You are reading an archived issue of Sleet Magazine. To return to the current issue, click here.
Volume 2 Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2010-2011
You are living but no longer in my life; alive but dead to me, like the music you play in damp churches, composed by dead masters with bad teeth and gout. I don't remember your teeth.
Were they white and straight or shadowy gray? You never smoked, but you liked to drink red wine and eat French cheese on crusty white baguettes, and always cream for your coffee. Maybe you have gout.
Or maybe you're dead.
No, if you were dead I'd know. I'm not saying that I would feel it in my heart, but the precarious grapevine of our tentative circle of friends would message me the news. And I would know.
You're alive. You play the viola da gamba in stone churches. You give lessons to old German women who let you borrow money, as they did that summer you came to me at Gripsholm Castle, where we took a room in a two-hundred year old inn.
That was the last time I saw you.
It was August, cool and breezy as late summer will be in that part of Sweden. It was a borrowed time. Your instrument back in Bremen, your heart on your sleeve, and my mind on America where I would soon return for good, though I did not know that then.
Now, every once and a while, I find myself looking for your name on my computer screen, when I am up late and the children are asleep and the house is quiet except for the deep and sonorous sounds of a Bach cantata playing softly from two small silver speakers. You're there somewhere in that recording, frozen yet fluid, to be played and replayed. The wooden body of your viola da gamba hugged between your legs, your long fingers pressing down on strings once made of sheep gut, today synthetic; your right hand, bow hand, sliding back and forth. The deeper and lower the notes, the more alive I am in my solitude, remembering how you used to play for me in your rented room back in Bremen.
When you told me that your heart was done breaking for me, I did not think you meant goodbye.
If there is a heaven, and if it looks like Barton Cove on a cool autumn day after the campers have gone away and the trees have lost their leaves; and if in this heaven you hurl yourself through woods following some scent, some noise, or nothing; and if you run away and then come back, in this celestial place, to check on me or not check on me, but just because your roving has led you close enough so that I can see you even if you don't notice me; and if I wave a bag of treats and call your name, Daisy, come to me, Daisy; and if you come and even if you don't, I will be in this heaven some day.
But not today, today Barton Cove is just Barton Cove: campers (though only a few) and trees and leaves. Today you lumber by my side and struggle to keep up. You don't wander as you once did, and I don't chase. Today you stay, by my side. Today it is humid, July, and a storm is on the way. Darkening skies and we walk on: aged hound, timid master.
But what's this? Down the embankment, toward the river, to see what the shore has to offer. Maybe this is heaven after all, where the lame shed their canes, and the blind are given sight, where an old hound dog can once again dart away on a course set in motion by a scent on the wind. Maybe this is heaven, and I can walk alone without imagining future walks without you. And if this is heaven, I won't ever have to come here alone. And if this is heaven, you will come back to me — and you do, with dead fish hanging in your clenched jaws: divine prize, trophy, you good dog.
A girl and a boy slide out of a station wagon and stand in front of a new, old house, located on a street that bears the name of an ancient Greek poem, which the girl once memorized, twenty lines anyway, in translation: Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles.
One evening, when they still lived in their apartment, the girl's father overheard her practicing, and he, being in an unusually good mood, teased her: That Achilles was a real heel.> The metallic snap of his beer can top punctuated the girl's silent displeasure. She knew he had never read Homer.
Today, the sister and brother stand in front of this new old house their parents have told them all about: the fenced-in yard, flower garden, and porch; trees up and down the street arching over well-maintained sidewalks; the short walk to school.
Neither the girl nor the boy know yet of the laundry chute that connects the second floor to the basement — big enough for their lean frames — or the screened-in back porch that will one day become the boy's bedroom when the fifth and sixth children are born and the house that looms so large in this post-war prosperity shrinks. Porches not meant to be bedrooms will become bedrooms; two cribs will flank the sides of the marriage bed.
But today the sister is thinking that she has never seen anything quite so fine as this house on Iliad Street with its yard and driveway and garage. She nudges her brother and nods toward the giant maple tree in the side yard with its climbing branches and thick expanse of leaves. They are about to run when their father appears before them in his work clothes though it is Saturday: dark blue pants washed and pressed but bearing the permanent stains of machine shop grease; dark blue t-shirt with one pocket above his heart into which is tucked a pack of unfiltered Camels. From his lips a lit cigarette dangles, dropping ash on his chest.
Bring these inside.> He continues to empty the station wagon while a pick-up truck pulls onto the front lawn. The children's mother comes outside to tell her husband to keep the cars off the grass. It is May and everything is green and growing, and the house, while not theirs, has a mortgage that bears their name. Her husband grunts something in reply and legs his way back to the station wagon, the creases in his pants only slightly wilting under the weight of lift and carry.
The girl and her brother make three trips from front lawn to front porch and beyond, avoiding the men carrying bed frames and cribs, a toy box not emptied of its contents. Walking back outside, they watch their father lower a bureau onto the grass, his brown, muscled arms bulge under blue army tattoos. Manage this, kids?
The girl and boy cannot believe their good fortune, delighted by this faith in their ability to do the work of adults.
Grab that side, the girl instructs her brother. He places two hands, palms facing up, under the edge of the scratched surface.
On three. The girl sounds like a professional and feels like a professional as she mimics the words she has heard her father and the men from her father's shop use all morning.
The children heave the bureau higher than they would have expected and smile at their previously untried strength, the sinew and muscle they didn't know they possessed. Then they skip across the lawn with the bureau barely weighing them down, taking the front steps in effortless strides.
Back outside, they spot their parent's double-wide bureau with the six metal knobs in the shape of bald eagles. They look for their father. He is not there. They lift the bureau anyway, not even bothering to count, laughing as they run into their mother who stands at the bottom of the front porch steps, arms crossed. She wears a cotton dress, neatly pressed. Wisps of sandy-gray hair fall out of her bun. She looks at the houses on either side of theirs. No neighbor has brought by a casserole or lent a hand carrying boxes, as she had done last year when new tenants took the empty apartment on the second floor.
Don't make it look so light. She taps the bureau with the silver eagle knobs, make it look like mahogany. She nods for her son to step aside and for her daughter to grab the other end. She counts to three and feigns a grimace as the two lift the laminated plywood dresser. Barely raising it off the ground, she shuffles a few feet before lowering it again, arching her back once she is free from the imagined weight of ancestral wood. Make them think we've got our own family heirlooms.
The girl and her brother do as they are told. They lift the bureau with theatrical difficulty, straining to carry it a few feet before dropping it on the ground. The girl's performance rivals her mother's as she rests a hand on the wood she is trying to weigh in her mind: Too heavy for us kids, she says to her brother, loudly. They laugh and run to the maple tree, which they climb, higher than their mother's gaze can reach.
Michelle Valois lives in Massachusetts with her partner and three children. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, Fourth Genre, the Florida Review, 2River, and others. She teaches humanities and writing at Mount Wachusett Community College. http://www.readmelikeabook.net/