Glazed A. Lyn Carol
M
y daughter leaves for college in less than two years. She will be driving in less than two months. Her encroaching departures, both large and small scale, trigger a recurring nightmare for me. In my dream, she is late coming home, way past curfew. I am watching out the window for her car, peeking through the blinds, calling her phone every few minutes. I see nothing but the thick darkness of two o’clock in the morning. After hours of waiting, lights sweep across the living room wall as she pulls into the driveway. Fog makes the headlights fuzzy. As she walks from the car, her gait is uneven and tilting. Her long hair conceals her face. I swing open the door, as angry as I am scared. My voice is strident as I throw questions at her, not giving her a chance to respond. “Where have you been? Who were you with? Do you know what time it is? Did you not think of how worried I’d be?” But in my dream, she is unable to comprehend my questions. Her glazed eyes skim over me. She doesn’t register that it’s me. My panic bleeds into terror. I ask her the same litany of questions, my volume and speed increasing with each iteration. She continues to look at me without recognition, her pupils small and fixed in the blue eyes she inherited from me. I realize she is drunk. A loud, buzzing static fills my brain. I realize they aren’t my eyes at all, or hers, but my father’s. *My father drank Wild Turkey whiskey straight from the bottle and often didn’t come home after his shift at the post office. He was a mail carrier. I was proud of him because his job had an actual uniform, which was fancier than the local hog farmers with their shit-crusted gumboots and pungent odors. When my father left for work in the mornings, his blue work shirt was tucked into blue work pants still smooth from the iron. Every hem was crisp. His wide-billed work hat sat tall and straight on his head. My favorite part of his uniform was the eagle insignia. In the logo, the eagle is poised for takeoff, powerful wings raised and strong beak masculine and commanding. Beneath the eagle, in bold black letters surrounded by red, white, and blue: U.S. MAIL. To me, my father was as important as the president when he wore that uniform. Sometimes when my father didn’t come home by suppertime, my mother rounded up my sisters and me, and we went looking for him. We usually found him at Charlie Brown’s, a dive bar that served food. He favored their fried chicken gizzards when he was drinking. Being the oldest at age eleven, I was the one my mother sent in to fetch him and let him know that we sure did want him to come home. When that didn’t work, my mother told me to tell him “Jesus wants you to come home now.” That didn’t work, either. Windmill 155