Stephen Dixon - Frog

Olivia prays. “Dear God, please don’t let my father have pain wherever he is. Any pain, in any part of him. From his toes to his head top to out to the tips of his fingers and penis and nose. Whatever part and wherever he is. Dear God, please just do that for me and I’ll do anything you say and want for the rest of my life forever, I promise. Please, please, thank you.” She turns over in bed and hugs Talking Bear. If she hears her mother walking or putting away dishes or turning a page, she’ll cry she wants her. Wants her for what? It has to be good or she’ll get mad. For water, to make peepee, or she’s still having trouble sleeping, thinks she’s getting a cold. She listens, hears nothing. She listens for Eva in the next room. If Eva cries or talks to herself or taps on her crib bars or wall or bangs her feet against them, she’ll call for her mother and say Eva’s keeping her up. She hears nothing. Why’d Eva get to get one more story read to her than she tonight? Tomorrow night it’s her turn to get more. She had so many other bears she loved more than Talking Bear but right after her father died he became her favorite. Why’s that? Talking Bear was brought back from some place her father had been, the only bear he gave her just by himself. She never thought of that but now she knows. When her mother said before “Just rest in bed and think, if you can’t fall asleep, but no getting out of it,” would that be something interesting she could tell her mother she thought? She thinks so, but it wouldn’t be a good enough reason to get her here to tell her. “The other bears tell me my father isn’t somewhere still alive,” she says to Talking Bear. “Is that true? Should I believe them or you?” “Believe me,” Talking Bear says. “It’s best for you. I am closest and mostest and I always tell the truth and all I do is think of you. That’s my job.” “But the other bears all together, when they’re together, say the same thing and know much more than you. They know more than anyone. They know almost everything there is to know when they’re all together.” “Then believe them. I won’t be hurt. I say ‘If it is good for you, it is good for me.’ I say this every night before I go to sleep. Right before the last wink awake, so I haven’t said it yet tonight to myself.” “What about if I don’t believe any of them when they’re all together, or you? If I just find out for myself?” “That could be the best way. If you can find out and if you know before you start looking that you might be able to find out.” “If I don’t know whatever it is you said, that last thing, and if I can’t find out, what should I do?” “I don’t know.” “The other bears all together would know, but I can’t get them all together now for them to tell me. I’d have to get out of bed. That wouldn’t be hard. I can inch out. I can move quietly. The door’s shut. There’s a rug on the floor. I could get some of my bears. But for the rest of them I’d have to leave the room. I might even have to go to Eva’s room if she took some when she wasn’t supposed to, but I don’t think I’d have to go downstairs or outside. What I’ll do, if I can’t find out about my father from here, is believe what makes the most sense.” “That’s a good way too. If you can’t find out for yourself or you’re not able to, believe what makes the most sense.” “Or the best sense.” “Or the best sense. But if I were you I’d believe me. I tell the truth and I also know. I am for you.” “But no matter what, the truth is if he is still somewhere alive but doesn’t or can’t let me see him anymore, I’ll be very sad.” “That’s why I’m here. To help you in things like that. You can ask me how if you want.” “How?” “You’ll have to give me time to think…. You can throw me up and down and try to catch me. You can kick me and I won’t say ouch. You can squeeze me while you sleep or are feeling sad. If you’re away in a car someplace and I’m not with you because you forgot me or you couldn’t find me, you can know I’m home waiting for you and wanting you to throw me or kick me or squeeze me while you sleep or anytime you’re sad. Lots of ways. We can think of many. It’s something we can also do.” “How should I start to find out if he’s alive or really dead or really alive or near here or what?” “You can look for him. I haven’t seen him for a long time, maybe as long as you, but I hear he’s around. You can ask me how I hear this.” “How?” “You’ll have to give me time to think…. I just hear it, there isn’t any reason how. It’s something I can do. Or we can look together for him if you want. In basements, outside behind bushes, in backs of bottom drawers. All the places you haven’t looked. If we don’t find him or we can’t, because he’s too big to be there, in a drawer, we might find a sign of him. Or you can speak to the bears. If they know everything, they might know where to look. I won’t be hurt.” “They said he isn’t alive. When I said you said he is and I think he is and I want to find him, they said the one thing they don’t know anything about is where to look. Missing bears they can help me find. People they can’t. It’s just something they can’t do and now they don’t even try.” “Then we are in what your father used to call a spot. But go to sleep. Maybe in the morning you’ll have your answer. Maybe I will. Maybe it will just appear. A paper we pick up that has a map showing where he is and how to get there. Something that was once a piece of scrap paper but now isn’t. Or something that is and always was a map. Or we might see something written on a wall in this room. A message written in light from the outside or being written while we watch it on the wall.” “I don’t know how to read.” “You don’t know now but maybe tomorrow you will. Or maybe you’ll be able to read just that. You know a few words. The message might just be in those words. ‘Red, blue, dog, gray, go, he, girl, green,’ and some others, and we’ll figure it out. Or maybe I’ll even know how to read by tomorrow. Listen to me though. What I say is true. Maybe in the morning everything you want to know or what you need to know it, like reading, will just happen or appear.” “That’s what bears always say. ‘In the morning. Tomorrow.’ They’re good up to a point. After that point, they’re not. It’s always that way. And always when they’re most sleepy.” “If it’s always that way, then it’s always that way. Ask anyone. Though that doesn’t mean it will always always be that way. And if it is always always that way, then it doesn’t mean it will always always always be that way. But go to sleep. It’s not because I’m sleepy. Just maybe you’ll know in the morning as I say. Or maybe I’ll know. Or maybe all the other bears and us together will know, something we never did once. But maybe it will probably not be so. If that’s so, what?” “I don’t know. What?” “Let me think…. I don’t either.”

Eva does a series of paintings called Memories of My Father. One shows her father sleeping behind her mother. Another shows him sitting on a toilet seat folding a newspaper in half. Others: squeezing lemon juice for a pitcher of scotch sours, mailing a bunch of manila envelopes in a post office, pushing the two girls in a shopping cart at a supermarket, paying for takeout food in a Chinese restaurant, haranguing her mother across the dining room table, peeling an avocado seed for planting, fork-feeding the two girls simultaneously, kissing her mother while holding on to her bottom, digging his knuckles into his temples, looking at several photos of his father, helping his mother downstairs, putting a record back into its jacket, filling a pen, cleaning a typewriter key. Eating, exercising, cooking, slicing, typing, reading, driving, raging, sneezing, aimlessly peeing, winding his watch, brushing his teeth, grating a carrot, unpinning her diapers, filling her baby’s bottle with milk, in a hospital dying. Brown tweed suit, button-down blue shirt, light gray tie. The family stands above it staring inside, Eva on a box, Olivia on tiptoes, his mother crying. He looks healthier there than in any of the others. The paintings are exhibited and get lots of attention and reviews. The gallery sells the lot. Two are bought by European museums, one by a prominent Japanese art collector. Most of the drawings for the paintings sell too. Newspaper article, long critiques in art publications, two-page spread with reproductions of some of the works in a popular newsweekly, interviews. “I feel awful,” she writes Olivia. “First, that I didn’t keep even one for myself. That’s because I couldn’t make up my mind. ‘Daddy in the Tub’? ‘Daddy Showering’? ‘Daddy Shaving the Back of His Neck After Giving Himself a Haircut’? When I finally chose the tub one, it was just being bought for the most money, even if it was one of the smallest and no better framed than the others. The gallery owner said to me ‘My dear, we must pay expenses and keep peachy relations with this particular buyer, who’s already begun to sock away funds for the most expensive work in your next show. Choose another,” but by then admissible bids were being made for the other two, and the few remaining I didn’t feel merited keeping. Secondly, that I didn’t offer you whichever one you wanted for nothing. Especially the one of you and Daddy holding hands and he with your backpack over his shoulder as he walked you down the hill to school. I got you both from behind. You seem to be looking at a squirrel in a tree running. I think it’s a good one. Now I’ll probably never see it again, though I’ve some like slides of it. Also, that I should be on my way, or already made, as one idiot critic put it, and partly because of Daddy. What about all the paintings I did before? The Laughing Mom series. Bombed quietly. One-dimensional, that gallery owner kept being told. They didn’t get the joke—’Say “Cheese”’, even though I know you can’t float a whole show on one pun — or see, as we say, the new nuances in them, among other delusions. No reviews, one sale, and I think that one to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Iris, who still haven’t unpacked it because they want me to believe someone I didn’t know — possibly a hotshot influential art collector — bought it. It wasn’t you, I hope, since half the sale went to the gallery, another ten percent to the gallery for announcements, hangings and cheap opening-night crackers and wine in paper dentist cups, and the rest she’s still promising me. Besides, I’d have given you any two Moms you wanted. Best thing about that gallery is that it dropped me flat. That’s what I need most to get into and go on with the next series. As it is, I’ll probably have to start debasing my present success and maybe give away half my earnings to old age homes for artists to start anything new. But what’ll more likely happen is that the Moms will now sell. They had some good things in them, but everyone seems to think the Father ones were more lived than the Moms, though technically as virtuous. But all the scenes in the Mom paintings I experienced and all the ones in Father I made up. I had nothing to paint from because I had no memories of him. Just photos of different sorts and groupings, and I wasn’t going to reproduce blown-up versions of those. They’d be so cold, except perhaps my reaction to them, and it’s also been done to death before. You should have painted the Father series. You showed lots of talent once. It’s all I can remember of you for years. Drawing, painting, tracing, coloring, cutting out and pasting things together to play with and for collages and mobiles, designing and illustrating your own books. Or we could have done Father together. You giving me your head snaps and telling me if I’m getting them on the canvas right. And dabbing here and there and even splashing all over the place if you wanted, for I’m sure you’re a better artist dormant than I am active and that it’d all come back to you in a flash and with an intelligence and feeling my works lack. And then with paintings, if it’s really bad or there’s a serious mistake, there’s little you can’t cover over and change. Now it’s too late. They’re done, bought, hung, insured, guarded by guards and alarms and maybe even attack dogs in some places. And many probably can’t be located and, if I wanted to, destroyed, since some collectors think announcing they’ve a collection is like asking for a major break-in. And somehow I don’t see myself doing alone Olivia’s Memories of Our Father. Though who knows? Since after I do a series on you and a shorter one on Grandma and an even shorter one called Other Relatives, a Bad Marriage, a Number of Lovers and Some Friends, I won’t have any place to go. Maybe sculpture. That’d get me doing something new. Though suddenly I see myself sculpting bigger-than-life-size bas-reliefs of all of us, starting with Mom just giving birth to you, and Daddy, in this same scene, in hospital gown and mask and holding you in his arms and weeping voluminously, a moment, Mom’s said Daddy called, the happiest in his life.”