Orbits
A week after my mother died, I stood in my kitchen, eating a slice of toast for breakfast. I chewed without thinking of chewing until the time came to swallow and my throat refused to work. I wasn’t sick or in pain, but my throat wouldn’t do what it was meant to do. Calmly, I willed myself to swallow until I managed to finish my breakfast and then forgot the ordeal. It was just one more thing that wasn’t right.
At lunch my throat again refused me. And at dinner nothing changed. I chewed, willed the right muscles to work, swallowed a thimbleful of food at a time and believed nothing explained what was happening to me but grief.
When my father died, there was strangeness then too. Daylight bothered me more than it ever had before. Nothing was wrong with my eyes or the light itself, but July had never been so white, hot, and electric. My mother and I drove around town doing all the things you do after a death has occurred, both of us in sunglasses, the sun warm on our skin as it came through the windshield. My mother said it was a blessing my father hadn’t died in the middle of winter. The gloom would have done her in, she said, but in the middle of the summer, all this sun, it was improper like someone laughing at the end of a sad story you just told.
At home we went about the work of living on. We ate just soup or scrambled eggs since we had no appetite. But, as my mother said, we had to keep body and soul together. Around us were all my father’s things—his shoes by the door, his wallet on the dresser, the library book about Richard the Lionheart he’d left leaning against the hi-fi. My father had died suddenly and we weren’t prepared. We left the house as it was as we drove around town to make what few final arrangements there were to make since my father always said he didn’t want a funeral, just cremation and whatever we wanted to do with the ashes was up to us.
Three days after my father died, we came home with his ashes and placed them on the fireplace mantle. That night my mother and I bought a bottle of wine to ease ourselves into living in the company of his urn. Neither of us were drinkers, but we settled on white wine in a bulbous Carlo Rossi bottle with a glass ring on its neck. We can slip our finger in the ring, lay the bottle on our arms and pour our wine like pros, my mother said. Her humor had become dry.
As we each drank our second glass of wine my mother told me things about my father that I’d heard before, but I listened quietly. I heard a hint of disbelief in my mother’s voice. This was the first time she spoke of my father as a man who was gone. He looked just like Harold Lloyd when I first met him, earnest and so decent, my mother said. His favorite piece of music when he was a boy was “Night on Bald Mountain,” and he was wise enough to keep this from his friends; he never much liked the sight of golf courses after he spent the summer he was seventeen driving a gang mower at the Whitemarsh Valley Country Club, flinching as errant golf balls arced through the air around him. My mother animated my father as we sat on the sofa with our wineglasses in hand. We were giddy and morose in turn. I finished my wine and got figurative.
“We’re planets, Mom,” I said, “the three of us revolved around each other, but now that Dad’s gone the gravitational pull isn’t what it was and the two of us have been flung out of our orbits.”
I sipped my wine. “Damn,” I said quietly, fearing I’d made my mother more miserable.
“Damn,” my mother said. “That sounds like something your Dad would have said.”
She gazed across the room, absorbed in thought. Finally, she pointed at the globe on the bookshelf across the room.
“Your Dad had that globe since he was a boy,” she said. “Every so often he’d take it off the shelf, turn it in his hand and just stare at it. One night, not that long ago, he said the world is full of fresh horizons and you couldn’t get to them all in just one life. I thought it was a beautiful thing to say and now I wonder if he knew something he didn’t tell me.”
We sat in silence. Words were of no help to us.
Bit by bit, in the time I stayed with my mother, I smoothed the house in ways I knew she wasn’t ready to do on her own. Grief is in the details. I took my father’s shoes from beside the door and placed them in the closet; gathered his work gloves, the hoe and rake he’d left outside the backdoor and placed them in the garage so it didn’t seem he was about to appear to finish the work he’d started; I stood at the dryer and matched up his socks, folded his underwear and shirts and placed them in the dresser. My mother told me to take some of my father’s belongings back home with me to Maryland. They’d be a comfort to me, she said. I took three of my father’s neckties, six of his White Owl cigars still wrapped in cellophane and his globe with all its fresh horizons. My mother still had his razor and toothbrush, his suits and ties, the stacks of maps of the United States and Europe he read as other people read books, the Debussy and Gershwin albums he kept by the hi-fi, everything he owned in the drawers and closets and on the shelves. Nothing the dead leave is trivial.
My mother and I talked on the phone every few days. She had to get back to living, she said, and she did. She kept up the house, haunted the aisles of thrift stores the way we did together when I lived at home, cropped her hair so she didn’t have to spend so much time fixing it in the morning, learned to cook for one, came to visit me in Maryland. Her life had become smaller, though. She existed in the sphere of her house and the neighborhood around it except for her trips to see me. I asked if she wanted to live with me. She said, no, but thank you, I don’t think I can make any more changes. Not now.
***
When my mother died, four years and three months after my father died, I got the news on the phone from a doctor at the hospital. She told me she was sorry; they did all they could and when did I expect to arrive. There was no warning this time either. I asked the doctor what had happened, and she said it was my mother’s heart. She’d never had heart trouble, I said. It was one of those useless things to say when there’s that hope that disputing what happened will make life magically snap back to normal. The doctor said she was sorry. I told the doctor I’d be there in the morning, hung up, made my way to the stairs, but stopped with my hand on the banister. I felt as though I had fallen into a stupor, my legs and arms shot through with ice so all I wanted to do was sink to the bottom step and just be still. Determination to pack, get out of the house and on a plane moved me up the stairs. I opened the suitcase on the bed and filled its emptiness with my clothes. In the bathroom I gathered the last of my things, glimpsed myself in the mirror and thought: I am no longer a daughter.
I arrived in California the next day and found my parents’ home was still as it had been when they were together. My mother hadn’t been able to bring herself to change the house and during my visits I hadn’t the heart to tell her she should. I emptied the rooms one by one until there was nothing to deaden the sound of the rose bushes scratching against the living room windows and the drum roll of the furnace in the attic. The house had become just glass, wood and mortar.
When I returned to my own home, I folded my parents’ possessions in with mine. My mother’s milk glass, her necklaces and rings, my father’s best suits and my mother’s best dresses. All of it tucked away in drawers, on my shelves, in my closets and cabinets. Then came my reluctant throat and the meals I missed when it took too much time to will myself to swallow.
Autumn ended and winter arrived. None of those moments came to me that I’d heard happen to other people who’d lost loved ones. I didn’t want to dash to the phone to tell my mother something interesting about my day. I didn’t wander in bookstores, come upon books on the British monarchy and wish to send them to my father. I knew they were gone. What did come were the questions I wished I’d asked. My questions were about the flecks and shimmers in my life. Details I hadn’t remembered in years became important. I wanted to know about that building we passed on our way into the city when we still lived outside Philadelphia—the building with the iron angels or were they silhouettes of children welded to the façade. Was that building in Willow Grove or Jenkintown? At night, before I slept, I willed the building, the roads we drove to reach it, to come to me. I wanted my father or mother to appear in a dream and just say the name of the street and I’d take it from there. But my sleep was flat and empty. I’d been too late in wanting to know more, but bigger questions came to me.
Dad, I’ve seen only two pictures of you as a boy. There’s the one of you swaddled in your christening clothes and placed upright in a wooden chair and the one where you’re dressed in knickers and a shirt and tie. Nothing about this photograph is right. You’re not smiling and you’re looking off to the side, your eyes anxious and sad as though something terrible is about to happen. When I asked what it was you saw, you never told me. I don’t believe you forgot what it was. My hope was that when I was older you’d tell me, but you kept it to yourself. You were always the protector, a child of the Depression you called yourself, and what you wanted for me was a good, clean, simple childhood. Sometimes I believe you wanted me to stay simple, an easily understood child and in adolescence, when I became insular and private, you told me I’d become a puzzle to you. I was glad then to finally have some intricacy. When I was older, you said I was just like you: steady, serious and diligent. But don’t overdo it, you’d say.
Mom, there’s more pictures of you as a girl, but they’re all heavy with what was to come. There’s the one of you when you’re fourteen, seated in a deep, upholstered chair with your younger sister and brother on your lap. You’re dressed in your school uniform, your hair tied in a ponytail. You’re smiling, but the sadness is in your eyes. It’s the same face I saw beside me, lit by the July sunshine as we drove around town after Dad died. All of you were living with your aunt then, you told me, since your mother was sick and would not live much longer. When I turned fourteen, I feared what happened to you would happen to me as if something so awful could be passed down from mother to daughter.
Deep in winter I was still had to think about the mechanics of swallowing so that my throat obeyed. I kept busy at work, went home, slowly swallowed my dinners as I sat at the table by the window staring at the sycamore tree that stood black and heavy as iron against the sky. There were no longer parents to please, to entertain, to try not to disappoint. It was liberation without relief.
On a late afternoon in January, I walked to my car after work in air that was still and bitter. The sky was cloudless and the sun had just set. The last of the daylight was trembling off in the distance. I got in my car. I didn’t turn on the ignition, but just sat as the cold seeped through my coat. Birds flew from the trees on the edge of the parking lot. Starlings. They swooped against the sky. A crow perched on the tree near my car. He was sharp as an ink sketch—blue black against the red and blue sky. Where the sun had been, the sky was the color of a blood orange.
My mother and I were out on an evening like this. Cold and blue and sharp. Time folded in upon itself like origami. We were shopping at a thrift store for dishes and pots and pans for my first apartment, a sliver of living space a few miles from my parents’ home. My mother and I shivered in the parking lot beside our cars parked side by side, the windshields full of sunset as we said goodbye. Living alone was new to me then and I dreaded the silence and closeness of my new apartment that night. I watched my mother’s car turn onto the street, its taillights fading in with all the other taillights as she returned home to where my father was probably sitting on the sofa, smoking a cigar, waiting restlessly for the sound of my mother pulling into the driveway. That was what I remember from the last cold, sharp, blue day that was like this one.
Dusk and frigid air pressed against me. My hands were numb, and I rubbed them as I watched the starlings swirl across the sky. A thousand hearts in unison, they flung themselves apart and gathered themselves together, again and again, in the last light of the day.
• • •
Denise Kline’s short fiction has appeared in The Courtship of Winds, Dime Show Review, Origami Journal, and OneTitle Reviews. She also received Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction competition.