Four Seasons: Spring
I shoved his wheelchair up the incline so we could get a place close to the ampitheater and maybe a little more out of the wind. He was in pretty good humor today, so maybe we would be able to stay for the whole thing, listen to a little blues like we used to do years ago. It was nice enough weather, some sunshine, and I put a sweater on him and packed our windbreakers. This was more work than I planned on having to do when I got into my seventies, but crosses to bear, and here we are.
The band hasn’t started yet, and most of the crowd is out on the grass, so we could take our time getting comfortable and not bother anyone. He likes sunshine, so I didn’t worry too much about it shining in his eyes, just handed him a baseball cap and he managed to put it on straight. He wanted cheese curls but I gave him a packet of baked chips so I wouldn’t have to worry about his getting yellow crap all over everything he touched. Sometimes I catch a look in his eye that tells me he knows damned well what he’s doing, that he’s not half as lost inside himself as he seems.
We’re off to one side, so we can do some people-watching for a bit. Lots of little children are playing in the grass and I wonder how my little ones are doing, if it is as nice there as it is here, and then I think of course it is because they live in southern California and we’re here in Michigan. It’s always nice there, and I know that we should take up our daughter’s invitation to move in with them but I want to live in my own house for as long as I can. Maybe when he has to go to a nursing home. That might be next week, that might be years from now, it is hard to tell.
He is looking over the crowd of people, and slowly eating the chips one by one. A little girl runs by, chasing a ball. I’ve not seen so many children about for years, and thought maybe they’d all disappeared into a world of video games, but these are very small children, about the same age as my daughter’s kids, and I feel the pang of missing them and missing out on their growing up, because it doesn’t last long, their being little like that. The tiny girl runs back and I watch her scurry up the grass and around her parents and past others in the crowd, some vaguely familiar faces, people we used to know years ago, probably, when he was still working. Everybody looks older now and I suppose we do, too. I know he does.
He’s not looking around at the crowd anymore, just staring in one direction, saying nothing, and he’s stopped eating. I hand him a napkin and he fingers it absent-mindedly. The band members are on stage, and they’re doing a quick check, and now the lead is talking and welcoming, and they start playing. We haven’t come to this park before, and I’m surprised by how nice it is, and that the concert is free, something I haven’t seen around here in maybe twenty or thirty years. Brings back memories.
He’s actually responding to the music, something he hasn’t done for a while, and he’s watching the band and looking alert. Well! I guess this was a good idea, then, fresh air and music. It’s a good band, and there’s such a nice mix of ages in the crowd. Some people are actually dancing, barefoot in the grass, lots of young moms with their little ones, some young dads, too. I never danced with my kids, I don’t like to dance, and neither does he, it’s hard to be out there like that and I always felt clumsy.
He’s staring out at the crowd again. The sun hits his face in such a way that for a moment, in the sharp mix of sun and shadow from the cap, he looks half his age and it makes me feel twice as old. His lips aren’t sagging, but taut in what used to pass for a smile in his prime, you had to know him well to know he was smiling. What on earth is he looking at? Of course. It’s the young moms in their sundresses and bare feet, dancing freely with their children, with butterflies and birds and late daffodils bobbing in the breeze. I should have known. He’s still a letch deep down inside. Disgusting. But he’s not doing anything too noticeable so I say nothing. The little girl with the ball keeps running back to her grandma, who is sitting in a lawn chair. She looks familiar, but her sunglasses keep me from recognizing her, and then she lets the little one pull her up and over to the group of moms and children who are dancing, and pushes the glasses up on her head. I know this woman.
He is staring at her, and that is what he’s been staring at all this time. It is her. The music catches her up and she dances with the children, as freely as she did thirty years ago. She hasn’t changed much at all and I feel still older. Does she not see us? Recognize us? What is she doing here? He’s actually sitting up straight, at least for him. He recognizes her, she has meaning for him, still, the one who obsessed him when I was still changing our kids’ diapers.
The music drums in my ears and doesn’t make sense anymore. For better or for worse. She wasn’t the only one, I knew. And he is here, he never left. Unless, of course, he is looking at her. The world could fall away and he would be locked on her. Some clouds build up and we are in for a spring rain. The breeze grows to a light wind, and it gets cool. I start to get out his windbreaker to put on him, but he abruptly signals no with a quick hand gesture. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her. I sit back and stare at the ground, and an hour passes without my really hearing the music, not even the applause.
It is starting to drizzle as the band wraps up and people are packing up quickly, throwing on sweaters and jackets and hurrying to cars or walking back home. She is nowhere to be seen. I put on my own jacket and pull up the hood, then fold up my chair, and balance it across the back of the wheelchair. I start to push, and his head falls forward. I crouch down to look at him; his eyes are open, the mouth still in that secret smile. He’s dead. He smells. I get to deal with this in the middle of a public park in a chilly spring rain. A pair of crows land on a sandwich wrapper a few feet away. They look so sharp and proud against the pale narcissus in the flowerbeds at the edge of the park.
I see the ad for a real estate agent on the bus stop bench across the street and I call them. A bicycle cop in a shiny rain poncho approaches, and I wave him down as I call my daughter next to tell her what is going on. The water is beading on her father’s neck, and I start to cry in the miserable cold rain.
Four Seasons: Winter
I walked very carefully from the apartment to the pier and only went as far as I did because there was a rail to hold onto. The sun feels good on my back; it’s early and it’s still cool in the shade of the palm trees, so I stand in the sun and I don’t remember walking out here, I can tell you how I probably got out here, but I can’t picture it. It’s been two weeks since the surgery. I’m holding on to a plastic bread bag with some slices that have gone stale. I like to feed the gulls. I’m not even supposed to be alive, but I am here, I feel awful and I am somehow here.
The gulls are slow in coming, but the pelican is on the piling. He was here before all this happened. Maybe it’s not the same pelican, but it could be. He always sits facing the same way to keep one eye on the pier. He looks as impersonal as I feel, he is here for food, he goes through the motions for food, and he is ugly. I toss a hunk of bread at him, gently, from the wrist and not the upper body, and he catches it without moving his lower body. I do not know why I am alive, except to feed this brown pelican a dry heel of bread. We are the only two sentient beings.
The water starts to glimmer as the sun rises above the palm trees, sharp and glaring like sun on the ice and snow back home. One gull arrives in a flash of white, then it becomes a blizzard of gulls. I want to go home and I do not want to go home. I see no point in my life, except to feed this pelican, streaked brown and gray like the dirty snow back home, who looks at me with one beady eye and I don’t have to explain what he means.
Four Seasons: Autumn
Dad hurtled the grain truck down a narrow two-lane road, and I hung on the best I could to the seat, gripping the vinyl cushion or the handle on the door. We were going too fast for me to be carsick. It was the middle of October and Dad wanted to get the soybeans over and done with and get on with the corn harvest. I was excited about my first Halloween party at school. The air outside smelled of ripe corn, the truck inside smelled of grease, gas, coffee, and soybeans. My jacket smelled like the apple I had in my pocket. I was thinking of being a witch for trick-or-treat.
He slammed on the brakes and I almost hit the windshield, but he didn’t stop, just swore and swerved around a dead deer in our lane, and then prepared to take a sharp curve just up ahead. As fast as he was going, a whole bunch of crows went faster, a black blur past the truck window. They landed on a cluster of corn shocks in a triangle patch of land formed by three roads. They didn’t fly away when we blasted by, but my eyes locked on the scene and I turned in my seat to keep looking at it out the back window as we barreled on: seven crows, three giant pumpkins, and three monstrous corn shocks.
I recited the crow poem from my book at home, too quiet to be heard over the radio:
One for sorrow,
Two for joy.
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy.
Five for silver,
Six for gold.
Seven for a secret
Never to be told.
We went back to the farm the same way, and I counted more pumpkins. There were no houses nearby, just cornfields and woods. How did they get there? The crows only jumped aside a little bit from the deer carcass. We went by three more times that day, the last time, going back to the farm, it was dark, the S-curves in the road full of scary shadows, and the headlights from the truck caught a face looking out from one of the corn shocks, a face with a large sharp nose that I didn’t see there before. I was scared at first and then realized it was a scarecrow. The deer carcass was gone.
Four Seasons Fiction/Art: Summer
It was time to do something that didn’t have anything to do with my regular writing work, and I happened across the Artists’s Seasons 2011 group project at Coach Creative Space. This is my first installment of four; they are each part of a larger project that I have in mind to do about our sense of place, and how it affects our understanding of the role of death.
Summer
I decided that this was one of those times that death was not a bad thing, like squashing a bug, so I slid off my green inflatable dinosaur and half-waded, half-swam across the shallow pool and tried to drown Cathy Robinson. Actually, all I did was go up to her, look her right in her smug hazel eyes, put my hands on her shoulders, and push her down under the water. She didn’t do anything. Nothing. She didn’t resist, she didn’t say anything, act surprised, she didn’t even blink. Her long red hair bloomed under the water, some of it waving over those impassive, unblinking eyes. An iridescent beetle floated by on the surface between my face and hers, right over her mouth, and then got caught in her hair, and it was gross so I let her go.
Cathy Robinson’s father drove his station wagon into the yard, stirring up dust on the gravel driveway, and picked her up and drove away, making even more dust. I tossed out the bugs I saw floating on the water, blew more air into my dinosaur, and hopped back on. I really wished that she was dead and out of my life. I let her go, and when I heard twenty-five years later that she drank antifreeze and successfully died, I pictured death as a green beetle toying with two eight year old girls.
Faraway House Up Close
Another icon, the simple house, in misty colors like something you’re unsure of seeing. 12″ x 12″ acrylic impasto on gallery-wrap canvas.
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