Letting Go

 

LETTING GO

Finalist the Abiko Quarterly Literary Contest Japan 1997

Read on BBC World Radio October 1998

 

MY SISTER ARRIVES the day after Dad died, her suitcase full of sweaters and insecurities. She’d flown into Logan Airport then rented a car for the drive to Maine, not wanting to risk her life in a commuter plane. She truly hates flying.

“Where did you get that sweater?” I look at the Icelandic knit. “Did you buy it in Boston. I can’t imagine you needing it in Honolulu.”

“It’s been cold this year. Ozone layer. Crazy. The weather.” Leigh-Anne talks in phrases, not complete sentences. She often answers questions I didn’t ask without answering the ones I do.

My Mother, hearing Leigh-Anne’s voice, comes out of the cabin and draws us inside. My Dad paneled everything when he built the place years before I was born. Periodically, he announced that he’d never have to paint or wallpaper again. I never knew what it was an issue. Mother had gone wild with gingham prints creating a warm, loving ambiance

“Tea, Leigh-Anne?” Mother asks.

“I’ll make it,” I say, glad to do something as simple as heating water and reaching for the white fluted teapot decorated with violets. That pot has been through so many family conversations.

As Mother launches into yet another telling of how “IT” happened, I take my cup and wander into the side yard. “I’ve heard about “IT” enough, yet I appreciate Mother’s need to talk. Leigh-Anne can take her turn listening.

I spent my childhood summers here, escaping the heat of the city. My sister, my brother Rory and I ran through the pines that shelter the cabin. We swam in the pond, barely visible through the trees, when no one wanted to drive us to the beach 15 miles away.

I love Maine in the summer and early fall. My folks loved it all year. They’d have shriveled in a Florida retirement community. They relished being snowed in with a pot of chili bubbling on the wood-burning stove.

Whenever there was a storm, Dad would Skype me to report the depth, temperature, wind-chill factor and the amount of wood he’d burned. I teased him, saying he was a misplaced pioneer while he mumbled about the soft-younger generation.

A baby chipmunk, which Dad trained to run up his leg and into his hand for seed, darts from behind the tool shed. He looks at me, assessing my trustworthiness. “I’ll wait for the old man,” he seems to say.

“You’ll have a long wait,” I tell him. He cocks his head before scampering off.

I follow the path through the pines to my folks’ vegetable garden. The pumpkins are not quite ready to pick. Most are misshaped. What scary jack 0’lanterns they’ll make.

Fall gardens look forlorn. The summer squash leaves are brown. Unpicked tomatoes have fallen victim to the first frost. Wine bottles, their necks buried in the ground, stand at regular intervals, so many soldiers marching to unheard drummers. The bottles are/were Dad’s special irrigation system. He and Mother said emptying the bottles was the most fun.

Next to the garden is the bench where Dad took his final “nap” as Mother calls it. I understand she doesn’t want to say the real word. I can barely think my Dad is dead. I find it easier to think of him sitting on the bench. According to Dad, who bought it at auction, it came from a Boston subway car. Mother knitted innumerable afghans as she sat on the bench watching Dad putter among his crops.

I can’t bring myself to sit on the bench and choose the large flat rock to the left. It once served as a tea party table for Leigh-Anne and me a lifetime ago.

My tea is cold.

The wind is cold.

I’m cold.

*****

At the wake, neighbors tell me how wonderful Dad looks. He doesn’t look wonderful. He looks dead. Instead of saying what I think, I hold my tongue. Being rude won’t help. Some former co-workers fly in from New York to tell us how wonderful he looks. Mother is pleased. I don’t ask why they didn’t visit while he was alive.

At man whom I don’t know asks, “You’re the brilliant one, right?”

I nod. I was considered the brilliant child, Rory, the problem and Leigh-Anne the beauty. I hated those labels.

My sister was beautiful with her thick auburn hair, green eyes and pimple-free skin. As a teenager, I’d lay awake in bed listening to her breathing across the room and wish cellulite and acne attacks on her. She collected boys the way I collected rocks.

My brother Rory was always in scrapes, like the time he “accidentally” broke twelve neighbor’s windows. He claimed he’d been aiming at the windowsills.

He loaned Dad’s car to a friend too drunk to drive. The kid ended up as a paraplegic with a suspended sentence for vehicle homicide of the two boys in the car. My parents never punished him. Dad said living with the death of two people and a life-long crippling of a third was punishment enough.

Now in his late thirties my brother is about to marry for the third time. He’s carved out a good real estate practice on Boston’s North Shore. Dad had predicted he would be a later bloomer. He was right.

At times when fighting with my dissertation, I wonder, really wonder, if I really am the bright one. Does the world need another anthropologist, brilliant or otherwise? Yet it is easier to recheck one more reference and write one more paragraph.

 *****

Maybe I’m brilliant by default. Anyway, I’m their “daughter, the Ph.D candidate,” and bask in their pride, deserved or not. I resent that pride being diminished by half.

I’m angry that I’ll never be able to call Dad to say, “Hi, I’ve finished my dissertation.” And I feel just empty he’ll never see me in my scarlet robes receiving my degree.

Thus, we three stand in a row near the coffin: Problem, Brainy and Beauty, greeting those who are paying their respects and protecting Mother. The flowers’ smell is gag-producing.

I look for an escape just as my cousin Tom walks in. He braces visibly. I guess facing us is as hard for him, it not harder than looking at Dad. He and I have talked about how much we hate funerals.

Tom spent lots of summers with us in Maine. Now he has a big job with a computer company in Tennessee. Often, when he comes to Boston on business, we eat in one of those little restaurants with mismatched chairs in Harvard Square .

“It’s a good thing one of us makes a decent living,” he tells me each time he pays the check.

After we eat, we roam around the Square listening to street musicians. Tom always brings a roll of quarters. Six months ago, I received a roll in the mail. There was no identification. I called him. “I just got a roll of quarters.”

“Fancy that.” He was at my door that weekend. Sometimes people mistake us for lovers because we enjoy each other’s company so much. We were never lovers, although I’ve had some I liked less than I like Tom.

He stops to hug Mother and Leigh-Anne. He gives Rory a pat, typical of men who don’t want to seem sissified. Me, he sweeps into his arms. Being embraced by Tom, gives credibility to the term “bear hug.”

“I’m so sorry, Kid.” He always calls me kid. There’s comfort in rituals.

*****

I sit on the stool, my elbows on the divider separating the kitchen and living areas. The fire in the stove warms us but not as much as the hot chocolate we sip. Everyone but Leigh-Anne and me are in bed. We can’t sleep.

“This should be cider. It’s fall,” Leigh-Anne says.

Growing up our seasons were marked by drinks. Lemonade was summer. I loved the tinkle of ice against the clear glass picture. It tasted best with hot oatmeal cookies.

When fall came we drank hot cider through cinnamon bark straws. In winter when we were chilled from skating, Mother made hot chocolate with Marshmallow Fluff. I was in college before I realized that the marshmallow was to hide the scum we all hated.

Leigh-Anne sighs as she picks scum off her drink and drops it on the napkin. I notice most of her statements begin with sighs.

“Ted blames me. Natalie has lost so much weight. A Dachau reject.”

I’ve not seen her husband and my niece for three years, although we chat sometimes on e-mail.

“Want some apple pie, Leigh-Anne?” Talking about food and my anorexic niece together seems indecent, but my sister doesn’t notice.

She gets two plates. “I cut; you choose.” That’s another childhood ritual created by Mother to reduce fights. I don’t worry about the fairness of our slice. Something else isn’t fair. My niece is throwing her life away when Dad, who so loved life, is gone.

We talk long into the night, forging new understandings and burying old resentments by sharing our alien worlds.

*****

My family sits in the first pew during the funeral. Holding hands, we form a chain separated by handkerchiefs pressed into them. Actually, only Tom and Rory have handkerchiefs. The rest of us have tissues. Usually, I use only toilet paper, never remembering to buy tissues, the distinction, an artificial creation by marketers.

There’s a large crowd behind us. The minister drones on about life everlasting. His words don’t describe my father. The people here make a better description.

As we wait for the limousines to drive us to the cemetery, Mothers says she pictures Dad playing bridge with Auntie Helen, Uncle David, and Uncle Fred. They’ve all died within the last year. If there’s a heaven, he’ll be rewarded with lots of grand slams.

*****

After it’s all over, after the last crumb of coffee cake has been cleared, after the neighbors have gone and the kitchen is spotless, I slip down to the pond. The woods are quiet except for the crunch of my feet on the pine needles.

A duck, one of the many fed by my parents, swims in ever-widening circles. He should head south. Birds hang out too long because of good living given free of charge by people like my folks.

Interesting that Mother and Dad pushed us out of the nest, no dilly dallying allowed. Yet, they coddle the ducks.

I pick up a small stone, perfectly shaped for scuttling across the water. It bounces five times, a personal record. The duck watches from a distance.

“Not bad, Kid.” I jump. Tom has followed me.

I shrug.

“Is that a good or bad shrug?”

“An unanalyzed one.”

He says nothing and puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses the top of my head.

I lean back into his chest, enjoying his closeness.

I realized that it was a peaceful shrug, the shrug of someone letting go.