Abandoned Train Tunnel Colleen Purcell

Colleen Purcell Abandoned Train Tunnel

Joe E. Kraus The Birthmark

I. The Parent

I suppose he was in junior high school, just starting to play football, wrestle, and lift weights, when I started to worry about it. He’d had all sorts of marks when he was a baby – I remember a set of moles along his calf that reminded me of a constellation – and he always had red splotches on his chest. I figured it would fade like the others as he got older. Instead, it turned that peculiar blue and got more and more prominent on the underside of his left forearm. I scrubbed at it for weeks, imagining he’d rubbed a broken magic marker on the spot and hoping I could clean it if I kept trying. We finally got worried enough to ask his doctor about it privately. I was terrified it was cancer, and my husband thought he might be on the steroids. “Keep an eye on it, but don’t worry;” the doctor said. He’d never seen anything like it, but he promised us, “It’s just a discoloration, certainly benign.” If it got bigger, he’d refer us to a specialist.

That was reassuring, so we didn’t think much about it for the next few years. He was growing so fast, getting so strong, that his body changed all the time, and, besides, he was a teenager. We knew it was good he claimed his privacy, and we’ve always felt we could trust him. He says he didn’t do anything, and I believe him. It just grew.

One day when he was a sophomore in high school, I caught a glimpse of color, and I made him let me look at it. I remembered the mark as a cloudy blue blob, but you could already see distinct lines forming against the background of his skin. That was the first time I thought it might be some kind of a tattoo, but tattoos don’t keep changing once you get them. They’re fixed in place, and this kept darkening and defining itself.

We did take him to the specialist then, a dermatologist who took a lot of notes and said something about maybe wanting to write about it for one of the medical journals – “not for the risk, only for the curiosity.” You get worried about a thing like that, and then you let it go. It gave me an ominous sense when I sat down to look at it, but we had other things to think about. We spent hours deliberating about his college and football; we talked about the things we could control and let the rest go.

In retrospect, I don’t know how we didn’t make the connection sooner. There are pictures of them in so many books and movies; now I notice them everywhere. But it was, of all things, Harold and Maude. He brought it home on DVD and didn’t tell us what he wanted us to look at. He just went to the scene where we see the scrawled tattoo on Maude’s arm. And then he froze the picture. I looked back and forth from his forearm to hers, trying to find the differences. The digits weren’t the same, of course, but there wasn’t any denying what suddenly seemed obvious: the lines of his mark had resolved themselves into a series of seemingly hand-scrawled letters and numbers. He did have a tattoo, but it didn’t come from any needle.

I couldn’t help crying once we’d made the connection. I know it’s stupid – I know it isn’t true – but I wondered whether I might have erased it if only I’d scrubbed it longer, scrubbed it harder, when he was a boy. He says he won’t get rid of it, and maybe he’s right, but I can’t look at it. I know he didn’t suffer like that – I know it’s just something he happened to be born with – but it reminds me of things I can’t imagine my son enduring. I wish his arm were a blank page. I want to imagine him as someone who gets to write his own story.

II. The Classmate

So he shows up in this class, “The Holocaust in the Literary Imagination,” and he doesn’t belong. He looks like a meathead jock – blonde and tall – and the rest of us are all Jews. (Well, there were two Asians, but one turned out to be Jewish anyway – adopted.) And I figure he’s probably there to pick up chicks, like those assholes who register for Women’s Studies because they figure the odds are just too much in their favor.

Then, after class one day, Rachel tells me, “That’s the guy with the tattoo, or the birthmark, whatever,” and I remember hearing about him freshman year. After that I start trying to get a look at it. He’s careful, though; he usually wears a long-sleeve shirt, and he’s such a muscle-head that he’s always holding his arms close to his sides. I’m determined to see it, and I even start sitting next to him so I can maybe catch a glimpse.

What I don’t count on is that the professor assigns us into presentation pairs by how we’re sitting. I’m not happy about being his partner, but what am I supposed to say, “I’m not working with this guy because he isn’t Jewish…because he looks like an Aryan asshole…because he walks around with a tattoo like he’s some kind of survivor?” I don’t want to blow up my grade or come across like some asshole myself, so I just suck it up. Still, I promise myself, muscles or no, I’ll punch his lights out if he doesn’t show the right kind of respect.

We wind up working on how the cartoon figures of Maus turn around the convention of the comic strip, and I’ll give him credit. He’s prepared when we get together in the library; he’s read the whole thing twice, and he’s even got a good idea: “The cartoons make you think you’re looking at some Disney crap so you drop your guard. The point is to talk to you as if you’re a kid about things only adults can handle.” We go with that – it’s better than what I’ve got – and we end up with an A- for the project. (Our PowerPoint slides were “cluttered.”)

A few weeks later, I run into him at a Sigma Chi party, and he’s cool. I’m still edgy around him, but he grabs me around the shoulder and makes sure I’ve got a beer. He asks me what I know about Paula from the class, and I tell him not much. Then, I take a swig, and I finally say what I’ve been trying to get out since early in the semester, “Dude, what’s the deal with that thing on your forearm?”

He gets this look like he’s suddenly sober, but he doesn’t get mad. My throat goes dry ’cause I figure I’m about to get my ass kicked, but he leads me over to a corner that isn’t so noisy, and he pulls up his sleeve. “Just so you know,” he says. “I was born with this. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t know what kind of witness it makes me, maybe even what kind of joke, but this is it.” It looks like all the

pictures: like an almost casual note you write on something so you won’t misplace it later, like a mark that means you’re more a thing than a person.

I stare at it awhile, and my own arm starts to feel naked. My grandmother’s best friend from grammar school was gassed at Treblinka, and three of my father’s second cousins died of dysentery at Bergen-Belsen. I’m the one who lost relatives, lost a whole culture to the insanity. I’m the one who ought to have some mark to show for that.

I can’t think of anything to say, so I stick out my hand and he shakes it. My fingers brush against the mark and, even though I expect to feel some kind of shock, I don’t. It’s just flesh like any other flesh, skin doing what skin does.

They took me to meet a survivor. I was a senior in high school and the mark was pretty much as clear then as it is now. It was in a nursing home in one of the suburbs. He was in a wheel chair slumped to one side. They said he was 86, but he looked even older.

The minister from my mom’s church was there and so was a rabbi I didn’t know. He tried to explain to the old man who I was – “This is a boy who has a mysterious birthmark,” he said, “we thought he should meet you” – but it was clear he couldn’t make sense of it.

I got down on one knee and rolled up my sleeve for him, putting my forearm alongside the arm of his chair. He looked down at what I was showing him, and his head fell forward as if it suddenly got heavier. He looked back up at my face through his big-eyed glasses, and then he looked down again.

“Mein brudder,” he said, but it wasn’t clear whether he thought I was somehow his brother or whether he was remembering a brother of his who’d died in the camps. Mom and dad and the minister and the rabbi and the history teacher from school who’d arranged the visit, they all started sobbing. I could feel it even though I didn’t look at any of them, just the old man.

He and I, we didn’t cry, though. He sighed, sighed like it was a word in another language I could mostly understand. That’s when I leaned in and hugged him. We held each other for a moment – it felt longer – and when I straightened back up I could imagine what he looked like when he was younger.

They say “never forget” and, obviously, I can’t. I once grabbed a skin-colored Band-Aid from the trainer’s room and put it on top of the mark, pretending I was normal for an hour. When I couldn’t see it, I felt it all the more acutely, and I have a feeling it would be the same way with real plastic surgery. Once you’ve carried something like it, you can’t just put it down.

Mom sent me a note last semester with a newspaper clipping reporting the old man had died. I read it, put it in my pocket, and spent the afternoon walking through parts of the city I didn’t know. A couple of times I thought I recognized people from campus driving past, but I never waved. I just concentrated on the small space of sidewalk in front of my feet, and I was never more lonely in my life.

Amanda Hart Miller Always Them

Little girls can be stolen, especially a little girl with sad, heavy-lidded eyes and a too-small jacket, a girl who carries a stuffed unicorn in the crook of her arm and rubs it against her lips again and again. She waits all alone at a bus stop by a patch of winter-gray woods and only a few small run-down houses with torn-up roofs, cardboard taped to the windows, and junk on the porches. To put a bus stop here, Johnny feels, someone must have been asleep at the wheel.

Johnny has been watching her now for 41 school days. He marks off the days in his notebook, which he then tucks away. Johnny’s head doesn’t work as well as it used to, so he can’t remember these things unless he writes them down. He writes other things about her, too:

Girlie has ribbons in her hair today but they fall out she keep putting them back in. Girlies hair don’t cover that bruze. Girlie got candy bar today. Girlie stares and stares at the moon this morning I want to be there too Girlie.

On his most daring of days, he trills a bird call and she turns around to see nothing because he’s behind the trunk of a big tree. He rests his cheek against the bark and listens to his heart scurrying back down his throat.

He wears trash bags and rides his bike along the main drag in what is a small town. People say it’s because his wife got burned up in a house fire and he went crazy. He’s written this down. He doesn’t remember that happening, but he does remember lying with Bea after love, her skin silky and scented like almonds and sex, don’t ever leave me but he doesn’t know where she is now. And sometimes he remembers the men under the overpass tying him up and lighting him on fire Ooh-wee… he’s lit up like a Christmas tree but usually this stays deeper inside him in someplace that can’t be remembered but eats him up just the same.

Girlie sometimes tries to trick him, he thinks. She brings chalk and draws pictures on the sidewalk, and she works on them so hard that she has to press her lips together tight so she can think, but suddenly she’ll look up quickly, at his tree. The mornings are getting darker, though. It will soon be the longest night of the year.

After the bus comes and takes Girlie away, he copies her chalk drawings into his notebook. She mostly draws hearts and flowers, and he likes to pretend she draws them for him. When he copies them into his notebook, they are for her.

On January 20th, the sky is much more gray than white. This is when the gray van pulls up. When the man inside puts down the window and says something to Girlie, she stands up from her drawing and cocks her head. She takes three steps back from the van, and Johnny feels like he’s one of the tiny hairs on her skin—just as bristled and scared. She takes another step back and then looks toward Johnny. He forgets to hide because he falls into her eyes for years before she looks back to The BadMan, who is opening the van door until he, too, sees Johnny. The man shakes his head and mutters something angry that Johnny can’t hear. The van purrs as it rolls away. Girlie is smiling at Johnny, thin lips closed and dimples showing. Now there’s this thing linking them, hurtling him through a rabbit hole of jittery nerves so he comes out the other end pumped and fretting at the same time.

The bus comes then and Girlie gets on. He can see her through the window, through her clothes to her skin and even deeper, to her heart sending all that blood around, and even deeper than that, to what it all means. The world has always been just the three of them: Girlie and The BadMan and this block of flesh that is Johnny’s to place between them. With trembling hands, he pulls out his notebook.

Sue Granzella Twisted Wires

I grew up on a county road speckled with orchards and pastures, across the lane from the piece of land where my dad grew up. When I was twenty-four, my parents sold my childhood home, leaving those fields on the edge of unincorporated Napa, California, for a house they’d had built on the other end of town, in a hilly green neighborhood my mom had always loved.

My parents were frugal people. We never threw out used aluminum foil, and when the old day-bed that served as our family room’s first couch finally became too threadbare, Mom stitched a sensible red corduroy slipcover for it. She was the barber for the four of us kids until we were near voting age, and she made the clothes for our Barbie dolls from fabric scraps of the dresses and pants that she sewed for all of us. Dad fixed his own cars, grew most of our family’s fruit and vegetables, and wore the same clothes year after year until they were embarrassingly see-through. My parents were cut from the same cloth, and it must have been on sale.

Yet before they moved into their new home in the hilly neighborhood, my Depression-era parents, in a move I couldn’t fathom, sought the consult of an interior decorator. This woman educated my parents on “style,” pointing out that the new living room needed two couches, a large mirror, and glass-topped end tables. Mom and Dad obeyed unquestioningly. Large framed paintings that I’d never seen in the old house appeared on the walls in the hill-house, carefully hinting at the same rose and tan shades of the brand-new swivel chairs and porcelain knick-knacks the decorator had suggested to my mom and dad.

Though the beautifully-matched living room in the new house looked very pretty, it didn’t feel like my parents. It was too perfect. But apparently, Mom and Dad hired her for only the one room, because the contents of the other rooms reflected the parents I’d always known – worn in places, comfortably mismatched, and economical. Their thirteen-year-old black vinyl sofa-bed was transplanted into the hill-house’s family room, as were the small plain framed prints, scenes of the France they’d never visited. The old wooden TV trays were pressed into service as end tables, along with some top-heavy small brown nesting tables.

But to me, the stars of the family room furniture --- indeed, of the whole house – were the only other new pieces, my parents’ his-and-hers beige corduroy recliners from Montgomery Wards. When the chairs were purchased just before moving day, they were identical twins. But after several years, it was clear that Dad’s hadn’t aged as well as Mom’s. For one thing, Dad ate his dinner in the recliner, and whenever he spilled or dribbled – which was often – he tended to use the armrests as oversized napkins. And each time he sat down, he would drop himself onto the seat with the full force of his generous weight. After several years of this, the metal framework of the stained chair began crying out in loud and jerky protest whenever Dad rocked back or tried to raise the footrest.

So Dad eventually bought a new chair – another beige, corduroy recliner that, while not an identical twin to Mom’s, was clearly a member of the same immediate family. And so things remained the same; whenever I went to Napa to visit Mom and Dad, I spent most of the time on the black couch, chatting with them as they sat alongside me, perched in their respective beige recliners. * ** When Mom’s chair (the surviving twin, age sixteen) started creaking and squawking about six years ago, Dad was terribly impatient to get rid of it. He couldn’t stand the noise, which was ironic because Dad was not a quiet person. His damaged hearing made him watch TV with the volume set to “shriek,” and his snoring sounded like a rototiller. He talked loudly, argued passionately, laughed frequently, and swore energetically. But the sound of Mom’s short legs carefully pushing down her recliner’s footrest and causing the metal supports to scrape together was just too much for Dad.

I was visiting them in Napa one July morning, sorting through a huge pile of their mail. The three of us were sitting where the kitchen, family room, and dining area all blended into one open space. Mom was in her recliner with a word search puzzle, and I was at the country-style oak dining table, sandwiched between the room’s big windows and Dad’s chair. Dad, in sweat pants and a tissue-thin old white undershirt, lay back with bare feet up, reading the Wall Street Journal while the TV, neglected, blared in the background.

Mom stood up from her recliner to make her lunchtime tuna sandwich. I hadn’t noticed any unusual creaks when she’d gotten up from her chair, but Dad’s recliner was just a couple of feet from Mom’s. Apparently, he’d listened to the metal joints grating against each other one time too many.

“God DAMN it! We’ve got to get a new chair for Mom!” As it burst from his mouth, Dad shook his head back and forth with his lips pressed together, his trademark expression of disgust. While Dad cursed at the furniture, it hit me that I should take my parents chair-shopping. I liked it when there was a concrete way to help them, because there was much about their aging process that was frustratingly beyond my control. Mom was small and eighty – perky and healthy, despite being a two-time cancer survivor. Her weakness, though, was her mind; dementia had been a quiet thief over the years. Mom used to host huge holiday dinners, preserve the bounty from our orchard and garden, work as a bookkeeper, and volunteer with the Legion of Mary, bringing Holy Communion to the sick. Now, she forgot how to mop up spills on the carpet, and couldn’t find groceries after she’d put them away. In place of the “old” Mom was an eternally-cheerful mother who could follow daily routines, but not problem-solve.

Dad was the opposite. He was round and eighty-three, and his mind was the vibrant, powerful force it had been for his entire life, able to retain details and analyze situations to a degree that was often intimidating. Propped up in his recliner, he’d turn the TV on by 6:30 a.m. for the opening of the stock market, and his eyes would lock onto the continuous stream of letters and numbers along the bottom of the screen, reading minute-by-minute reports on his individual investments in the New York Stock Exchange and the S&P 500. Several times an hour, when he wanted up-to-the-second values on his various accounts, he’d snatch the phone from the wooden tray beside him and punch in long strings of phone and account numbers, all from memory. He’d listen silently to the quotes from the automated voice on the other end, his eyes not leaving the streaming ribbon on the TV screen. “Dad, how can you remember all of those numbers?” I’d ask, shaking my head in wonder. “I don’t know,” he’d answer, with a shrug and a look that said that if I was impressed by that, I was somewhat less than razor-sharp myself.

In addition to his keen interest in finances and business, Dad devoured newspapers and kept up on current events. A few years prior, I’d accompanied him to an appointment with his cardiologist, a man I’d always known to be supremely calm, quiet, and respectful.

On that day, as the doctor breezed into the room carrying Dad’s thick medical file, Dad whipped out a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket. Reading the scribbled notes he’d taken about a news story that had broken that morning, he jumped right in with: “Say, Doctor, I see there’s been a recall on one kind of combination pacemaker-defibrillator. Is that the one I have?”

It was the only time I ever saw this even-keel doctor display anything other than unflappable professionalism. Dr. Mitchell threw his head back, gave a shout of laughter, slapped Dad’s folder down on the table, and cried out, “I KNEW you were going to ask me about that!” His whole face lit up in triumph at having been right. I wondered if he’d placed an office bet before Dad’s arrival. As Dad grinned with both surprise and pleasure, I nearly choked, I was laughing so hard. But I was also proud. It was clear that Dad’s family and friends weren’t the only ones who knew how alive his mind was, and how compelled he was to read and stay well informed.

No matter how powerful Dad’s mind was, though, it wasn’t strong enough to stop the downhill slide of his aging body. Downhill is great if you’re skiing or biking, but the path of Dad’s health had not been a fun ride. Going through the major events felt like when I’d had braces in fifth grade. At each orthodontist appointment, the wires would get tightened, and afterward, my teeth would ache for days. Then the sharp hurt would fade away, and just when I’d forgotten what sore teeth felt like, it was time for the next appointment. He’d twist those wires tighter again, and the cycle of pain would start anew.

Dad’s major health crises – bypass surgery, lung cancer, stroke, pacemaker malfunctions – had been spaced far enough apart that just as I was starting to relax after the last one, another would hit. Then I’d feel the sickening drop in my stomach again, and the return of that feeling of constantly being twisted tight inside. It put me on edge and made me apprehensive, like lining up for the 100-yard dash, locked into the “get set” position – ever on the alert, waiting for the starter’s gun. The nervousness was always with me – a fear that this crisis would be the one that would lead to the end. With time the anxiety would fade into background, but it would never disappear.

The most recent manifestation of Dad’s failing health was the very round belly he now carried. Nine months earlier, in October, I’d added a new fact to the list of things I’d never wanted to learn: a weakened heart can’t pump fluid away from vital organs. That fluid build-up made my dad look pregnant; the visible evidence made it harder than ever for me to relax inside. I knew that Dad never forgot it; I grew to cringe at the number “fifteen,” having heard him repeat it to friends, over and over. It was the percentage of one of the heart’s pumping functions that he had left.

Though I couldn’t increase that number, it helped me to do any physical tasks for my parents that I could think of – gas up the car, change light bulbs, or pick up crusty French bread and nectarines at the market. So if Dad wanted to get a new recliner for Mom – even if I thought it wasn’t necessary – then I would take them shopping.

“Okay, Dad, so you want to go? Where shall we head? There’s an Ashley Furniture in Cordelia.” I knew that Montgomery Wards had closed years earlier. “Nah, it’s going to cost too much there. There are some furniture places on the old highway into Vallejo.” So around one o’clock that July day, the three of us got into their silver 1997 Nissan. I drove us south on Highway 29 for twenty minutes until we pulled up at our destination, a huge furniture warehouse with signs outside proclaiming: “Big Discounts!” I hopped out, ran around to Dad’s door, and helped steady him as he tottered toward the entrance, using my left arm for support. Mom followed a step behind, tightly gripping the purse she carried everywhere.

As our eyes adjusted to the dim light inside after the bright summer sunshine, we could see rows and rows of upholstered furniture, kitchen tables, and bedroom sets. I had Mom sit on a plush couch in the main aisle, while Dad and I set out for the recliners. We found them right away, a couple of long rows of them, all obediently facing forward in the very front of the store.

He wanted one that was a bit small, a better fit for my petite mother. I spied a dark brown one in the second row that looked like the right size, and pointed to it, asking, “Hey, do you like that one? Why don’t you sit in it, and see if you think it’d work for Mom. I’ll go get her.”

Dad began moving slowly toward the recliner. He’d forgotten his cane in the car, and so was holding on to the backs of the chairs in the front row for support. Just as he dropped into the brown chair, I saw his face change. He looked suddenly extra-alert, and his brown eyes opened a little wider.

“Uh-oh – I think I have to go to the bathroom.” He was already struggling back to his feet, but I wasn’t sure where he thought he’d head. The building was massive, and we had no idea where the bathroom was.

“Dad, hold on a second – I’ll go find out where the bathroom is. Just wait, okay?” I was alarmed by that focused intense look; I sensed I didn’t have much time. I dashed over to a slim young man who was striding confidently toward the bedroom furniture. Praying that he worked there, I blurted out, “Do you know where the bathroom is?” He nodded and gestured toward the very back corner of the warehouse, and I sprinted back toward where I’d left Dad. When I passed Mom, still on the couch, I tossed her the keys and asked her to wait in the car. I needed to rush, and knew it would slow me down if I had to deal with her worried questions and fussing.

I found Dad a little ways away, heading down the main aisle; he had set off on his own, in search of the bathroom. I was glad that at least he was going in the right direction. Looking even more stressed now, he said when he saw me, “I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled on his darkly freckled hand with its puffy fluid-filled fingers, tucking it into the crook of my arm. “Hang on, Dad – just a little further.” I continued lying, telling him that we were almost there, knowing that it usually didn’t work to try to fool Dad. I urged him along as quickly as I dared. About three-quarters of the way there, he slowed down for a moment, and then sighed, “Aw, shit.” Oh, no. As the awful smell made its way to me, it was clear that there was no need to ask a clarifying question, or to continue to rush him. Now what the heck would I do? I was split in half. One part of me was completely in problem-solving mode, spinning solutions at warp speed, with swirling wonderings about privacy and clothes and cleaning. The other part of me was just cringing horribly for my dad – my powerful, multi-talented father, my brilliant father who had just crapped his pants.

Once in the employees-only area, I hustled Dad into the dingy bathroom and started pawing around for anything to help me deal with the mess that I hadn’t yet seen. There were no paper towels, and just a few squares of toilet paper remaining. Obviously, I’d need more supplies.

Firmly instructing Dad to lock the door behind me and then stay exactly where he was standing, I stepped back into the dark hallway and shut the door. Then I began peeking and darting into rooms and cabinets, hunting for anything helpful that I could swipe. “Thou Shalt Not Steal” was engraved very deeply on my Catholic-school-educated soul, but so was “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” and that’s the only commandment I cared to follow just then.

A garbage bag and a few containers of Wet Wipes would have been ideal, but there was nothing like that around. Finally, I spotted a large, opened package of napkins in the employee break room. I took the whole thing, along with a nearly-empty bottle of dish soap. I ran back to the bathroom door and smacked the flat of my hand against it for my hard-of-hearing father.

He opened the door for me, and I saw that he’d followed my directions. He hadn’t budged; his tennis shoes were still planted in the same spot. He didn’t ask where I’d come up with the soap and napkins.

Dad wasn’t prone to embarrassment, but I still wanted to act like this situation was no big deal. Trying to make my voice sound chipper, I said, “Okay, Dad, it’s going to take a little while to clean you up, so you have to tell me if you get tired of standing. Don’t just start walking around. Okay?” The bathroom floor wasn’t real clean to start with, and its state was certainly not going to improve with what I was about to do.

He nodded, uncharacteristically quiet. I began with the pants. Dad had started wearing sweat pants since his belly had begun bulging out in October, and today, that was a blessing. I pulled them off right over his tennis shoes, and tossed them into the sink. There was no question of cleaning his underwear; they had to go. I had Dad place his hands on the sink to steady him while I stooped over and pulled his legs, one at a time, up and out of the disastrous underpants. Placing a napkin in the palm of each hand, I stuffed the bundle into the trash can, sending a mental apology to the poor soul who would find the unpleasant surprise.

Now it was time to start in on Dad himself, as he stood there, naked except for his tennis shoes and yellow polyester pull-over shirt. I set to work with the flimsy napkins and precious green dish soap, stepping countless times from sink to father to garbage, sink to father to garbage.

Once his body was in an acceptable condition, my attention turned to his clothes. Thankfully, the sweat pants weren’t bad. I drenched them with cold water, dribbled soap over them, and scrubbed them into a passable state. Next were his shoes, which had escaped the initial assault, but which hadn’t fared as well when I’d removed his underwear.

When I was ready to help my silent father back into his now-wet clothes, I finally took a good look at his face. His expression was confusing to me; he didn’t look especially perturbed. He may have said, “Thank you,” but I’m not positive. Then we emerged from that dungeon, the tiny, windowless room that had changed us both.

My cleaned-up father and I, his shell-shocked daughter, made our way back out into the sunshine. Mom was waiting for us in the back seat of the Nissan, sitting sideways with the door open. Once I got Dad in the car, I told them to wait while I dashed back into the store.

I told the young man seated at the desk that my dad had had a bathroom emergency, and that he’d been sitting in a brown recliner just before he’d had to go. Even though I thought he’d vacated it in time, I scribbled down my phone number and told the manager to call me if he saw or smelled anything around the chair we hadn’t had time to buy. Behind the wheel again, I pointed us north back up Highway 29. My mom, serene in her cloud of mid-stage Alzheimer’s, was oblivious to the drama just played out. As she made cheerful conversation on the way back, I had time to think.

I was pretty shaken up. I decided that it wasn’t because I’d had to go through cleaning my father up and throwing away some of his clothing. And it wasn’t because I felt worried that there might be repeat performances in his future. It wasn’t even that I was disturbed at the flip-flop in the parent-child relationship that had played out so graphically. In different ways, that had already been happening with both parents, and I knew that it would continue

No, what had me reeling was the fact that my fiery, passionate, powerful father had been nearly catatonic during the entire episode. He’d said barely a word. He hadn’t looked frustrated, angry, or embarrassed; in fact, he’d been eerily passive, silent, and compliant. I suddenly thought of the way my high-strung dog had acted on the loudest Fourth of July I could remember. When he’d finally stopped barking, it wasn’t because the booms and crashes no longer bothered him. I could see it in his eyes. He’d gone beyond frenzy, and was in a deeper level of fear. It had him paralyzed. The silent, still Dad who hadn’t gotten rattled at all upset me far more than the shouting and arguing Dad ever had. This was a totally different slope in the downhill slide. Dad didn’t stay quiet for long. We went to the doctor a few days later, asking if anything could be done about his internal bowling ball of built-up fluid that had led to the furniture-store incident. After a number of tests, the physician reported that Dad might be helped by learning some exercises to counteract the pressure, and he prescribed physical therapy. Following the first therapy appointment a few days later, I asked him hopefully, “So how did it go, Dad?” “Aw, she just had me do some squeezing things in my butt.” Not surprisingly, he didn’t sound very enthused. “So when do you go again? How long will the therapy last?” The voice he’d been lacking in that dank, grubby furniture-warehouse bathroom this time came out loud and clear, now that he was back in his recliner at home. “Aw, HELL! I’m not going back! I’m NOT going to do physical therapy for my BUTT!”

I had to laugh. I’d argued with him before about other aspects of his health regimen that he’d been reluctant to follow, but I just didn’t have it in me to push this one. Would I have chosen any differently for myself? Besides, it was a relief to hear the fire in his voice again.

Dad and I never mentioned the scene in the furniture store bathroom. I merely placed a brown bag with a clean set of clothes in the back seat of their car, and tried to keep reminding them that if anything surprising happened when they were out, the clothes were ready.

Neither did we return to that furniture store to buy the brown recliner for Mom. I did pop in a few days later, and was relieved to hear from the manager that nothing amiss had been noticed around the chair. It somehow felt too painful, though, to buy Mom’s new recliner from that showroom. So I stopped at a different Highway 29 warehouse the next week when I was heading to Napa to go see them. I picked out a small, beige, corduroy recliner in less than five minutes. It was delivered to their house the next day, and the last of the original twins was hauled away, out of their family room.

Author Mom loved her new chair, and Dad loved how quiet it was, no interruption to him at all as he made his daily stock phone calls. And I visited more and more frequently that summer, sitting on the black vinyl couch as they perched in their newer-model beige recliners. The wires on the braces were now twisted tighter than ever, and I felt the awful ache deep inside. I was locked in at “get set,” and knew I couldn’t allow myself to relax. Not even for a minute.

Thoughtful prose