Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

“By this time the old man had only one lime green safari suit he was willing to wear, and he wore it all the time. It was very dirty, and it was crumpled, and he came to his weddings in this suit, and the beautiful women he was marrying, who were always there against their will in the first place, were disgusted by this smelly old man in the ugly suit, but the sons were there with submachine guns, so the women could not leave.

“The sons buried these women in the woods behind the house.”

~

When we first got married, Tutti used to come home with canned goods. She would come home with bags of canned goods, and she would bring the bags into the kitchen and set them down on the kitchen counter. She would stand there in the kitchen, in her coat, with the keys still in her hand and the smell of the outside still on her. “How was your day?” she would ask.

~

There are places in the middle of the city where a sort of silence settles, like snow, and all the noise seems far away, coming toward you like clouds.

~

Headlights kept hitting the backs of her legs. Her legs were white and formless, and they disappeared, eventually, into a pair of white shorts. It was dark enough now that I was losing sight of her. The headlights of cars coming toward her lit up the hair on her arms so she glowed around the edges. Then the headlights got past her and blinded me so I lost sight of her momentarily. When the headlights got past me, I could see her again, but it was growing darker and she was harder to see. What I saw now was mainly motion.

~

I knew him when he could stand up. He can’t stand up anymore.

It’s their heads that I notice.

Okay, who’s the guy who keeps saying maybe, and who’s the guy who keeps saying no? Who are all these guys?

~

Tutti says there is a God because of this Brad Pitt guy, who is the biggest honey of all time, if you listen to what Tutti has to say. Tutti says she doesn’t even know what the movie was about, she was too busy thanking God, because as far as she is concerned, yes, Robert Redford is still the god of gods when it comes to honeys, and, yes, he has still got what it takes, but, she’s sorry, a thing of that nature cannot go on forever. Eventually a person has to pass the crown and, up to now, as far as Tutti was concerned, there were no contenders.

The weird thing is, this Brad Pitt guy even smiles like Robert Redford.

“It’s his son,” Tutti says. “It’s Robert Redford’s son.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not. I saw it on TV that it’s not Robert Redford’s son.”

“It’s got to be his son. I don’t care what they say on TV.”

Tutti is cutting out patterns for her sewing projects. We have this movie with Brad Pitt going on the VCR. Whenever Brad Pitt comes on the screen, Tutti gets down on her hands and knees and starts to howl at the screen.

I get the clicker and turn up the volume. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying,” I say.

“Who cares what they’re saying,” Tutti says.

“I care.”

The next morning, at breakfast, we’re both feeling rough. The movie was a long one. When it was finally over, Tutti lay beside me in bed going, “There is a God. There is a God.” Normally, I can go to sleep in an instant when Tutti is talking to me. As a matter of fact, this is a bone of contention between me and Tutti, because Tutti will be talking to me and right in the middle of a sentence, I’ll just go to sleep.

But with this Brad Pitt thing, things are different. Every time Tutti says, “There is a God,” I flinch.

So at breakfast, we both feel it. I feel swollen is what I feel. I feel as though there is water trapped beneath my skin. My cornflakes are going soggy.

“I’m sorry,” Tutti says, “but if that Brad Pitt guy asked me to sleep with him, I’d have to do it. I hope you could forgive me.”

I look at Tutti with her hair going out in fifteen different directions, and her eyes puffed out. She’s wearing her bathrobe that makes her look like a blue lamb.

~

Can anyone tell me where this area on the map is in the actual building?

IF YOUlook at a book about Casa Loma, you will see that it originally had three bowling alleys. This was in 1914, the year construction on the castle ended.

When Tutti first learned she was pregnant, we went looking for a house. I’m not as naïve as I once was. I understand now why a guy might want to build a castle in the middle of a big city. And why he might want to put three bowling alleys in.

~

Tutti and Sammy are standing in the middle of the driveway when I get home from work. The two of them standing there. I stop the car and look out the front windshield. Sammy waves.

~

I’ll tell you something which used to keep happening to me, which is, I used to keep thinking I was going to remember something. I kept getting this feeling, as though something was about to come back to me. What I used to do whenever this happened was, I would get all nervous and try to remember everything as fast as I could, and if there was anyone around me who was making a lot of racket, I would think to myself, Fuck , and that would be the end of it.

~

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

~

I was sitting at my desk, writing up an order for blue ballpoint pens. Outside my window large snowflakes were falling out of the sky like white spiders coming down to earth.

~

The sun was shining. Sometimes you might see a dog. The yards were empty squares. There were fences, and pictures of people having adventures. Things went by fast. Girls were screaming.

I NEVERwanted to go to dinner with her. I never wanted to put myself inside her, feel her taking things away. I only wanted to go to sleep, take everything with me into sleep, and keep it there with me, alone with me, in sleep.

~

“You know what he does?” Tutti says. “He puts three or four kinds of cereal into a bowl. Then he puts milk on it and walks around the house waiting for the cereal to get soggy.”

This is what Tutti is saying to my sister. They are downstairs talking about me, and I can hear their voices coming up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they are saying, except for the thing Tutti says about the way I eat my cereal.

~

I wanted to see big old houses, big old mansions. I wanted to see the people who lived in them, people whose lives were coming home from work.

~

“Stay off my desk,” I tell Foufou. I go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I come back to the bedroom and sit down at the desk and stare at the wall.

Foufou jumps up on the desk. She gets her paw up in the air and knocks the pen out of my hand. It lands on the floor and rolls under the bed.

“Get off,” I tell her. I get down on the floor and get the pen out from under the bed. I pick up my coffee and go into the kitchen. I look in the fridge. Foufou comes in and starts rubbing my legs.

“Get lost,” I tell her. I push her away with my foot.

At 3:30 I go over to pick Tutti up at work. She’s waiting outside the front door. She’s wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts set. She’s smiling and waving. She climbs into the car. “How was your day?” she says.

~

A guy from work says this to me: “I bought these things in China.” He holds the things he bought in China up to my face. I hear the far edge of his voice slip away, sliced off by the things he is holding.

~

I keep my hair short. I have had several different jobs. I brush my teeth. I live in a small apartment. Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door. I take the pamphlets they give me and put them in the kitchen. One time a minister called me up. He said his wife’s name was Jewel. He said he was not at all sorry.