Do You Remember Me? by Jeffrey Winter

Do You Remember me? a novella

by Jeffrey Winter

CHAPTER ONE The Golden Years

The first thing I need for you to understand is the pain that greets you in the morning when you wake up as an old man— the pain in your ribs like a smoldering hole, the soft crunch of compressed pulp somewhere deep inside as you roll over for a sip of water. There it is, a bottle of water on the nightstand, the nightstand that contains the drawer that contains your dreams, and you cannot reach the water for the pain, the pain of the fire in your side that you need the water to extinguish.

But I will also need to communicate the quantity of the pain, not just its qualities. This is how it is every morning, waking up to all the disparate pains you have accumulated through the years.

You wake up each morning a forest fire, acres upon acres of dilating inflammations yearning toward coalescence, three hundred dry joints crackling in the white heart of an inferno. This is what you get for hanging in there, this is your reward for having the audacity to creep up on eight decades of life on earth. Look down at your mottled purple hands, try to squeeze them into fists. You can’t do it anymore. You can’t remember the last time you could.

And then there are the dreams. Not the scraps of paper on which you’ve recorded them, not the madly scrawled shorthand that recalls their substance to you, but the dreams themselves.

160

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

Rheumatoid arthritis, incontinence, the dull ache that migrates from organ to organ: all of these are preferable to the weird dreams that haunt your nights and then color the subsequent days with their melancholic tincture, with some free-floating panic that you can’t seem to evade. You find yourself near tears in the shower.

You find yourself sobbing over a bowl of oatmeal, remembering for some reason your first love, who is planted in the earth now somewhere near where you grew up. You realize why, the spoon clatters against the rim of the bowl: You’ve dreamed of her again, of that poor girl. You’ve disturbed her rest. Wasted her time as an old man, just as you used to waste her time as a boy.

They cling to you, these dreams. They cling to your bony shoulders like sheets or shrouds as you rise in irregular increments, gasping, attempting a timorous stretch of your limbs in the feeble light leaking in through the curtains.

Then again, the dreams, with their hosts of lugubrious spirits and the depressive, slowly dissipating spume they trail through the subconscious, are preferable to the constant self-pity. Such narcissism, such inward-facing histrionics are strictly for the young. Unseemly in a man of advancing age. You’ve already noticed, no doubt. No need to say more on that score.

Order has fled, along with just about everything and everyone else. Holidays, landmarks, weekends, mealtimes: these are all behind you now, meaningless things you should not expect to encounter anymore. You stand staring down woozily into the toilet bowl at three in the morning, you drift off to sleep in a chair at three in the afternoon; it’s all the same. One minute may as well be another. You peer at the digital clock on the stove, you peer at the one by your bedside, and the numbers all blur together; your vision is not what it used to be, and anyway, the numbers and their sequence ceased to have any real value long ago.

JEFFR EY W INTER

161

Day, night. You scoff at such distinctions. The only real difference between them is the shade of the shades they produce.

The smoldering hole in your side. The half-hour it takes to rise from the bed like a stubborn corpse exiting a fresh grave.

The bottle trembling its way to your lips, emptying itself down the front of your pajamas (you wear pajamas at this age, almost exclusively if you’re not careful).

You put pen to paper to record the dream you just had in the fewest words possible, a dream about the dull broad backs of twin buzzards hunched over an obscured carcass. You make your way to the kitchen, aimlessly, and the minutes pass in tandem, on tiptoe, each taking its share of your breath and lucidity.

You turn your watery gaze to the front window and there you see it, just there, next to the mailbox: a rumpled blue windbreaker, a pair of grass-stained jeans, a pair of scuffed tennis shoes, all filled with the body of the child lying face-down in the dawn on the frost of your front lawn.

These are the golden years.

CHAPTER TWO First Morning Out

It is a day in March. It is five years to the day since the last day I spent outside my home, since the start of my self-imposed sentence. I have contradicted myself, I realize: all that blather about milestones and landmarks ceasing to be. Oh, well. So the dissolution of time is not yet quite so complete as I suggested. It will be, I am sure, before too long. Give it time.

The first step outside is not as strange as I imagined it would be, probably because I’ve spent so long imagining how strange it would be. The sun, still wintry and distant and pale. The scrape of the sole of my slipper on the concrete, deafening as a car crash. I anticipated all of this.

I stand there in my tattered slippers, in a robe which I vaguely remember fitting me less loosely, on my front lawn, clutching a broom (for what reason, I cannot say), prodding this young fellow repeatedly. About ten, maybe twelve years old, as far as I can make out. The melting frost soaks through to my socks. I tremble— whether from the cold or trepidation, I cannot be certain.

I prod him with the handle of the broom in the back of his blue windbreaker, and he does not move. I stand there, watching him not move. I know what I’ll try, I think, and I prod him again.

JEFFR EY W INTER

163

The wind burns my eyes and I wipe the tears away with the sagging sleeve of my robe. I look, I imagine, like a wizard in a living room play penned by a child. The street is silent in its early morning way, a silence punctuated by the plaint of some poor dog locked out for the night and the muffler-rattling eructations of a few distant motors. The same sounds you can hear with your ear pressed to the inside of your front door, only harsher.

Just before it dawns on me that the boy is alive, it dawns on me that the boy is dead and I think how funny it is, things working out like this, on this day. For a moment I believe in fate again. Then a soft sort of chirp emanates from somewhere inside the blue windbreaker and fate evaporates. He begins to stir, sits upright.

Brown blades of grass cling to the side of his head, to his ruffled black hair. His face is a knot of purpled lumps and crusted blood.

His eye, the eye that had been pressed into the ground, is swollen shut, a tender egg on the point of cracking open. He reaches his hand to touch his eye. I kneel down to speak to him, my knees popping in protest.

“Are you okay, young fellow?”

A foolish question. He does not answer, and I do not blame him. Instead he struggles to his feet, bit by bit, and I try my best to aid him. When he is finally standing, he places his hands before his face for a moment, contemplating the palms with his one open eye. His breath comes in foggy puffs through the spaces between them.

The skin of his hands is a rich brown, and I stare into it as he stares into the other side. I am trying to read whatever message he sees there, but I am on the wrong side and cannot make it out.

Then he is wandering away, down a frigid avenue of dormant grass and chain-link fences, wheeling and shuffling like a little drunk. I

164

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

watch him go until I lose him in the sunrise.

I glance around for an upended bicycle. It seems like there would be one, that there ought to be one beside any fallen child, a front wheel slowly spinning, its tire punctured. A tidy symbol of menace, of innocence despoiled. Instead I find only a tooth left behind, lying in the grass. It will have to do. I pocket it and take one last poke at the compressed grass that marks the spot where the boy lay, then I hurry back to the door.

The second thing I need for you to understand is that I really did want to help, in that moment, but I genuinely did not know how. It did not seem my place.

CHAPTER THREE Dreams, Again

Walking back into the house feels, somehow, stranger than walking out. I am still shivering a full thirty minutes later as I fall asleep watching Gary Cooper furtively clip a lock of his sweetheart’s hair with a pair of scissors as she stands blushing by a fence.

Bottom of a hill, heavy rain, slipping in the mud, climbing toward a house with one light on.

This is what I will write to describe the dream that I have on the couch once I’ve woken up. It doesn’t do it justice; it is light on particulars, but if the dream is vivid enough, if its meaning is of great enough import, then this is all I will need to recall it.

My bedside drawer is stuffed with dreams I have jotted down upon awakening, scraps of paper carrying scribbled descriptions such as this one. Will I remember the storm in this dream, the lightning, the tree by the house at the top of the hill, the jacket snagged on a lower branch, waving down at me? Will the description on the scrap of paper call to mind the foolish figure I cut in my dream, filthy and drenched with rainwater, collapsed in exhaustion by the trunk of that tree, clutching a rain-slick lock of hair like a dead bird against my breast?

I wake up to the aftermath of an act of arson, to a frontier on fire. Panicked homesteaders rush about and horses tear through the smoke and I try to lie there and watch, to submerge myself

166

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

again in the drama of the ghosts on the screen. But the compulsion to immediately write down my dream is too strong, so I toss off the blanket and rise carefully. I head for the bedroom.

After adding another dream to the growing nest of paper in the drawer, another compulsion takes hold of me. I begin to remove them, one by one, to straighten them with my fingers and lay them in rows on the bed. I have meant to do this for some time, to see what I can remember of five years’ worth of dreams and to see, more importantly, what has been lost. For whatever reason, today seems to be the day. I select them at random, try to find my way back inside each of them, to locate a portal in the ragged script.

Inside a French cathedral full of yawning tourists. Falsely (?) accused of theft.

Fingernails fell off in an elevator, a small girl swept them up for me.

The doors kept whispering, woke up on verge of understanding.

Cavities in my head, kept probing w/ my fingers. Skull began to crumble.

I was a king (medieval?). Could not raise an army to save my life.

Tiny men in caps, tapping at the windows. An infestation, an invasion.

Paralysis. A butterfly on my face.

Dying of thirst in the jungle, cannot move. A vine up the fundament, my mouth full of flowers. ________ called, laughed and hung up.

Bearing down on large bird. MWMWMWMWMWMWMW This last example you will find several times if you sift through them all, a recurring dream I cannot seem to shake. I have lost my appetite for this endeavor even before I hear the rapping on my front door.

CHAPTER FOUR Delia

For the past five years my groceries have been delivered by a young man so that I would not have to leave my house. He was about twelve when he was referred to me and should be just about old enough to graduate this year. I like him, primarily because he still rides a bicycle and has never questioned the arrangement. This will not be him knocking at my door, though; he was given this date and knows that his services will no longer be required.

A fistfight on the screen as I pass through the living room— two men rolling about, pummeling one another, showers of dust.

Honor at stake, I suppose.

The knocking ceases before I arrive at the door, and I don’t dare open it just yet. Then it resumes, this time to the left, and in the kitchen window, the same window through which I spied the boy, a small hand appears against a background of blue. Then a thick spray of curly black hair. Then a face, a pair of brown eyes peering in at me. It is she.

The eyes squint gaily—they are accompanied, I can tell, by a smile, though I cannot see the smile for the sill. The hand points its index finger toward the front door; I sigh, I nod. I wrench the door open for the second time this morning and a ray of sunshine bullies its way into my home. A second ray of sunshine stands just outside, awaiting an invitation.

“I’m like a vampire,” she says.

168

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

“Pardon?”

“A vampire,” she repeats. “You have to invite me.”

I smile, my face unused to the contortions required, and step aside with a flourish. She wraps her arms around me but does not squeeze, lest I shatter. When she steps back, she is wiping at tears with her wrists, and I look away.

“Very windy out,” I offer. My voice is rough and wobbles from disuse.

“Not anymore,” she says, “just cold.” And she pushes the door shut behind her. For a moment she scans the kitchen, the living room.

“I’ve kept it up the best I could,” I say weakly. A lie. I could have done much better. I did, in fact, for a while. I offer her coffee, she declines, says it makes her jumpy. She rifles through the cabinets, removes a box of crackers, an expired box of Bisquick. She keeps sniffling and nudging her nose with her sleeve. Finally, when she is satisfied that I have not been living these five years in total squalor, she claps her hands together and gets down to business.

“I wanted to know when you’d be over,” she says. “I wanted to check on you first, since I finally can, and then I wanted to know when you’d be over. We’re all ready for you.”

“I’m also like a vampire,” I say, trying to grin. “You have to invite me.”

“That’s what I’m doing, dummy,” she says, slapping my shoulder lightly and laughing. Birdsong.

I tell her I’ll be over in an hour or so, and she nods: this is acceptable. She takes another look around, pokes through the mail on the table.

“The boy brings it in,” I say.

“I know. I’ve watched him.”

She jerks the telephone from the wall and holds it to her ear, her lower lip jutting out. “I thought it was just a quaint old

JEFFR EY W INTER

169

antique,” she says, replacing it. I tell her I am the only quaint old antique in the place, and she likes that very much.

“I’m going to finish tidying up,” she says, “and I’ll expect you in an hour. In sixty-one minutes, if you haven’t come out, I’ll be back at the door, ready to drag you across the street in front of God and everybody.”

“I’ll be there.”

She marches over to the closet by the front door and pulls out the vacuum cleaner.

“That won’t be necessary,” I mutter.

“Yes it will,” she says, placing it on the carpet. “You remember how to use it?”

Then, with a wink, she is gone again.

For a while I lean against the door, my robe wrapped tight about me as it was out on the lawn, listening to the gunfire from the living room. With great effort I manage to push off and stand up (if you haven’t noticed, the majority of your energy at this age is used in trying time and again to stand up), to stagger over to the dining room table, past the vacuum cleaner standing there in that ridiculous way they have, like a solicitous little soldier awaiting orders. I pull out a chair and the two of us groan in unison. I can just make out the image on the TV screen, Judge Roy Bean dying in bliss, in the throes of purest adoration. I think of all the other men like me, sitting still in silent houses, watching, waiting, giving up and hanging on.

All this useless tissue just floating around. All this trash.

CHAPTER FIVE Preparations

I drag the screaming contraption across the carpet for a good fifteen minutes, this way and that. When I’m done, I rip the plug from the wall and head for the kitchen. I crack an egg over a pan and then, back at the table, I sop up its yolk with a triangle of toast and force it down my throat.

Once I have eaten, I wash my plate and return it to the cupboard. I only have the one, so this operation is repeated after most meals. I would like to say that this is some sort of system that I’ve worked out intentionally, that having one single plate forces me to remain efficient, but no. The rest of my dishes chipped and cracked and broke long ago, and I am so protective of the one that I have left that I will not leave it in the sink, will not let it deviate from its path from kitchen to table and back, will not move it along that track with less than two hands. When it finally breaks—as it will, as it must—I don’t know what I will do. The thought of new dishes at this late stage turns my intestines cold.

Next I shower—the most dangerous part of an old man’s day—and dress myself in a fine old shirt which, again, was once much more snug, and a pair of slacks and loafers. I comb my hair down before the mirror, randomly choosing a side for the part. I look fine, I suppose, for an absolute mess.

Before walking out again—and I’m much more nervous this time, because I have time to think about it, because I know where I’m going and who I am going to see—I place a chair by the back door and look out the window into my yard. A neat little space,

JEFFR EY W INTER

171

free from the junk that surrounds some of the houses on my street, all the stuff scattered across the grass, whole histories fading out there in the sun. Disgraceful, really. You will find nothing of the sort outside my house. A birdbath in the back, a loosely coiled garden hose. No flags, no advertisement of any affinity of any sort, past or current. My histories are hidden.

The body, though, is another story. You attempt to hide it; it cannot be done. The ruined hands, the collapsing chest, the spindly legs with their pale shivering hairs. Revolting things, my legs.

The whole story’s there, in my slackened jaw, my sallow skin, my eyes like turbid puddles. What really rankles, if anything can really rankle anymore, is the farce of pretending, as everyone else does, not to notice. The farce of acting as if nothing were awry rather than running around and shouting, I am old, I am old!

Age is degrading. You are slowly, visibly degrading, and that is degrading. It would be better, in some ways, if it all just happened at once, if you suddenly collapsed to the floor, a pile of mush and hair to be mopped up while people step respectfully around you and go about their business. But no, it’s a process. One day you are suddenly so embarrassingly, disgustingly mortal. It’s like being turned inside out, like walking around with your stomach open, your bowels glistening for all to see. All your actual substance, all that you actually are, out on open display. The curtain drawn roughly aside and all you can do, if you opt to venture out of your home, is look each stranger in the eye and smile your phony smile as if they weren’t witnessing your every failing function in broad, harsh daylight.

All you can do is smile and suppress the urge to explain or apologize: I’m sorry, that’s just my gallbladder, all gray and grotesque. Please pardon my liver. Look, look here, here is my heart. See how it slows, its palpitations almost imperceptible. See how tired it has grown.

172

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

You resent yourself for it as if you’d chosen it, asked for it, accepted it like some rotten bouquet. As if it were a roving cloud of gnats you wandered into when you might have simply sidestepped it and gone whistling on your way. And the young smile their sweet, supercilious smiles at you, assume your own decrepit smile is authentic. And they will fail to learn the lesson they might have learned from you and one day, after they’ve soiled themselves a few feet from a public restroom or smashed their forearms to shards against the steering wheel in a minor collision with a carful of crowing teenagers, they will wonder why no one ever warned them.

So stupid. We are hopeless, and yet we hope. And that part is beautiful, at least. The idiocy is beautiful.

An ornery blue jay on the edge of the birdbath shrieks his ownership of the newly thawed water out into the empty air. A pair of sparrows squabbles over a spot on the spigot. My hour is up, and I am expected.

CHAPTER SIX A Swell Celebration

The second time stepping out is more the way I’d imagined it than the first. Crunch of melting frost underfoot, mild midmorning air, the sudden suspension of sound, the feel of the atmosphere adjusting to accommodate my stooped shape. A child cycles by, scarf fluttering like laughter behind her, and I think of the boy, of the dirty blue windbreaker on my lawn. He is still there, in a way, and will, in all likelihood, be there always. Another specter to pester me when I totter out to empty the mailbox, another frail form fainting at my door.

I retreat further down inside my coat and set off, passing through the thin vapor of my own breath. I visualize the inside of the house I just stepped out of and remind myself that I will soon be back inside it, and this soothes me. I step carefully down the short drive and set foot on Wilder Street for the first time in five years. A horn sounds somewhere in the distance, either cheering me on or warning me off.

The sound of my shoes shuffling across the street, like a passive-aggressive argument conducted through coughs.

I have also imagined this for a long time, what I am about to experience. I’ve imagined a handshake, a hug, a few awkward moments preceding peals of laughter, and then everything resuming its old rhythm. I’ve imagined the three of us seated at a table on which a single balloon wobbles. A single balloon: it’s the

174

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

sort of thing he’d think was funny. And I’ve imagined our mouths opening to speak, but this is where my powers fail me.

Before I can knock on the door it swings open and she is there, giddy and already in tears again, her hands over her mouth, her brown eyes brimming. And then she is embracing me again, as if we hadn’t already been reunited just an hour previous, as if it’s been the full five years since she’s seen me. I find myself inside, the door closed behind me, with no memory of how this came to be.

As soon as she releases me, I wipe at my own eyes to clear them for a look around. “Still pretty windy outside,” I say lamely, and I turn.

The layout of this house is identical to my own, only flipped, and it produces, as it always has since I first stepped inside it, a sensation similar to that which accompanies being in a dream.

I know this place, I am intimate with its structure, and yet it is strange to me. The kitchen is there when it should be there; the bathroom is right where it should be in relation to the kitchen and yet finding it requires intense concentration, an intentional overriding of instinct. I think of driving on the other side of the road in a foreign country, or of speaking Russian, which has always sounded to me like someone speaking English backward. But I have never traveled abroad, and I only speak the one language, so I don’t know if the analogy is apt.

Her hand pushes the back of my coat in the correct direction, and I submit to its gentle force.

In the living room the television is turned up loud, one of those police procedurals in which everyone scowls all the time and none of the rooms is properly lit. An agitated boy in a prep school blazer is being interrogated by some wily detective and finally he breaks and blurts out, “Look, I’ve done a lot of messed up stuff, okay, but I didn’t kill that whore!”

“Did you figure out the vacuum?” she asks, and I nod. And there, in the recliner where I left him, sits Jeremiah Graves, in a

JEFFR EY W INTER

175

sleeveless undershirt, a quarter somersaulting over his thick hairy knuckles. The blue tattoos under the white fur of his arms, the pink bump of his pate visible beneath his silver flat-top—he has been preserved, somehow, in this chair, an animate fossil grinning eternally, and now he gazes up at me with his eyes still boyish, still blue and mischievous. How different they are, father and daughter.

How different their eyes.

“Holy hell, it’s Lazarus, back from the dead! Dee, what did you bring home?”

“Be nice, daddy,” she says, guiding me to the sofa. “It’s his first day.”

“Well, for God’s sake, he looks like a fucking ghoul,” he says, gesturing toward me with the remote, winking. “Look at him, will you?”

He regards me for a moment, smiling and shaking his head, starts to speak and then stops. He extends his hand and I rise slightly to reach for it. He pulls it away for a moment and murmurs with mock concern, “It’s not contagious, is it?” Then he seizes my hand roughly, pumps it once or twice, releases, laughing at his own joke.

“Hello, Jerm,” I say, and I fall back on the couch, already exhausted.

A few minutes later the three of us are at the dining room table, from which a small group of balloons has been brushed (I miscalculated), and Delia is pulling my coat from me. I see him take in my frame, its fragility, and look quickly away. For a moment he says nothing, and then he starts to speak as if continuing a train of thought, as if the thoughts in his head had been spoken aloud: “Well, you’ve got to expect it, right? The man’s been cooped up inside, breathing his own farts for five years now.”

She slaps his shoulder. “As opposed to what, breathing someone else’s? As opposed to breathing yours?”

176

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

“As opposed to breathing fresh fucking air!” he bellows, and brings his fist crashing down onto the table, startling a nearby saltshaker.

She rolls her eyes and excuses herself.

He is still shaking his head, as if at the unfairness of it all, when she returns and places a small chocolate cake on the table before me. Welcome Home, it says. When I look up, she is beaming down at me. “We’ve missed you,” she whispers, “so much.”

“You remembered,” I say, and the room begins to swim around me, and when I close my eyes each of them takes one of my hands.

I keep my eyes closed for some time and nobody says a word. If you were to look in at us through the window you would think you’d caught us at prayer. In the living room, the investigation proceeds apace.

They decline my help in cleaning up the dishes, so I sit and wait to see what comes next. I listen to the water applauding from the tap, so different from the way it sounds in my own kitchen, and I try to come to terms with the idea that this day has a shape which has not yet been determined, a shape I cannot already see. The shape of today will be distinct, will be different from the shapes of the days that came before it. The shape of today will determine the shape of tomorrow, but tomorrow’s shape will not be today’s.

When they are done and the last plate crashes into its place, they return to the table but do not sit. Delia asks her father, “What’s the plan, then?” My face must betray my surprise, because then she says, “As much as I’d like for us to stick together today, he made me promise that the two of you could get some time alone.” I look at Jerm, but he is not looking at me.

“That sounds fine,” I say, and she leans to kiss me on the cheek, then kisses her father on his broad forehead.

“So what’s it going to be?” she asks, looking back and forth between the two of us.

JEFFR EY W INTER

177

Suddenly he returns to the conversation, clapping his hands and cracking his knuckles. “First thing we gotta do,” he says, “is get this zombie here cleaned up a bit. Once that’s taken care of, maybe we can manage to get into a little bit of trouble.”

“Trouble’s not what we need today,” she says, and I can see that she’s more than a bit concerned.

“Nonsense,” he declares. “A little healthy trouble’s just what the doctor ordered. And I take my orders from my doctor, not from my daughter. Let me get my shirt on, and we’re on our way.”

Once he’s gone we stand there, she smiling apologetically and me trying to manage a smile of any kind whatsoever. I can feel something at work inside me, something rising up bit by bit, rising up to be seen, to be said. I realize what it is just before I say it.

“There was a boy,” I say, “on my lawn this morning.”

She blinks. “A boy? Just . . . hanging out on your lawn? Did he say anything? Was he . . . What was he doing?”

“He was lying down.”

“Like, sleeping? Sleeping on your lawn?”

“No, not sleeping. He was beaten. A bit. He was . . . Somebody beat him up, it looked like. Left him there, on my lawn.”

“Well, who? Who did it? Did you talk to him? Did you call the police? What did you do?”

Now I cannot speak, and I find myself wishing I hadn’t spoken.

When I look up I look away, toward the bedroom, where the kitchen is located in my own house, and there stands Jeremiah Graves, shirt half buttoned, mouth open, staring at me.

CHAPTER SEVEN Two Bits

He backs his old Chevelle into Wilder Street and we’re on our way. “Careful,” I say, and he nods but does not look at me. I look back at my house as we pull away, but I don’t feel the way I would think I would feel.

At the end of the street, on the corner, I see a pair of big burly looking fellows—one older, one younger, both in overalls with curly hair, gray and rust-red, spilling out under identical ballcaps— bent over beneath the raised hood, over the oily silver entrails of a pickup truck. They look up as we pull off, then I watch them return to their work in the mirror.

It’s as if I’m on safari and everything is an elephant, a giraffe, some wild gargantuan thing I’ve never seen in person before.

Every tree, every split-level with its rime-glazed roof sparkling in the sun, the rictal grin of every blonde realtor advertising from the roadside: these are things I know I can expect to see, but in their actual presence I am dumbfounded. They are familiar yet strange, commonplace yet otherworldly.

We pass a few small churches, and the sign outside one of them promises a sermon on the Book of Ruth, to take place three weeks previous. He tells me the story again, about the church where he grew up, where the sign by the side of the road read ARE YOU READY FOR THE GREAT SNATCH for a full week one summer, and he and his buddies catcalled from the car window each time they passed and had their pictures taken next to the sign with

JEFFR EY W INTER

179

thumbs raised to indicate that they were in fact ready. “They took it down right quick, once they realized,” he says, still disappointed after all these years. “Someone must’ve clued ’em in.”

To be told a story again, again. To be spoken to.

I keep waiting for him to bring it up, to talk to me about the thing he has surely waited five years to talk to me about, but he doesn’t. He lets me look out the window and take it all in, and he says surprisingly little.

Finally we pull into the parking lot of a small barber shop in a strip mall—not where I used to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t matter anymore. I ask him whether he is a regular here and he scoffs: “Hell no, my daughter cuts my hair. But I’ve heard good things.” And he grunts, heaving himself out the car door.

The gentleman inside introduces himself to us as Earl and asks us to kindly take a seat. The walls are covered with photographs of smiling men and boys, newly shorn.

When my turn comes Jerm steps up to Earl and claps him on the shoulder. “We’ll need you to do your best work on this one, my friend. We’re getting him ready for a funeral. His.” Earl smiles the patient smile of a man who has endured his share of jokesters and ushers me to a chair. I sit and he gives me a once-over.

“You been cutting it yourself ?” he asks, and I nod, embarrassed.

“For a while,” I say, “whenever I remembered to.”

“Off with that beard,” Jerm calls out from the corner, his attention claimed by a stack of magazines. “Off with it all,” he intones.

I close my eyes and place myself in Earl’s capable hands.

Try to remember to always appreciate the feel of fingers swimming in your hair. The absorption of another person into

180

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

your person, the concentration of all their energies on your care as they slow-dance in orbit around you, tilting your head this way and that for advantageous angle and appraisal. The kiss of the brush on the back of your neck.

When he is finished he spins me around and I regard the skeleton in the mirror with shock.

“I know that man,” I say, and I mean it as a joke, but I also mean it. “I remember him,” I say, and Earl pats me on the shoulder.

“Handsome fellow,” he says, which is very kind of him.

My face stings in the air outside and I feel naked, denuded.

When we are back in the car Jerm sits there, the key between his fingers, thinking. When he turns to me one eye is squinted shut in the sun and the other is doing the work of both, and a couple more besides, trying to see inside of me.

“What was that you said to Dee, about a kid? Some kid on your lawn this morning?”

“Well, it was just as I said. There was a boy out on my lawn. He was lying out there when I looked out my window this morning.”

“Uh huh. And you talked to him?”

“I did.”

“And he talked to you?”

“He did not.”

He pops the key in and turns to face me fully. “What the hell is this?” he asks, and I realize now that he is not sure of the veracity of my story, and I realize why, that I wouldn’t be sure in his place either. I take my time responding, looking deep into his eye so that I can say more than I am saying.

“He was there, Jerm. This morning, last night, a boy—a boy I’d never seen before—was beaten up and left lying in my yard. I helped him up and he left. Went home, I suppose. I don’t know.”

He nods his head, satisfied, and faces forward again.

“Gonna have to look into this,” he says, starting the car.

CHAPTER EIGHT Measuring

He says I’m going to have a meal, something to stick to my ribs and put some weight back on me, if he has to force it down my gullet. I do not argue.

We sit in a restaurant with stained glass lights descending from the ceiling, near a group of lovely young women. When we entered and walked past them I overheard one saying to another, “I said to him, tell me one thing you don’t like about me, and he couldn’t even do it.” “Oh my God!” said the other, cupping her hands over her mouth.

Grilled chicken breast, mashed potatoes and asparagus, probably prepared by a grease-stained angel with a beer gut and a hairnet and a wad of Skoal stuffed in his lip. I give thanks and devour it.

He wants to know how I spent all this time, how I managed to stick it out, if I ever considered cutting my sentence short for good behavior or because I realized it was a foolish thing to do.

I read and slept and watched old movies, I say.

I took it a day at a time and remembered why I was doing it, I say.

I never thought it was foolish, I say, though I know I am a fool.

These answers aren’t good enough for him, because no answer could be, but he accepts them and drinks his beer in silence, and I sip my water in silence and watch him drink his beer.

182

D O YOU R E M E M BE R M E ?

On closer inspection, he has aged a bit. Just a bit. You can see it in his shoulders, how they are a bit more hunched, a bit less broad. How he braces himself when he says, “Gotta piss,” as if he is just starting to experience the uncertainty that comes with each attempt to rise.

Later the young ladies have left, and it no longer seems quite so odd to be here. I realize how quickly I am growing to feel again that I deserve to sit at this table, in this place, over this plate, and I feel equal measures of relief and guilt. My hands are numb from kneading one another under the table; I place them on my knees and squeeze slightly to bring the feeling back.

“When Dee was a baby,” he is saying, “I used to measure her all the time. Used to weigh myself on the scale in the bathroom while I was holding her, then lay her down on the bed and weigh myself again, subtract the difference. Every day I did it. Her mama said I was obsessed. I was obsessed. You come into the house, the old house where she grew up, there were pencil marks all the way up her bedroom wall. I used to get drunk some nights and just stare at it, think of how far I’d managed to get her. We finally painted over ’em when we sold the house, after Linda passed.”

“I’m not sure of what to say,” I say, and he gazes into his glass for a moment before continuing.

“I used to wish she would grow faster,” he says, “the way other parents wish their kids would stay small. I used to think of her lying there in her crib, gaining weight, trying to wish weight on her. I wanted to rush her through being a kid, I wanted her to grow up as fast as she could.”

“And why was that? Why would you want that?”

“Terrified. I was terrified, having a baby girl, what could happen to her. I’d look at her and all I could see was how small she was, how easy it’d be for someone to snatch her, take her away from

JEFFR EY W INTER

183

me. Every pound, every inch, every tooth was one more they’d have to contend with if they tried it. Every trick I taught her was one more trick. We used to practice, I used to coach her on how to defend herself when she was eight years old. One time she hit me in the nose and I saw stars. That was the happiest I ever was. I was always scared. All the time.”

“O, could I lose all father now,” I offer, nodding sagely. He doesn’t seem to hear.

When the server comes, I order him a glass of water, ask for the check. “First time I’ve spent money in person in a while,” I say, and I watch him watching the world through the window, his cropped silver hair full of colored light from the fixture that looms above us.