When he arrives home, officially, he kisses my mother on the cheek. It is the one and only time anyone sees anything like this transpire between them, and it is startling. It fills me with dread.
The arms now will not go over his head, his legs will not bend as imagined. He is covered in pink jagged scars. There is no more running or basketball or baseball with his friends. At night he sits with a tool to strengthen his hand. He squeezes the strengthening tool, while we watch Taxi.
Now things are changing, also, because I am in a different grade in a different school, and I am being treated like a real child student, at least, I go for the whole day rather than half a day, and now when I come home at the end of the day, it is not my mother waiting in the cul-de-sac, but instead it is my father, because he now stays home. My mother has returned to the secretarial desk, and not just part time. The house is being renovated. Mom-mom is going to a special home, a home where they will be able to understand her. She too is outside of language. My parents will take her portion of the house and integrate it into their lives, for betterment.
My mother visits her mother almost nightly in her new special home. I go along. In the yard of her special home, there is a mimosa tree which, when it blooms, smells of strawberries. In the hallways of her special home, the elderly sit in their wheelchairs in a state of perpetual despair. Sometimes they speak to me. Often I run from them. My mother buys mom-mom an elegant rug to cheer up the room. The rug goes missing. She buys her many fine linens, in bright colors. The linens go missing. In the home, things are transient. They are fleeting.
Now in the evening we are not simply at one with the TV. My dad and I ride bikes. Instead of anything else, there is the bike, because my father can pedal and sit, and it strengthens his legs, which are now thin white lines with long thick scars from the insertion of the new hips. So is his chest and so are his shoulders. So is his head, beneath the hair that is finally growing back, he is quilted. He is craft.
We take what my father calls the round robin. We ride down past the old airstrip, down and down past where we walked with mom-mom and Lad, our mangy grass-diseased dog, and down toward the cemetery. Through the cemetery and further still to the road that leads to the old trestle bridge, and then down a brisk long slope, on the last paved road for some time, through fields of swiftly changing wildflowers and tall grasses, in the middle of absolute nothing, until we round a bend and come slowly back into something like a residential neighborhood but a neighborhood of small farms, widely spaced on a half-paved road, and it is here that every evening, at exactly the same point, a pack of farm dogs chases me on my little bike, and though I am terrified, I ride on, at ever-increasing speeds until they give up and return to their compound. On the final turn, we come up a very steep hill, one that I can barely manage on my tiny purple one-speed. This, this difficult slope is the last stretch before home.
The speedboat is sold. The flat-bottomed boat is sold. There is no more lake, for anyone.
For my father, the language is there but not quite. He speaks, yes, but somehow not in quite the same way. He writes, but with a shaking hand, and he spells words not quite in a language of anyone’s memory. He makes a shopping list and leaves it on the table for my mother. Ligt bubs? she says. Can you see this? Do you think he thinks this is how we spell light bulbs? He barely finished high school, she says. He had three different scholarships to junior colleges to play sports, and he flunked out of every one.
He does not drive trucks. That is no more. He lurches about the household. And when I get home from my new school at the end of each day, there he is, lurching about considering the yard. There are things in the yard, though not much. Has he ever noticed the yard? I think not. For so long it was the place only of the mangy dog, and the rotten walnuts dropping from the tree, mud puddles and dead grass stomped on relentlessly, and the feral child bouncing upon her swing, and the mud puddles and the inconsequential shrubbery and the chain-link fence. Here, he considers. Might there be more?
In a way, I am now the center of things. I am now the thing around which the day is organized. What luck to have such complete attention! Though now, in my new school, I am well beyond hamminess. At the new school they are teaching me a mathematical system that involves drawing little dots on all the numbers and then counting those dots. (This will ensure that I will never be able to tabulate a tip on a meal without poking spots for ten minutes. I am crippled by my learning.) They also read aloud the story of the hardships of many rabbits who, in seeking to establish a new colony, must strike out from their homeland. These rabbits are both intrepid, and gentle, and this book is accompanied by a magnificent cartoon.
But it seems, we are no longer all of us one together with the TV. My father takes himself out into the soil until very late at night, where his new burgeoning yard needs much watering. And as it begins to flourish, he is mostly at one with his garden, in a lawn chair, below the bug zapper with its hypnotic violet glow, which protects those of us with sweet flesh from the bloodsuckers.
No, now, it is only me, myself alone with the TV.
I wonder, perhaps if it is then during this period that his friend Gene kills himself in a hunting accident. And perhaps it is only the fact of the stroke that he didn’t go along on this trip. I can never remember the order of things.