Water

Nothing in our house leaks except for me.

Even these occasional effusions are only improvisations. I only admit to leakage publicly because there are actual photographs of me leaking and I feel that it is best to get these things all out in the open so as to forestall any scandal.

In one pornographic sequence of stills—safely sealed behind a sticky plastic sheet in the otherwise innocent pages of our family album—my mother catches me smiling. She sneaks up on me while she is holding a thin silver Kodak 110 instamatic with a flashcube situated on the top of a rotating black pillar like a lamp on a lighthouse.

I am a ship in distress. I am in a corner of the dining room trying not to make a nuisance of myself, as is my habit even today at parties. I stand in front of a long-necked orange glass vase that I desperately hope will be voluminous enough to contain the bubbly contents of my bursting bladder.

We are having another in that endless series of birthday celebrations for Kyle, it seems. The upstairs and downstairs bathrooms are both occupied by elderly relatives—who shall remain nameless, if not blameless.

These are the thoughts swimming through my head as I lie on our old olive carpet with my mouth turned toward the common wall, conversing with my grandmother on the other side.

My body trails down the stairs toward an oak and glass door, through its 12 panes, down a step, across the pink and maroon brick pattern linoleum lining the foyer, past an identical oak door in the open position, through a flimsy white aluminum nothing with a screen, down two cement stairs, past a penny on the walk, out the gate, and on into Eternity: the trunk of a golden Chevy Chevelle where my father is presently stowing 3 blue suitcases that ordinarily nest inside each other like a family of matryoshka dolls.

We are about to take an exciting trip to Letourneau Christian Camp on Canandaigua Lake—where I will almost drown.

My grandmother kneels in her dungarees dusting the baseboards with a chamois that I glimpse as a swirling shadow as it passes across her vent.

“Have you packed your bathing suit?”

“Yes.”

Hiss.

Burst of lemons.

“Did you pack Dolly?”

“No.”

Dolly will not be coming. Dolly is a small red monstrosity with an indestructible duck bill smile. She pretends she loves Spaghetti Os. I suspect she secretly shares mom’s belief that they smell like puke, but she is too polite to complain.

Dolly’s stomach was originally stuffed with shredded rags by a pair of small hands in South Korea. She has recently received a transfusion of synthetic cotton from my mother’s sewing basket. A triangular iron-on medical plaster (patch) covers her chest.

Dolly—like Vladimir Nabokov’s little heroine—has a few holes in her, where love has rubbed her raw. She would sink instantaneously if she tried to swim in Lake Canandaigua. She would be completely useless at a Christian Camp as a lifeguard. She is staying at home to guard the house.

My grandmother dissolves into her favorite hymn (‘We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the...’) when she moves off to scrub and disinfect the commode.

As much as I enjoy art and music for their own sake, if they do not attempt to communicate something beyond the walls of a concert hall or a museum, I see no point in the continued existence either one. Even at 5, I am sure that I felt the same way about writers.

I turn away from the vent, listening to her fading refrain.

Evidently she has closed the bathroom door.

I can barely make out ‘We shall come rejoicing…’ let alone the misty whisk of her toilet brush. I study the blankness of our ceiling for a moment, as if it were the Sistine Chapel redone with a fluffy peach colored roller soaked in mid-20th century gloom by Mark Rothko.

Luckily, I am disturbed in my contemplative reverie by the cheerful sound of a distinctly muted but full-throated flush. The door is opened. The singing resumes. Though at a greater distance than ever.

She must be in the bedroom, checking on Kyle.

With nobody to talk to, I refuse to defy gravity any longer and I slide down the stairs—bumpety-bumpety-bumpety, bump—stand up—and jump into a pair of my father’s favorite church shoes—white loafers—with little ornamental brass buckles set off to one side.

Is he still out there, I wonder?

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

Yes.

He seems to be finished packing the car.

Slam.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

“Fine, a penny: stick it up.”

When I squat for that lost coin, I eclipse an ant war that is bleeding into the grass.

A million soldiers look up. The insects cannot help but notice I am wearing a pair of cut off jeans—hot pants, really—with a happy Choo-Choo chugging to the right across the left cheek of my caboose.

The Generals shake their antenna and conclude that I am an ant, too, but I am out of uniform and I am too big to be shot. I will only get bigger, too. It is best not to make an enemy of one so young.

Fighting resumes when I stand and the sun returns to the sky.

At the curb, dad extracts a steel, vinyl and foam cage designed for the use of children by a committee of concerned sadists.

“Why are you taking out the car seat?”

“Your brother isn’t coming to camp with us, babe. He’s too little.”

“I get the whole back to myself?”

Visions of oriental luxury. The Nile. Camels crawling along the distant ridge of a dune. Pillows stuffed with flamingo eiderdown. I step back and look at our Chevelle again. Cleopatra’s barge.

“No. You have to share the back seat.”

A German torpedo strikes the Lusitania.

“Who with?”

Tense violins.

“The new lifeguard. Brad.”

Brad, it turns out, is the man who saves me from drowning. He goes to another church, dad says. Lutheran. He is not a Baptist. He is a dirty blond.

Brad grabs my ankle. He throws his long arm around my chest, lifting me out of the lake. I am coughing and choking. The smooth stones I had been collecting with care all afternoon pour out of my pockets.

I had been so absorbed in looking for more purplish ones—the granite ones that turn chalky red when dry—I had walked out too far and fallen off a submerged ledge—into a sort of ditch—like the poet Dante.

Dante is dead, I am afraid. He may be in Heaven. He may be in Hell. I do not care where he is. There is no salvation for me or for anyone in Dante. Dante is useless as Dolly in these situations. The difference between Dante and Dolly is that she knows this—she knows her limitations. That is why I set her up with a shotgun to guard the house.

So much for poetry. So much for art.

What do we have left?

Well, Brad is here, certainly. And I am glad my dad is here, shaking a bit, paler than Brad, who seems to be a man made of ageless bronze. The water is a little shallower where my father shivers, but it is still deep enough to swim in. Dad couldn’t quite make it. Brad hands me over to him.

Mom is also here—somewhere.

She seems to be playing hide-and-seek along the horizon, behind all of those faces.

I am getting closer to her though.

I can hear her cry.

The Uncertainty Principle

Not every game that I played with my parents required so large and so mathematically sophisticated an apparatus as our beanbag tic-tac-toe set: with its ever shifting planes of experience—Xs and Os—victory and loss—all poised on invisible pins and ready to pivot from pleasure to pain to panic—that nightmare land of indecision—at the slightest provocation.

We also enjoyed simpler pastimes, such as hide-and-seek.

This is the 1970s. Everyone is seeking something: personal fulfillment, the meaning of life, cheaper gasoline in Fort Erie, Canada. Devout as my parents were (Southern Baptists), they were both under 30 for most of the 70s and they were pulled along by gravity toward Niagara Falls along with everyone else floating toward oblivion in the latter days of the Age of Aquarius.

As far as I could tell at the lucky age of 7, my parents’ mania for self-destruction seemed pretty normal, even tame, compared to others. It consisted of: family devotions, fondues, and a slimy, soupy, tomato, spinach and cottage cheese gruel—cooked in a Crock Pot—that was supposed to be a newer and more nutritious take on lasagna and that I refused to eat because it looked too much like our kitchen rug.

When I needed a snack and my grandparents were out—our home was a duplex—I liked to share granola and yogurt with the harmless hippies who occupied a cozy second floor studio in the apartment house across the driveway. The narrow stairs and dark passages of that building reeked of incontinent old men and recently incinerated flying carpets, but their comfortably cushioned rattan and bead bedecked abode was always sunny. The syrupy atmosphere of love it exhaled into the hallway when they opened the door smelled of beeswax candles and cloves.

Like my parents, they were both in their 20s. They had no children. The man enjoyed an average-sized penis. His wife —I think it was his wife—possessed a boisterous bush of black pubic hair that contrasted very sharply with the milky curves of hips. She might have been a model if she had shaved her legs and armpits like my mother.

They used to walk around naked at night. Because of the size and the position of their bamboo shades, I could never quite make out their faces when they were naked, just their genitals. I pointed this curious fact out to my brother one evening, when my room was being wallpapered in Bicentennial red, white and blue bars. (My own demented color scheme.)

Kyle and me were sharing his pine-paneled bedroom with a cage full of pet rocks bound for Brother Johnson—a travelling evangelist—a gag gift cooked up by my mother and some other ladies from church. But Kyle seemed more interested in getting back to sleep than spying on the neighbors. I soon drew down the blinds and meandered off to Dreamland myself.

I forget the names of the hippies now. I was better friends with their half-breed poodle, Pepper, really. She taught me how to bark.

Maybe there was more going on behind the scenes than met the eye. I was barely 4 feet tall and missed a lot. The truth is that—apart from cartoons—much in the world fell beyond my comprehension. Things were constantly appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in our household with a random regularity that mystified my mother and probably would have astonished Einstein.

Take the box of Ayds.

Ayds—mom’s delicious little chocolate diet cubes—stated to metamorphose into crumpled up plastic squares whenever she went to look for them. Even though they were hidden in the highest, most oxygen-deprived region of our kitchen cabinets.

After that, my own math papers—marked “See Me” in red pen by Mrs. Miles—underlined twice—began materializing inside my toy box. Then, a golden trinket (a lovely thing, a precious thing decorated with a piece of pink coral, a souvenir of a dart game at a fair in 1965) I had noticed in my grandmother’s cedar chest turned up one Saturday afternoon sandwiched between the cushions of our living room couch, when we were vacuuming.

Or consider The Case of the Spectral Spatula. While she could always be depended upon to find something to use during a disciplinary emergency—a spatula, a thick black belt belonging to my father, the back side of a pink hair brush—mom could never be confident how her nuclear arsenal would be stocked at any given time.

My mother had an inquisitive mind, but she was not a budding physicist like me. She took night classes in the art of upholstery instead of melting crayons with a magnifying glass. She re-did the couch on the sun porch in a rough and rusty plaid fabric. She dabbled in ceramics with her friends, Angie and Rita.

While the three of them were seated at the kitchen table—chatting, glazing and sipping sweaty glasses of unsweetened instant iced tea—mom might easily be provoked into searching for a spatula. Especially if she heard me slam down the key cover on our upright player piano. On the fingers of my brother. (I wanted to play, too.)

Aroused by a scream, she boiled up like a volcano from the depths of the sea and began going through drawers. She found every spatula, wooden spoon, plastic spoon, slotted spoon, serving spoon, and runcible spoon in North America had evaporated.

Being short-tempered and Italian, Angie reacted immediately and decisively in these sorts of situations, like Mussolini. Besides an older boy, Freddy, Angie and her husband Dave had two daughters, the same age as us.

She said, “I would kill both of them, Kathy.”

Rita’s ancestors were less hot-blooded and more phlegmatic. They were Scottish. You could tell from her red hair. Rita took a swig of tea and made a face, I expect, expecting the tea to be sweetened. Rita was rather fat and loud and had a good sense of humor, as I remember her, but she understood the need for discipline as much as Angie and my mother. In addition to her own boys and girls, Rita and Tom took care of a crippled foster child named Charlie.

I imagine that Rita choked on an ice cube while she tried to maintain her composure and continued touching up her bust of Elvis.

Mom marched us upstairs and demanded that we explain—or at least account for—the missing spatulas and spoons and other artifacts. She promised ten licks from a doubled-up length of orange Matchbox racing track, if we did not. What could we say? She might demand we grow wings and wheel about the sky like angels. We were not angels. We were boys. What did she expect?

Why she turned to us for an explanation of quantum mechanics—Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—I have no idea. Kyle could no more offer a solution to the problem of the missing spatulas than he could account for Schrödinger’s Cat. He pulled down his pants, bent over with his hands on the bed, and burst into tears, hoping the saltwater would dilute the sting.

I was under no such illusions. Crying made things worse, in my opinion. The best I could manage was a kind of sullen defense of the facts as I saw them. The deployment of spatulas was not in my department. I suggested that she ask dad, because he was bigger than all of us.

*SMACK*

I am not sure that she spoke to my father about the incident when he got home from work or what he might have said to her about the spatulas, if she had. All she discovered from me was that the more she required a spatula, the less precisely the coordinates of any particular spatula in Western New York could be controlled, determined, or known.

A nimbus of mystery pervaded the whole atmosphere of our house for the next few days. It was unusually chilly outside and in. Mom adjusted the thermostat. A funny smell from somewhere in the basement—the furnace, I suspect—drifted upward whenever the weather turned cold.

It seems pretty clear to me now that this warm but obnoxious gas—a mixture of Love and Despair—was the most elusive member of our family. Love and Despair are both fairly equal in skill, when it comes to hide-and-seek, fairly expert. They both approach the game like God: you know they are there, you can hear them quietly breathing. But, unless you can grasp the elusive nature of Life, you will search high and low for them forever and still come up empty-handed.

After Life, I guess, my mother was the second best player of hide-and-seek in North Tonawanda. Like Life, it took a determined effort to find her, if she really decided to hide. My father could always find my brother and me pretty fast. We didn’t rate in the cosmic scheme of things. Were were not even players yet. Not in the manner of adults, anyway.

In other words, dad was helpless when it came to mom. She was his spatula.

The poor man wandered from room to room on tip-toes, opening closets slowly at first—then quickly. He peered beneath beds. He looked down the laundry chute for some reason. He pulled out a pair of streaky Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear that had gotten stuck. Finally, and angrily, he yanked aside our opaque shower curtain—like Anthony Perkins—whom he slightly resembled as a younger man—in Psycho.

His Norman Bates impression was all in vain. My mother may have had her ample bosom, but she wasn’t Janet Leigh. She wasn’t holding her breath in the bathtub expecting a maniac. Our shower didn’t work anyway. Mom only hung the curtain there for decoration. To deceive guests.

After he had ransacked every room in the house—basement to attic—bowels to brain—my father stood at the top of the stairs, looking down disconsolately at the front door. He squeezed his jowls and he drew his cheeks to his chin in exasperation. He called out to my mother,

“Okay, come on out, Kath, we give up.”

I thought it was strange that my father said “we,” as if he were speaking for all of us. I knew exactly where my mother had been hiding the whole time.

My mother was not given to giggling under a pile of dirty clothes like us. She did not play hide-and-seek just because it was fun. She played to win. She was patient. She could wait. She still was young. She could keep silent in her secret hiding spots for hours, years if necessary. She knew exactly where the floor creaked, she knew which hinges squeaked: she carried a sort of sonic map of the entire house in her head. She shifted her position throughout the game.

She was like that Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, who popped up in the Philippines in 1974—bayonet in hand—surprising everyone—including Emperor Hirohito.

Maybe that is why my boyfriend is Japanese.

The Roman Empire

Geographically, the left is almost identical to the right, except that there are paint chips in the flowerbeds, and, on the whole, life on the left seems slightly less civilized than next door. My home is a work in progress. Or maybe the word is regress. If you think of Rome in the 4th century—increasingly Christian, increasingly crumbly—you get the idea.

The brown façade of our duplex has 8 windows on the first floor, divided by 2 doors: 4 for my grandparents and 4 for us. Above that, on the second floor, 4 more windows face the street: 2 for my room and 2 my grandfather’s. Below the cicadas in the tree branches, you can hear his air conditioner hum.

A slightly recessed peak crowns our house. It is not so much a garret as a newspaper hat on a madman. 2 blind eyes stare blankly at the sky. In lieu of a corpus callosum, a layer of lath and plaster divides the attic into two compartments: the conscious and subconscious mind. Each contains relics. Mine also contains aliens—silver invisibilities—gigantic garbage cans with serrated steel teeth. If you step on their feet, their mouths open up. They eat anything—including babies. If you listen very carefully, you can hear them crunching Christmas ornaments at night.

The residence of the soul remains a mystery. I have a feeling it lives in the walls we share—in the hot and cold whispers of air mixing in the conduits of our separate furnaces—our separate lives—in the grilles and grates through which we communicate—if it exists anywhere at all.

So much for my body and soul. The rule here is bilateral symmetry, as it is with most living things on planet Earth. The external line of division between the 2 dwellings is represented by a walkway, disfigured by the stumps of 2 melted crayons—a red and yellow cross—an orange nail in the middle—marking for future generations where my first experiments in light and color were performed.

Stepping over an abandoned magnifying glass and a gold and green box of Crayolas—still open, 2 crayons still missing—we walk with a man (a boy, really, from my present perspective) across the lawn. On the left, around the corner, I point out the gas and electric meter—a sort of octopus with numbers for eyes. When he squats to read our rates of consumption, I watch his t-shirt rise from his teal trousers, revealing a milky slit of skin: an arrow of peach fuzz points down to a new magnetic pole on my compass—one I have never quite noticed before.

When he is finished reading the figures, I ask him if he would take like to take a look at my furnace, too. He smiles. He says, no. He says that he only measures people’s electricity and gas. We have oil heat, he explains, leading me to a greasy fixture a little further along the foundation of the house. I will have to wait for the oilman and his pink hose, it seems. I thank him for coming by and we shake hands. I must have looked disappointed, because he turns around on the driveway and he waves goodbye with his clipboard.

Depressed by his departure—my brother is off having surgery, so I only have my shadow for company—I pick up a twig to sharpen and plant myself on the cold patio. I sit down rather hard and perhaps the faint impression my fanny made on the concrete is still visible. All I know for sure is that we have no chairs over here today. We have no picnic table. Worse, have no garden. Our decrepit garage takes up too much room. Only children grow here, apparently.

My bewildered brother celebrates his first birthday in this very spot in 1971, enthroned on the aluminum and vinyl highchair I have never quite outgrown. I do not remember being invited to his party, although I am sure that I was. It would have been foolish to hire a babysitter to sit with me in the house when everyone else was outside having such a disgusting blast: flinging cake, wallowing in ice cream and pouring out Pepsi. My birthday is scheduled for the following month—September—when I will turn 2—so I am not the star on this occasion. That is probably why I did not preserve the invitation.

I am sure that somebody took a picture of Kyle, which is why I recall the event today. For his sake, I hope the album containing it hasn’t been lost. If it has, these few paragraphs will have to suffice for a snapshot. In a way, I suppose I am like those imaginary aliens in the attic, with one important difference: I am not imaginary. If you step on my foot, even accidentally, I can assure you, I will scream. I might even bite you. It all depends on how big you are and how hungry I am for a spanking.

But if you lock me in a padded cell—a comfortable place like my apartment—if you let me lie down and close my eyes, I can block out the howling maniac in my head. I can hear a chorus singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ If you put a piece of paper on my face, I will blow it off, swing my feet off the bed, pick it up, and use whatever crayons I have stashed under my mattress to draw you a picture. I will begin with a pointed party hat decorated with tiny dancing zebras, rhinoceri, leopards, lions, apes, giraffes and other savage beasts—creatures of the Coliseum—all blowing frilly noisemakers.

My mother beams behind the new Emperor, adjusting his dunce cap for posterity. There is frosting on his face and a fine line of elastic running down his right ear. A drop of vanilla dimples his chin. I see an extinguished candle, too—white with turquoise edges—shaped like the number 1 in the foreground.

I have seen that number somewhere before: maybe in another picture, at another party, sprouting up from the remains of another birthday cake like some lonely column—left over from the temple of Castor and Pollux—in the Forum.

The marble rubble of my Imperium.

I snap the twig.

Back when I commanded the love and allegiance of home.

Drama, Updated

The curtain rises on our stage. Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live together in very close proximity, in fact, side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the 20th Century. Our family purchased their property in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, you will see a victory garden, less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nevertheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. These men were always attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this:

“If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese checkers and the vinyl chloride vats of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.)

According to family tradition, it is possible that—in revenge for the rolling pin—my grandfather broke my grandmother’s nose at the time of The Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962: the fatal day Florence snuck up, leaned over Francis’s silent figure and shouted, “Boo!” as he was dozing on the davenport.

I do not think any malice was intended. From the way she rolled her eyes when he told the story, I gathered that he accidently struck her in the face with his fist when she frightened him out of his wits.

Besides, violence would have been completely out of character for him, if not for my grandmother. She was a different sort of creature altogether. Florence once threw a croquet mallet at my mother as she ran out of the happy home they inhabited during the Eisenhower administration.

When I asked her why anyone would want to throw a croquet mallet at her, my mother looked up from the jaws of the ceramic shark she was painting (a bank, a future Christmas present for me, it turns out) and she said that she didn’t know. She said she was a perfect child. She invited me to ask my grandmother about the incident. I immediately turned on my heels and stomped out of the house like the Spanish Inquisition. I rang the bell (which I never did) and my grandmother answered the door. She was pickling beets. She led me up the back stairs.

“Why did you ring the bell?”

“Why did you throw a croquet mallet at my mother?”

She turned and squinted and looked me straight in the eye and said, “Because she deserved it.”

Having been spanked with a wooden spoon by my mother on more than one occasion, I could accept that. I sat down on the steel and rubber step stool my grandmother used to reach the upper shelves in her pantry (where she kept mason jars) as she decanted a can of Spicy Hot V-8 in an orange juice glass. She gave it to me and went back to stirring her cauldron.

My grandmother might have made a spectacular witch, as my grandfather often alleged, but she was a terrible shot and had no sense of timing: the mallet crashed through a pane of glass in their old screen door instead of hitting my mother. I also adore Spicy Hot V-8 juice and did as a child.

A loving husband and a caring father, I have always felt that my grandfather—uncle Franny, as he is known to my cousins—played the role of pater familias and gracious host to perfection. He will succumb to cancer while I am holding his hand.

With that same hand, on a rickety wooden gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used for transferring her plants to larger pots, he would habitually place a chipped ashtray decorated with tiny, indeterminate flowers. On the reverse side, the glaze bore the mysterious legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’

This was the one ashtray that my uncle John refused to use. He preferred to use another one in the living room, one that my grandfather reserved for his butterscotch candy wrappers. For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he had a reputation for being more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in my grandparents’ house was uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. I loved him for that. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

As you might imagine, the day uncle John died was something of a disaster—especially for him. I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I followed the blur my grandmother formed as she whizzed by me—as she tripped, running up the front stairs, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” When she was forced to complete her ascent by crawling on her knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen an adult behave like a child before.

I thought my grandfather might have agreed. I am not sure that he did. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck t-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

With wet hands, he lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it took only a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her head together sufficiently to blurt out, “Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.” I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me, even worse than death.

I dropped the chain of multicolored plastic monkeys I had painstakingly connected on the carpet and was about to dispose of in their home—a brown plastic barrel. Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

In fact, I did cry. So did my brother.

We had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family had ever died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

Once my grandfather had inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door. This time, I sat on the stairs. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and a sea-gray acrylic cardigan with a black Greek meander design dancing up both sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick phone calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my aunt’s. My grandfather tied my brother’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

He took us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra pair of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

You see, I was 7, which I had always been led to believe was a lucky number.

Now, I was confused. What did the death of uncle John mean for the blackberry bushes that grew next to his garage? Would aunt Midge allow me to continue to pick them? Would the proprietors dim the pink and blue neon bowling ball at Rojek’s on Payne Avenue, two doors down the street from the chilly house with the lemon trim where my aunt and uncle lived? Would Principal Baker order the flag at Grant Elementary School to flap quietly at half-staff for a few days? Would President Ford address the nation? What kind of future did I have to look forward to? Would there be nuclear war?

I wanted answers. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a Windmill cookie. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was carefully backing down the driveway, trying to avoid the swing set he had once almost demolished with his Buick. In other words, we didn’t have any Windmills in our house. Or answers.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. It rolled to the edge, paused, and then rolled back to the middle, glittering at the center of a flower fringed universe like a gilded turd. I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00 p.m., anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

38 hours later, a prophylactic whisper in the funeral home foyer informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away on his porch, napping beneath The North Tonawanda News, after eating a basket of fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

I may not like liars, but I have always admired a lie told with élan. My mother could always manage that. She took no chances. Out of the air, she plucked a pen that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to a little pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Edwin, Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led my brother and myself to the casket.

My father was at work. My mother said he would be dropping by to add his name to the book later.