Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

~

The universe keeps striking the same note. I suddenly realize there has only ever been one note. The difference is, I used to wait to hear the other notes. They’re coming , I thought. There was this wonderful sense of possibility.

I am saying, it was always only the one note. The cosmos has no imagination. Look at this macaroni dinner I am trying to eat.

~

Once, I was camping in a trailer park and an old lady made me breakfast. She cooked it for me, but she couldn’t come out and give it to me. She was too old. There was something wrong with her legs.

She sent her husband out. He handed me a paper plate with breakfast on it. There was a napkin with a plastic fork and knife tucked inside.

“My wife made this for you,” the husband says. “She thinks you look lonely.”

He went back to the trailer. He walked through the forest as though it were a cathedral, and it was going to take him the rest of his life to get back to the trailer. I could see the old lady’s face in the trailer window.

~

Tutti and I were living in that apartment where you couldn’t put anything in the freezer because of all the ice forming on the freezer walls. I saw my whole life in that freezer. I saw a guy with hairy legs, living in a cave, eating frozen fish-sticks. I saw God in that freezer.

~

I went out the door, into the heat. I stopped. I went back into the building. I saw Lisa. “It’s a wall of heat out there,” I said. Lisa looked at me. I imagined she was saying to herself, There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I went back out into the heat.

IS THATsomething you can do?” was one thing someone in class had said. Plus this: “We learned in our other class that you can’t do that.” Another thing people said was: “How will you be grading us?”

I wanted to get at what was most important in my life. Cut to the quick, so to speak. Get to the point. Say what had to be said and be done with it. I didn’t want to fuck around too much anymore.

I had a story already written down. It was about beans. I decided my project would be to cut out all the nonessential crap in my story about beans. Then I would have it. I would have what I was looking for, what I had been looking for all my life, more or less. No doubt people would want to read what I had written this time, since it represented the culmination of a lifetime of searching.

But when I read it over, I saw that it represented nothing. It was just this story where a guy goes over to his uncle’s place and finds all these beans in the cupboard.

You see what I was trying to do, though, don’t you? The beans were supposed to represent something. Having all those beans. More beans than you could ever consume.

There was one moment where the uncle opens the cupboard and looks at all the beans and shakes his head in disbelief, as if he can’t understand how all those beans got in there, how this could be what his life had come to. You know the kind of moment I’m talking about. The epiphanic moment. The moment of revelation. The moment where some little, mundane thing shows us how little and mundane our lives have really been.

Only I guess the uncle already knew how little and mundane his life was, and the revelation was not all that revealing. I don’t think it could have been a revelation at all. More of a confirmation maybe. Like when you see a documentary on TV and you find out kangaroos have no backbones or something. That sort of thing.

~

When the kid came home for the first time, the grandparents said, “Is he warm enough? What are those spots on his face?” The grandfather put his face very close to the baby’s face and looked at the spots.

Pretty soon the mother and the father got in their car and took the baby home. The father mentioned that the baby had no eyebrows. The mother said she thought the baby was an elf, because he had soft fuzz all over his ears. At night, they put rubbing alcohol on the baby’s navel. All of this happened in June, and the summer was another hot one.

~

Tutti went downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer. I was in the kitchen. I could see a guy in a white shirt standing out in the road, looking at various units in the condominium complex. He walked up and down the street, looking at various units in the complex. He stopped in front of our unit and looked at our unit for a while. Someone, somewhere, had their stereo going and I could hear the bass and drums. I was thinking it would be nice, for once, to be able to buy the ten-pound bag of apples and not have half of them shrivel up and rot before we got a chance to eat them.

I THINKwe have reached a turning point with Sammy. He is starting to hear the sadness in everything that happens. Last night he had a tantrum because I brought him a Kleenex. This was deep into the night. I was tired. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. It scared me.

~

Do you know what it’s like to sleep with another boy? With Rita, that’s what I thought. I thought, This is my chance to sleep with a boy without actually having to sleep with a boy , and all the kinds of things you have to listen to people say when you’re sleeping with boys.

What I am saying is, now that she’s gone, this is when I start thinking this thing about boys, about sleeping with boys.

I’ll tell you something, though. If you could have heard her talk. If you could have heard her talk through her cigarette that way. She would point her eyes down at the cigarette just long enough to get the thing lit. Then she would point her eyes up at me, and she would talk to me through her cigarette.

When she talked, her cigarette bounced.

~

The guy from the Neighborhood Watch comes to the community center and we all go over there and sit in the meeting room and listen to him talk about how to prevent crime. He shows us some things you can only get from a locksmith. Long striker plates, with silver screws designed to be driven deep into your door frame. He tells us if we don’t put the right type of deadbolt on our doors, we might as well leave our doors unlocked.

The meeting room has the smell of a classroom. The smell of years of children being frightened into submission.

~

I had the book in my hand. I took it across the darkness of the bar. Twice I almost dropped it. The second time I thought, Why am I living this way?

I took the book and handed it to an old man and said, “Maybe you want to read this.”

~

You couldn’t put a quarter into a video game in Athens. You would have to use some form of Greek currency. After that, the differences stop, and you encounter things that give us a common existence on this planet. Most involve frightening premonitions of sudden death.

~

Sometimes I can’t tell my wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law apart. They all have the same eyes.

I sit in that chair my in-laws had reupholstered a couple of years ago, because the cat had ripped the stuffing out. Now, whenever the cat goes to scratch the chair, my mother-in-law runs over and tries to hit it.

My father-in-law, Jack, mutters, “Goddam cat.”

It was my sister-in-law, Coco, who brought the cat home, about seven years ago. Jack said he didn’t want a goddam cat in the house. He said he was allergic to fleas.

For a while, he collected fleas. He kept them in a plastic pill bottle. He stuck the fleas between pieces of Scotch tape and put them in a bottle. Tutti showed it to me once.

Sometimes I’ll look up from reading and say, “Hey, honey,” and then experience a moment of panic. I’ll look right at Tutti’s face and wonder, is it Tutti, or Dora, or Coco?

I was reading Chekhov one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Tutti out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. Tutti was looking at me. For a long moment I felt lost.