Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

“A deep fat fryer! What are they trying to do, kill me?”

“The oven needs cleaning. My mother used to get down on her hands and knees and clean the oven every week. She baked her own bread, and put a hot meal on the table every night. She made us oatmeal in the mornings, none of this toasted-twinkies instant-breakfast stuff. She sewed all her own clothes, and my sister’s as well. She’s been dead thirty-five years, and I miss her still.”

The young woman sighed. In thirty-five years, would she miss her father? Maybe you miss people more as you get older — but she’d come to terms with his absence many years before.

When he had moved across the country, in search of a job or a woman, she had completely lost the sense of being his child, of being under his protection. She didn’t miss him yet: it didn’t seem that he was gone, just that he’d moved on.

She filled a small saucepan with water and put it on to boil, then opened the door of the cabinet next to the stove: a tin of baking powder, a package of cardboard salt-and-pepper shakers, vinegar, spices….

She moved an herb-jar, and a piece of yellow paper wafted down. “The odor of wild thyme, Pliny tells us, drives away snakes. Dionysius of Syracuse, on the other hand, thinks it an aphrodisiac. The Egyptians, I am told, used the herb for embalming, so I may yet require the whole of this rather large packet.”

She reached behind the herbs and grabbed a box of tea bags, a supermarket house brand. Better than nothing. Written on the box: “My mother drank Red Rose tea all her days, and I used to wonder how she could abide it when the world was full of aromatic teas with compelling names: Lapsang Souchong, Gunpowder, Russian Caravan. I keep this box for guests with unadventurous palates. There is good tea in the canister marked ‘Baking Powder.’ Don’t ask why.”

She pulled down the baking powder tin. There was a tiny yellow note stuck to the inside of the lid. In miniature script, it said, “The famous green tea of Uji, where there is a temple to Inari, attended by mossy stone foxes wearing red bibs.” Her father had spent several years in Japan studying Zen. The experience had not made him, in her opinion, calmer, more accepting, more in tune with the universe, or any of those other things she thought Eastern religions were supposed to do.

A teaball? She opened the drawer below the counter. There were no notes in it, but there was a bamboo tea strainer among the knives and spatulas. She picked it up. Written on the handle, in spidery black ink, were the words, “Leaks like a sieve.”

Sitting in the worn easychair in the living room of the small apartment, a mug of green tea balanced on the arm, she took stock of the situation. The lease was up in a week, and she had no intention of paying another month’s rent on the place. Best to get the books sorted and packed up first, then look through the other stuff to see what she might want to sell and what she’d give to the Goodwill. She didn’t plan to keep much. Had he really read all these books?

She had liked to read when she was a kid. But reading took so much time, all of it spent inside someone else’s head. Movies and tv, you could watch them with other people. That’s what it boiled down to: how much time you wanted to be all alone by yourself, with just a book for company.

There in her father’s apartment, she could see how much his life had been about books and the company they provided. It wasn’t just that he created books — in some way, books created him. Who he was was the sum of the books he had read and the books he had written. And now, all that was left was the books. And herself.

When she was younger, she had seen the books, both the ones he read and the ones he wrote, as rivals for her father’s affection. She had abdicated the competition long ago.

A mammoth unabridged dictionary sat, closed, on the desk, next to the typewriter. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary . She opened it. The binding was broken, and the cover flopped open to the title page. The editor’s name was starred in red ink, and her father’s handwriting sprawled across the bottom of the page. “Dr. Gove had been my freshman English teacher at New York University on the old mainland campus, circa 1940. He told me I was the most promising freshman he had ever taught,” it said in red. Below that, in black: “My attempts to re-establish contact with him have come to nought.”

Later, in a cheap, plastic-covered copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate , on the page crediting the editorial staff, she found an inscription in red: “Re: P.B. Gove?” and, again in black, “P.B. Gove is dead.”

So was her father. So would she be eventually, all the flotsam of her life left for someone else to clean up. With that in mind, the little yellow notes made sense. Like his books, they were a way for her father to extend his lifespan, they were hooks that would reach into someone else’s life after he was gone.

There was a pile of empty boxes in the bedroom — the very boxes these books had come out of? She dragged several into the living room and started putting books into them. One box for books she’d keep, another for books she’d sell, a third for completely worthless books, for the Goodwill.

There were a lot of books to sell. She checked them warily for yellow notes, and found only marginalia. Her father carried on a dialogue with every book he read, sometimes arguing points of fact, sometimes just interrupting the author’s train of thought with reminiscences of his own.

“Disembarking from a troop carrier was not as easy as this description implies.”

“When I was in Samarkand in 1969, this mosque was open to the public. The majolica tiles of the iwan were among the most glorious I’ve seen anywhere.”

“1357 is the most often cited date for this battle, but in fact it undoubtedly occurred in 1358.”

She frowned at the tiny scribblings. They would certainly reduce the book’s resale value. Why on earth had her father written all over these valuable books? It seemed to show a lack of respect.

She opened Samuel Pepys’s Diaries , read her father’s lengthy inscription on the inside. “Books are memory,” it said. “They remember their contents and pass them on. They keep track of who claims ownership, who they were given by and for what occasion. They mediate, in their margins, disagreements between reader and author.” Her father’s books, it seemed, were charged with enormous responsibility. Could they mediate a decade of emptiness between him and her? Can you make peace with someone after they’re dead?

As she worked, something puzzled her. The bookshelves, usually the most orderly part of any place her father lived, were in quite a bit of disarray. There were gaps in between the books, but few books by the bed or on his desk. In the bathroom she found only a book on the Greek alphabet, one on Islamic architecture, and Volume Ed — Fu of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition , in an inexpensive cloth binding. What was missing? Again, she wondered if someone had disturbed her father’s things.

The next few days did not pass quickly, but they passed. She finished her father’s Japanese tea and ate crackers from a package she had found unopened in the cupboard. She called in pizza. She drank too much Diet Pepsi.

She boxed letters and manuscripts for a library in Kansas that was willing to accept her father’s papers. She found many photographs of people she did not know, but there were some that meant something to her.

A Polaroid of her mother, maybe twenty years old, in a ridiculous orange dress and heavy leather boots. Another of her father, already a middle-aged man, holding her as a baby. Their faces held nothing, apparently, but hope for the future.