Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Don’t let him play with stuff like that? Like what? She gave the G.I. Joe back to the poor kid as soon as Patty Ann left them alone again, and he hasn’t set it down since. He acts as though it’s the only normal toy he’s ever had. Maybe it is. He’s gliding it through the air right now, making loops upon loops, accompanying the motion with soft sounds, almost the only sounds she’s heard him make since arriving. All the boys seem oblivious to the shouting from the kitchen. Ugly scenes clearly are nothing new to them.

Life has taught her that there’s no changing the past — or, really, the future. Free will doesn’t mean free to choose what happens. It means free to be a good sport about it. But she has to protect the boys in what little way she can while she is here. That’s why she’s here, surely — Patty Ann can’t be hoping for her help with Lee. A lot of other fish in the sea, she used to singsong while Patty Ann curled her finger around the telephone cord. Just wait until you get to college. You’ll see!

She should have tied Patty Ann up with that telephone cord.

If only Michael had been still with them. Patty Ann, he’d have said after the very first time Lee came around, that boy undoubtedly has his merits, like all of God’s creatures. But he is not the right one for you . And Patty Ann would have listened. Patty Ann always respected her father more than her mother; Michael was a doctor and a war hero. She herself doesn’t even have a college degree. She could spend her life trying to prove she’s worthy of bearing the name Gannon.

Of course, in real terms, that’s water under the bridge. She’s a McCloskey now.

“…the Man.”

“Oh, fuck you, the Man! If the Man can get me a fucking stove that works, then bless his Man soul!”

“Yeah, that’s just what you are, isn’t it? You’d fuck the Man for a new fucking stove, wouldn’t you?”

“Me? Me! ”

She gets up and loudly closes the door to the kids’ bedroom. Children should never hear the things she’s heard since arriving the day before yesterday. It’s worse here than she expected, and she’d expected bad.

Hey, Mom, what’s up? Patty Ann said on the phone three days ago, as though seven months hadn’t passed since they last spoke. How’s the weather in Phoenix? How’s Sissy? Want to come visit for a few days? Want to come tomorrow?

Even before they hung up she was reaching for her suitcase, because if Patty Ann was calling, Patty Ann must really need help. She thought Patty Ann would be forced to see her at Francis’s graduation last spring, but then Francis got the job in a guitar shop and said he wasn’t planning to attend his graduation, so there was no point in her coming. When she tries to call, it’s always Kenny who answers: Mommy can’t talk right now, he says. Which means she hasn’t spoken to Patty Ann since the two-year memorial service for Luke last February.

She sits down on the bed and runs her hands over the sheets.

Two years, seven months, and three days.

Once a woman becomes a mother, the morning never comes when she wakes up, stretches her arms out, and feels light, like a teenager, again. Happy, yes. Weightless, never. The children grow up, they move out, they experience life in a way no amount of Mercurochrome, bandages, and a mother’s kiss can make better. Becoming a mother means committing to a lifetime of worry.

Unless that child is lost. Forever.

And then you wish you could have all that worrying back. God, please, let me have it back! God, please, let me have him back. Why did I waste all that time worrying instead of simply being grateful for this perfect person I put on this earth? Why can’t I just have this perfect person back? Why why why.

She reaches beside the bed for her purse and snaps it open. She rummages for a cigarette before remembering she quit again.

“You okay, Grandma?”

“Am I okay? Ha! You won that battle, but you haven’t got me beat yet!”

They are an American family, and people have to stand by their country. Luke had to go over. It was no one’s fault. Not hers, not Luke’s, not their country’s. Patty Ann is the one who had choices. And made them badly.

She flips over a card.

We’ve moved to a house, Patty Ann said on the phone. At least the last place had other apartment complexes around it, a sidewalk, a row of palm trees. Patty Ann’s new home looks out on a FedMart gas station in a torn pocket of LA, a far cry from the orderly neighborhood where she and Michael brought Patty Ann up. Someone — presumably not Lee — has painted the squat bungalow a dubious blue that has nothing to do with the sky or a robin. The front door is on the side by the carport instead of in front; the interior is a box split in four. The kitchen door opens onto a back patio lined with broken cement. The only semblance of lawn is the scrub out front.

And the state of things inside…In her time, people cleaned their homes before having visitors, especially mothers or mothers-in-law. Wives turned the rugs, men washed the cars, together they hid any sign of desperation. When she first arrived from Phoenix, Patty Ann’s house looked as though the Bomb had hit it. Soiled clothing lay on the beds and floors, dirty dishes on the counters and tables. An ashtray spilled ash and cigarette butts onto the sofa. A stuffed bear, flattened and chewed as though by a dog — although there isn’t any dog — lay on the ragged carpeting. The musky odor of dirty bedding filled the air.

Even with kids popping out of her like Pop-Tarts from the toaster, she kept their house as neat as a pin. The day after Michael died, her heart heavier than an iron, she tucked in the corners of their empty bed, tight enough to pass any inspection. She pushed those sheets in under the mattress, firmly folded back the top sheet by the pillows, smoothed the now-barren land of her private life, then went out to the kitchen and tied on a clean apron.

The first thing she did at Patty Ann’s — after pouring herself a glass of water and sizing up whether Patty Ann might possibly be pregnant again, which, thank God, doesn’t seem to be the case — was to gather up those filthy sheets and take them to a Laundromat. For Christ’s sake, Mom, Patty Ann said, lifting her shirt to feed the baby right in front of her, like some woman in National Geographic magazine. You just got here, and already you’re criticizing my housekeeping?

Yes, Patty Ann. Yes, I am. You live in a pigsty. And look at you — you act like a suckling sow. On the way back from the Laundromat, she stopped at Sears and bought a vacuum cleaner. The abandoned Electrolux in Patty Ann’s carport clearly would never hum its hum over anyone’s floor again, probably stopped working months ago. Maybe it never worked.

Patty Ann is twenty-seven now, with three children. Lee’s family was never much, but she brought Patty Ann up to be better than this.

Kenny turns over a card and rubs a sunburned knee. He fiddles with the edge of his shorts. “Mommy doesn’t like it when we close the door to our bedroom, Grandma. She says it’s sneaky. She says she can’t keep an eye on us.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “You just concentrate on your hand.”

“Oh, Grandma. Everyone knows war’s just a game of luck.”

“You say that because I’m winning.”

“No, you’re not!”

They compare piles.

The front door slams.

“Okay, okay. Your pile is bigger,” she says. “But it’s not over till it’s over. I’ll whip your butt yet.”

“Grandma!”

The front door opens and slams again. Patty’s voice carries in through the windows: “That’s it. That’s it, Lee. I mean it!”