Contrary Motion Read online

  The family room is shadowed with indirect late-afternoon light. Crowding the windows, on sills and stands and hanging in baskets, are all kinds of plants—aloe, ferns, hibiscus, and other green things I don’t know the names of—that my mother tends to diligently. On the wall opposite the windows are squat bookcases stacked on low, barge-like dressers. The shelves are filled with classic novels; spirituality, psychology, and philosophy paperbacks; and ten-pound art books, all of which my father snagged from the Goodwill for pennies on the dollar. Sitting on a dresser top, in front of the shelves, is an old food processor.

  For as long as I can remember, but more intensively after he retired ten years ago, my father shopped thrift stores and rummage sales, scouting mainly for unloved appliances he could rehabilitate or cannibalize for parts. He couldn’t resist making broken things work, repairing toasters and microwaves for neighbors and friends, gifting relatives with rehabbed blenders and vacuum cleaners, regardless of need. He tinkered feverishly in the basement, as if he were repairing a crucial solar panel on a dying space station. When he would emerge for meals, his fuse was as short as a firecracker’s, his sense of humor sarcastic as hell. Between bouts with the appliances, he chugged hardcore books on psychology and spirituality—everything from James Hillman to the Upanishads—though he remained as tightly wound as a first-octave A string.

  “Matthew, is that you?” my mother calls. She appears at the top of the short flight of steps, wearing an apron over slacks and a blouse.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say. “I’m sorry,” I murmur as I climb the stairs.

  “I know, I know,” she says. Her eyes are puddles behind her big plastic-rimmed glasses.

  We hug. “Why didn’t he listen?” she asks the air behind me. “Why didn’t he listen?” The sentiment is bitter but she whispers it like an endearment, trying to bond with me over how frustrating he was for her.

  She moves on to hug Audrey. “Hi, little honey,” she says in a louder voice. “Your grandpa was a good man. Did you know that?”

  Audrey nods solemnly.

  We head into the kitchen, and I find that of my six siblings, only the two other out-of-towners are stopping in for dinner. Three years older than me, my brother Tim is a portfolio manager in Boston. He’s been divorced for a couple of years now, never had kids. Tall and athletic-looking with a sharp crew cut, he has confessed to me that he has an uncontrollable thing for women who tend the cash registers of convenience stores and gas stations, at least one of whom broke up his marriage. He rises for a firm handshake that evolves into a back-patting hug. Emily is a high school social studies teacher in Phoenix with large, strong hands and a black belt in Kobudo. Eyes downcast, she moves in for a quick tight embrace. Her husband, Patrick, a clean-cut, blue-eyed lawyer who drafts legislation in Arizona’s statehouse, and their kids, Gretchen and Otto, are also seated at the table. Patrick reaches for a handshake and gives me a tight-lipped nod.

  My mother has held off dinner as long as possible, but apparently everyone was just sitting down to eat when we arrived. The visitation starts at the funeral parlor in a little over an hour and everyone still needs to get dressed.

  Looking pale, shoulders slumped, Mom leads us in the standard meal blessing, everyone aware that this is Dad’s job. No longer observant, I mumble along with my hands together, barely vocalizing at all, but somehow unable to avoid participation.

  People start serving themselves in silence, which only brings back more strongly memories of childhood meals with all nine of us passing dishes and slurping and wiping our mouths on our sleeves and yammering and laughing. Bart, George, and Luke, my three oldest brothers, might trade baseball cards, knuckle each other in the ribs, or spoon half-chewed food from their own mouths onto each other’s plates. Tim would show me below table a grasshopper he’d trapped in a perforated sandwich baggie, and I’d respond with something I’d found in the ditch, maybe a rusty bolt or a small colored stone that held no interest for him. Our sisters—Mary Ellen and Emily—had their own conversations at the other end of the table, about which I can’t remember a thing. Though Dad was usually silent, stirring leftovers on his plate in appalling combinations, when he was in a good mood, he’d retell jokes he heard at work and begin laughing himself during the punch lines.

  I can’t remember the last time the whole family sat at this table together for supper, an arrangement gradually eroded by my brothers and sisters missing meals for practices, games, and jobs, and then moving out. It now strikes me as a moment that’s lost to history.

  Finally, Mom says, “Thank you for coming, everyone.”

  “Sure, Ma,” Emily says.

  I cut Audrey a small square of lasagna, praying she doesn’t complain out loud.

  “I warned him about the doughnuts,” Mom says, as if someone has asked. “I said, ‘You’re eating the stress!’ ”

  Lasagna is not one of your leaner foods, even though my mother has always made it with cottage cheese instead of ricotta. I decide against an ironic joke.

  “You tried to tell him,” I say.

  “I just wanted him to relax,” she says miserably.

  Dad had been scheduled on Thursday for what they called cryosurgery—basically, they were going to try to kill the cancer cells in his prostate by freezing them—and he was having trouble sleeping. When I talked to him on the phone about the procedure just a week ago, he said, “It’s nothing.” Then he added, “This is what I get for living so long.” In recent years these two statements, along with “What can you do?” were my father’s triumvirate of go-to expressions.

  “You did your best, Ma,” Emily says.

  “Thank God he had his faith back,” Mom concludes, as if his legendary “crisis of faith”—when Dad stopped going to church for a few months—happened recently and not over thirty years ago.

  “He did, Ma,” I say.

  “He put his house in order,” Tim intones, with a distant look in his eyes.

  I have no idea what Tim means by that.

  My father had his heart attack while listening to one of the meditation CDs my mother had been begging him to try. When my mother called me with the news, she said, “He was spiting me!”

  This seems entirely possible.

  Now the conversation stumbles, collapses, struggles to stand—like a drunk in a strange alley. We try to catch up with each other. Tim admits sheepishly that his fund is doing very well and the brokerage as a whole is doing even better. Mom is officially a self-sacrificing, blessed-are-the-poor sort of person, but it’s always been plain that she loves it when her kids thrive financially. Tim’s comment might seem a little selfish at a time like this, but it’s more likely to cheer her up than saying something about Dad.

  “How’s your business, Matthew?” Mom asks politely, though she’d just as soon see me pack in the harp and get a real job, one with which I could keep a wife and stabilize a family.

  “Never better,” I say, which isn’t saying much.

  I teach a handful of students and play weddings, brunches, and parties in Gold Coast high-rises, plus the occasional orchestra concert. Milena went fifty-fifty in the divorce, but I am slowly burning through my portion of our meager savings.

  “Never better,” she repeats, almost musing. “That’s nice,” she decides, as if my harp career and my father’s death are somehow parallel lines coming together at the vanishing point of civilization. In fact, my father had encouraged my music in his way, keeping me oversupplied with electronic metronomes. “Is Cynthia coming up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mom, she hasn’t met any of you and she’s busy,” I say a touch too sharply.

  “Just asking, honey,” she says calmly.

  “I know. Sorry,” I mutter in a frequency only a dog might hear. I blush violently at the memory of my phone call to Cynthia. “I’d like to have you with me,” I had said, “but I know you’re buried in filing deadlines right now.”

  “Whatever you nee
d,” Cynthia had replied.

  Now Audrey works at her lasagna with her fork, trying to separate the layers. If she doesn’t like what she’s been served, she often performs a sort of on-the-plate predigestion that involves breaking apart the food and spreading it around without actually taking a bite.

  As Tim offers my mother help getting her financial affairs in order, I whisper to Audrey, “It’s a lot like spaghetti, sweetie.” Emily’s ridiculously well-behaved preteens are chewing with their mouths closed, elbows off the table.

  Audrey whines in a muted way and paradoxically the memory of our meltdown in the car helps me keep a tenuous grip now. I offer her the basket of bread and she takes a piece and begins munching.

  “I shouldn’t have said a word about the doughnuts,” Mom suddenly throws in, rapping the knuckles of her tiny fist on her placemat. “He’d still be here!”

  —

  At the wake, my family forms a long receiving line, a bucket brigade of grief, passing mourners toward my father’s casket. The queue stretches out the door of the capacious viewing room, which seems to energize my mother, who asks about the people paying respects as much as she accepts condolences.

  Afterwards, Tim heads out, ostensibly to return to his hotel room but more likely for a mini-mart tour to indulge his romantic compulsions, while Emily and her family retire to two of the upstairs bedrooms at my mother’s house, where Audrey and I are also staying. As everyone else sleeps, I wander the house like a squirrel: moving abruptly to look at a picture on the wall, nibbling on some food, pausing, stepping up to a window, scratching my face with two hands, rising on my toes, listening.

  Eventually, because I can’t help myself, I approach the converted bedroom where my father died. Someone has pulled the door shut, but I turn the knob and the hollow brown wood door swings open to reveal a sewing table and a very old exercise bike. The post lamp on the front lawn casts upslanting light through the window, like a rising sun, spraying the tops of a few bookcases. The house is so quiet I can hear the dull roar of trucks and cars on I-94, which runs behind the houses across the street, the suburban version of oceanside surf. Across the room, green LED letters on the Goodwill stereo indicate that the CD player is engaged and disc one is still cued up.

  I turn on the lamp by the reading chair. On the floor at my feet is the blue exercise mat on which my father had his heart attack. Beneath this is a shag carpet in shades of green. These may have been the last square yards of sincere shag installed in the United States.

  At dinner, my mother had gone on to reveal that my father had brought home doughnuts again on his final day. They had stopped for skim milk and ground turkey and bananas at Jewel after church, but with these cheap and healthy items acquired, my father had directed the cart toward the bakery. She had dutifully stood by him, protesting only in a restrained way while he ordered his half-dozen Boston creams. But when they were home and Dad had eaten one and then started on a second, things had flared up, though she could not bear to tell us what had been said. Whatever it was, it made Dad smash the remainder of that doughnut plus the box with the four other offending pastries into the trash can, an act which took the argument to a whole new level.

  Yet by the end of the yelling my father had somehow agreed to try meditation instead of doughnuts to manage his fears about the upcoming cancer-on-ice procedure. For all of his anger, the man was never beyond giving in. But there are sacrifices that heal and sacrifices that are more like suicide bombings, designed to hurl shrapnel at loved ones. And it was probably the resentment and anger buried in this agreement that made him try meditating immediately, while he was still riled up. My mother, in her busybody way, was curious about whether he had “a nice meditation,” so after she heard through the door that the voice on the CD had stopped, she knocked, entered, and found him—right at my feet.

  I will not lie on the exercise mat of death, but I can’t stop myself from reaching over and pressing Play. A sensitive male voice comes on, soothing but too loud: “Welcome to Part 1 of the stress reduction and relaxation pro—” I turn down the volume, close the door, and turn off the light for good measure.

  I settle into the reading chair, and the voice goes on to assure me, as he did my father, “You are assuming an active and powerful role in improving your health.” He invites me to think of this meditation as “a nourishing time, a time you deserve to give yourself some positive energy and attention.” But even these words could have been an affront to my father because they imply you need help.

  “In doing work of this kind,” the voice continues, “it’s important to remember not to try too hard to relax. This will just create tension.” There: a note of accusation, of judgment. But then the voice rights itself and begins to narrate a meditation exercise. He asks my father to breathe with his toes. Then the bottoms of his feet. The tops of his feet. His ankles.

  When he gets all the way up to the thighs, an eerie wind stirs in my head, maybe a ghostly aftershock of my father’s passing in this very place, listening to these very words: it suddenly seems clear that by this moment in the CD my father was already gone. He must have known that he was trying too hard to relax, that he would always try too hard—even after the voice had warned him not to!—and this in turn would have produced more tension, creating an infinitely reinforcing stress loop, until my father had his final paroxysm.

  I think I should cry now, and my throat muscles tighten, and I have a strange facial event during which I seem to chew the air, but then the feeling rumbles away like distant dry thunder.

  I wish I could sell this version of events to my mother, to convince her that he died battling his demons, not her, but my intuitions rarely persuade others, and I’m reluctant to trespass on her grief. People’s emotions are just a series of flooded streets crisscrossed with downed power lines, and I try not to walk there. He was my father, but he was her husband, and she will want to own why he died as much as she wants to preside over the lives of her children.

  I sit in the dark for another few minutes, listening to the calm instructions, wondering which of these words were actually the last my father registered. Then I imagine I hear my mother’s slippers whispering toward me across the shag. I stop the CD, quickly leave the room, and close the door before she can find me here.

  —

  At the funeral mass, I play crushingly sad tunes at prelude time: “Clair de lune,” Gymnopédie no. 1, “Moonlight Sonata.” I should be missing notes through my tears, buzzing strings, eventually tipping over the harp and running from the room with my hands over my face. But no. Like an anorexic who brings rich desserts to the picnic and smiles politely while others foolishly indulge themselves, I play with what feels like an expression of bland concentration, laying it on thick as scattered weeping breaks out in the congregation. Audrey stands in the third row of my siblings and their families. Whenever I catch a glimpse of her, she is looking down but I can’t tell if she is moved or bored.

  After the mass, there’s a buffet lunch in the church basement. I slop some baked beans, potato chips, carrots, and a ham sandwich on my plate and sit on the periphery of my siblings and their spouses, not saying much. My brothers talk about home repair, and my sisters talk about each other’s kids. The only apartment dweller in the family, I express sincere amazement at the bathrooms remodeled and the drainage tiles laid. Audrey spends little time eating, and I let her hang out with a handful of cousins who eventually disappear, probably to run the halls of the parish school upstairs. Halfway through my chow, I dump my paper plate in a big trash barrel. Out in the corridor, I run into my brother George, who’s about six years older than me, exiting a restroom, self-consciously running a hand over his cue-ball head.

  In February, George finished nine months in Felmers Chaney Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison in Milwaukee, for insider trading in the shares of Joy Global, the company where he worked designing electric mining shovels. To make a new start and achieve “total transparency,” he shaved off
both his beard and his full head of hair.

  “Hey, George,” I say. “How’s it going?”

  “Could be worse,” he says. “I’ve got a lead on a job at Briggs and Stratton.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “I’ve learned my lesson, man,” he says. “Total transparency from now on.”

  “Right on,” I say. “Nothing to hide.”

  “Not anymore,” he says. “Not like our goddamn family.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. Look at the man who just died, our dear old dad. All the secrets.”

  “Well, they must be pretty well kept, because—”

  “The hospitalization, man. The nuthouse.”

  For a second, I wonder if he’s referring to his own incarceration in Felmers. “For Dad?”

  “Yes.” He nods emphatically. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “You were just a little shaver. Actually, it was right after you started playing the piano and Mom thought you were a genius. Anyway. Ancient history, well suppressed by Mom. Don’t bring it up with her. She’ll freak. The secrets must be maintained or the fragile people crumble.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Dad had some kind of nervous breakdown. Locked ward, suicide watch, the whole nine yards. ‘Crisis of faith’ is Mom’s cover story. Was on serious meds for the rest of his life, I’m pretty sure.”

  “He tried to kill himself?”

  “Who knows? That’s my point.”

  I don’t know how to respond, so I run my right hand up and down the inside edge of my open suit jacket as if I’m playing a glissando.

  “Look, I’m sorry, brother,” George adds. “This is the wrong time. I chose the wrong time.” But he says this last with a pinch of irony. “Now is the time to grieve.”

  He pats me twice, heavily, on my shoulder.

  “Our patriarch is dead,” he says soberly. “Long live Mom.”