Lana, her husband Clark, and their two daughters traditionally came over for holiday meals, but because Blythe was no longer capable of cooking, that year’s holiday gathering was held at the daughter’s new home. Cousin Emily was down for the occasion to bless the house with burnt sage and prayers.
Lucien played wallflower to his engaging in-laws in the belief the less he said, the less he opened himself to recrimination. The autistic understood his mother’s moods implicitly, but was otherwise analytical (suspicious) of silences and inconsequential gestures directed his way by others.
Cousin Emily called herself a spiritual advisor, though her primary talent lay in the role of social facilitator. Lucien’s mother was invigorated in the presence of extended family, and once the two women began to catch up on family intrigues, the son seized the opportunity to wander off. He strolled into one palatial room that, in more robust times, might have been called into service where a house full of people needed places to chinwag. Tchotchkes were objects of particular interest here, and studio portraits of his two young nieces.
The uncle judged his sister’s children to be happy, although he was no judge of disposition by appearance. He approached the outline of a mirror on one wall, over which was draped a white sheet. Lifting a corner of it, a waifish voice cautioned, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Lucien turned to see little Ainsleigh glaring at him.
“Auntie will know,“ she told him.
The confident older relation pointed at a sepia tone picture across the room, which depicted a threesome of ankle-biters in their Easter best posing on a thick-pile carpet. Only the pretty girl, in a crisp starched dress, smiled directly into the camera. The two boys on either side of her looked like they had been dropped off by the photographer’s studio after lobotomies. Each stared solemnly (distractedly) at seeming objects in the room other than the camera. From the perspective of a viewer of the portrait, their preoccupation centered on corners of the fake gold-leaf frame. “That’s me,” Lucien proclaimed cheerily. “The kid on the left.”
The niece was not persuaded. “Momma said I shouldn’t talk to strangers.”
The uncle reached into his sweater vest and pulled out a wad of cards assembled one daylong Saturday at Kinko’s. “This is my business card,” he advised.
The child examined the piece of laminated card stock quizzically.
Her aunt appeared in the doorway, limping with a bandage foot. “Dinner’s almost ready,“ she informed her cousin.
Ainsleigh skedaddled.
A walking stick preceded the crepe hanger into the room and danced like a divining rod over silken lampshades. “I sense your father’s presence…”
Lucien required no genealogy for this deduction, and embellished, “Since Dad’s death, he has reverted to the young man my mother married in my dreams: tall, lanky, and tanned from his rooftop job. He appears around the house wearing his dark blue uniform, and is either under a kitchen cabinet fixing a leak or in the laundry room replacing a faulty belt on the dryer. He does not join the family for meals. Somehow he and Mom are estranged, divorced, or separated. I am unable to explain why he is in the house.”
The cousin’s manner was folksy, but with Lucien she spoke forthrightly. “Feelings do not differentiate between dreams and waking, or whether actors called to a stage or alive or dead. With age, a few realize the boundary dividing dreams from waking is provisional; and while the realm of dreams waxes, the waking realm wanes. It is the reverse of childhood, when you sprang from bed each day eager to drink in the world. Now you are reluctant to leave your bed and, eventually, like your mother, you will not leave it at all.”
“It’s one of life’s ironies,” Lucien supposed.
“It is transference of sand in an hourglass,” Emily pressed her analogy. “The chamber of sleep, which was at first empty, fills with more detail than what is left to gather in its absence. A debt is nearly repaid; and this is all one may say of it.”
“A debt…?” Lucien found the explanation quixotic. “If only I slept as well as you imagine.”
The advisor planted her cane on the hardwood floor, where it was used to relieve pressure on her swelling foot. Her expression conveyed concern. “I know a place that can help you with your sleep. I will write down the address.”
Lucien supplied one of his business cards for the jot.
Blythe was heard to break into laughter in the other room. Laughing was something she did less and less.
The cousin’s look was antithetical to its mood. “The love you have for your mother is a child’s love,“ she observed. “And maybe, for her, this is all she has ever expected from you. That love is a blessing from God, given to you with all your smarts. Love keeps you from slamming the door shut on Him.”
This segue confused Lucien.
Emily spoke plainly. “Blythe has congestive heart failure. It’s all those eggs and bacon she fixed for your Dad, herself, and the family pets all those years. Three dogs were mummified in cholesterol. Even from halfway across town, I see their ghosts running around out in the backyard where the old clothesline poles used to stand. They were warning shots over the bow—lab rats fired from a tee-shirt cannon.”
“I will change her diet,” the son announced.
Emily could hear gears grinding in the son’s head, under the stiff collar of the thirty-year-old dress shirt bought him by Blythe for high school graduation. “Your mother is the simple daughter of sharecroppers. She’s not going to take to garden salads and balsamic vinegar this late in the day.”
Lucien’s silence was defiant, and the cousin, respecting this, took his arm and reminded him, “It’s time for dinner.”
The brother-in-law played sommelier and uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay. Lucien nervously walked into the dining area where his mother was already enthroned at the table. Meals, where ears were available for bending, were never quiet affairs: Lana, Clark, and Emily provided comic relief, while preoccupied Lucien dished out the deviled eggs and green bean casserole.
The blessing conducted earlier that morning left one form of aromatic sage to linger over another rising from the steaming cornbread dressing. Emily offered the same spiritual service to her aunt, but Blythe was content to keep her ghosts in the old family house, if only to have excuse for complaint.
She was on again about Ernie. “I know your father is getting into my cabinets in the middle of the night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense since that man never expressed any interest in cooking while he was alive and I waited on him hand and foot. He’s brought some Mexican with him, too. My neighborhood has got enough Mexicans without your father letting them in through the front door. God only knows what your father calls himself doing in the kitchen with this man. The only thing he can fix is the float in the commode tank. He doesn’t know the difference between Miracle Whip and a bottle of Miss Butterworth.”
Clark commented, “If he can still fix a toilet, tell him we’ve got work here.”
“And tell the Mexican we have yard work,” entered Lucien, inappropriately.
Adele, the eldest daughter, frowned.
“I just had this house blessed,” scolded Lana. “We need ghosts like we need a backyard pen of baying blue tick hounds chewing through buried Comcast cable.”
Blythe, who never ate much, even in good health, was already feeding Deirdre under the table.
The brother-in-law mumbled, “Mom, between that dog’s methane and your oxygen tank, our house will be a powder keg today. I will not undermine the house blessing, or tempt fate, but do my smoking in the driveway.”
“This little dog doesn’t have long,” Blythe lamented, justifying her indulgence. “She wheezes all night.”
The daughter proclaimed confidently, “That dyspeptic little snot will outlive you, Momma.”
“Just put her down, and make room for her in the coffin with me,” replied the doting mother.
Emily digressed, “Wasn’t Liam supposed to come down this year?”
Blythe reengaged, raised her fork as a pointer. “He sent his Momma a birthday card!”
“That was in September,“ noted Lana.
The mother frowned at her plate. Her fork struck the ceramic like flint trying to gather sparks. “He always sends his Momma a card.”
The sister interjected, “I had a custom placemat made for him a few years back, with all the family birthdays on it so he would remember the dates. It was on a Christmas theme, very pretty with holly and fancy script lettering. He’s been very good about sending cards, although he missed Ainsleigh’s birthday this year.”
“Maybe he got distracted,” concluded Emily.
Lucien piped up. “He has a girlfriend.”
Everybody stared in disbelief.
Blythe beamed. “I always wanted him to meet a nice girl!”
“How do you know this?” queried the sister. “Our brother doesn’t own a phone.”
“His girlfriend owns a phone.”
“Ah!” said everyone in unison.
The mother pleaded with her daughter. “Maybe you need to get another placemat, one with telephone numbers on it.”
After dessert was served, Lucien thought the worst was over until Clark introduced him to a wooden crate in the garage. A silver figurine of Genesha, the Hindu elephant god and remover of obstacles, was uncovered. An oval mirror was set in the deity’s plump belly. The statue had arrived as a housewarming gift, and was made of some impractically heavy metal. No written instructions in English, Hindi, or Sanskrit were included in the crate’s bubble wrap.
Lucien jokingly asked his brother-in-law, “Were little Hindi men shipped in the roomy crate to help assemble it?”
The assembly was straightforward, and several orders of magnitude less hard than any of Ernie’s typical holiday trials.
Lana was suddenly at the connecting door. “What was in the crate?”
“Something business associates sent us. Where do you want to put it?”
“It stays in the garage,” she answered. “It has a crack in its mirror.”
(The assemblers had missed this detail.)
Emily leaned forward on her walking stick, peeking around her cousin; she shared her distress over this introduction of another mirror to the house.
When the afternoon was long, Lucien and his mother returned home. Blythe was exhausted and went to bed; the son also took to his bed, though worryingly. His object was to nap off his meal while watching the soft browns of November intensify in the golden window light. He imagined his mother fussing in the backyard, in fitter days, wearing her memorable breezy blue housedress…
She must have risen to let the dog outside, although the idea of her following the pet off the patio and into the narrow yard was unanticipated. He imagined, in his dozing, sweet gum burs sticking to her white ankle socks and cloth house slippers. Next she took to a little-used ornamental bench swing with steadiness, and with every confidence that she would free herself from the trap unaided.
Nothing in her venture adhered to purpose; and from the ranginess of the surroundings, her cantankerous battle with the neighbor’s encroaching bamboo appeared ended, along with tending to weeds among her hydrangeas.
The son, removed by circumstance, was unable to crawl into her skin and animate it. His will could only disinter and further desecrate: Fractures in his mother’s body did not fall along anatomical fault lines. Each constituent fragment threatened to become an entity in its own right; and vanity alone set the son grasping at wisps to lift his mother off the low bench, where nothing would be left to hold up to daylight that was not daylight itself.
A breeze arose in the hedgerow, and here and there shadows came to life like larder beetles gamboling in different directions. Long slender arms separated from a low tangle of dark branches across the lot line; Lucien squinted, searching for Ganesha’s mirrored spyglass beneath them; and for a glimpse, through it, for what else moved in the vicinity.
He wondered if the remover of obstacles would help remove his mother from the snare of the low bench swing…
His mother spoke aloud, perhaps to the dog, or perhaps to elderly neighbors in an adjacent yard (although these neighbors passed away in preceding years).
A tall reed of bamboo bent over the chain-linked fence; it yielded with the limber ease of a blade of grass. What was this shadow that poured out behind it? One might suppose the foot of something indescribable dropping through the upper branches of the sweet gum trees, and pressing into its stride until the tough green reed shattered.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.