back with my right hand.
          I have had 16 doctor's appointments in 3 months. I am tired of running downtown.
          No impassioned appeal can turn things back, no eloquence or status, no confidence, no righteousness or bravery. We have arrived herelimping, stoned—we have awakened in an empty bed, and the mirror cannot lie.
          Not even Meryl Streep can save us.
          The ace is somewhere else, now: in private determination, the reluctant wisdom of age, in the sort of quietness that long walks bring. Nothing will be easy but it will still be rich, slightly sexy, and well worth having—the little satisfactions of John Updike and Bach, the surprise of nameless brooks in the woods, and the ability to remember without the tearful misery of loss.
          The grand gestures—the crash diets and all-night rowsbelong to an earlier time.
          Let's go.