Memory Won’t Save Me a haibun
Mimi White
deerbrook editions
published by Deerbrook Editions PO Box 542 Cumberland ME 04021 207.829.5038 www.deerbrookeditions.com
first edition Š 2012 by Mimi White all rights reserved
Book design by Jeffrey Haste
isbn : 978-0-9828100-4-0
for my father Hyman Novack
Memory Won’t Save Me
the river is cold shadows beneath shadows glide darken steep cliffs Vivid dreams follow long days of writing. I feel my father, hovering. Each day, he visits as a feeling or as an image, or more fully in dreams. I sit in a wooden rocker in the sun and hold the accumulating pages. I write to the end of what I think is the story of my father’s last days, my rush home to see him before he dies. once upon a time then a branch snaps, breaks in every story
When at last I finish writing, my father disappears. “Maybe he doesn’t need you anymore,” my husband, Steve, suggests when I tell him that my father has stopped visiting. “He never needed me,” I say.
§ My father is 95. He’s feeling okay. The hospice nurses say he could live another three or four months, maybe more, maybe less. We’re having lunch in the dining room of his assisted-living complex: my husband, my father, and my 9
stepmother. I order crabmeat salad. It arrives lukewarm, almost as white as the china plate it swims on, a metallic, salty aroma rising from the clumped mass. My father wrinkles his nose at his food. “Is this what I ordered?” he barks. The waitress’s face shows concern and boredom. Quite a feat, I think, wishing for the same detachment. I try to remember earlier meals, meals my father cooked for me at his condo, served on his china, at his table, but memory won’t save me today. This is one of my last visits before Steve and I leave to spend the month of March in Asheville, North Carolina. My father is agitated, angry. He turns in his wheelchair, twists his body as if he is going to push back from the table, but then he picks up his fork. I would like my father to be easier. I would like him to be nice. I would like him to live. No one orders dessert. open a window if not for the wind, then for the birds who want these crumbs My father keeps the love letters he wrote my mother, mostly letters of courtship, in a brown shoebox. I’m not sure where he keeps them. Maybe they are buried deep in his closet. Maybe they are within easy reach. I don’t imagine he rereads them; more likely he knows them by heart. He had promised them to me when he moved from his condo into his assisted-living apartment, but he hasn’t offered them yet, so I am surprised when he 10
mentions them during one of my visits. “You can have them later,” he tells me. “I still want them with me.” I nod in agreement. My father is a genuine romantic and my mother, I suspect, will always be his sweetheart, both of them still young in his mind and starting out together on life’s great adventures. Neither of us says what we are thinking, but we both know that “later” will come sooner than either of us wishes. Then both my parents will be gone. § December 1981, Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts. My mother looks beautiful, well, almost beautiful, her hazel eyes greener than usual, more like mine. She wears the face my father may have fallen in love with. Her smile, calm, thin. Her lips serene. Her hair longer, wavier, freer than the short gray hairs I have known all my adult life. I wonder how beauty can shine forth from a dying body, but she is my mother and I love her. Perhaps I see the beauty she sees in me: a frightened daughter, herself a young mother, who has left New Hampshire to do what she can to help her mother die. Near the very end of my mother’s life, she and I make a list of who gets what jewelry; I write her obituary. I am scared to death. I have no idea how I will live without my mother. Snow falls in thick bands for two days. I am stranded on the Cape, my return home delayed. I watch my father fuss over my 11
mother. He prepares her food. He plumps her pillows as if his puttering could will her illness away. My mother seems to grow smaller. Sitting in her favorite red wing chair, she asks me, “What sort of mother was I?” Past tense. “Kind,” I say. “You were very kind.”
photo 1930 my mother’s white collar I want to smooth it out I am wheeling my mother to X-ray. The nurse at reception leans down and touches my mother’s wedding band. “It’s beautiful,” she says. The ring is a circle of woven laurel leaves worn through in places with age. If you hold the ring to the light, tiny lacy openings shine back. My mother looks up at me. “Do you want it?” “It’s yours. Why would I want it?” “When I die. You want it then?” “Yes.” “You know he’ll want it.” “I know.” My mother nods and feels the loose band. “It will slip off easily.” My mother dies one week later as I am preparing to drive to Boston to visit her in the hospital.
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moon’s borrowed light passes for illumination night is infinite § As my departure for Asheville approaches, I make regular trips to Boston to visit my father. I take him to the radiologist. I take him for a CT scan. I bring him soup and homemade applesauce and always, every week, a box of chocolates. Steroids have piqued his appetite. Eat, I say, eat, and he does. I fear I will miss his death the way I missed my mother’s. One day I find him dozing, dressed, on the hospital bed in his room, surrounded by his antiques and Native American art. If only he were a pharaoh, we could seal off his room and let him live on in his homemade sarcophagus. If only he could take this life with him. My stepmother, Helen, has dressed him in a sharplooking gray checked shirt, khakis, and thick gray socks. He opens his eyes. “Oh, get me up, I don’t want to miss a minute of your visit.” I am taken aback. Is this the medication talking? My father has not always been this kind nor this happy to see me. He has always had trouble juggling four children, his love not without strings, and at the end of my father’s life, I am the odd child out, so I am grateful for this outburst of genuine affection. He knows I will be leaving soon, which might account for how quiet and pensive our visit is. We sit on his couch, holding 13
hands. “You’re too young to have arthritis,” he says, tracing my crooked left index finger. “My inheritance from you,” I quip, and we both laugh. “Well, we did nothing,” he says when I get up to leave, and then he adds, “But sometimes it’s good to just visit.” always a hand, go, stay, always a last wave heart in the air I am getting ready for work, a poetry gig with second graders in Hampton, New Hampshire. My father pulls into the driveway just as I am closing the house door. “Dad, what are you doing here? It’s eight-thirty in the morning!” “I dropped Helen at the airport and just kept driving.” Ah, forever the salesman, en route, driving. “I have to go to work,” I say. “No problem. I’ll head north and do some antiquing.” “I finish at one o’clock. Come back then and we’ll have lunch.” I give him a kiss. “You haven’t even shaved,” I say with surprise.
remember road trips all of us singing you on harmony My house is his destination. I am so touched by his 14
presence in my driveway I think of calling in sick. Later, I eat lunch alone. I imagine him going in and out of shops along Antique Alley, doing exactly what he wants to do.
“You leave soon? You’ll love North Carolina.” My father is sitting on the sofa in his usual spot. “I remember the redbuds. They should be in bloom. Will you stop at Gettysburg? You should. Your brother knows every single battle.” “We’ll have the dog with us,” I say. “And the Smokies? You’ll see the Smokies?” “Sure will, and the Blue Ridge. I love the Blue Ridge. We’ll fish the rivers. Steve says the browns are big and plentiful.” “Remember that fluke you caught off the Chatham Bridge? We had to buy a net to pull it in, it was so big. Fed all six of us. You sure could fish.” “Yes. I remember. I had a good teacher.” black & white photo fluke on string, Mimi, 11 small smile, huge fish Two days before Steve and I leave for Asheville, a cold rainstorm slams the New Hampshire seacoast. Power goes out up and down our street. Trees topple and basements flood. We clean the house in the daylight hours. We check off tasks on our to-do list: move mattress and clothes 15
into extra bedroom; empty fridge; ready the house for new floors. We pack books, fly rods, laptops. We wait. We watch night fall and take flashlights and books to bed. road in sky, sea bluer than lupine arranged just so in my mind It’s cold for North Carolina. Steve and I, our hands thrust into our jacket pockets, walk past neat bungalows, large Arts & Crafts–style homes, Tibetan peace flags strung between trees, old sofas on porches, Priuses, Obama/Biden bumper stickers. When snow falls, Steve ties flies at the kitchen table and I write haiku while stretched out on the sofa. A fire blazes in the fireplace all day and into the night. A red amaryllis brightens the blue slate mantel. house behind a house on an alley between yards we live contentedly Doc Chey’s, a favorite local eatery, usually has a line snaking out the door, but we luck out and grab the last available table. We warm our hands over cups of tea that materialize even before we settle in. Elbow to elbow with bench mates, I eavesdrop on conversations and look around: kids asleep in their parents’ laps, tattooed waitresses dressed more for dance class or yoga. Soba 16
noodles, lemongrass, shiitake mushrooms floating like paper fans. My meal is a small still life. fortune cookie tea I collect all the words time chance take now you I call my father, eager to hear his voice. “Mimi! Mimi!” My father calling me, my name surrounded by distance and black space, like an echo that cannot find a wall or a piece of sky to bounce against. “Helen, get me the other phone. These damn hearing aids. I can’t hear a thing.” Again, then again, he calls my name; I answer, but my father cannot hear me. When Helen gets on the phone to salvage the conversation, I can only imagine how my father feels. Helen says they’ll try again soon, that maybe it’s wax buildup or maybe my dad needs a new hearing aid. When I hang up and hear the click of the receiver, my father’s death inches closer. I have counted on our phone calls as a way to stay close. It is a trick I played on myself, a bargain I made so I could have my time away, but dying knows no boundaries. It crosses state lines as easily as I do. early March snow small white flakes add up, disappear 17
Dear Dad, The Penland School of Arts is an eclectic collection of studios, dorms, and old houses. A very steep, winding road leads to this oasis in the country an hour from Asheville. Steve and I stumbled upon a hands-on open house. We played with clay, hammered and etched shiny bracelets, and I made you a small origami box that opens to reveal the words “Thank You.” This is a postcard of the dining hall and a beautiful outdoor installation of grasses bundled together to look like lost haystacks. I miss you and love you. —Mimi I rather like wading upstream, casting as I go snowmelt on my mind Being on a river is like being in a dream. I search the water for movement, a quick shadow or sudden swirl, as I work my line below the surface and feel with my hands for an unexpected bump or knock. I walk slowly, paying as much attention to the path I cut through water as I do to where I think a trout might be hiding. “Everything is movement,” Auden said about poetry, and the river offers layers of movement, white, gray, black, to read and to follow. river, a house with many doors that open wide and close freely 18
“Hi, Mimi, how’s the fishing?” My dad sounds strong as ever. “You can hear me?” “Of course I can.” “We caught about thirty rainbows the other day on the New Mills River.” “Wow, that sounds like fun.” I fill him in on my poetry reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore and my plan to peddle my books around town. “Oh, that’s great, making new fans, trying new experiences after the age of sixty. Good for you,” he cheers me on, my biggest fan, it seems. new sky, dad’s voice clear as a radio—jigs, reels in the world, god-damn His voice has that sense of excitement and adventure it always had when he was venturing forth in the world. This Sunday afternoon phone call is poignant to me because my father sounds so healthy and energized by the news of my trip. It’s only much later that I realize that he sounded as if he were giving me his blessing for going to Asheville, as if he were finding a way to say good-bye. Perhaps he fears missing his good-bye with me as much as I fear I will miss the chance to be with him at the end.
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when lilacs bloom he will be here and not here like birdcall at dusk My sister on the phone this morning. “Dad’s not eating and he won’t get up. Ken said not to call, but I knew you’d want to know. Don’t do anything yet,” she urges when I ask if we should come home. I don’t buy groceries. I don’t read the newspaper. I don’t know what to do, so Steve and I go to a bakery. I pick at my sesame roll and let my tea grow cold, sitting at a sleek black table surrounded by people who have no idea that my father is dying. Doing nothing makes waiting for more news torturous. Steve and I drive over the mountains to Hendersonville. We drift in and out of shops looking at poetry books, shoes, fly rods, instruments. I pluck out a simple tune on a small wooden hammered dulcimer. I carry my cell phone from store to store. Helen, how’s my dad? Oh, darling, he won’t eat anything, not even your applesauce. Later. How’s my dad? Oh, he seems a little better. He ate six pieces of scallops. mountain, rain, stream Blue Ridge folds, unfolds snow in high terrain A cold rain turns downtown Asheville into a bleak and dreary landscape much like the city of the 1950s when 20
the fancy estates were dilapidated and boarded up and the hippies and artists had not yet arrived on the scene. The streets are deserted, but to our surprise the restaurants are bustling. Bouchon, a cozy French bistro, is jammed. Tupelo Honey doesn’t even have room at the bar. Table, a new farm-to-table restaurant, is practically empty. Expensive, I think, when I read the menu posted on the door. We count two parties, one paying its bill, the other sitting in the front window. The man and woman in the window look like well-dressed mannequins, thin and hollow. I am holding my cell phone when the hostess takes us to a table in the back (my request) and when she brings me a glass of wine (Steve’s request) and when I duck into the bathroom to call home. “Dad, how are you feeling?” “Not bad. You know, it’s not easy.” “It’s Mimi.” “Yes, I know.” “I sent chocolates.” “Yes, I got them. They remind me of Portsmouth. They remind me of your mother.” “I know they do.” “David’s coming Sunday. He called. He’ll be here in a few days. I haven’t seen him in a long time.” His voice is weak. I am afraid that talking is hard for him. “Dad, I love you. I’ll see you soon.” I’m standing in a dark bathroom, leaning against a cold sink. “I love you, too.” 21