And suddenly he is gone completely. With the help of Feral he has found his own little house on the lake and he is gone there and there he shall stay! My mother begins crying. This goes on for several days. I desire a grilled cheese sandwich. One cannot be had! I cry and scream but no more loudly than my mother. Eventually my brother comes and makes the grilled cheese sandwich. He hands it to me on a saucer without speaking.
It goes on like this for a time. How long a time? A very short time. My father’s escape is so very brief. He is gone for only one week. Then, one day, I come home from kindergarten and something is very wrong. More wrong even than it has been in the week of the weeping mom.
I have had a hard day, that day at kindergarten, very much in keeping with so many of my long, dark days of kindergarten. I have arrived late as usual, because I have not been able to awaken. I have had altercations on the playground, and I have been accused by my teacher of being mean to the church girls, even though the church girls are classically the meanest girls on the planet. Yes, I have been mean to the horrid church girls, but not mean enough! Not by a mile! Afterwards, I have been given a snack, and I have not enjoyed my snack. And, I have been caught talking during nap to the lice boy. For talking during nap, I am made to sit in an isolated shaming location known as ‘the box,’ which is for solitary confinement and contemplation of wrongdoing. Only I love the box, which is like a small safe cave, and I have begun to chat to myself in the box about those mice in the tree and without noticing have chatted louder and louder regarding these mice, until, in vexation, my teacher drags me out of the box by my arm and my name is added to a chalkboard. This is the precursor to a collective punishment, for if one’s name appears on the board and then wrongdoing continues, one’s name receives a check mark, and the entire group is punished in some incomprehensible way by the appearance of this check mark, incomprehensible in part because it never happens, because a name is added as a precursor, but then the collective shaming begins, so rarely does the name have an opportunity to continue in wrongdoing. And also, we are only there for a few hours, and we can barely even read our own names. In a way, how could it ever go so wrong as to require a check mark? Such is the danger of the marked name, however.
But I manage; I survive the hardship, and I have made it through without a check mark, but when I emerge from the building I have not been picked up by my mom in the cul-de-sac of hovering cars. I have instead been picked up by the mother of my fanciest friend, the one who lives in the house where Dennis Weaver’s wife grew up. She has picked me up, and has taken me to Dennis Weaver’s wife’s house, and she has given me a snack of fine waxen biscuits and she has kept me there till nearly suppertime, and then she has driven me back and dropped me at my home where something is going wrong. What has happened?
The stroke has happened. The stroke has struck in the night! My father in a little house on the lake has suffered an aneurysm followed by a hemorrhage. This aneurysm followed by a hemorrhage has been accompanied first by pain, then by incomprehensible rage demonstrated in the utter demolition of the little house on the lake, and this was followed by disorientation in which some sort of a call has been placed to someone, perhaps Feral, perhaps Fuzz. My father is now in intensive care in Joplin, land of all things. Not so far, only forty minutes.
What is the nature of a stroke? It is hard to say. Something in the brain ceases to flow perhaps? Or begins to flood its boundaries? There is a leak, a surge or a swelling. There is a point at which language stops, and perhaps will not begin again. But this is not the worry on anyone’s mind.
What happens next? Many things which do not happen ever. The phone begins to ring and ring—it is sometimes a doctor, sometimes an uncle, sometimes the switchboard girl who my mother shouts at—don’t call here! Then my mother disappears, and returns with Vesta! Vesta in our home? This never happens. Mom-mom lives in our home. Vesta lives elsewhere in a little house on central street with a flooded basement, and a large pecan tree in the yard, where she is forever and always taking in sewing, and washing, and ironing, and making the whole neighborhood rompers.
Then my mother leaves again. Leaves us there, my brother and I, with Vesta who attempts to offer me a food. I rebuff the offering. My brother appears and is persuaded to make me a sandwich. I accept the sandwich. Then Vesta draws me a bath of an inch of cool water and places me in it for five minutes. I do not take baths in an inch of water! I take baths in several cubic feet of water, and I take these baths interminably, until quite chilled and puckered and beside myself, because I have been developing whole underwater fantasyscapes with various of my aquatic playthings, and also perhaps because I have been forgotten in the bath. Perhaps because Vesta remembers the dust bowl, she believes a bath is an inch of water and it lasts five minutes. Then, unbelievably, horrifically, I am put to bed. There is still light in the western sky. I lie in the bed in horror. I have never been put in bed so early.
That night, my brother does not breathe as Vader, nor does he pursue me in a KISS mask. I long for this familiar terrorizing. I begin to sob and choke on my spit. I am unattended. I lay for some time in this state of sob. Then, as with a tantrum, the sobbing passes and I sleep.
The next day, I am removed. I am removed to a neighbor’s house.
We pack my bags in the living room, and then my mother bundles me. I will be fine here, my brother says to Vesta. Just leave me. I will be fine. And there he remains with mom-mom, who needs looking after a bit, not nearly as much as me.
The neighbor is called Agnes, who is an old lady who is the mother of my mother’s best friend from childhood. I know her well enough. My mother takes her to the grocery store on Saturdays and I ride along in the car and then sometimes, in the grocery store, I choose to follow Agnes around rather than following Mom around. Agnes’s husband died of the miner’s TB years ago, and he was well-beloved, and in her little house just blocks from my own, there are sepia-tone pictures of him all over the walls.
Agnes, for some reason is someone I do not mind. Why? She is perhaps just simply benevolent. She is perhaps just a kind old lady. Yes, she is the perpetrator of the German Chocolate ice cream. She also tries to perpetrate lime sherbet, most hateful of all fruit flavors. But otherwise, I like her. I will now live with her. I will sleep in the bed with her, even though the bedspread is made of crochet.
And so I do. For what seems like some time. But how long is some time? My mother passes through for an hour only in the afternoons, one hour per day, or one hour every other day. At night she sleeps on a cot somewhere. Where? In a hospital. Or in a waiting room of a hospital, it is unclear.
My brother is I don’t know where, but perhaps he has remained with the home. Or perhaps he is wherever the other one is, the one that I have now nearly forgotten. The stroke victim. This goes on for so very long.
I am five. It’s probably only a few months or slightly more. Any time is a very long time, and all that time is time in the memory of an unformed mind. Be careful, my therapist reminds me, now, in these much later days: those may be screen memories. What are screen memories? I ask. The memories that we put in place to protect us from worse memories.
Worse memories? There could be, somewhere within me, worse memories? Worse than this thing where my dad once was, and then was not? Or was not quite not, but was very nearly not—hovering on the verge of not. Was removed, or removed himself, and then was removed all the more, as if in punishment for his first removal?
Screen memories. And so that little dog that had adventures in Berlin replaces the story of the suicide of my father’s friend—or the story of the suicide of my father’s friend becomes confused and my father is someone now in it, inside the memory, and his gun is being propped in such a way near him so as to make this notness seem accidental, unplanned. Perhaps my father was, after all, on that hunting trip in Germany, and is dead in the same way, as it seems, he has been erased.