Page 16 - WTP Vol. IX #5

Rending (continued from preceding page)
As a child, she would spend days outside with her friends Sam and William, the three of them perched on the fence, handing one another a rope tethered
to a high limb of the silver maple. One at a time they would hop onto the rope, sail over an ocean, and land on the shore of another world, one offering sword fights and treks over seaside cliffs.
Later in the day she would come inside for a sand- wich, which she would eat at the piano while playing some sharp, jaunty tune. She would finish her food and drain her juice, slamming the cup down on the blonde Wurlitzer, and then she would charge back outside. At least that’s the way I remember her, run- ning through the house to the back door, head pitched forward, fists clenched. An actual charge.
Sometimes at the end of these summer days she was too agitated to fall asleep on her own, so I would lie in bed next to her. She would flop back and forth, scratch- ing her mosquito bites. I felt restless myself and anx- ious for her to be asleep, so I discouraged conversation. But now I wish I could go back to that time and breathe in the scent of her skin, sweat and wind and grass. I wish she could tell me about the land of the dead and the ocean that was our backyard.
~
Next August. We load her things into the car and pile in, the whole family. My younger daughter is only ten, and she hates long trips. We try to make the journey more inviting by promising new video games and a stay at a hotel with a pool, things she loves, but she
is a reluctant traveler. She is afraid that in the chaos, she will be forgotten somewhere. Whenever we are on a trip and are stopping at a rest area to go to the bathroom, she insists I stand directly outside the stall, so that my feet are visible under the door. If she loses sight of me, we might become separated and never find each other again, because in her eyes, the world is that big, and parents are that unreliable. Nothing we say will ease this fear, so it stays with her through- out the trip, upsetting her stomach and her sleep. And her anxiety gets mixed in with the dread all of us are experiencing as we embark.
We are a car stuffed with belongings and vibrating with trepidation, though we do our best to create the veneer of a normal family vacation. We pack a lunch, and we find a park on the way where we stop and eat. Except for a slight mishap with the bike, which at first moves too freely on the back of our car, the drive goes smoothly. By evening we reach my father and step- mother’s place in Northwest Tennessee.
They have a large house dominated by three golden 9
retrievers, who appear at every turn, smiling up at you, their tails slowly wagging, releasing gold threads that float up into the light. Harry is the oldest and my father’s favorite. He is arthritic and deaf and needs help getting up from the floor, and his eyes have clouded over, betraying a new weariness, as if he is being dragged backward and is losing the strength to resist. At times I catch my father gazing at him. “He won’t be with us much longer,” he says.
My father is seventy-nine and has undergone three surgeries in the past year. He has lost several friends and four siblings to death. He is, as he will tell you, increasingly aware of his mortality. At one point in our stay, while I am standing by the sink, looking out the window at a crepe myrtle, and through its fuchsia blossoms to the back pasture saturated in gold, he stands next to me, drops a hand on my shoulder, tugs me into him.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “If anyone gives that girl any trouble, I will drive over to Vanderbilt with a base- ball bat and a t-shirt that says, ‘Grandpa with noth- ing to lose.’”
I imagine my father on such a mission, clutching a bat, trudging up a campus hill in his grimy yard- work jeans, his white beard lifted, gray eyes search- ing, trying to codify an impression from a second
ago while returning to his intention—What was he doing? Nothing to lose. Not because you don’t care, but because life, in its relentless flow of growth and decay, keeps stripping away everything and everyone you love.
~
Move-in day. We pull our dingy Honda into a line of Volvos and Explorers and Escalades. We wait, win- dows down, engine off, and we bicker. My younger daughter is complaining, and my husband says, “I know this is hard, saying goodbye.”
“It’s not hard to me,” she retorts.
“If it’s not hard for you,” the older one says, “then you don’t have to come into my dorm room—you can stay outside.”
We follow a flashing patrol car through the streets of Nashville and arrive at a circular drive next to the dorm, where a crew of alarmingly cheerful students in neon green t-shirts seizes on our car, unloads all of our stuff and drags it to the top floor, sweeping
us along with it, depositing us in a small room with laminate faux-wood flooring, which is not beautiful, but not terrible either. Certainly it’s better than the