Three More Short Short Essays
Here is another triad of essaylets from my collection Earthquakes and Angels. These essays are well published in the periodicals, but the collection –to use an old and somewhat sexist saw, continues to be a bridesmaid rather than a bride. I persist withal.
Abandonment
I’d awakened from a dream of a wedding. Wraith-like figures patrolled a stone church’s aisles, which appeared to flow deep crimson. So, by the time I saw the blood on my grandmother’s sheet, I’d already been seized by terror.
Before the snowstorm, our parents flew to some warm place we children had never heard of. They tried to soothe us by saying their trip was a second honeymoon. Tension, though no outright conflict, had prowled the house through the preceding six months or so. I suspected my five-year-old brother sensed it, and maybe even the three-year-old, too.
Our grandmother, when left to mind us, imposed little discipline. As a rule, I rejoiced when she baby-sat, although at seven, I disliked anyone’s calling it that. This time, however, I did not celebrate.
Whatever their motive, our parents’ departure felt like a monstrous threat. It struck me hardest in the early hours of the second night: they had plain abandoned their children. Not that their treatment of us was always exemplary, but I knew it to be as good as what many of my friends got, and a lot better than some did.
We called our grandmother Nanny. That night, her bedroom window revealed a cluster of oak leaves below, fallen at last in late winter, lying still as corpses on the new snow. In the flagrant moonlight, the garden also teemed with other, weirder shapes. I knew these were merely shadow-blotches, laid down by clouds crossing the moon, but this knowledge failed to reassure me.
The blood on her blankets, I understood, must surely be nothing but shadows too– and still I was scared. I’d never known such quiet. In my mind, the silence and stillness portended something awful.
Though I couldn’t predict what unholy rites would go into that grotesque wedding I’d conjured in my sleep, I knew they were going to be brutal. You only dreamed it, I kept telling myself, yet I stood spellbound at Nanny’s door, a paralysis that seemed to go on and on. I feared the old woman’s breathing might have stopped. Still, I balked at stirring her to find out, no matter how much I ached for adult comfort. If she were dead, that was horror enough. But if she came to – and I have no idea why I thought this way– the dream’s malevolent agents might return.
Dream-bride and groom each wielded a weapon in one hand, some book – black magic scripture? – in the other. In fact, I couldn’t precisely identify either weapon or book, but like all in the congregation, I understood both were deadly. The couple glared along the pews where we all sat wordless, afraid that the slightest sound or movement might provoke them to mayhem. Even after seven decades, I shudder to recall the cruelty in their eyes.
I had sat, Sunday after Sunday, in our easygoing Episcopal congregation with the frail little lady I watched now, while my parents were doing…who knew? Assuming she was indeed alive, that tiny woman would surely be of no help to my younger brothers and me, should the actions of the bride and groom turn dire.
At length, I found the courage to move from Nanny’s doorway, but I slid my feet along the floor, avoiding the noise of actual steps. Back in bed, I leaned against the headboard, its panel chill on the skin of my neck, and waited – interminably, it seemed – for daylight.
Anosmia
One of my younger sisters and her wife contracted COVID-19 late in 2020. That sister’s sense of smell has not returned since.
I was about to say I’d never much thought about such an ailment, but come to think, I had briefly pondered it years before, when I was still a college teacher. I recall prompting a student to tell me a back-story during office hours, because her written story for class discussion contained a word that the narrative never defined. It mentioned, more or less in passing, that her protagonist had anosmia. Then it went on pretty conventionally about how the girl, who came from a NASCAR family, once fell for a certain race driver, apparently somewhat famous. Predictably, the affair ended in heartbreak.
I had no interest in automobile racing, and, even if I had, the love plot would have been too familiar: exactly the kind of thing, I’m afraid, I’d read by many aspirant young authors of all genders. I knew that the account represented real urgency on this one’s part, but it just couldn’t hold an older reader like me. That sort of jadedness was a key factor in moving me to retirement shortly after. I didn’t want to feel even a jot of contempt for young people merely because they were young. I too clearly remembered being on the other side of such disdain.
Anosmia, though– well, I’m a sucker for out-of-the-way words, and I wanted to own this one. It appears that her dad was an EMT, and as a child she peeked inside his satchel one evening. She asked about the smelling salts. When her father explained their use, she begged him for a whiff. Though he didn’t want to, he gave in, partly because it was the girl’s ninth birthday. She sniffed the open vial, and that marked the last moment in her life when she could smell. Anosmia is the clinical term for such loss.
Yes, I did find that a better and sadder tale than what she’d submitted. I was intrigued, thinking that in my own case and perhaps most people’s, the capacity to experience odors is essential to feelings of nostalgia or joy or revulsion–the list goes on.
Smell is also closely linked with the sense of taste, and I asked my student about that. She said that the only food she cared for at all had to be highly spiced: certain Thai or Mexican or Indian dishes. Her mom had quickly been obliged to introduce such fare to her balky midwestern family.
It happened that she recounted all this on yet another birthday, her 22nd. I offered her best wishes as she left my office. By my reckoning I was not all that much older than her father, and I thought hard about his cursed luck. The man had repressed his reservations so he could oblige a child on her birthday. What followed must have devastated him.
Driving home, I looked through my windshield at a hard-edged January moon, and beside it, Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. Now if unlike me you have faith in that sort of thing, you believe people born under the sign of the Bull are pushovers for sensuous gratification: wet kisses, good wine, rich food, so on. But mysticism aside, I wondered how it can possibly feel to have made a small mistake that so altered the life of your child? You must keep replaying that moment, wishing it could be undone.
And then, again because my mind –or perhaps anyone’s—rarely follows an orderly sequence, I thought of Dick, the old Vermont lumberjack I’d known when I was slightly older than that young woman. He married twice, his first wife having died in birthing their fifth child, who died during delivery too. He fathered two more children with his second spouse, who outlived him by almost twenty years.
Dick’s manner was terse, and he had a nose for bald truth. I suddenly recalled something he said, and not only about working in the woods: There’s always a trap set for you.
When I got out of my car at home, I gazed up at the moon again. It looked as sharp as one of Dick’s axes.
Without Grace Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out.
–A.E. Housman
Once shaped like the smirky smile of a cynic, that scar on my calf—a bit above my slightly arthritic right ankle– has somehow turned downward. It vaguely resembles the well-remembered frown of our hockey coach, who frequently reprimanded me for some graceless, feckless play I’d made.
There are notions that, even as an old man, I apparently can’t relinquish. Deep inside, I still yearn to be Bob Feller, Gordie Howe, Y.A. Tittle, or any childhood hero who never seemed to doubt himself.
If only pompon-wielding girls had mounted a cheer for me alone! One of them might have wanted my ring. Or someone, anyone, my autograph. Sometime.
Might have.
The sky overhead is still the sky. It’s still devoid of signature or sign. And I remain what I am and was, and nothing more. Nothing.
Yes, much has turned to pallor, but some pains abide, undeniably there. Most are dull by now, true enough, but some still aren’t. I recall especially that bull-shouldered defenseman’s stick, which, like the vaudeville hook, yanked me by the neck and off my skates. The thug got ejected; I got a nasty gash just below the occipital bone on my right side. That scar is buried under hair, which, unlike its vanished kin on top, endures there.
Coach, inspecting blood on my jersey, seemed oddly satisfied, and oddly reluctant to see me driven to the clinic.
And oh, that impossibly beauteous nurse in her crisp white uniform!
My speech hindered by longing and by rushing ether, I watched the mask swell with my whisper: “so graceful…”
She appeared to consider the delicate gold watch on her unblemished wrist.
I must be wrong to recall a yawn.