Page 34 - WTP VOl. VIII #6

Doctor's Daughter (continued from page 25)
basement workshop, we had a spare bookcase. Mom snatched a hammer off the wall and smacked the
top shelf. She put the slab of wood under her arm and we leapt up the stairs and back into the car. Dad took the supplies and somehow, splinted Janey’s leg. Maybe someone took off a shirt. He packed the leg in ice and the ambulance came. The people backed away. I saw Dad climb into the truck with Janey. Still, I remember the blood on her leg and her sneaker, in lines, like a road map.
We found my brother and Janey’s and went home to wait. The bowl lay in the gutter, split in half. Shards of the bookshelf poked from the grass.
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You can choose any kind of wood that you want at the casket store. The man shows you around the showroom, pointing out the features of each model. They are lined up, one after the other, on angles. The room is dim. There is carpet, a deep red, I think, and quiet angel music. You can select mahogany
or walnut, pine, beechwood. Glossy or satin. High shine, low. You can have crosses or stars carved onto the wood, or not. You can reach inside and touch the fabric. There is a pillow. Some of the caskets are closed, some open. You float through
the room, hearing nothing that the man says, feel- ing somewhere else, feeling your feet not touch the red carpet, feeling dead, yourself. You imagine your father laying in the box, two days later, and a hun- dred years later, and you imagine him where he is that second, in some place on the other side of town where you’ve never been, on a lab table, maybe, being readied for the box. The box that you will pick but don’t want to.
“He wasn’t flashy,” Mom tells the man.
We can’t have a flashy box.
We pick a humble box. It is the color of wheat.
Outside, the sun smacks me in my eyes. We drive home to pick out the clothes my father will wear in the box.
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He always wore madras shorts to the Phi Delta Epsi- lon Picnic. Plaids in navies and greens, reds and yellows. Orange, even. He loved the yearly party, and his medical fraternity brothers, and the idea of it all. Softball game, Yoohoo in bottles. Your hand turned numb fishing in the icy water, clearing away Cokes
and 7-Ups. Scott and I tried the drink each year, as a ritual, but never found a taste for it. Men in aprons cooked minute steaks on giant grills. We’d have three in an afternoon, sometimes.
Dad introduced us to every doctor at the party, and caught them up on our accomplishments since the previous spring. I felt pretty special at the Phi D-E picnic, and safe and free, running around the park
in pigtails, sweaty, my belly stuffed. Once, Dad got a charleyhorse rounding third base—it was a competi- tive enterprise—and Mom drove home.
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We folded the clothes and put them in the car. I picked the tie. Dad taught me how to make a knot and let me practice on his neck, never redoing a cockeyed triangle or evening out unanticipated length. By high school, I was wearing ties, myself. There is a photograph in the yearbook, sleeves rolled up, a loose twist. Dad had more than a hundred. A shocking pink raw silk, a mid-60s gift from teenage nephew Jim and, as I heard it, a dare to shake up the halls of science, which he did, even without the tie. There was the floral Liberty of London, Mom’s sarto- rial translation of the ERA, and the narrow reps from college in Boston, serious stripes in which Dad felt most at home. Then, there were the gifts from me, a collection that charted my aesthetic and emotional path, from smart paislies to watercolored washes.
I picked one of these for the ceremony. Mom and I drove the clothes to the funeral home. We were quiet in the car.
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I didn’t say much when we had lunch at Uncle Bar- ney’s house in Florida. It really bothered my dad that I was a quiet kid. He wanted me to speak up and ex- press my opinion; I usually waited until I was asked and then, I was sort of shy. Barney was my great uncle and might have seen me as a baby, but he didn’t know me before that day that we had lunch. Dad wanted him to see who I was becoming, I realized later, and expected that I would help that process along during the course of a two hour meal.
When you have an older brother who is talkative, you either compete for the airwaves, or you sit back and listen. Or not listen. Or think about which shirt you will wear the next day. Or write poems in your head.
I don’t remember what I was thinking about at Uncle Barney’s dining room table.
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