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By Meaghan Mulholland
Two months before he died my father took my sister and me to the beach, and that's the glimpse I hold of him -- sitting on the towel with his knees to his chest, looking past us to the horizon. It was long ago, and I was a young girl; he was a man, nearing what should have been the middle of his life. He remains in my memory the way he looked that day; sunburned, windblown, distant. We shrieked with laughter when he tossed us into the waves, the chilling water that stung our eyes and left our bodies gritty with salt. Afterward we wrapped ourselves in bright terry towels and walked to the concession, where he bought us red and blue slushes in damp paper cones. I remember his body, the drops beaded on his pale belly, the dark hairs plastered in webbed trails across his chest, how he tousled his balding head with a towel; the close clean smell of him when he leaned over me to pat my overturned pail of sand smooth.
Dad sat glistening, drying, his back flecked with pieces of dried kelp, his forehead gleaming in the noon sun. The radio on the blanket beside us played Oldies. We ate sweet dripping oranges and the sand stuck to our fingers. He squinted at the ocean, the edges of his mouth turned down, his eyes two slits -- the way they would look later, in the hospital, when his face was bloated from the morphine coma, and he lay choking on a respirator tube. I don’t remember him that way, as the man on the hospital gurney; that was not my father. I remember him as I saw him on the sand that day at the beach. I didn’t study him, or try to memorize his face; I thought then that I would always be able to grasp his hand just before the wave came plummeting down on us.
In the memories of sunglass reflections, the bodies glistening tan-oil sweat, the low-tide creek stink, the hiss of hot sand, the mourning gulls -- my own father's face is just a memory. When the sun was low, at the end of the day, I begged him to take us to Salt Island --we weren't allowed to cross the sand bar alone -- but he said it was too late, that we would go next time. We were always on the verge of something, then; there was always something more to look forward to. As he packed the sun-lotion and our sandwich wrappers into the bag I ran, a tall shadow against the sand, and threw myself into the current, calling to him, my breath caught in the shock of cold water. Look Dad, I'm swimming by myself, my feet aren't touching! He straightened himself against the cool sky and waved. I can see him that way, blurred above the water-line, a distant golden figure. I see it all now, the amazement; I see what he meant when he promised that even without his strong arm under my belly I could stay afloat, that the water would hold me up.
****
Hank Feldman looks nothing like my father. Daddy was a tall man with dark eyes and broad shoulders who never got old. Hank is tiny, at least seventy, hunched and wrinkled. His eyes are pale blue, vacant as the winter sky. He sits quietly in the window seat as I shove my duffel into the overhead compartment and collapse into my place on the aisle, dumping my purse on the seat between us. He waits a few moments, until I have fastened my seatbelt, leaned my head back and closed my eyes, and then taps my shoulder.
I am tired, but agree to give Hank my seat when he explains he will need to rise repeatedly to use the restroom during our two-hour flight from Chicago to Boston. I like to be near the window, anyway; to look down on clouds.
When we are settled into our places he asks, "Are you coming or going?"
"Coming," I reply, resigning myself to a few moments of small-talk. "Coming home." I will tell him I live in Boston, that I am a music teacher, that I grew up on the north shore of Massachusetts. I will not tell him this was my first visit to Chicago, or that the so-called specialists at the hospital there can't help me; that I am probably dying, and at thirty-five years old I might die before he does.
But he asks nothing else. He tells me he lives in a small Illinois town called Palwaukee, and is going to his granddaughter’s high school graduation. “She’s off to college,” he says, his voice wavering like the air above asphalt on a hot summer’s day. "Can’t believe it.”
During the flight attendants’ safety demonstration Hank watches, alert and interested, as they explain how to breathe, how to float, how to escape in case the plane should catch fire or plummet from the sky. I look out the window to the paved runway, where men in bright-colored jumpsuits scurry about, searching for something.
“You know what,” he comments, as the plane lifts into the air, “things have changed since I flew myself. I was a crop duster in the fifties.”
I am only half-listening, thinking instead about the oncologist I’d met the day before, the silver paperweight I’d stared at when he told me about experimental treatments, waiting lists, the unpredictable nature of what lay ahead.
“…different technology,” Hank continues. “It’s all done with computers. The planes, even the little twin engines I flew, are different.”
Out the window the ground spirals away from us, dissolving into atmosphere. I close my eyes, in awe of technology, of the miracle that carries me thirty-thousand feet into the sky; of the measurements these pilots make, using instruments of time and wind.
****
“Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”
I wake to lights below me; they blur and waver as though I’m peering through the glass at the iridescence on a sea floor. Hank shuffles down the aisle, and returns to his seat beside me.
When he smiles, I notice his face droops on one side – the effect of a stroke, perhaps. I hadn’t noticed before, as that side was turned away from me. His pale eyes are cloudy behind their thick glasses. He says, “You, know, the worst thing about getting old is the surprises. You just keep being surprised by all the things your body does to you!”
I laugh as politely as I can. Not knowing how to respond to this, I say: “Well, you look great.”
“That’s very nice of you,” he says. “Don’t listen to me, anyway. You’re young and beautiful. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.”
The lights in the cabin shut off, then, and a bodiless voice intones, Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our final descent. I turn to the window and feel myself floating, submerged in some futuristic womb, staring not into the empty sockets of my skull’s reflection but out to a silent void. The plane circles Boston Harbor and I see a peninsula jutting out like a crooked finger beneath us, spider-webbed with thin trails of light. Around it the utter blackness of the harbor joins the blackness of the sky, seamless and desolate. I try to imagine that Hank and I are adrift in space, ageless and untouchable.
But Earth ascends, and the world comes back to us. Now I can make out illuminated stadiums, dark lawns rimmed with streetlights, freeways illuminated by white headlights streaming in one direction, and red taillights streaming in the other. As the plane lowers; billboards and office buildings glow into focus. Hank says it’s nothing like when he landed in the black cornfields of Waukegan Illinois, where two rows of lights were the only thing marking the solitary runway from the surrounding darkness. It was like landing in a jungle, or an African plain; some wild, undiscovered country. Even now, as an old man, he feels the same slight tensing of his muscles, the same inner steadying of himself, as if he grips the yoke in his own age-mottled hands and prepares to touch down.
You’re taught where to focus when you land, he says; to look ahead at the horizon and the end of the runway, rather than down at the Earth – that could be perilous. I have spent my recent life looking only at the sidewalk beneath my feet, afraid to think of what is coming; able only to glance back, occasionally, at the receding landscape of places I’ve been. I wonder if my father still sees me; if he would even recognize me now. It seems a lifetime has passed since I knew him. I like to think he remembers me as that child, sun-warmed and laughing, who learned how to swim at Good Harbor Beach.
Now I press my forehead to the glass, watching the pavement below whiz past like a swift gray river, and my breath catches in anticipation. “This is it,” Hank says. Reaching for the armrest between us, he accidentally grasps my arm, and for a brief moment his hand is cold against my skin. We sit watching, waiting, knowing at any moment we’ll feel the lurch and rumble of the plane’s wheels touching earth, that always-surprising jolt of reconnection.
Page last updated: 12/16/2008 14:07
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