Thank You for All Things Page 6

  Mom tips her head toward the living room. “He’s getting anxious,” she says, motioning to where Milo is fidgeting on the couch.

  “It’s because he has no work space,” I tell them.

  “Then let’s give him a place to spread his things out,” Oma says. She hurries into the living room, where Milo is still sitting stiffly, fidgeting as he reads. “Come in the kitchen, Milo,” Oma says. “You can spread your things out on the table, just like at home.”

  Oma ignores Mom’s protests as she helps Milo get situated, then she asks me if I’d like a tour of the house. I nod.

  Oma opens the basement door. “We’ll start at the bottom so I can get that bedding in the dryer and work our way up,” she says.

  I follow Oma downstairs. The basement is poorly lit, with a bare bulb hanging near the washer and dryer. Webs of dust dangle from the back of the wooden steps.

  Two of the walls have wooden shelves attached to the concrete blocks, mostly empty but for a few jars of foods floating in cloudy juice. Another wall is bare, and the fourth is tacked with corkboard and a few hanging tools. While Oma pulls ropes of sheets out of the washing machine, I spot a sled in a darkened corner, propped against the wall.

  “A sled!” I shout, and hurry to it. Oma’s voice follows me. “That belonged to your uncle Clay and your mother,” she says.

  I bend over to admire the sled. Before Uncle Clay’s wife started sending photo Christmas cards, they sent us regular store-bought cards. One year they sent us one with a picture of children dressed in Christmas reds and greens on the front, sledding down a hill. I kept that card tacked on my wall until it fell down and disappeared behind my bed. Thinking of it now, I wonder if my longing to be a figure skater and my longing to sled like the children in that picture doesn’t stem from some deeper-rooted longing for winter snows and ice, and if so, why? It’s not as though I’ve never seen snow before. All winter long it’s tossed past our apartment windows, and when we come and go, I see it fall and turn to brown slush under tires.

  I stroke the dusty wood of the sled. There’s not a nick anywhere on it, and the red lettering on the seat is still glossy under the dust. “It looks brand-new. Did they even sled with it?”

  Oma shrugs. “I imagine they did. Eventually.” It is an odd comment, but one I don’t have time to probe her about, because Oma is heading up the stairs. “Come on,” she says. “I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

  We leave the dryer whirring and go up the stairs. I’ve seen the kitchen and living room, and even though I still haven’t seen what’s behind the three other doors off them, where I want to go next is upstairs. “Can I see Mom’s old room first?” I ask.

  “Yes. As soon as I check on your grandpa.”

  Oma opens Grandpa’s door only slightly when she peeks inside to check on him. I tuck my head under her arm and take a peek into the room, which is darkened by heavy shades. Grandpa is only a long, snoring mound on the bed. Oma shuts the door before I can get a good look, saying that we’ll not disturb him. “Come on, I’ll show you the upstairs, and your mother’s room, now.”

  Mom and Milo are settled at the table when we pass through the kitchen. Milo has his books and notebooks open and now looks as comfortable as he does at home. Mom looks anything but comfortable, though she’s got her laptop open and is typing. As Oma and I head up the stairs, Mom calls after me, “Don’t get too cozy here, Lucy. We’re only staying long enough for me to stretch and get some ideas down for my next chapter before I forget them.” Oma looks at me and grins as though we share a secret.

  Back home Milo and I share a tiny bedroom, even though, in my opinion, we’re too old to. We each have a single bed with one nightstand jammed between them. To get over the books that are stacked on the floor at the foot of each of our beds, we have to walk to the end and long jump. Mom’s childhood room has books too. Classics mostly, lining shelves along the wall. The shelves, like the woodwork throughout the house, are painted thick with white glossy paint.

  I instantly fall in love with Mom’s spacious old room, with its pale pink and cranberry flowered wallpaper and long windows dressed in filmy curtains that obviously were once wedding-white. There’s a small nightstand with gouges in the wood next to the full-size bed and a vanity clotted with dried nail polish. And, best of all, there’s an old rolltop writing desk, the veneer on the writing area bubbled and cracked in places.

  Oma stands in the center of the room, her hands on her hips as she swirls in a slow circle. “Your mother had this room filled with posters of rock stars by the time she was twelve. She pulled them all down when she left,” she says, moving to the wall and running her fingers over the tiny patches where triangles of glossy paper sit trapped under yellowed strips of tape.

  Oma shakes her head. “I can’t believe your grandpa’s third wife didn’t clear out this room.” Her peachy lips form a circle then. “Oh, I wonder …” she says, as she heads to the closet.

  “Oh, my gosh, they’re still here!” Oma reaches past the cardboard boxes closed with duct tape and runs her hands over the stack of notebooks beside them, their edges frayed and waved like potato chips. There are at least five dozen notebooks in the stack, bound with a thick rope made of braided yarn.

  “What are those?” I ask.

  “Your mother was born a writer,” she says. “I think she kept notebooks of her thoughts and happenings from the time she was old enough to write her ABCs.

  “I put most of the things she left in the attic, along with her toys, but I left these more personal items here, thinking she’d be back for them soon. I’ll have to tell your mother they’re here.” I reach to take a notebook from the stack, but Oma taps the back of my hand and closes the closet door. “Come, I’ll show you the rest of the upstairs.”

  We just step into the room where Oma slept when she lived here—the room that makes a haze slip over her eyes—when Mom calls from the bottom of the stairs, “Ma! Can you come down here?”

  I follow Oma down stairs that creak as we walk. Mom is blinking rapidly. She points toward the living room, where Grandpa Sam is slowly shuffling across the room with a walker, his back to us. The thick dark hair he wore in the photo is thin now, and sidewalk-gray. Long wisps almost four inches long swirl straight up from the top of his head like the hair of a troll doll. He is wearing long underwear bottoms that show the crack of his butt, a sleeveless undershirt, and one slipper. His arms, underneath sagging skin, aren’t much bigger than Milo’s.

  “Sam?” Oma says, and he lets go of his walker and turns ever so slowly with shuffling baby steps. He stops when he sees us all staring at him and stares right back at us.

  Oma brushes past Mom and goes to him. She gives him a warm hug, the kind of hug missionary workers probably give starving kids in Third World countries. She pulls back and places her hands on the sides of his head. “It’s Lillian, Sam. Your second wife. Do you remember me?”

  “Lillian,” he says flatly.

  Oma gives him a kiss on his slackened cheek. “And, Sam, these are your grandchildren. The twins.” Oma steers me to stand in front of her. “This is Lucy. And the boy on the couch is your grandson Milo.”

  I can’t stop looking at Grandpa Sam’s eyes. Not only because they are shaped like mine (but for his lids, which droop over the outer edges of his eyes like sheets on a poorly made bed) but because the dullness in them is somewhere between the glass eyes of the antique doll that Oma keeps propped on her bed back in Chicago and the deadened eyes of the superintendent’s nephew, who has an IQ of 70, tops.

  While Milo and I are saying hello to our grandpa, Oma laces her arm through the crook of Mom’s and leads her to her father. “Sam? Do you know who this is?”

  He does not blink.

  “Come on, Sam,” Oma says through a smile. “You know who this is.”

  Mom grumbles, “Mother!” under her breath, and pulls out of her grasp.

  “Course I know who that is,” Grandpa says slowly, his voice as dull and
lifeless as his eyes, but without a slur anywhere in his sentence. Oma waits for him to say Mom’s name out loud, but he doesn’t. He grabs his walker and starts to move.

  Oma steers Grandpa toward a salmon-colored chair that has a remote control on the arm so it can rise up to meet his butt, then take him back down again. Once he’s sitting, Oma squats down next to him. She takes the hand that is sitting listlessly on his bony leg. “Sam? You remember years ago when I promised you that I’d come take care of you in the end if you needed me to. So you’d never have to go into a nursing home? Well, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Where’s Jeana?” he asks.

  “She’s gone home, Sam. She went back to Pennsylvania.”

  He pivots his head in water-sprinkler slow motion and asks, “Where’s Millie?”

  “Who’s Millie, Sam? Your third wife? An old girlfriend?” She glances at Mom. “Hmm, he had a dog named Millie. Do you think he’s talking about the dog he used to have, or an old girlfriend?”

  “Same difference,” Mom says.

  Oma glares at Mom, and Grandpa stares at the TV, which is now running a regular commercial. Oma takes the remote from the end table and pushes buttons ’til she finds the History Channel, then sets the remote down on the arm of his chair. Only when Oma looks up and says, “Tess, could you …” do we realize that Mom has left the room.

  I follow Oma into the kitchen, past where Milo sits, already deep in his studies. “Where’s your mother?” Oma asks him. He points to the back door, which is slightly ajar, a rusty screen door showing. Oma squeaks it open and slips out, only partially closing the heavy door behind her. I follow Oma to the door and stand still, peeking through the gap to watch them through the mesh screen.

  Mom is sitting on the back porch—or deck, or whatever it’s called when it has no walls, when it’s only a large surface of grayed boards with six pillars holding it off the ground—her legs dangling over the side. Oma sits down beside her.

  The backyard beyond them is spacious, with two clothesline poles made of rough wood in the shape of crosses. There is a dog tied to the pole, which Oma must notice at the same time I do. “Oh, poor thing.” The dog is black and looks like a Labrador but for a white splotch between his eyes and a patch of long hair that runs down his back like a Mohawk. He is sitting on his haunches, wriggling, as though he wants to bark.

  “You okay, honey?” Oma asks, ignoring the dog for a moment.

  “I’m fine,” she says. I’ve never heard tears in my mother’s voice before, but I hear them now.

  Oma sighs. “It’s a shock seeing him like this, I know. It was for me too. He was always such a proud man.”

  “Arrogant is more like it,” Mom says.

  Mom’s head rotates like an oscillating fan set on slow, as she looks over the yard. Her legs are bouncing. “You remember how upset he’d get if anyone pulled in the yard? He never wanted anyone he was trying to impress to see this place. And oh, God forbid if someone did dare to stop in when there was a speck of dust on the furniture or a newspaper laying out. You busted your ass to keep this place clean. And it looked decent, considering he wouldn’t let you have a dime for upkeep, but it was never good enough. We were never good enough.”

  “Oh, you know your father. First saving every penny for that sawmill, then for his retirement.” Oma sighs. “Isn’t that the way it goes, though? We get caught up in getting ahead, planning ahead, and for what? Whatever money he could have left at this point is useless to him. What does any of it matter in the end but who we loved and how we loved them.”

  Mom leans back, propping herself on hands that are splayed behind her. “He was such an ass about money,” she says. “And about most everything else.” She is quiet for a time, and the dog watches her, squirming as though he’s waiting for her to say more, just as I am.

  “You know what’s the first thing I saw when I came through the door? Grandma’s old mirror, hanging in that same odd place—not centered on the wall but hanging where you hung it that night, butted too close to the archway. And all I could think of when I saw it was how insane it is that you stayed with him all those years.”

  “There was purpose in even that, Tess.”

  Mom huffs, “What was that? So you could experience hell here on earth?”

  “Oh, Tess …”

  I want to hear more, of course, but Milo interrupts by nudging me out of the way. “Oma,” he calls. “Grandpa keeps switching the TV channels and won’t stop. I can’t concentrate when he does that.”

  “I’ll be right there, honey,” she says. Rising, Oma pats Mom on the shoulder, and says, “Tess? Could you please stay for a while? Even a couple of days? I know you don’t understand why I had to come back and do this, and I don’t suppose there’s any way I can really make you understand it, but my choosing to be here doesn’t mean it’s easy for me. I have my memories too.”

  “I have to get back to the city and pack. Figure out where in the hell we’re going to live while they gut our building.”

  “I know. But just a couple of days?”

  Mom doesn’t answer, but she gets up and I back out of the doorway to let them inside. “I’ll take care of your grandpa, children, but will you please go untie his dog from the clothesline and bring him in? His dishes too.”

  Milo stares after Oma as though she’s asked him to give up his studies to trim her hair or stitch a seam in her workout sweats. I grab his arm and tug him out the door.

  “I like it here, don’t you?” I ask Milo as we walk across the lawn.

  Milo has his pencil tucked behind his ear like a geek. “I don’t know,” he says.

  The dog hops on his back paws as we near, his tongue flapping. I pick up the dented metal dish that is tipped upside down, and Milo picks up the one that is crusty inside with bits of dried food. “Poor thing,” I say. “Aunt Jeana prechews her dog’s food but lets Grandpa’s dog’s dishes go empty.”

  I reach out to pet the dog and he leaps up, his toenails digging into my stomach. “Down!” I snap, and he instantly crouches to lie flat-bellied against the ground. His tongue and tail continue to wag. “Ouch, that hurt!” I tell him, rubbing my still-stinging stomach.

  Milo’s never petted a dog before. He reaches out, his hand flat, patting rhythmically on the top of the dog’s head, bouncing it as if it’s a basketball (not that he’d know how to handle one of those either). The dog tilts his head and slobbers Milo’s wrist with his tongue, getting a rare laugh in return.

  Milo reaches down to unfasten the chain at the dog’s collar, and as he does, a tin medallion in the shape of a bone dangling from his collar flutters against his hand. “Hey! It says Feynman and the address of this house.”

  “Must be his name,” I say, stating the obvious.

  Milo’s mouth is gaping, like he’s gone dumb.

  The second the dog’s loose, he starts running in circles around the yard, going so fast that you can hear his feet thumping the ground. “Come here, Feynman!” Milo shouts, and the dog stops, looks at us, then grabs a small branch from the grass and runs it back to us, dropping it at Milo’s feet.

  “He wants you to throw it,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “So he can fetch it, idiot. It’s what dogs do.”

  The minute Milo cocks his arm back, Feynman takes off at a good clip. He’s halfway across the yard before he realizes that the stick isn’t going that far. Feynman watches the branch go up in a tight arc and drop a mere fourteen or fifteen yards from Milo, then he comes back to fetch it. He drops it at Milo’s feet again, and Milo laughs. “I think he likes you,” I say, and I try hard to keep the jealousy I’m feeling out of my voice—not that Milo would have noticed even if I hadn’t.

  I’ve always wanted a dog. Not a dog like Aunt Jeana’s—the kind that yip nonstop and feel like dried-out buffalo wings to the touch—but a dog like Feynman, big and cuddly. And not so I could toss sticks to him but so that I could talk to him like a friend. A man down the street back home h
as a dog, a beagle. He lets me pet it when he comes past the stoop, and he is always whispering to it, and the dog’s eyes work like sponges, soaking up everything as though he understands. A dog would be the best listener, since they can’t repeat one single word said to them. It just figures then that, as much as I’d like a dog like Feynman to tell my secrets to, the dog likes Milo best.

  Milo runs toward the house, and Feynman tears after him—no doubt because he thinks Milo’s legs are two skinny sticks worth chasing—and beats him up the steps easily, then wags his butt until Milo opens the door. I pick up the empty dishes and take them inside.

  We stand watching Feynman as he first laps his water, then buries his muzzle in the food dish, saliva dripping as he crunches furiously. Oma enters the kitchen and drapes her arm around me as she watches Milo crouch down alongside Feynman, patting his head some more, so that the poor dog’s snout keeps whacking the sides of his metal bowl. “He would probably like it if you scratched him behind the ears,” Oma says.

  Milo looks up and grins, then starts scratching. “Guess what, Oma? The tag on his collar says his name is Feynman. Like Richard P. Feynman, spelled the same! Could he have been named after the Feynman?”

  “I’ve no doubt but that he’s named after your Feynman. Your grandfather was quite the science buff. You’ll see what I mean if you go into the study off the living room, across from where he sleeps now. It was his private sanctuary. A room full of treasures for a boy like you.”

  Milo hurries off to find them, and Feynman follows. “Weird,” I say. “Milo was just listening to that guy’s stupid CD in the car, and now he finds out that the dog here is named after him. That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “Oh, honey, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. It’s synchronicity.” Oma smiles blissfully.

  “As in the synchronicity Jung studied?” I say. “When two or more seemingly pure chance events coincide, forming a connection that has extraordinary and particular meaning for the one who observes it? Those meaningful connections between the subjective and the objective?” (A definition I read—more or less—on page 367, first paragraph down, in a study on Carl Jung himself.)