Some lives are flattened by the deception that the future is at least foreseeable. The eye only sees ahead to the horizon and not to the treacherous and bone splitting pits disguised as not there. Those with flat lives makes a hell for those who look to see where to place their next step.
There is upon the earth a place of fresh water, Lake Superior. The land around this fresh water slopes and curves to hide to remind us that attention to the few feet in front of us is paramount to longevity. It’s not the glory of God, it’s a lesson in gratitude for those of us with a will to live. We suffer the carnage of those who continually look ahead until the lake and the land consume the self-enlightened and fortune tellers.
Aside from that, there is not much else to do around here but go to church and the bar, (not bars–there is only one bar where I live). My dad went to the same bar for years and he died getting off the bar stool on Saturday night right around closing. I make a point of sitting on the same bar stool when I go for my sip of sherry. Joe, the bartender said he died in the parking lot, but Mike, the other bartender said he died right there in the middle of the floor, after sliding off his bar stool, sorta kickin’ and turnin’ purple. I figured Dad would die pissed off. I sit on the same bar stool and order sherry. First time I ordered sherry, Joe smiled.
“Not the hard stuff like your old man, huh?”
“No.”
“What you doin’ here, anyway?” Joe asked.
I shrugged. Dad left me everything–everything by accident. The acres of land that his Dad bequeathed him only because his Dad did the same; all came to me. Dad left me everything and the sound of Superior singing and the wolf pack that howls late at night. I think Dad figured he’d live a long, flat life, seeing everything before it came to him. And to be spiteful. But he didn’t and all that money he was socking away, working for the state of Michigan, maintaining roads in the Upper Peninsula came to me. And all the life insurance money that Mom thought she’d live to see, well that came to me too. I’m very careful with the money, nothing too opulent for me. That’s what Mom would say, “Nothing too opulent for me.”
Mom liked to read the novels by the Bronte sisters.
I remember my Mom younger than the day she died; younger with the sun shining on her brown hair, curly and soft against her neck. I see her in her best dress, pale yellow with a V-neck, simple and straight. She would sit in the old wooden chair next to my Dad, he asleep in a heap and she with a book in her lap, looking toward Superior. She might have heard Superior in the daylight, I never could. I imagine her getting up with her dress swaying about her thin form and walking toward the big lake and allowing it to wrap it’s big waves all around her.
Superior always loved her with a soft acceptance contrary to its nature. Superior loves me too with all the determination that sparing me any sort of rod would spoil my outcome.
When Lake Superior and my Mother met there was longing on her face and a longing in the song I heard Superior sing, soft and abject at her feet. Perhaps that’s why she stayed in her seat and only listened to Superior’s calling song. Soon enough, they both seemed to say.
I think of her now walking the slopes and curves of the land, the morning mist parting for her as the intruding morning sun pushes the night away. Yes, my Mother drifting quickly toward Superior’s shore to spend the heat of the day beneath the glacier cold waves. She didn’t stay for my sake.
Mom and I would dream in the heat of the day, under the weight of daily chores about the little house we would have someday. In other words when Dad died. We discussed the floor to ceiling bookcases, and the little dormers in our bedrooms. Plenty of windows to watch the snow thicken upon the ground in winter and the quiet to listen to the ice boom at night. We dreamed of smaller spaces and larger ways to live around corners and window casings painted glossy white against dark blue walls.
That was a bad day, me standing on the outside of her grave with Dad breathing heavy and stone cold sober beside me. That was a terrible day.
Two years later he was gone. Two years.
I thought perhaps that would be the case; him dying because when Mom went he stayed longer at the bar and they reprimanded him at the job for being late. The union protected him; I heard others talking. The union men, they would talk in the bar that Joe and Mike, the bartenders and owners of the one bar in town. The only bar in a twenty-mile radius. It had a pool table shipped in from down below and it had mirrors behind the bar so people could watch people drink and play pool and dance slow and clumsy.
These men, these union men, seemed to understand my father’s suffering. The men, who with two days’ beard on them, would throw back a quick one, nod their sage heads and commiserate. Losin’ his wife that way–and his daughter not worth much. The only thing that kid could do was drive down and make sure he got home from the bar. But I didn’t care what they said or thought. It worried me he wouldn’t die with benefits, but he died in time.
After he died, I took over his bar stool; I sip sherry and talk to Joe, sometimes Mike too. I walk across the land to the shore of Superior. Superior was hers during the day. It is ours at night.
Nobody else talks to me, they all pretend I’m not there. Some women would talk to me at first, they were a little older and wore too much makeup and were too thin, but they would talk to me. Then they grew tired of me and asked men to dance. I disappeared to them in time.
I sip sherry on the same bar stool my dad fell off of while Joe tries to talk some sense into me; that I shouldn’t hang out in the bar while so much of life was goin’ on.
Joe has always been nice to me but never refused a whiskey and soda ordered up by my Dad. Pondering that fact I study Joe’s face; the skin creases like small fans from the corners of his pale blue eyes, the deep lines across his forehead pucker while he’s lecturing me. I feel him grow uncomfortable under my gaze, so he talks more and faster. Sometimes he slams down my sherry in front of me, takes my money and stays at the opposite end of the bar, while Mike sends me a sympathetic smile once in a while.
Joe asked me if I have any plans to travel or maybe go away to school. He tells me about his time in the army and his trip to Vietnam. He asks how the construction of my new home is going–the home my Mother and I planned together for so many years. Joe tells me how lucky I am to have so much land and such a nice little brick house to live in, that Dad had set me up. Too bad my Mom died sort of young. I nod and sip my sherry.
Joe asked me one day, “why don’t you go home and get up in the morning and go to church, find some nice young man there and settle down?”
“Mom told me not to look for men in church,” I said, sipping my sherry and maneuvering for a comfortable position. A comfortable position on my Dad’s bar stool is still something I’m trying to find.
I could tell Joe was about to laugh–and a part of me was sorry he didn’t. Perhaps at the sound of his laughter, I might have fit in. If the regular crowd heard the bartender and I sharing a joke, maybe I wouldn’t be treated like an unwanted guest or like I was that icy shiver in everyone’s spine. But instead of laughing he paused and looked at me and his big blue eyes sorta got bigger and he said, “What?”
“Mom said that nice men at church have a funny notion about women and that I shouldn’t go there to look for men–I should go just to worship God.”
“So, you go to church?”
“Sure.”
“And what do those men at church say about you coming to a bar?”
“They never ask how I spend my time.”
“What will you do when they ask?”
I shrugged and look away from Joe because no one will ask me. He didn’t understand. Some people at church, they are very nice and call me and tell me if I need anything, I should let them know. People make me nervous when they are people and not a congregation singing or taking communion. They seem to me to treat God like a police officer. I don’t think they are sick, but deep down lonely. Church people are like people in the bar; they talk to each other and not to God. Neither notices how the sun in the morning shines to expose the undulating land, and the sun in the evening hides those things living on the land.
I feel sorry for them because Jesus made things so hard for us and simple too. I like to think of Jesus talking to women; talking to His Mom and to the lady at the well and Jesus just staring at the prostitute at His feet. I think women made Jesus think of Superior singing; sort of sad and wistful and sorry that things weren’t different or the way they should be.
“What are you thinking about?” Joe asked one night, a quiet, slow night.
“Jesus.”
“In a bar?”
I smiled at Joe. The men at the bar really do not differ from men in the church. That was something I would have to tell Mom when I saw her again. There was Joe, all gray and tired looking. He fought in the jungles and lived in Detroit for a while, and he smoked pot when a kid. Did he think of God at all? Sure, he did. He thought of God keeping score but not as someone to talk to.
“I was thinking about when Jesus told the crowds of men they were all guilty of adultery when they thought of committing adultery.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Tough guy.”
“He’s God.”
“Tough God.”
“He’s okay though–God I mean because He sacrificed His own Son to save our souls, so we think right.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Joe walked away; I had made him uncomfortable. Wanting to laugh out loud but knowing people wanted to burn me at the stake already, I sipped my sherry. There I was with all of my dead Dad’s money, staying in the middle of nowhere; dirt roads, a tiny bar (not bars mind you–we have only one, one gas station and one paved road that the state of Michigan maintains) and thinking about Jesus in a bar and avoiding men at church and listening to Superior sing; the crowd was becoming annoyed.
Imagine God’s own Son slapping His open palm up against His forehead and saying, “Are you kidding me? I made you. Talk to Me, discuss your desires with Me. I know you did your neighbor’s wife in your head while on top of your own wife.” Men around Jesus looking about sheepishly and feeling uncomfortable mumbled and murmured and then Jesus moving in with a zinger–“of course, your own wife was not mentally there because you’re all boring lovers. Yes, she talks to Me, I listen.” Then they’d drag Him off and nail Him to a cross because they don’t want to listen.
Joe’s wife left him several years ago and everyone knows why, but nobody discusses it. To me, the aloneness of everyone is normal. Men like Joe push things aside and pretend they understand other men who outlive their wives or marry women who are never satisfied; women who think the landscape is romantic. Men like Joe or my Dad could never understand my Mother and her ability to hear Superior sing the song of knowledge that things aren’t what they ought to be.
My Dad woke me up two days before he died. He woke me up rough and smelling of something awful. He told me to make him some coffee, but I didn’t want to because after Mom would make him coffee, I would hear her crying in the bedroom. But he shook me again, so I got up and made him coffee.
He sat at the old kitchen table and watched me. Fighting back sobs I talked to God. Praying real words, I went about putting the coffee together like a robot and felt my hands shaking with cold and weakness. For comfort I remembered sitting with my Mom the last time. She looked all swollen, but she said she was in no real pain; she was smiling at me and talked to me. “Debbie,” she said, “Debbie men of power do not want to save anyone. Men of power want dependency,” my Mom told me. “Jesus went through life so we could stand on rocks and part the Red Sea of loneliness, so we could raise our hands and win the battle of raising our children. He died on a cross and healed us of snake bites–even though the snakes bite us over and over again and never go away. He died for us so we can live to run our race and meet God, that’s what Jesus did.”
She worried about me so I didn’t mind her talking about God. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. Dad won’t live forever.”
“You build our little house; I’ll come and visit you.”
“I’ll build it.”
“Build it strong.”
I only nodded at Mom. But when I stood there shivering in the kitchen, the very kitchen where Mom taught me of Jesus and God and I felt all the hate of a dying man grind into my back, I felt the thinnest of my entire life, paper thin and not so sure. A life full of pits and cliffs. Placing the coffee in front of Dad but not look into his eyes I went back to my bedroom, locking the door behind me.
Never staying until the bar closes; I just sit there until I don’t want to anymore, maybe an hour or two. It’s funny because when I’m at the bar I think I just want to be in my nice quiet home where no one has lived except me and where I feel my Mom visit at night. She waits for the mist of Superior to rise up, thick and white. We listen to the wolf pack at night and wait for Superior to sing.
He banged on my bedroom door, my Dad did, and the door shook as if the Devil himself was demanding entrance.
“Monday! That’s right, on Monday, I’m making sure you don’t get a dime missy–not a dime. You’ll finally work. The oldest work known to man–if you can get anyone stoned enough to pay for it. That’s three days away little Miss Debbie. It’s my way of making sure you won’t die a virgin–you’ll thank me later.” My Dad shook the thin door of my room upon its hinges. “Your mother can’t protect you anymore. And her water stained shadows on the wall don’t frighten me.”
He said it in a high-pitched shout and for the first and last time; I felt a pang of pity for my Dad and an almost certain knowing he wouldn’t last three days. I wished that I could see my mother’s shadow, like he did, for I was certain it would be a comfort to me. I never did, and I had that old shack of a house torn down soon after it spent its purpose. The water-stained shadows and the echoes of my Dad’s terrified screams crumbled together.
I still pray in real words though fear is gone and I think of things Jesus would say while sipping sherry on the bar stool my Dad used, among other things in his flat life.