Head so humongous she couldn’t hold it up! Jesse laughs.
Not true, not true. Are you listening? Are you getting the point of my story? What is the point of my story? I think. She stared at my father’s bag and I said, Golf clubs.
Goff? she said.
Golf.
The mother, prompts Jesse. Right?
Right. You knew she couldn’t be too far behind, eh?
Scowling.
Scowling, exactly. The scary arrival. But this time she spoke to me. Sweating a little, from trying to catch her kid. Swaying on her bike. She said, Suzanne is a special child and she’s not ready for playmates. Do you understand? I didn’t understand.
Especially boys. We need to get our exercise in the evening, but you have to understand, she can’t stop and play. Okay?
Okay, I said.
It’s sad, Seth says.
I did feel sad, and I didn’t know why, really.
Because you were starting to make friends, Seth insists, hopeful again.
Maybe. Maybe we were. I didn’t see her after that. She quit coming around.
Her mother made her stay home, Jesse says triumphantly.
Wherever I was hoping to lead the boys, Seth has come closest to getting there, I think. I feel tired. The same age as my father. Is that why I’m muddled, nostalgic, trying to make a point? Maybe it’s best to stick with legends. The truth seems harder to fix, somehow.
Yes, her mother had snatched her out of reach, I say.
Can we go outside now and make a wish?
Sure, Seth.
Jesse leads us out to the drive, from where we see Venus just topping our roof’s jagged peak. The driveway is spotted from an oil leak in Janet’s Jetta. I check my watch. She’ll be home from the clinic in twenty minutes or so, but it’s too late now to run the car to Jiffy Lube. Tomorrow.
I remember her face, earlier, as she was leaving, tight, pale, worried, and realize now part of the point of my story. Suzanne’s mother’s scowl.
Yes ma’am. Yes ma’am. A special child. I understand now.
Seth jams his hands in his pockets and whispers:
I can guess his wish; Jesse’s too. But as we stand here watching the evening light disappear, as I remember my father’s driveway, years ago, and Suzanne — her haunting smile, her sorry, too-big shoes, her hushed Goff? — I want to tell the boys that scary as differences are sometimes, they’re not always what we have to fear most.
My daddy’s heart stopped in a sand trap two months after he assured me the sun’s light never wavers. His pitching wedge fell to the ground, and according to one of his friends, he stood stunned for just a moment, as though he’d holed-in-one, then he crumpled joint-by-joint, an accordion.
Now, Jesse’s pointing wildly at the sky. There’s Mars and Jupiter and Antares, the scorpion’s heart, see how red it is? Only the brightest ones come out before the sun’s gone —
I’d tell him, if he weren’t too young to understand: Pay attention. Here. Your neighborhood. Yours — for now. Look around. We were starting to make friends.
— later, Sirius, the dog star, will show up over there, and the Seven Sisters —
Sis? Seth shouts, following his brother’s pointing finger. Where?
A car turns a nearby corner; headlights brush the boys’ legs.
Okay guys, you still have homework to do, I say.
No!
Yes. I promise them strawberry ice cream and fifteen minutes of TV if they’ll get their pj’s on and finish their chores before eight.
Geez, Dad, give us a break.
Daddy, I wished that Mama will be okay.
Me too, Seth.
And our baby sister.
Birth and death, and in between … Maybe we’ll call her Goff, I say. It’s a pretty word. What do you think?
Da-ad, Jesse groans.
Together we march back inside, in the dusty sunset’s crimson glow.
The Leavings of Panic
At the moment Pearl Harbor was attacked, my father was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes in an Oklahoma movie house. A blind girl had just handed Charlie Chaplin a flower, and my father, the projectionist, was supposed to switch reels. As he reached for a film canister, he dropped a lit match. Within minutes, flames wrapped the tiny projection booth. He stumbled out, yelling, “Fire! Fire!” People hustled from the theater. They stood across the street, watching the building collapse.
Hours later, when the streets were dark, my father returned to the theater’s ruins. He’d lost his watch getting out and thought he might find it among the charred and crumbling bricks. It had been an early Christmas present from his own father and losing it, he knew, was a greater reason for alarm than the property damage he’d caused. He was seventeen, still a minor, insolvent; besides, the theater was insured against accidents. The watch was the only loss his father would have to cover.
By now the news of Pearl Harbor had spread. He heard talk on the street, in front of a market — some old men of the town wondered if America would enter the war. He was approaching draft age; these somber speculations must have troubled him. But he was, that evening, preoccupied with his watch.
The fire marshal had cordoned off the theater’s remains with a thin white rope, but when my father arrived, no one was guarding the smoldering pile of wood and steel and stone. The toes of a woman’s shoes poked through the rubble. He noticed cups and tattered popcorn buckets, the leavings of panic: a jacket, a glove, a still-smoking scarf, a sketchpad and a broken pencil. He ducked beneath the rope, kicked through ashen bricks, and bending down, injured his arm so severely on a hot piece of metal, he was later kept out of the army.
He always claimed to hate the movies, but whenever I heard him tell this story, he relied on a kind of Hollywood melodrama.
My mother was a nurse in the Oklahoma City hospital he went to for his burns. He fell in love with her during his brief recuperation. “While my friends were dying on the battlefields of Europe,” he’d say, “I was having my arm bathed by a beautiful woman. Just think. If I hadn’t hurt myself, I would have missed the great romance of my life.”
As I grew older, and learned about the Second World War, his time frame seemed terribly wrong to me — several months passed, I read, between Pearl Harbor and American troop deployments in Europe — but no matter. His tale was wonderfully dramatic. When he got to the hospital scenes, he’d always raise his shirt sleeve and show his listeners the scar on his arm. Then he’d hug my mother.
For me, the important part of the story was his father’s reaction to the loss of the watch. My grandfather, a grave Methodist minister, was easily disgruntled. He never forgave my father’s negligence. It was, to him, a sign of moral laziness. “If you can’t take care of a simple object,” my father remembered him shouting, the night the theater burned, “how can you be trusted with matters of conscience, matters of the soul?”
It’s incredible to anyone who ever heard Dad talk about all this that the old man was less concerned about Dad’s arm than he was about the watch, but I always believed it. As a child, I saw Grandfather Darnell’s obsession with nice things — jewelry, shoes, belts and ties, furniture for the church and the house. Many times I witnessed him belittling my father’s character. Often I heard him say that marrying my mother was the only smart thing my father ever did.