Allison Field Bell | Sometimes our Bodies Fail Us

Sometimes Our Bodies Fail Us

Allison Field Bell

It’s dawn and I should not call my father. I had the dream again: he’s twenty-two—my age—and he’s driving from New York to California. A 1960’s Volkswagen with bucket seats, which I always took to mean actual buckets—plastic five gallons like the ones with the sea salt I used to sell at the aquarium store. “No heater either,” he told me. Bucket seats and no heater. So, in the winter, he used a candle. A candle in a car in the winter in New York. And the dream’s just that: the car, the winter, the salt buckets, my father.

And now it’s a few minutes into dawn—the sun’s pushing strips of copper light through the blinds—and I’m thinking maybe I should call him. “Hi,” I’d say. “Just checking up on you, Dad.” The kid in the beetle hauling across the country.

“Open spaces,” he told me. More than anything, he had wanted open spaces. Uninterrupted sky and great swaths of field. No more brownstones or street hockey played between city blocks. I still think the hockey idea is fantastic—hockey and baseball and, pause the game when there’s traffic. Or piss behind a parked car in that way learned by all Brooklyn boys of a certain age. He showed my brother once: lean in, casual, nothing wrong with being human, Danny. Sometimes our bodies are just bodies, Danny.

My father moved away from all that for open spaces. And for sounds too. Can you imagine moving away from a place for sounds? No more sounds at night! Can you imagine living where there were always only city sounds. Sirens and car horns and drunk men and goddamn, the smell on garbage day. But here, he can breathe, he said. Here, it’s all ocean sweeping from shore to orchard to the little house on Hessel road. Coast-cooled nights..

I should call him. But in California it’s not yet dawn and I’m the one in Brooklyn now. I should tell him about the dream. Him driving the same roads I know and drove last summer by myself. Endless flat Texas hell, Alabama thunderstorm, Swampy New Orleans Sazerac. The dream’s nice, actually. But I’m still afraid. Afraid because of what my mother told me about the doctor—the thing my father should tell me about but won’t.

“Nothing wrong with being human,” I would tell him. Sometimes our bodies fail us.