Harryville

Imagine me, a middle-aged woman, closing my eyes and spreading my arms wide to accept flight. At first the wind has its way with me as I tumble from breeze to breeze. I gain my airlegs quickly, though, and soon I'm playing give and take with the currents. They pull me from my territorial patch of sky; I win it back. At a hundred feet, the air tastes sweeter.

On the ground below, my father Harry and his grandson Joshua are busy ignoring the flying woman above them. When a sudden breeze knocks me off-balance, my shadow plays a frantic game of charades on the ground before them. Joshua doesn't notice, and wouldn't care if he did. "Mom gave us that money," the boy shouts at Harry, who just blew all they had on baseball cards. "And you got nothin' left? Some v'it was `esposed to be for me too."

Getting no response from the old man, Joshua looks up and sees nothing. Across the street, a maple is an avid shade of orange. The wind shakes loose a few of its surviving leaves. Languidly, they seek the ground and die. This goes unnoticed by Joshua, who is too mad to notice much of anything, and by Harry, who is busy sorting his stack of baseball cards. "Dwight Gooden? Who's he?" asks Harry, showing the card to Joshua.

Joshua grabs the card. "Dwight Gooden! You never heard of Dwight Gooden? He plays for the Mets."

The two of them stare at one another, equally incredulous, until Harry asks, "You mean the Giants?"

"The New York Giants?" laughs Joshua, shaking his head in disbelief. "That's football, stupid. Dwight Gooden plays baseball. And he plays for the New York Mets."

Harry doesn't feel like pursuing it any farther. He gets up, stretches his legs, cracks his knuckles, and begins to walk down the road.

Joshua watches Harry begin to wander off. "Grampa. Wait up," he calls, running to catch the old man.

"Are you sure?" When the child nods his head again, the old man turns and walks toward home, reciting the batting order of the 1934 New York Giants.

My shadow stumbles over the terrain as it races past them. With a ghostly ease, I descend from the sky into a long dead life. Dreams of flight often accompany feelings of dissatisfaction, a crime to which I plead no contest. The only trouble with dreams is that you wake up, as I just have, to find yourself in the same situation that made you close your eyes in the first place.

On the table next to my bed is a photograph containing what I remember to be my family. It was taken as we all crammed uncomfortably close together on a Sunday afternoon in 1965. It is a good picture, though it has yellowed some in the twenty-seven years since it was taken, and four of the six images exist today only as memories. They serve as evidence that I come from good, sane stock. If you look closely, you can see a cousin of mine making rabbit ears behind my head. The truly insane would never stoop to a parlor trick like that.

The odd-looking gentleman in the back of the photo (imagine Albert Einstein's impersonation of a deer caught in the headlights of an onrushing car) is my father Harry. His hands rest on the shoulders of Benjamin, my cousin who, six years later, at his birthday party, would disappear mysteriously and presumably die. That day Harry was pretending to be a magician. When he asked for a volunteer from the audience, Benjamin raised his hand and then climbed into The Amazing Harry's magic cardboard box. The magician waved his wand (a Number 2 pencil) and kicked the box. We in the audience all heard Benjamin yell "Hey!" That memory is very distinct because it was the last thing any of us would ever hear him say. Benjamin really did disappear. As we began to clap, the magician looked confused, apparently no longer a magician. A lost-soul look appeared on his face. At that crucial moment in time, Harry's insanity played the cruelest of jokes: it forgot the end of the trick. It forgot how to make Benjamin reappear.

Unfortunately, this happened long before modern technology gave us wonders such as missing-child milk cartons. After filing a report with the police and a thorough search of the area, there was nothing more that we could do except to go home, pray and reminisce. The trouble was, Benjamin hadn't yet done anything worth reminiscing. That didn't remain a problem for long. Benjamin became something of a family fascination after that, with memories of him taking on an increasingly speculative quality. In death, he was far more interesting than he had ever been in real life. We all began inventing our favorite Benjamin stories after that. That he had never done any of these things didn't matter. On the other hand, how could anyone know for certain? Who could tell what someone capable of climbing in a cardboard box and disappearing could do?

My own Benjamin story is typically bizarre and deviates from the usual plot only to the extent that it is true. When I was in the second grade, on Good Friday, Harry, Benjamin and I reenacted the Crucifixion. Harry, of course, got the starring role, with Benjamin and I cast as thieves, flanked off to either side of Harry. Or as he put it, "I'm the Son of God and you guys are a couple of schnooks."

Neither Benjamin nor I were particularly keen on the idea but for Harry dreams die hard. "Come on, you panzies, all families do this. Come watch daddy die on the cross like a Jewish savior," he said, as he led us down the hall to my bedroom.

The three of us assumed the position standing with our backs to the wall on my Underdog bedspread, staring across the room at my Herculoids wallpaper. Still Harry wasn't satisfied. "Come on, people. Work with me. They're supposed to believe you're dying. Do you want to go to heaven or not? You know, God hates bad actors worse than communists! You're not a communist, are you, Comrade?"

So we did, until I began to wonder if all of this was worth the effort. "What's heaven like, anyway?" I asked.

Benjamin thought that it consisted of angels sitting on clouds and watching cartoons all day. That didn't seem right to me: that people would live a life of self-sacrifice just to spend eternity in the presence of Dudley Do-Right. I turned to our Lord for guidance. "No, what's it really like?"

Harry looked at me like I'd asked a stupid question. "Pretty much like this," he said. I looked at the three of us in the mirror and prayed to him he was wrong.

"That's it?" He told me I'd have to spend some time in purgatory until I thought of better sins. Then he asked Benjamin the same question.

"Oh, good one," he said. Then, to me: "Now, that's a thief." Then, to Benjamin: "Verily I say unto thee, this day thou and I shall be in paradise watching Thundercats."

I could see the hunger on Harry's face. "Father forgive them for they know not what they do woman behold thy son my God why hast thou forsaken me I thirst it is finished. Ow, ow, ow. Okay, I'm dead. Let's eat."

I sometimes wonder if I would have turned out differently had I not been crucified at such an early age. The face of the little girl beside Benjamin in the photo, squinting defiantly into the setting sun, is so earnest. Her mind is filled with dreams of a superwoman that I will never be. Looking at her now, as I stand in her bedroom, I realize that she's about the same age as Joshua is now. Our son is just becoming more aware of who his mother is. He thinks that I am a writer, but writing to a five-year-old amounts to nothing more than penmanship. I suspect he imagines that I spend endless hours practicing my letters. On the contrary, my work has never been that creative. Three decades have resulted in nothing more than a bunch of trite stories containing stiff characters who are driven by the will to succeed despite all odds and who have no time in their lives for cartoons like Harry and me. I have written none of her masterpieces. Back then, anything seemed possible. Growing up around Harry gave the world a false, magical quality. Her dreams were destined to go unfulfilled, slipping away one by one until her perfect future became my tense present.

Surrounding the little girl in the photo, relatives stand, proud and dead. Basking in the surrealistic glow of the sunset, against the malaise of our rotting barn and dead leaves twisting in the breeze, they smiled. The barren trees flexed in the wind and with the flash of the camera their deformity was frozen, along with my family's dreams, forever. Gone now is Mother, Uncle Dave, and Aunt Eloise. They were victims of leukemia, a car accident, and a rare blood disease that I forget the name of, respectively. A neighbor was behind the camera when the photo was taken and thereby escaped its curse. As for what happened to Benjamin, I haven't the slightest idea. For all anyone knows he could be living today, like a phoenix having risen from its ashes, as Axl Rose. That would be the one life that even we could have not imagined.

As I lie awake in bed and gaze at the picture sitting on the nightstand, my thoughts drift back to 1965. Benjamin and I sat in the living room listening to older folks at the dining room table talk about Harry as though he wasn't there. My father didn't realize that he should be offended. His brother Dave was a working stiff if there ever was one, and Harry's condition, whatever it is, irked him to no end.

On that particular day Dave asked Harry what he wanted to be when he grew up. That was when I first realized that Benjamin and I might beat him to adulthood. "What are you going to do when you grow up, Benjamin?" I asked, assuming that he would.

He seemed impressed by this. "You gonna write about yourself or make it all up?"

"I don't have to," I said. "I'll just write about my dad." Soon after that I began a diary documenting my father's insanity. For instance:

I set the diary down, turn off the light, and try to envision what my dead relatives would think were they here right now. Even though I know it's really just the wind, I listen closely as I drift off to sleep and imagine that I can hear them speak.

"Is Ellen asleep yet?" asks mother.

"Hard to tell," says Dave. "She's never really awake."

Benjamin peers out beyond the frame and into my room, which is dark except for my Scooby Doo nightlite. He leaps out of the photo, still picture-size, onto the nightstand and then onto my pillow. He gently lifts my eyelid and looks into my sleeping eye. He lets the lid slap shut and whispers back to the others that the coast is clear.

One by one, they emerge from the picture, bitching like a bunch a New Yorkers. Dave helps my mother climb down from the frame. "I haven't moved for so long," she says, "We stand there and watch these people and all they do is nothing. All day long, they do nothing, and we have to watch."

"I know, my cheeks are so sore," says Dave. "It feels like I've been smiling forever."

They crowd together on the nightstand, regarding me as if I was the dead one. Uncle Dave turns back to the picture, to a black-and-white Ellen, my ten-year-old other self, and calls for her to join him. She scrambles down from the frame and takes her place among the others beside my bed. "Who's that?" she asks, pointing at me.

"You," says Dave, "In about twenty years."

Ellen looks to Harry as if for confirmation, but receives only a blank stare.

Dave loops his arm around Ellen's waist and speaks in comforting, grown-up tones, but what he says is anything but comforting; not to the present me, and not to the me who is forever ten.

"You followed Harry around," he says, "And look where it got you. We can measure your life by the things you don't have. A job. A husband. A future. And what you do have--namely, a son--you shouldn't have without the things you don't have."

Harry leaps down on the bed and pulls back the covers. "And look! She's flat-chested, too!"

"I don't know, they look about right to me," says Benjamin. He races across my chest and climbs up my breast. He grabs my nipple, causing it to grow erect, which impresses him all the more. He begins to laugh but falls onto my belly as I roll over and smother him.

"Quick, " says Harry, "Tickle her so she rolls back over."

This spectacle is all a bit much for the Protestant sensibilities of Mother and Dave. Mother takes little Ellen's hand and leads her back toward the picture. "You shouldn't be looking at this," she snipes.

"But it's my chest!" Ellen protests.

"Not yet it isn't," says Dave, as he helps the two of them over the threshold of the frame and into the picture. They walk toward home and normalcy without looking back. As Benjamin and Harry hasten to rejoin the others, lights go on in the picture of our house.

This is why I prefer to do my dreaming during the daytime. Dreams have a tendency to become uncontrollable once the sun goes down, with unchecked desires escaping conscious chains. A breeze on the back of my neck unleashes a flood of happy endings to otherwise unhappy relationships. In one particular dream, I live with an old boyfriend of mine named Art in a bungalow in California overlooking a ravine. I spend my days at home writing popular, yet critically acclaimed television scripts, a rehashing of the old M*A*S*H formula.

The dream disappears when the breeze turns to hot breath, then to kisses. My eyes gradually focus on the room's features. Everything is the same as when I went to sleep, except for the tongue on the back of my neck. "Art?" I say, still half-asleep.

"Who's the hell's Art?" asks Harry. His arm slithers around my waist and pulls me closer.

"Harry! What are you doing here?"

"Shhhh. I live here, you silly bitch. Now be quiet or you're going to wake everyone up." It's a voice I've never heard before: low and hoarse and full of dirty romance, like Clark Gable making an obscene phone call.

Harry's mind is operating under the premise that I am Mother. He kisses me softly on the cheek and I wonder if she would have been receptive to such a kiss, if she would have rolled over and let him make love to her as I lay sleeping in the bedroom above them. "Harry, don't. You're going to wake up Ellen," I say, toying with him. Just mentioning myself in third person causes me to shiver.

"Who?" he asks.

"Ellen. Our daughter?"

Harry laughs. Apparently the memories that I cherish seem trivial to him. Never mind that we went to the moon together in my Red Rider wagon and looked for signs of intelligent life amid the moontrees, mooncrows, moondeer, mooncorn, and moonchucks. However real they seemed at the time, they were only characters in a life being acted and written at the same time. Nothing ever occupies a special spot in his heart. Harry is the sun; Joshua and I are only planets.

My father, to whom I am no one special, lays back, hands cradling his head, and stares at the ceiling. A flash of lightning from an approaching storm illuminates our awkward situation.

"Harry, I'm your daughter. Why don't you remember me?"

"It's infatuation," says Harry. "It makes you stupid."

As the rumble of thunder fills the room, he reaches for my breast and I elbow him in the stomach. "Go to sleep, Harry. I mean it."

I wake to the sounds of birds singing, dogs barking, and my son shouting bullets at his grampa. "Bang! Bang! Bang! Fall down, you're dead!" It's cowboys and Indians today. Joshua, the cowboy, is in the treehouse trying to hold the fort with a dart gun. Harry is wearing only boxer shorts and has ketchup and mustard war-paint smeared on his chest. The Indian's pale, loose skin jiggles as he does a war-dance around the treehouse.

Then Harry stops dancing. He picks up an apple, twists off the stem, tosses it into the treehouse, and imitates the sound of an explosion. "You're dead. That was a grenade."

"Indians don't have grenades," shouts Joshua.

"They can if they want to. Don't be such a baby_you've had a full life."

"You lie," screams his grandson. "Play fair or I'm gonna quit."

"I can't help it if you shoot like shit."

I open my bedroom window. "Hurry up and die, Harry. Joshua's coach is going to be here to take him to baseball practice in half an hour."

"Mom, Grampa won't play fair."

There is a dart suction-cupped to Harry's forehead. "Harry, are you sure Joshua didn't shoot you?"

He feels his chest for bullet wounds. With the body of an old man but the mannerisms of a child, he looks up at me and shrugs his shoulders. His legs are crossed as though he has to go to the bathroom. His head sways side to side like Stevie Wonder's.

"Come on, Joshua. Hurry up and get ready. I'll fix you some breakfast."

"Me'n Grampa already did it."

"What'd you fix?"

"Scrambled eggs, pop tarts, pancakes, toast, orange juice, oatmeal, and cereal."

How I didn't wake up earlier, I'll never know. The kitchen is a mess. Smoke is rising from the toaster. There is broken glass everywhere. A pancake is beginning to peel away from the ceiling. On the stove, a vat of molten oatmeal gurgles, exploding blobs into the air which ignite when they strike the burner. Were Harry here now, a tribe of imaginary Hawaiians would be offering a sacrifice to appease Jemima, the God of Breakfast Foods. My every step toward the stove is accompanied by the Velcro sound of a barefoot mother walking through a dried pool of orange juice. Eventually, the two of them resorted to dry cereal. On the kitchen table sits a bowl of Alphabits. H-A-R-R-Y is spelled out next to the bowl. I drop the letters, one by one, into sour milk.

The back door slaps shut, and the cowboy enters to complain again about the undead Indian. Harry, who is still alive, runs into the house, shoots Joshua with a rubber-tipped arrow, and runs past him, past me, and out the front door. Waves of milk, like echoes, ripple away from Harry's name as Joshua chases after him out into the front yard.

Harry shouts at Joshua: "You're dead, I shot you."

"No, you're dead, I shot you."

"You're so dead, you don't even know you're dead."

This is getting silly. Now out in the front yard with them, I ask Harry to stop taunting Joshua.

"No," says Harry. "You stop taunting Joshua."

"Come on, Harry. Die like a warrior. You are an Indian, aren't you?"

"No, you're the Indian."

"Mom?" asks Joshua. "Are you an Indian, too?"

"I don't know. Whatever. If Harry says I'm an Indian, then I guess I'm an Indian."

So then the cowboy shoots me. Just like that, he shoots his own mother.

Harry looks into my eyes intently, as though I were a statue. His hand touches my cheek. There is a look on his face I rarely see: recognition. Harry knows who I am.

He turns to Joshua and says: "She and I just met and I feel like I've known her all her life. So maybe she wasn't so good-looking. And her credit was lousy. That didn't mean you had to go off and kill her. I couldn't have loved her more if she were my own daughter."

Then he sees that Joshua is pointing his gun right at him. "Say your prayers, injun'," says the cowboy, as he shoots his grampa.

My knees buckle and I fall to the ground and pretend to die. Make-believe blood flows onto the ground. A breeze blows and dead leaves rush to bury my corpse. Deaths in Harryville are as peaceful as the lives. Only here is it possible to live and die each day. The next life always holds such promise. I lie in a shallow, leave-covered grave and wonder what tomorrow's life will bring.

Staring up into the sun, trying to be as ethereal as possible, I can hear a car pull into the driveway. The car door slams. Every step taken toward my body is accompanied by a serious crunch of gravel.

"Don't talk to them. They're dead," warns Joshua.

His coach stares at Harry and me. "They look alive to me."

"They're not really dead, just pretend dead."

"I see," says the coach, but he really doesn't. As the two of them make their way towards the car parked in the drive, he keeps looking back at me.

Standing above me, the still-dying Indian is making a show of it. He is howling in mock horror and staggering around with a calculated randomness. He feels his wound, then raises his hands to the sky, offering his pretend blood to an uncaring god. Finally, he falls to the ground next to me. I, already dead but dreaming of tomorrow, listen to his heavy breathing until it stops.

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Chrislip College Journal

Harryville