Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

I tried to get some of those balls off with that little machine Coco uses for getting the fabric balls off her clothes, but I only ended up wrecking the machine. After I wrecked the machine, Coco got mad. She told me those machines are only meant for clothes. She said you weren’t supposed to use those machines on couches. She went out and bought a new machine. She told me this time if I wanted any of my clothes fixed I could give her the clothes and she would fix them. She said she was not giving me the machine again.

~

First I had a milk shake. Then I went to bed. Then I got back up. I had raisin toast. Then I got a yogurt and stuck a spoon in it. I listened for any sounds from the bedroom.

~

I am never going to leave my wife.

My DADwas born in 1929. My mom was born in 1936. In 1956, Dad and Mom got married. I was born in 1959. In 1965, Dad and Mom got a divorce. In 1971, Dad married another woman. In 1974, he had a daughter from this other woman. In 1976, he had a second daughter from her. In 1993, Dad phoned me to see if I wanted to go for coffee.

~

Most of the time you couldn’t see my sister’s eyes because of her glasses. She had those glasses that look like butterflies.

~

Walking over to the mall, he was talking about Kyle.

“You know why Kyle is my friend, Daddy?” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because I like his name.”

~

I think eventually, for whatever reason, you have to give up everything. You have to say, I am not this and I am not that. Then, after that, you can sit back and wait to see what happens.

THIS GOESway back to the time Dad bought me a steak at a steak house. Back, even, before that. Before I was born. To the year Dad was in England. Or before that even, to the year my grandpa was in the war.

~

Tutti was with Sammy. We were at the beach. I was in the cottage and I could see Tutti out on the beach, sitting in the sand with Sammy. In a week I would be back at work. The phone rang. It was my sister. “We need the recipe for peach bars,” she said. I decided to have some toast.

~

My grandma and grandpa had a little room at the end of the hall where they stored all their stuff. They’re both dead now.

We’ve always had lockers to put our stuff in. In every apartment we’ve ever had, Tutti and I have always had a locker.

I like to go down and stand in the middle of the locker and look at the stuff we have.

~

Some nights I can’t sleep, so I turn on the light. I lie on my back and look up at the ceiling. The fan is on.

~

When Tutti was pregnant, she was always hot. She would lie on top of the blankets with her belly in the air. She could only sleep on her back. I would lie on my side and watch her sleep. I could see her belly sticking up in the air from the light coming in through the window.

~

I woke up. My eyes felt swollen. I lay there for a while.

I swung my feet over the edge of the bed. My eyes still felt swollen. The bottoms of my feet hurt. I stood up. I stood there for a while, feeling my hair. I was trying to figure out how much work it was going to take to fix my hair. I went downstairs.

I opened the fridge. I stood there, leaning on the fridge door, with my forehead against the freezer, looking down at my legs, how the hair on my legs got lit up by the light in the refrigerator. Ever since then the refrigerator light always makes me think of eternity.

~

There’s a guy across the road from us who drives a Cadillac. He’s bald and he comes out onto his front porch mornings to smoke cigarettes. Sometimes his son comes out with him. His son must be eighteen years old. He has long, blond hair, which is very beautiful, and he always wears a baseball cap. You can see that the world is just opening up for him and he has sworn never to be bald like his father.

~

I think when Dad and Mom got married they were making a promise to God. We kids were God. Mom’s handwriting was God. Dad’s need for the perfect hardboiled egg was God. These were the things that were God.

~

What I say is, “We’ll get it done. Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get it done.”

Tutti says, “No, we won’t. We won’t get it done. It won’t get done.”

This is early in the morning. Tutti’s hair is out all over the place. She goes on saying this thing about nothing ever getting done.

She says, “Nothing ever gets done.”

This is what she did when she first got out of bed this morning. She went into the living room and looked at the windows. She kept standing there in the living room, looking at the windows. Finally, she came into the kitchen and got one of the brown vinyl chairs and dragged it into the living room.

Where I was is, I was in the kitchen. I was in there with Sammy, trying to get him to eat his cereal. He had some cereal in a bowl. I was trying to get him to eat the cereal. He kept getting up. He was down on the floor, eating the cereal, and what he was doing was, he kept getting up. He kept taking a mouthful of cereal and then he would get up.

I was saying, “He keeps getting up.”

This is what I was saying to Tutti.

Tutti was in the living room, standing on the brown vinyl chair, hanging curtains, and I was calling out to her, “He keeps getting up! Why does he do that? Why can’t he just sit down and eat his cereal?”

I was drinking my coffee, and the thing is, I could feel how bad my hair was. I could feel that my hair was as bad as Tutti’s hair.

I kept telling Sammy to sit down, to stay sitting on the floor. I said, “You’re not supposed to get up every time you have a mouthful of cereal. You’re supposed to stay sitting down.”

Meanwhile, what I am trying to do is, I am trying to drink my coffee. I keep pushing on my hair, trying to get it to look less bad.

I say to Sammy, “Sit down and eat your cereal.”

“I need it, Daddy,” Sammy says.

“Need what?” I say.

Sammy stands there in his pj’s with the built-in slippers. He keeps standing there looking at me.

The thing is, I know what he wants.

So what I say is, I say, “No, you are not having my chair.”

I phone the guy up. I get him on the phone. I hear his voice. It’s a thing where you try to get as close to dead as possible and then come back at the very last minute.

~

I could hear the kids outside, screaming in the street, and this would wake me up long enough to get all the pillows moved around, so that more or less of them were scrunched up under my belly. I could hear Tutti downstairs making things. Sweaters or brownies or dinner or phone calls. She was always in the middle of making something. Sometimes I would go downstairs and stand in the kitchen doorway for a while, watching Tutti, and I could feel where my hair was sticking out. Then I would go upstairs and get back into bed. Getting into bed felt like falling off a cliff, with the feeling in your chest of knowing you are never going to land. It made me want to cry. I cried when I saw the clock radio, or when I lay on my back looking at the little bumps on the ceiling where the guy who lived here before me had stuccoed the ceiling with one of those little sponges you can get.

WE’RE ATthe mall with the indoor amusement park.

I say to Sammy, “Do you need to pee?”

“No,” he says.

“I have to pee,” I say. “Do you want to come and pee with me?”

“No,” he says.

“If you need to pee,” I say, “you tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

~

When we get over to Grandma’s house, Grandma’s not ready yet. She’s not dressed.

“Can I eat the rest of your apple?” I ask Sammy. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, with the seat tipped back and my eyes closed and I can hear the rain coming down on the roof of the car.