Excerpt:
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
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Here are three of the 51 portraits – mini-essays or prose-poems, most around 300 words – that make up the book.
The Neighbor
d. 1978
He appeared at our bus stop one day in sixth grade with his blond
crew-cut and goofy smile. His father had become principal of the
high school, and they'd bought the mysterious house two doors down
from us in the development. While all the other houses had flat green
lawns or perhaps a single weeping cherry, this house had so many
trees, you could hardly see the front door. The only member of the
family we really knew was the dog, a huge wooly brown Airedale named
Chumleigh who caused great hilarity and panic whenever he managed to
bound away from the person holding his chain. The boy, on the other
hand, stayed on the leash. Which was short, since his father was the
principal. No, he could not come out to play Spud. Or ride bikes. Or
take bong hits. If we ever asked, which I'm not sure we did.
These days, if you want to know a secret, you just turn on the
television. Back then, there were only three channels and none of
them had shows where people who were not professional actors wept
and threw chairs at one another. Secrets were simply more secret,
which meant rumors were more baroque. For example, people said the
reason our music teacher was a little strange was because he had run
over his own child playing in leaves in the driveway. It was hard to
stop worrying about this. There were huge piles of leaves in those
days, particularly in front of our neighbor's house, with all those
trees.
My neighbor killed himself in his first year of college. My mother
saw it in the paper, and no one else has mentioned it since, nor come
up with any further details. How can this be, that we have no idea
what happened to this boy, that no one remembers a single
conversation with him? Today I found his father's phone number on the
Internet, which took about ten seconds, and I called it. I told him
that I was thinking about his son. Because our old class is having a
reunion, I said, fumbling for an excuse. I heard he died? There was a
long pause. He said, yes. He did. Have fun at your reunion.
The Driving Instructor
d. 1985
How many poems can you write about your father? Maybe one for every
day of your life. Your father is the poem inside you when you wake up
in the morning, the poem like a spine, shaping how you stand and sit,
the poem with you on the toilet, the sink, the coffeepot, the poem
that leans back into the driver's seat and spins the steering wheel
with one practiced hand. Turn left. Left goddammit. For Christ's
sake, learn to drive. Anger, forgiveness, duty, money, jokes, your
father is the chairman of all these departments. We used to say,
remember what an asshole he could be, but now we can't remember that
anymore. What's left is the assholes we are.
Whole religions were made up so people could see their father again,
and you don't have to be Jesus or Abraham Lincoln to have your actual
biography dwarfed by your never-ending story in other people's heads.
A thin gruel of memory thickened with everything that's happened
since. Twenty-two years out you can hardly taste the stuff you
started with but you just keep stirring, stirring, and putting the
spoon in your mouth. Every day there is another thing he never saw:
my children, my books, my houses, my aging face, the sweet little dog
we have now, the latest morons in Congress and the NFL. The things I
learned and the things I never have been able to. My disappointments,
which would have disappointed him as well, so I might have hidden
them. In dreams my father is sitting at the kitchen table, young and
smooth-jawed, looking suspiciously like my teenaged son. The phone
rings, he answers it, Hey Daddy, it's me. And look at this, still he
gives the phone to my mom.
The Realtor
d. 2006
If you live long enough, life sends you plenty of indignities to rise
above. Hangovers, cheap workmanship, the faithlessness of men, the
death of loved ones, the signs of aging, the vicious pettiness of
people when it comes to real estate. You must focus instead on the
joy. To sail through life as she did requires a rare combination of
high standards, low expectations, and undimmed enthusiasm. A thick,
tough, yet beautifully moisturized and preternaturally radiant skin.
The first time I saw her at a party, a tiny woman with a big Texas
accent and a fine purple wool coat, it was clear she had it all
figured out. I asked for her card. It said Realtor, but might as well
have been Realist. For many years it remained in my pocket, an ace in
the hole.
When we got into so much trouble selling my house, a crazy mess of
misunderstandings and buyer's remorse that spawned a lawsuit of
Dickensian absurdity, she took it in stride. She knew the exact way
to manage these things: big smile, great insurance, leopard print
suit and high-heeled boots. This was a gal who had twirled flaming
batons for Wetumka High. But our day in court would never come,
instead a stupid settlement that gave me a permanent rankle in my
justice-bone. Ah, let it go, honey, she told me. The house is
crooked, you're not. She opened a bottle of wine she and her writer
husband had brought back from Europe and we drank it in her cool,
leafy backyard. Tell me all about him, she said, meaning the guy I
was moving across the country for. She knew there was little that
can't be fixed by a glass of Bordeaux and a juicy love story.
If you live long enough, life sends you the indignity you can't rise
above: cancer that kills you in three months, with so much pain you
could eat your own pillow. Her dapper husband and ancient mama at her
bedside in the hospice, praying her out. Ah, honey. I'd rather think
of The Realtor as I saw her in Venice, giggling with her best friend
in the ladies' room of a castle, a silver head and an ivory one bent
together, still girlish at sixty-some, though both knew how much hurt
a woman can bear.
Excerpted from The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, Marion Winik (Counterpoint, 2007). Reprinted with permission of the author.
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