Mark Sanders

A Dog Named Loneliness

(first published in Shenandoah; received honorable mention in Pushcart XXXIII2009)

 

     A picture in one of my photo albums shows me, aged six, sitting on a scrubby lawn with my sisters, DeAnn and Jera.  We are surrounded by our dogs—Mitzi and her five fox-terrier pups, and Baby Face, the Chihuahua my third sister Bobbie Jo had claimed as hers just months before she died of a congenital heart problem.  DeAnn and Jera smile directly at the camera, all the dogs corralled by their arms.  I sit apart, separate, my legs angled away to the right, looking down, my winter cap and ear-flaps pulled low upon my head.  The date on the photo is 1961.  Because we are bundled in winter coats, the girls’ heads tied up in heavy scarves, I imagine it is late fall, four or five months after Bobbie Jo’s death.  No other photo in my collection bears this particular date, so I conclude this must be one of the first post-Bobbie pictures.  Already, at age six, my companion, my puppy, is Loneliness.  He and I sit there together, frowning, ears low, deferring to the shadows behind us.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

     In kindergarten, the year before, I had been a popular kid.  My father was active in local 4-H groups; my mother was a school teacher.  Their extracurricular activities placed me in social proximity to children and their older siblings who, back in those days, had not yet learned to sneer at the kid whose parents kept them close under wing while simultaneously strutting them around outside the coop.  The advantage, as I see it now, was never being left out of playground games or classmate birthday parties.  My parents ensured this; Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was pitiful, and while he could fly like other reindeer, he was outcast, conspicuous by difference.  Not me:  I played with numerous kids, of all ages, pre-school to junior high, at farm parties where my sisters rode ponies and I rode goats, and in and out of neighborhood doors.  I cannot recall knocking; I merely walked in, a Dennis the Menace type (though not particularly menacing), sat down at the kitchen table, and accepted whatever offering of milk or cookies or saltines someone’s mother set before me.  Truthfully, these were safe times; all I needed was the heat of home, the heat of family’s love, and the heat of the blanket that was life in a small Nebraska town.  Hope was never a consideration.  To need hope, you had to have need.  I never felt as if I needed anything.  We may not have had much, but it was enough.

     My best friend was Curtis Kizier, a tall-for-his-age, long-faced, clown-smiling boy whose awkward clumsiness was exaggerated by his horrible good nature; other kids picked on him, particularly the class bully Timothy Cousins, but Curtis would never cry, would never tattle.  Eventually, Timothy left him alone:  Curtis was no fun.  Additionally, in my cadre, were several little girls who asked me repeatedly to marry them.  One blonde proposed and proposed, until her persistence embarrassed me.  I never understood.  How can anything be that necessary? We would go to her house after school, she said.  Her daddy knew a preacher, we would marry, eat cake, and my mother could pick me up at eight o’clock, at which time, she said, she had to go to bed.  She said, we would live happy forever and, someday, she said, in a few years, we would have children and a dog, and, because she loved me, I could choose the dog.  I never went to her house.  I never wanted to marry (I also did not believe my mother would allow it). 

     Friends were vital, cushions to absorb the trials; thus, there were no trials.  One friend, whose name I no longer remember, helped me cheat on the kindergarten shoe-tying test.  He wore cowboy boots and corduroy slacks; he gladly performed the task.  I watched him make the crossing country paths, saw the bunny as it passed through the rabbit hole, and saw the second bunny follow the first.  That easy.  I never knew how to tie shoes until the summer prior my second-grade year.  I was left-handed; no amount of instruction from all the deficient right-handed people could get me to comprehend.  As long as I could find someone around who knew the trick, I convinced them do it.  Otherwise, playing, walking, running with untied shoes was not terribly troublesome.  If I tripped and fell, I picked myself up.  In motion lay the defeat of pain.

     Perhaps, though, kindergarten was where I began to love narrative.  When all forty kids were called into the reading circle, I pushed my way forward to get a better look at the pictures and words, of Sally and Dick and Jane and Spot and Puff.  I liked the nursery rhymes, the crooked man who walked a crooked mile, Jack Spratt and his fat wife, and the expansiveness of the house that Jack built.  I played lead in Great Big Billy Goat Gruff, speaking my part in what I was certain was amazing bleating tones.  And, I learned I could weave a yarn during show-and-tell that left the class’s two teachers shaking their heads.

     One story included a female classmate, whom I sat next to during art time.  I had painted a picture of a canoe with two people in it, her and me; at show-and-tell, I narrated the art.  It was World War II (more than a decade before I was born), and I had left camp to picnic in a park with the girl.  We ate peanut butter sandwiches (my favorite food) and Kitty Clover Potato Chips.  After lunch, we went to the edge of the park pond, found a canoe, and I paddled out to the pond’s middle.  Ducks swam around us, and fish came up to the water’s surface.  The girl stood up, I said, and fell into the water; of course, I jumped in to save her (I never knew how to swim until I was thirteen).  Since she was wet, she went home; I went back to camp.  The next day, I said, I went to fight the Japs and was killed. 

     There were ooh’s and aah’s, some laughs, some disbelief among several doubters.  Mrs. Kerchenbach said, “Mark, that’s enough.  Sit down.”

     Later, as we sat at our table, sipping milk, the little girl told me she liked the story.  It was how she remembered it.

     I was unaware that the stray, black dog was making its incredible journey my way, well before 1961, homeward bound.  My family was poor, yet I never particularly knew poverty.  Once, when I had spent one dollar in birthday quarters at Absolom’s 5 & 10 Variety on a tin, toy barn full of plastic farm animals, I opened the package while my mother and sisters tried on Redwings at Denny Shoes.  So many critters, pigs and chickens, geese, horses, and ducks, and a tin silo that emerged from the barn, that I found absolute excitement in my investment.  “I’m rich!” I hollered.  Everyone in the store laughed, yet I could not fathom where the humor was.  After all, it was true.

     My family lived in a tiny, tiny yellow and white house at the end of a dirt road, and across that road was a pasture where white-faced cattle grazed.  The house had one bathroom, two small bedrooms—one where my three sisters slept in one bed, and the other which I shared with my parents (I slept in a baby crib until I was nearly seven).  The youngest child, I wore hand-me-downs from my sisters.  Certainly, I never wore their dresses, but Mom and Dad understood frugality, children of the Great Depression that they were.  My sisters wore slacks and blouses that could have been for either boy or girl, long before anyone had heard of unisex.  When kindergarten came, I received the first of my “boy” clothes and had to relearn to button my shirts. My Grandma Moser sewed me a pair of Popeye pajamas that I was so proud of, I wanted to wear them to school to show them off.  “They’re too good to sleep in,” I reasoned.

     “No,” Mom said.

     “Why I oughta,” Popeye would have said.  I said nothing.

     Most significant among the new clothing was a brand-new jacket, green with a mottled inner lining that I thought looked like the underbelly of a painted turtle.  I was thrilled.  I suspect it was a gift from my Aunt Phyllis or my Uncle Robert, both of them childless and unmercifully generous.  I insisted on wearing it the very first day of kindergarten, despite the burning heat of Nebraska August.  I put it on that morning, and I glowed as much from heat as from pride.  I knew all about elementary school since my mother taught first grade; what fun school would be.  However, when I tried to show the jacket to Mrs. Peterson, the second of our two kindergarten teachers, she did not react with reciprocal pleasure, but led me to the cloak room where, under a sign with odd markings on it, was a peg where I was told to hang the jacket.  That peg was mine for all the year, she instructed, and that was where I would hang coats, caps, scarves.  I did as directed, regretfully--I had wanted to share my fortune with everyone.  Then, Mrs. Peterson led me from the cloak room to a chair that bore yet another sign with similar markings.  I asked what the sign meant.  “That’s your name,” Mrs. Peterson answered, looking worried.  “It says Mark.”  I could not read my name.  It did not look like my name.  Because I was left-handed, I always wrote it out backward, KRAM, but also reversed the direction of the letters, a mirror image to the signs Mrs. Peterson showed me.  Learning to write my name left-to-right, all letters leading appropriately, would become a solitary task for me in the imminent future.  This first day, however, had other lessons.

     We were all lying on the floor, on rest-rugs, when the fire alarm rang.  I had no idea what the noise was about, and I was confused, as were some other kids.  When the teacher said, “Fire drill,” and told us to line up at the door, a few kids starting crying.  I mistook the teacher’s sternness for urgency, the crying for crisis.  I panicked.  It remains my first memory of fear.  We marched down the long, enduring hallway, along with all the children from other classes, and proceeded out to the sidewalk that ran parallel the street curb.  My mother stood at a distance with her first-graders, my sister Bobbie Jo among them, and I left my group to be with them.  If the school were going to burn, I wanted to watch with family. 

     Then, revelation hit.  My jacket--in the cloak room, in harm’s way, the school burning.  I knew it was lost.  I tried to get my mother’s attention.  “Mom,” I said, “My jacket’s in the school!”

     “Go back to your class,” she scolded me.

     I thought she meant for me to go back to the classroom.  I ran up the sidewalk, through the doors, down the hallway, to the cloak room, and grabbed my jacket.  A good boy, I did as my mother said.  Rather than taking the jacket back outside, I carried it to my seat, sat down, and held it in my lap, heart beating out of my throat.  I could smell the smoke.  It burned my eyes.  A yellow heat seared my face.

     The bell stopped ringing.

     In the silent, following seconds, I wondered why the firemen had not come.  I had heard no sirens.  And, where was the smoke I was certain I had smelled?  I still felt hot.

    The first child into the classroom was a little girl, cloud-pale, her hair like duckling fuzz.  She stopped at the door, said, “You’re stupid.  There’s no fire.  That was practice to see how fast we could get out.”  The teachers scolded, as they had to, to make the example work, and some of the other kids snickered and pointed.

     The late cartoonist Charles Schulz said something to the effect that the success of his Peanuts strip was based upon the humor in tragedy.  There is no humor, he said, in a little boy succeeding at kicking a football, but there is in someone’s persistent failure.  Perhaps loneliness is a humorous thing, as serious and ironic a joke as life can make.  We live to love, but love is evasive; we seek acceptance, but can never accept; we struggle to do well, but too easily do the incorrect thing.  Childhood is cruel.  We spend our adulthood getting over it.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

Stop me if you know this one: 

     In the aftermath of Bobbie’s death, I had lost the security of insulation and naiveté.  Due the burden of grief, of work, and of three living children whose own despair at sibling loss must have altered behaviors, my mother enlisted the help of Miss Berger, a young, first-year teacher, single, who stayed at our house and slept on the sofa.  Miss Berger was my teacher; I felt privileged to have her all day at school and at home.  Dad was away, at his new job in Ord, Nebraska, three hours to the south—on a clear day with clear roads.  Blizzards, dust, Chinook wind, cattle drives down the highway, migratory pronghorn, and combine caravans could all turn the trip into a lengthier proposition.  A government man, working for the Soil Conservation Service, he had been officially transferred the previous spring.  Bobbie Jo had seen Ord just once and hated the town.  “I’ll run away if I have to live here,” she threatened.  “You won’t find me.”  Once her final illness had run its way, Dad had no choice but go; the events of the previous summer, however, forbade the inclusion of the family.

     It was September and my first illness following Bobbie’s death.  An ear ache.  I could not sleep, the bells in my ears rang so loudly.  I could not swallow.  As Bobbie had died, I feared I would, too.  My mother suggested I should see a doctor; this scared me more.  I had heard my parents complain about the doctors being unable to help Bobbie.  At night, in that shared bedroom when they thought I was asleep, I heard the murmuring, the blame, the fault.  I knew the doctor would kill me.  I wasn’t going, so I lay lead-heavy on the bed until Mom, in all her super strength, picked me up and hauled me over her shoulder to the car.  “A sack of potatoes,” she said, jokingly, to cheer away the fears.  It did not work.  When the time came to go into the doctor’s office, I remained immovable.  She carried me through swinging doors, down a white-green hallway with white and black floor tiles, to a little examination room smelling of alcohol and ointment.  If I had to die, I was not going to go easily.  One must be more contrary than either life or death to have made an impression.

     The doctor looked into my ear, made a few mumbled remarks, and his nurse came in.  I lay on my stomach on the clinic table; the nurse pulled my elastic-banded pants down, and gave me a shot in the ass.  I was not given time to be sufficiently embarrassed.  I walked out the clinic door, rubbing the hip, and asked Mom, “Is the needle still in there?”  It never exactly hurt, but it felt odd.  My leg was warm.  But I was somehow confident:  the shot had not killed me, nor had the doctor.  I had emerged, virtually unscathed, heroic.

     The next morning, when I crawled out of bed, I could not walk.  The shot had gone wrong, a muscle had been bruised.  No sooner had I put my feet on the floor than my puny legs collapsed beneath the weight of my puny body.  I spent the entire day in bed and worried about immobility.  I had seen people in wheelchairs, as well as a legless man seated on a board with wheels on a Norfolk Main Street corner, peddling pencils from a cup. 

     It was Saturday, so I did not miss school.  Dad had come home for the weekend, and the family busied itself with whatever they had to do in the other rooms of the house.   Surely, my parents or my sisters checked in on me, certainly Miss Berger—I fell madly in love with her and wore bow-ties to school to please her.  That weekend, though, Loneliness kept me company, that invisible dog and my stuffed toy Lassie, them and on the walls above my crib, cut-out characters  from cereal boxes:  the Trix rabbit, Sugar Pops Pete, and Sohi from Sugar Krinkles.  We played for hours and talked.

     I forgot my ear hurt.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

Did you hear the one . . . ?

     My favorite thing at school that year was the monkey bars.  I could have climbed them all day, no matter that they were dangerous.  I once fell from the top of the jungle, trying to reach the slide-pole and knocked myself out; I had been black-eyed and bruised by swinging kids.  I excelled at scaling, dropping, looping upside down, leaping. 

     Except I discovered a new conspicuousness.  The kids teased me about my hands.  My little fingers were crooked, almost hooked.  They called me, “monkey hands,” an insult that bore deep through the dark, rain-filled forest inside of me.  They knew I could swing better than any of them.

     One autumn day, I sat alone on top of the bars, waiting for my mother to leave the school so we could go home for supper.  She often stayed late, until after all the other kids had left and the teachers driven off, sometimes when the sun was already down.  My two older sisters were allowed to walk home.  I was made to wait.  Steven Stuebe, a child in my first grade class, had lost his week’s lunch money, and his loss weighed upon my mind.  The teachers throughout our elementary building requested our help in finding it.  A special case--Steven’s dad was blind, resultant from a construction accident.  He had fallen from ceiling rafters into a stairwell that opened to the basement.  He was led around town by a guide-dog.  Steven’s mother worked, somewhere; he had many brothers and sisters.  I understood money was a rare commodity. 

     Seeing two girls walk by, one who had been in my kindergarten class, I yelled: “If you kids find any money, give it to me because I lost it.”  An innocent lie--I wanted the money so I could turn it in, get the credit and enjoy the praise for having done so good a thing.  The girls stopped and looked dead-on at me.  They knew the money was Steven’s, not mine.  The girl who knew me, said, “That’s Mrs. Sanders’s son.  His sister’s dead.”

     Some dog breeds can teach themselves to climb trees, typically those used in hunting.  I have seen coon dogs do it most proficiently.  My own Great Dane scaled a six-foot chain-link fence to gain freedom from backyard seclusion during  thunderstorms. Perhaps this is how Loneliness found its way to the top of the monkey bars where I sat in silence until my mother called me down.  What was I doing there, what was I seeing except, perhaps, the monkey hands that were quiet, too?  In the wild, Howlers make marvelous noise from the heights, but even they, to the astonishment or curiosity of human observers, sometimes go to the pinnacles and sit there, eyes closed, noiselessly rocking in the treetops to subtle winds, precarious, on edge, the fall that never happens just an inch away.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

Then there’s the one about . . .

     My father and I went to the grocery store one Saturday to pick up some things for Mom.  I had begged to go along, since Dad was away except for the weekends, and because I thought he might buy me a treat.  Always, there was much silence in our house, the girls behind their bedroom door, playing with paper dolls or experimenting with makeup, Mom and Miss Berger at the kitchen table grading spelling tests and checking sums and differences.  Dad never said much, either, but I cherished any one-on-one he was rarely willing to give.

     At the checkout, I asked if I could have a package of Dentyne.  I loved the gum, its red color, its fire to the tongue.  Dad said, “No.”  When I asked again, his tone was insistent.  “No!” 

     I could not understand.  I wanted the gum.  The gum was there.  Dad saw the gum was there.  Why could I not have it if the gum was there?  What does the No mean?  I was mad.

     I put the Dentyne in my pocket.

     Dad had not seen, nor had the woman who punched keys at the register.  She and he talked, a boy sacked the groceries, and I had gum nestled in the pit of my pocket. 

     As soon as we were in the car, I said, “Dad, see what I have?”  I took the gum out to show him.  I thought he would be proud.  He had been so certain I could not have the gum.  What had I expected?: “What a clever kid you are,” “How did you manage that?” or, “I’m sorry; I was wrong.”  Dad swore, words that included “god-damned” and “sonabitch.”   He was out of the car immediately, at my door sooner than a boy can say, “Gum.”  He grabbed my arm, yanked me into the store, marched me like a marionette suspended on strings up to the cashier, and informed her I had “stolen” the gum. 

     Stolen.

     That was one of those Sunday school words.

     Stolen.  A bad thing God hated.  “You know where bad boys and girls go?” I could hear the Sunday school teacher ask.  She told us: devil, hurt, no friends, no family, no clothes, fire, being scared, being alone.  Some of the kids had cried; I was worried about having no clothes.  Wearing sister-hand-me-downs was bad enough.

     Stolen.  I thought the gum was there so anyone could have it.  How was it different from samples offered by ladies in Sunday dresses and white gloves?  Or chocolate milk in paper cups served by Elsie, the Borden cow?  I had not thought stolen.

     Dad gave the woman some change from his pocket and told me to apologize.  I don’t know how she could have heard sorry when I could not hear it myself. 

     Dad never said a word, all the way home.  Nor did he say anything about the incident to my mother.  I was miserable.  I could not eat supper, but asked if I could go to bed.  I wanted to sleep guilt away, but night would not come soon enough.  I confessed to Mom, and the confession rendered the verdict I had wanted: banishment, without supper, bed before sundown. 

     It was one of the longest evenings I ever had.  Loneliness was my ears, listening for the devil.  It kept my eyes open, watching for fire.  A thunderstorm rolled in, stomping and booming.  I knew whose footsteps those were.  The windows filled with lightning-blaze, and the forks of it were red.  I tossed, turned, and hoped--if I had not prayed it--that a quiet dark would cover me, though not as it had Bobbie Jo.  Had I died that night, I know the devil would have had me in a more horrible place than I already was.

     I could never force myself to chew the pack that my dad was obliged to buy.  Either DeAnn or Jera got it.  The price of it was too dear, too expensive, too rich.

     It had cost a nickel.

 

* * *

 

     One day I asked Mom if there were really a devil.  She stopped folding laundry, paused and set her teacher’s hands to her teacher’s hips.  “No,” she said, “There’s no devil.”

     “Is there Hell?” I asked.

     “No,” she said.  “There’s no such place.  That’s all make believe.”

     I heard a weather report on the radio.  Frightening things, there: President Kennedy talked about bombs, and Mom and Dad talked about how the bombs made fire, like in Hell.  Mom said that if the bombs came, she would take all us kids outside and stand on the porch to meet the fire so the end would come quickly.  My dad said we’d go to the cellar.

     “That’s fine, too,” Mom said, “We’ll be dead and in a grave at the same time.  At least I’d have Bobbie again.”

     The weatherman had talked about tornadoes coming at night, somewhere.  Houses knocked down, people killed.  Dad said, “We’ll go to the cellar if one comes here.”

     We’ll be dead and in a grave at the same time.

     “Are there tornadoes here?” I asked.

     “No,” Mom said.  “There are no tornadoes here.  They happen far away.”

     We went to visit the Kiziers.  Curtis and I were excited about the visit, and, inseparable, we ran the alfalfa field adjacent their white, single-wide trailer.  Mom and Curtis’s mom talked in the kitchen of their trailer house, sipping coffee, eating cookies.  Clouds darkened, thickened, gathered, rose above us, and the wind tossed the field grass back and forth in many motions of green and blue.  Curtis’s Mom came to the door to call us: “Boys, come back to the house.  There’s a tornado watch.”

     I laughed, though the laugh choked.  “There are no tornadoes here,” I announced, almost confident.

     “You’re stupid,” Curtis said, wearing his goofy, casual grin.  “There are too tornadoes here.”

     “My mom said there aren’t.”

     “Well, she’s stupid, too,” Curtis said, toothy.

     “She’s a teacher,” I reminded him, certain he would see his error.

     “Stupid,” he said, again.  He stopped smiling.  I had never seen him so serious; in school, even spelling could not evoke such an expression.

      Curtis ran ahead of me, toward the trailer.  I walked, the tall grass reaching toward me, touching me with its long fingers; there was a grumbling beneath my feet, in the ground, and I hurried a little more, fearful the grass would pull me downward, into the roots, into the cellar that is the earth.  I walked fast, to keep death from overtaking me, a wary eye on the sky where, somehow, though it should not be this way, the devil’s tail might swing down from Heaven.

     The tornado never came, but I asked my mother again: “Are there tornadoes, here?”

     She said, “Yes, sometimes.”   She did not apologize for the lie, but said, “I didn’t want you to be scared.”

     In Sunday school, lie was like stolen. 

     I knew the devil was real.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

 

Now here’s a funny story:    

     The summer of my seventh birthday, the family joined my father at Ord, Nebraska.  We moved into a bigger, two-story turn-of-the-century house.  My sisters and I felt indescribable ecstasy:  we had our own bedrooms.  We ran up and down the stairs, had three porches and three doors to go in and out of, a yard lined with fourteen elm trees, two hackberries, and a hollyhock hedge, an infinity of discoveries that made us nearly forget what we had left.

     Yet, at night, the house made noises.  Mice scurried through the walls, their clatter like my nervousness, and, at times, there seemed a deep, heavy breathing in my bedroom, and not my own.  Loneliness in the dark room was my only companion.  It and I would lie there, stiff sheets and smelly quilts over our heads.  I did not know what it was to sleep at night in a room by myself.  Windows rattled if the wind blew; the longer tree limbs scraped the roof, and the sound resonated above my bed.  An antique clock clicked and clacked as its pendulum whirred in the living room beneath me, like horse hooves on pavement, like a mallet on a butcher’s block.  I could not separate its noise from my own heart’s.  Always, it sounded as if someone were coming up the stairs.  And the rooms did breathe, deeply, loudly (I was the only one who heard it), and the walls of my room, white with moonlight, invited shadows in, and the shadows danced hideously.  I swear--one night, I saw Bobbie Jo among the shadows, dancing, too.  When she saw she had caught my eye, she leaped to the top of my bedroom door and sat there, kicking her legs.  “It’ll be okay,” she said.  I never saw her after that.  I always looked.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

     Because my sisters were older by four and five years, I committed my time to solitariness, riding Bobbie Jo’s bike, made-over into a boy’s bike by a welder named Joe Dobrowsky.  Or, played solitaire badminton, sending the birdie back and forth over the net while I scrambled, this way, that way, to keep the thing afloat.  I played like this for hours, until I would sit on the porch swing and rock into rest and recuperation.  The first two weeks in Ord, I never met another child.

      So, when second-grade began, I was shy and knew no one.  Miss Jensen instructed me to stand at the front of the room to introduce myself.  I explained my mother had been a teacher at O’Neill but now she was working at home.  I said my dad worked for the “Sowa Conservation” (I could not pronounce the word soil), and kids who had no idea what Soil Conservation meant laughed because they recognized a mispronounced word.  Acceptance was not going to be easy in the new school for the only new kid in class.

     “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” Miss Jensen queried.

     I thought long about my answer.  “I have three sisters, but one’s dead,” I said.  I hooked my thumbs into my belt loops so I would not fidget.

     “Really?  How’d she die?” Miss Jensen asked. 

     “I don’t know,” I said, barely audible.  More laughs. 

     “She musta been an old midget,” Chuck Heiselmann quipped. 

     “Hush, children,” Miss Jensen said.  Then, she turned to me, “Let’s see if they taught you anything at O’Neill.”  She gave me twenty addition and subtraction problems to perform on the blackboard.  I answered all correctly but felt awkward in front of that audience.  One kid, Bob Lambert, shook his head no to my every answer; his head-shake could not persuade me to change a calculation.

     “Recite the ABC’s,” Miss Jensen demanded.  And I did, without singing them.

     She handed me a primer, Cherry Lane, which I had read in first grade.  “Read the first story,” she commanded, and I did that, too.

     When her assessments were over, Miss Jensen announced, “I guess they don’t make dummies in O’Neill after all.  Sit down.”  She pointed toward the back wall.  I made my way to my desk, the last one in the last row, all eyes watching.  I felt shamed and embarrassed, even after I had done my best.  We all got busy with our lessons, and no one noticed I was there.

     Days later, Miss Jensen spoke about the importance of cleanliness and how children who stepped on nails died of tetanus.  Children dying I knew about.  “I know a kid who died,” I said.  I never knew what Bobbie Jo had died from, so I wanted immediately to believe it was tetanus.  I could not remember how clean or dirty my sister had been, so I told the class I had known a boy named Bob who got sick and died. 

     “Another old midget,” piped Chuck Heiselmann.  “Kids don’t die,” he added.

     Miss Jensen never corrected Chuck, so everyone knew I was lying.  I knew I was lying, too, and wondered where the devil was.  Miss Jensen seemed mean, like the devil.  Yet, I knew that kids died, and that was the devil of that.  The room buzzed with the stinging noises of children speaking hushed words.  “Class, be quiet,” Miss Jensen demanded and stomped her foot for emphasis.  “Mark knows what the truth is.”  Miss Jensen had a closet in her classroom where, I soon discovered, troublesome children found themselves isolated from the rest of the group.  It was an interesting closet, full of Tempra paint canisters, construction paper, an umbrella, decorations for all the holidays, chalk and pencils and handwriting paper.  I spent fascinating hours there.  It was not such a bad place to be, alone.

     That same week, while I watched the fish swim around Miss Jensen’s aquarium, I poked myself with a tack that had been left on the table.  The tack stuck to my finger, and I pulled it out, frantic.  A little dot of blood appeared—no more than that.  Tetanus joined death in my head.  No one had been there when the accident occurred.  All the other kids were at recess; I was inside because, once again, I had somehow gotten into trouble.  The first kid in, after the bell, was Robert Proskicil.  Seeing me upset, he came over to find out what was wrong.  I told him to get away.  I did not want him to see me die.  Dying was something to do on my own.  He ran to get Miss Jensen.

     My mother came to school.  In the hallway, at a distance from me where I sat in a corner underneath the coat pegs just outside the boy’s restroom, I heard her speaking to my teacher and Miss Swain, the principal.  “Yes, he had a sister who passed on,” she said.

     The next day, I was allowed to go out to recess.  It was also the first day in many I had not gone to the supply closet.  As one might guess, as luck runs, the first trip down the tall slide, someone had been there before me and waxed it slick.  I sailed the hump many feet and landed, flat on my back, on the ground, breath knocked out. 

 

     The kids seemed not to notice, but clung to motion--to the swings, off the slide’s end, their feet landing near the clump that was me.  Miss Jenson saw.  She picked me up and carried me to the school steps, where, cradled in her arms, there was intense heat, red sunlight.  I knew I was dead.  The devil hummed a lullaby.

 

                                                                          * * *

 

     Melodrama’s art depends upon overt sentimentality.  We laugh cynically at the melodramatic because we find humor in the gross caricatures, or we laugh derisively because we find repulsion in the grotesque mimesis: we are the caricatures, we are the melodramatic, we are the sentimental fools.  And, because we prefer not to be fools, we make laughter the mask. 

Nonetheless, the dogged joke is always on us.  Winston Churchill called his depression a black dog; I think that was aptly stated.  Our black dogs are jealous and, by protecting us from others, guarantee our sole companionship.  We are never quite good enough for anyone but the dog that extends its paw to reel in the hand that will compliantly pet it.  It’s the popular culture sympathy that Simon and Garfunkel sing about in “Sounds of Silence”:  “Hello, darkness, my old friend, / I’ve come to talk with you again.”  And, as good as that song may have been, the message seems almost trite in its universality:  every pop icon or group has such a song in its repertoire.

     Do I ever think about dying, long for it, wish to bring it to swift conclusion?  Yes, but who has not thought, in a second, about such things?  Seen themselves dangled at rope’s end?  Sucked the nipple of a gun’s muzzle in their mind’s mouth and found it sensual?  Seen that damned dog wagging its black tail?  Robert Frost’s epigram reads, “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on thee / And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”  The Big One:  Life means death.    The cosmic punch line depends upon us.  If William Carlos Williams can danse russe, naked before his mirror, admiring his ass, and sing soft epiphany to himself,

            “I am lonely, lonely.

            I was born to be lonely,

            I am best so!”

we can similarly be the “happy geniuses” of our own households.  A joke is not a joke without the last hilarity.      

 

 

The Punch Line:

 

     Back when I was in kindergarten, I frequently walked past my mother’s first-grade classroom on the way to recess or the restroom.  I would see my sister Bobbie Jo sitting in my mother’s room, her head down, asleep at her desk.  The other kids were always busy, writing out spelling quizzes, drawing, reading aloud.  My classmates were in awe.  Timothy Cousins and I would stand side by side at the urinals, pissing away, pretending to be firemen, and he would remark, “It must be nice to have your mom as a teacher.  Your sister gets to sleep all the time.”  I knew what he meant; she was receiving preferential treatment.  Even in kindergarten at rest time, the children who drifted off were awakened and told to lie there, but not sleep.

     Bobbie Jo could sleep anywhere, anytime.  If we got into the car to go somewhere, even to the grocery store, she would be asleep in a second.  In our back yard, she would crawl off the swing, walk a few paces to a tree, and fall asleep like Van Winkle beneath it.  She took naps after lunch, even though Mom no longer required naps, even during cartoons.  She went to sleep before the sun was down and never woke until next morning.  I did not know she was sick, not until much later--when she died.  And, I never knew precisely what killed her, not even in my adulthood because my parents protected through silence.  During kindergarten, though, I thought Bobbie Jo was lucky.  I would say, “Mom, I’m tired.  Can I stay home?”  Or, to my teachers, during a reading lesson of Cherry Street, “Can I sleep?”  The answer was always, “No.” 

     I did well in school, but never as well as Mom would have liked.  Teachers would tell her my progress, and she would tell me to progress more.  I never ran fast enough in P.E.; she made me race her until I beat her in a sprint.  I would not take artistic direction; my left-hand always smudged the lead in my lettering, and I was often made to wash my hands, until they were sore from soap and scrubbing, to get the smear off.  Bobbie Jo got bad grades, D’s and F’s, and I knew they were bad because my older sisters said so.  She was never scolded.

     And then, after kindergarten, during the summer, right before July 4th, Bobbie Jo died.  Grandma and Grandpa Geisler kept my two older sisters and me that summer.  The three of us packed our clothes into a big suitcase, took along a few toys, and went to the farm east of Creighton, Nebraska.  I loved the farm, the trees where we would run, playing hide-and-seek or cowboys and Indians.  Sometimes, we made string houses there, tying baling twine around the trunks to establish rooms, or set up stores from the cans and jars my grandparents had thrown into the garbage pile.  We played school inside the brooder house.  We all had chores:  I slopped the pigs with table scraps and vegetable peelings and fed the poultry, but I ran from the geese because their beaks pinched and their wings beat bruises.  We asked Grandma and Grandpa why Bobbie Jo was not with us.  We never got an answer, not an excuse, not a lie, not a truth.  Silence hung its head at us, tucked its tail. 

     Now and then, the phone would ring and, beyond Grandma’s idiomatic “Yallo,” I sensed she was speaking to my father.  Yet, when I asked to talk, she would not hear me.   

     We sat on the floor, watching television one evening when, through the open windows where merely the faintest of breezes moved, I heard a car coming down the long gravel mile to the farm place.  I got up, looked out, and saw Mom and Dad’s ’57 BelAir approaching.  Excitedly, I called, “Bobbie Jo’s coming!  Bobbie Jo’s coming!”  My favorite playmate, I had reasonably missed her during this vacation.  We would make up lost time. 

     Uncle Robert came into the living room to see what my commotion was about.  “What?” he said, “It can’t be.”  The car pulled up to the yard-gate, the lights on the Chevy went out, and I watched as Mom and Dad emerged.  They did so, slowly—Dad walked over to the passenger side, opened the door, waited, waited, stooped in as if to talk, and then, with an arm around her waist, walked Mom toward the house.  “Where’s Bobbie Jo?” I asked.  

   “Sleeping,” one of my sisters joked.

     When Mom got to the door, the rain inside the house poured.  She never said a word before everyone, except me, knew what had happened.  Grandpa Geisler grieved loudest, and Dad, who had always said boys should not cry, went to a place on the screened-porch and sat in the quiet dark with Robert.  My aunts Sharon and Phyllis took my sisters aside.  Grandma held my mother. I hovered from one place to the next, asking the same question, “Where’s Bobbie?” and, adding to it, “What’s wrong?”  When I tried to go out the door to the car to wake my sleeping sister, my uncle caught hold of me and held me back.  I slipped away, ran to Grandma’s bedroom, and hid in the space between the bed and the window.  Before anyone came to check on me, I had fallen asleep on the floor.

     The events of the next two days are many and, after all these years, crisp.  I attended family visitations at Hengstler’s Funeral Home, listened to the mortician’s wife fawn over the beauty of my dead sister, and studied every detail: the cherry wood box, its wedding-ivory lining; the navy sailor’s dress the neighbor lady had chosen, the dark-haired doll resting upon my sister’s bare left arm, how tightly pinched shut their eyes were, how red their lips and pink their cheeks.  The place stunk of flowers, so putrid in such profusion.  “She looks like a doll,” the mortician’s wife said, an adoring smile on her face.  And, “My, aren’t you a brave, little man?” she said to me.

     When we returned to my grandparents’ farm for lunch, Grandma asked my mother, “How did she look to you?”

     I stood near the stove, near the trash can, looking down into it.  I said, before my mother had a chance, “She looked good.  She looked like a doll.”

     At the funeral, where the family was seated behind a beige privacy netting, I knelt in my chair, looking backward at the row of relatives behind my own family.  Grandpa Geisler was there, a hollow, cavernous noise rising from deep within him, and Grandma Geisler’s mother, Grandma Hubbard, rough and pale, eroded by age, sat looking at me, touching my hand, again and again.  I smiled for her.  Yet, she scowled.  “It isn’t right,” she said to her daughter Auralea.  “I’m so old I should have gone first, not this baby.  It’s not right.  God’s not right.” 

     My father turned me around, leaned over to me, and gave instructions: “Boys don’t cry,” he whispered.  I heard Grandpa behind me.  But, he was a man, not a boy.

     At the cemetery, my mother had to be pulled from my sister’s grave.  The minister had given her the doll from the coffin, and Mom, struggling with Dad and Aunt Phyllis, screamed, “I just can’t leave her here!”  I wondered what that meant.  Abandonment was something I could not yet conceive, this letting go as in betrayal and as commitment to absence.  Who is most lonely, the living or the dead?  I followed relatives back to the cars parked along the cemetery lane, on my own power, under the influence and passion of this new information, in the landscape of stone, turf, and odor.  Hurt by my separateness, in the company of a pet that would never leave. 

     I cannot say Bobbie has missed us, for, indeed, what can the dead miss except all the nonsense?  Mom has surely missed Bobbie these forty years.  So have I.  (Peanuts, show us the humor, how Snoopy guns down the Red Baron despite the riddling of his own plane).  Walt Whitman wrote, “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”

     Bobbie Jo failed first grade.  My mother flunked her.  She never knew she failed.  She never knew she had to repeat anything, like we all have to.