Page 35 - WTP VOl. VIII #6

Afterwards, before we had reached the sidewalk, Dad told me that I was not allowed to be that silent, ever again. It just wouldn’t be permitted. He was mad. I
felt bad for disappointing. Through high school, and college, I thought about speaking up more. Finally, when a magazine editor destroyed my words with her green pencil, I said something. You have turned great into adequate, I remember telling her, at 25. She chal- lenged me to improve upon her edit, which I did. Dad saw my voice begin to form, when the clarinet and piano and ballet slippers were replaced with a pen.
He made copies of every article I wrote and mailed them to relatives and friends.
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Before the ceremony, while the guests wait in the chapel, the family gathers in another room, an ante- chamber. There, the funeral people talk to you, then they go away and you have a last private moment. It didn’t feel particularly private to me. Mom, Scott and
I mingled around together, not hugging or talking re- ally, just being our individual selves, thrust together in space. In retrospect, the relationships we each had with my dad, and the personalities with which we carried them out, screamed in neon in the room next to the chapel. One by one, we approached him. Mom, in full makeup and a black and white wrap dress, went first. She stood next to the casket and opened the clasp on her purse. Slowly, she lifted out my father’s stethoscope, like a magician coaxing scarves from a hat. She folded it in half and laid it down in the box. Then, she walked away. My brother wiped a tear, the first I had seen since Steven Lapper threw him
to the ground on the way home from school in fifth grade. I stood next to the casket and looked for the things that hadn’t been altered, the delicate surgeon hands, the fingernails, the ears. I did not want to remember him silent and still and feared that the im- age in front of me would wipe out all that preceded it. I wanted to remember him whole and powerful, the guy who walked as if he were in a marching band. The man who spun tennis balls like tops. Skipped every other step on a staircase.
C’mon, sit up, I remember thinking. It was lunatic, of course. But I kept willing it to happen. Move a wrist, twitch an eye. Shoulders back, chin up.
He kept a white cotton handkerchief folded in fourths in his pocket, took it out when he came home and centered it on his bureau. During hay fever season, he placed two pyribenzamine pills, split in half, on top of the hankie. They were blue on the outside, like robins’ eggs. I hoped that we put a hankie in his pants pocket.
"In retrospect, the relationships we
each had with my dad, and the personalities with which we carried them out, screamed in neon in the room next to the chapel."
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