Donna
Donna wanted to grow up to be a poet, and she did. She is also a ghost writer and belong to the same book club (affectionately dubbed the Slender Book Society). At our book club gatherings, Donna is often quietly observing or deep in thought, quick to listen and slow to speak. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard. She told me that the 30 sentences project has her thinking about sentences in new ways and she may even incorporate the 30 sentences structure into her writing practice. One of Donna’s latest pieces is the title poem of a new anthology called Bird Float, Tree Song: Collaborative Poems by Los Angeles Poets.
The only time I ever heard my mother say “I love you” to my father was at the very end, after she’d leaned to him, reaching for his hand under the flag that draped the cardboard casket, and hovered a long while below his chin, not quite resting her cheek on his chest.
I want to say she homed to the spot where the heartbeat should’ve been, where his breath would’ve moved her hair in some subtle way that felt familiar as he too hovered— presence/absence of person as almost-memory, as not-quite ghost.
But I didn’t really see them, intimate that way, until it was over and she joined us again, looking young and sad, the only sad one right then.
“I squeezed his hands like we used to do,” she said, surfacing, but still far away.
“That was our secret, when we couldn’t talk.
“Three times for ‘I love you’ and ‘love you more.’”
Then I was sad for what I’d never seen or guessed, not like “don’t make me think of Mom and Dad having sex,” but more like “I never thought to imagine those two as lovers.”
Their warm hands and secret code.
My brother and his wife and I had been talking about how Daddy would’ve gotten a kick out of going out in a cardboard box, and wondering what they do if there’s no flag to disguise the plain brown “melts in flames” wrapper.
Mostly, our hour of “viewing time” was like that.
We’re not really an emotional family except for rage and betrayal, where the scores have historically been off the charts.
Though my brother and I used to laugh that we’d both tear up at Kodak commercials when we were kids.
Longing turned to nostalgia for some perfect, predictable life shot entirely in the golden hour.
We got a little golden light through the high window in the chilly Swan-Law viewing room, where the four of us stood chatting, and often laughing, near the box.
I hadn’t wanted to go because people had told me they couldn’t get someone’s final grimace out of their minds after an open-casket funeral.
But there’s no way to quietly disappear in a family of four—three now—so I got in the car.
The tree across the street had been a blaze of yellow leaves when I’d been home just two weeks before, but it was bare as we pulled out of the driveway.
The sudden change, fall to winter.
The Japanese identify 72 incremental seasons—“Fish Rise From the Ice,” “The North Wind Brushes the Leaves,” “Hibernating Creatures Close Their Doors.”
This was No. 73: “Father Leaves, Blizzard and Daughter Fly In.”
My brother had picked out the clothes my father was in—the blue shirt, because I’d told Daddy once it made his gray eyes light up, so he’d favored it after that, and pants we couldn’t see under the flag and the light blue blanket.
I probably would’ve chosen the brown sharkskin suit, one of the dozen fancy suits that showed up at the house one day around the same time as the new color TV.
It was hard to be sure about such things, but my guess was that he’d won big at cards and been paid in menswear (sharkskin for the shark), or that someone had gotten the stuff off the back of a truck and was sharing the wealth.
He bought a matching shirt and tie for every suit, and with the brown one, he wore a pale orange shirt and a sunset-colored wide silk tie.
I’d never seen him in orange before—it was perfect on him—and I wondered who picked it out.
I’d never seen the smile he had as he lay there in the box, either, almost twinkly, as though he had finally experienced pure delight.
We didn’t pay for even a pat with a powder puff, so it was all him.
How odd, I thought.
My mother wanted a photo, so she could sketch him later, the way she’d sketched me in my crib.
I wonder if that was the missing “I love you”—that smile.
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