Life After Life (28 page)

Every inch of his room was decorated with posters and photographs and lures and tackle. He had a huge stack of rods in the corner and said he had a photo of every fish he’d caught since about 1956 when his daughter was born. He’s got every fish she caught and her brother, too.
Every one. Every one. I cleaned them all and ate my fair share.
He had several plaques of mounted rubber fish and he loved to press the little red buttons that made them flop and sing: “Take Me to the River,” “Pretty Fishy,” “Catch Us if You Can.” He liked to get them all flopping and singing at once and he did that right up to the day he died.

“You know what is so strange?” he asked, just before he drifted off and stopped talking. “I love the bottom feeders. I love to catch them and I love to eat them. I love grouper and I love catfish. But”—he paused and beckoned his son, a giant boy-looking man in his big summer shorts and tennis shoes, who kept wiping his face and blowing his nose into Dunkin’ Donuts napkins he kept pulling from his pocket—“I don’t like them in life. Don’t be a bottom feeder in life.” He shook his finger. “Your mother was not a bottom feeder and she sold cars so that should tell you something.”

The big boy son nodded and wiped his eyes and then looked at me and started laughing. He laughed until he wheezed and his father joined in with him. I left to get a cup of coffee when the daughter arrived, a woman built just like her brother who wore a Bass Pro Shop T-shirt and cap and placed an extra cap on her father’s head. I could hear their laughter all the way down the hall and when I returned they told me that they thought he was gone, that they were singing along to Pretty Fishy, and he just stopped breathing. “We sure are gonna miss you, old man.” The son leaned and kissed his father’s forehead and then blew his nose into a napkin and draped his arm around his sister. “He was a good one, wasn’t he?”

“A real keeper,” the daughter said. “A real prize.”

This was the high point Luke told me to find.
Can’t change it. They don’t call me slippery for nothing.
Anything about fishing will bring Jeremiah Bass to mind: lures and tackle and bait and hooks—
the pull, the pull.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Jeremiah Mason Bass

A hand-crafted lure is valuable and it takes a lot of time and some good eyes and the still and steady hands of a surgeon and he has to get the light just right, a bright light under a magnifier and carefully loop and tie fine filament and one day he will build a ship in a bottle, maybe have a room full of ships in bottles and imagine himself a tiny little captain way down in there but Mrs. Bass says that’s leisure work and leisure time, but they aren’t there yet because children cost money and there needs to be food on the table and money in the bank and what better food is there than a fish, the Lord multiplied and multiplied those baskets of fish, the scales on their bodies numbered and all you need is a line and pole and some luck like a lucky lure, sparkly and shiny spinning down there below the murky surface down where it’s cold and the light can’t quite reach and you just sink a little lower and lower down where it’s cooler and darker, a little colder, a little darker, a wavy spin of algae and roots, down and down to the soft muddy bottom.

Stanley

S
TANLEY HAS BEEN READING
a lot lately when he’s by himself—about roses—and listening to music. He has some of Martha’s books as well as all the catalogs she used to get that still get forwarded, his old address marked through and replaced with a yellow sticker and this address. It amazes him—this process of lives being forwarded, of someone like Martha, long dead, still being asked for her support, her opinion, her use of a coupon worth a hundred dollars if she acts now. He never realized until he started flipping through all of Martha’s magazines and books that he had really loved her garden, too. He didn’t do anything except admire it and can’t even recall if he admired it directly to her, but he certainly accepted compliments from so many people in town who said they often altered their driving path just to pass by. One young woman who had worked as an intern at the court house told him how her wedding bouquet came straight from his yard and that she had always felt guilty because she stole them in the middle of the night. He accepted her apology but didn’t tell her that this was something that had happened often through the years, so often in fact, that Martha was insulted when people did
not
take roses. Sometimes she would even tie a pair of scissors to a length of rope on the fence with a note that they pick respectfully and not touch this or that or the other, because so-and-so was planning to use those on the table of her debutante luncheon. It had not occurred to him how the garden had allowed Martha invitations to nearly every event in town and how she knew almost everyone as a result. It was something to admire and he has come to also admire the work that went into it. He has studied the layers and soil system and the constant pruning and tending that all those finicky fancy varieties required and marvels how she had done it all herself. She might send him or Ned down to the nursery with a list, but she was the one out there in dirty pedal pushers and white Keds (just like the pink ones Rachel Silverman wears). She wore a floppy yellow straw hat she had bought at Virginia Beach years before and what he has recently learned are called gauntlet gloves whose thick rubber protected her arms from the thorns.

He could imagine trying to have a garden, maybe even right outside his window there along the far side of the parking lot where he watches Rachel Silverman walk back and forth and where, unfortunately, he often sees the arrival of the funeral home car over at nursing. They try to be discreet but how impossible is that? Maybe some climbing roses on a trellis (like what he has marked on page 96 of one enormous catalog) would do the trick and he has found the names of many hardy climbers that he believes would take over in no time. Who knew there were roses with the growing habits and ethics of something like kudzu or bamboo, those types willing to run over whatever is in their path, like some people he has known, like himself from time to time he has to admit. And he has been just as prickly and unpredictable. What would Martha have said about that analogy? And what would Ned say? Ned would probably roll up his sleeves and show his scars; Ned can probably recall every prick and scratch of his life. Knock Outs, ramblers. Those would be Stanley’s kind of roses as opposed to the pedigreed tea varieties, which remain exactly as the pedigree dictates—this height and that weight—not unlike Martha who never changed in appearance except that couple of times when she got in her head that she needed to try to be someone other than herself and dressed up in some night garb that embarrassed him. He’s not sure why. Maybe it was because it wasn’t what he expected and as much as he liked to fantasize on the ramblers and the Knock Outs and things like men in a ring beating the shit out of one another, it really was not his nature either. He had wanted the pedigree and the guarantee of what he was getting, like the Labrador retrievers Sadie is always talking about and the one whose breeder had guaranteed there were not hip problems in that line. But no one could have guaranteed Martha’s health. No one saw it coming. God, he can’t go there, but what he can do is try to start a garden that might bring people out again. It would give some of these old shut-ins something to do. He could probably get old Toby out there digging and hauling manure and no telling who else might join in. Maybe Rachel Silverman. Maybe this would be something Ned could also take an interest in and would make him feel he’d finally done enough. Maybe he could grow some vegetables, too, or have a water garden with some koi. That was something he’d said he wanted to do when he retired and Martha as a result had given him books all about it for every birthday, Christmas, and anniversary. He is reaching for the water garden catalog that comes from up around where Rachel Silverman is from, filing a note in his head to ask her if she’s ever been to Paradise Gardens up in MassaTOOsetts. He hears a knock at his door and quickly stashes the catalog and turns instead to the pinup poster in his latest Wrestling magazine, a great big poster of Kurt Angle who the crowds always greet with YOU SUCK. That’s what he’ll say to whoever it is. Ned.

“You suck!” he says, and waves the picture at Ned who eases the door shut and comes and sits. “I thought you left already. You need more money or something?”

“No. I just hate thinking about you sitting around all day with nothing to do.” Ned looks a lot like Martha—the fair skin and big blue eyes—the expression of someone who would love to laugh or scream but seems afraid to. “Why don’t we go out, do something. We can go to lunch. We could go hit some golf balls.”

“Since when do you golf?” Stanley asks, and quickly adds, “I thought you were more into cooking and playing with yourself.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Ned says. “I do like to cook, but I also like to golf and read and go to the movies.”

“What about date? Do you ever think about trying that?” Stanley leans forward and pushes all of his catalogs under his chair and pulls back out the Herb Alpert album cover. “You need to find someone like this—a creamy delight.”

“Dad.”

“Really. I’ve got just three words for you.” He raises his fist before he considers how this was Martha’s old joke with the kids.
I have three words for you,
she would say in an angry loud voice that was so foreign to her mouth, and then after much clamor and question, she would scream out in the same angry tone,
I love you.

“Just three,” he says again. “Match dot com.”

“No.” Ned starts laughing. “God only knows what you know about Match dot com, but it’s not for me, not yet, at least.”

“Too good, huh?”

“No. Just not interested.”

“Why don’t you call your wife. She might at least be good for some sex.”

“Nice thought there, but she remarried,” Ned says, and Stanley can tell he’s getting to him, though Ned still doesn’t lash out with what would be so easy, how he has told Stanley that a million times, how he has told how she has a two-year-old and is pregnant with another. Ned cried when he told Stanley about it, maybe hoping for some sympathy, but Stanley was unable to reach his hand out and do anything. He couldn’t afford to blow his cover so all he said was
good riddance, bet those are some ugly children.
Now Stanley wants to say something that isn’t too mean but will still convince him to leave and stay gone at least until tomorrow.

“She wasn’t right for you,” he says. “Everything that happened was a blessing. Something to celebrate.”

Ned takes a deep breath, face red and fists curled. “It was
not
a blessing,” he says. “I don’t even know why I try.” He looks at the portrait of Martha as if she is the one he is talking to. Maybe he promised Martha that he would make amends, maybe this is all about some kind of deathbed promise and Ned hates it all as much as Stanley does.

“I don’t know why you do either,” Stanley says. “And she sure as hell doesn’t know.” He points to Martha. “She’s as dead as a doornail. Remember? You were there.”

“Nice. Thanks, Dad.” He stands and pulls an envelope from his back pocket and places two tickets to an upcoming wrestling event on the table beside Stanley’s magazine. “If you need someone to go with you, I’ll be glad to drive,” he says, no eye contact.

“You sat there and cried, remember? Cried like a two-year-old.”

“Yes. I remember,” Ned says, his voice a little louder, jaw clenched. “And I remember how you just
sat
there.” He leaves, letting the door slam behind him, and when Stanley is absolutely sure he’s gone he leans forward and cries. This plan is not working the way he had hoped it would.

Toby

W
ELCOME HOME, GIRL.
Toby is relieved to get back in her own space, her little cottage filled with belongings she has known her whole life: her mother’s furniture and china and the big dark mantel clock that had belonged to her father’s father. She pulls out her yoga bolster and eye bag and leans back to do some deep breathing, each breath a way of ridding herself of all those bad feelings Marge Walker left her with. You think you’ve got your skin grown nice and thick and healthy and then it starts sliding right off of you, like a snake or a burn victim, leaving you tender and exposed.

Mr. Thornton Wilder once said how people who have lived in it for years know less about love than the child who has lost a dog yesterday, or something like that, and she knows it’s true. Just looking at poor Abby sitting there, she knows everyone is helpless to heal her; only time can do that. And
that
is a truth for everyone, even old large barge Marge. Everyone has a hurt. Everyone has a weakness and how humans can live with devoting time to rubbing salt in and on another, she will never ever know.

Ommmmm. Ommmmmm.
She is playing a CD she bought at Walgreens called
Global Soundings
and there’s all kinds of things in there, thunder and waterfalls and birds and lions. She likes to close her eyes and just follow along just like she does when she visits Sadie. Poor Sadie. It does wonders for her to have guests posing for this and that and Toby faithfully shows up to ask for something whether she really feels like it or not. Some days she just likes to read and smoke cigarettes—her little secret. It’s why she won’t wear the nicotine patch but opts to keep smacking on Nicorette instead. Allowing herself to cheat and smoke every now and again is one great pleasure she has in life. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. She tries to do the kind of breathing so many of the people in her old yoga class did, breathing there at the back of their throats with what almost sounds like a growl. She has trouble doing it and always has, but she likes how it sounds kind of primal and wild in there just like what she hears on
Global Soundings.