|
Two hours left.
I stare into the mirror and back at my face. Dark circles shadow my eyes and I look like a wreck. I haven’t slept in a couple days, haven’t even given sleep much thought until now. I could sleep forever, I imagine. That’s probably what I need.
I’m in the bathroom at Grandma’s and Grandad’s house—but it’s only Grandma’s house now, I tell myself—and the only light is this night light plugged into a wall socket. It’s a sort of candle, like the ones Grandma keeps in front of the windows and lights occasionally. Their flickering and dancing makes her look mysterious and ancient and wise. “Candles show us the way to Heaven,” she always tells me. But this isn’t a flickering show-me-Heaven candle; its spectral orange glow is constant and makes my face look like lifeless marble, like a ghost, like Grandad probably did years ago.
My mother loves candles too, and places them sporadically throughout our house. She prefers the scented ones you buy at those gift shops downtown over the long tapering candles Grandma loves. She just likes their smell. Grandma doesn’t like those because she says they kill history. Her house smells like a house should; years and years of collected knick-knacks from Japan, England, and other places clutter her shelves and bring their own native scent to the home. The library she and Grandad built over the years, soft old leather bound tomes and yellowed paperbacks held together with rubber bands, smells like—and at the same time completely unlike—a public library. A scented candle would destroy what had taken decades to create.
In the fake candle light, I try to remember how to tie my tie like Dad taught me at home. He tied his own as an example and I watched him, but didn’t really understand. “Now, you try it.” I tried and tried, but somehow I always managed to create a knot the Boy Scouts would envy. After awhile of trial and error, he told me we couldn’t spend anymore time learning how to tie a tie. “Just find me before I leave with Jim and Greg.” Jim and Greg are his brothers, my uncles.
Over and around and through, over and around and through.
An hour passes and I stare at myself and try not to think of Grandad. I don’t want to think about the present; I want to live in the past and relive those fishing trips to the creek at the bottom of the hill. I want to remember how he’d ask me how school was going.
“It’s fine. We learned how to tie knots in Boy Scouts this week.”
Over and around and through.
“Tying the knot, you say? Aren’t you a bit young to think about marrying that sweetheart of yours?”
I’d laugh. “No, silly. Knots. You know, like rope.”
Or ties.
I was always close to Grandad. Every summer when we were younger, my sister and I would ask Mom and Dad if we could stay with Grandma and Grandad for a month, and they would let us. All summer, Grandad and I would go to the parks and feed the geese, run through fields pretending to be rabbits, and then he would buy a couple ice cream cones from the Baskin-Robbins. We would sneak around to the side of the house to enjoy our treat. We’d laugh and sit huddled close together under the kitchen window, three feet from Grandma’s simmering pots and steaming pans.
“Be sure she doesn’t see you with that ice cream, Rob. She thinks it’ll ruin your dinner, but I say eat all the ice cream you want and to hell with dinner.”
There’s a knock at the bathroom door. It’s my sister wanting to know if I am in there.
“Yes,” I reply. Over and around and through, but always a knot and never a nice, clean tie.
“Hurry up. I need to take a quick shower.”
“Alright. Let me figure out how to tie this tie real fast.”
She sounds exasperated and tells me we are pressed for time. “Can’t you do it somewhere else? Go in one of the bedrooms or something.”
I open the door and walk out as she walks in. There is a bedroom with a tall mirror over the dresser just to the right of the bathroom. I go in and lock the door. This is my bedroom when I come to stay with Grandma and Grandad. Grandad would wake me up every morning and we would eat a bowl of cream of wheat with syrup together and watch the morning news. He always made comments about the anchormen.
“What was that, Koppel? Did the prompter screw up your cards, eh? Having trouble keeping it all together?” He laughed with his whole body and I laughed too, even though I usually didn’t understand his jokes.
Thirty minutes left.
I stare at myself in the mirror. Over and around and through. It seemed so simple watching Dad’s demonstration.
Now that Grandad’s gone, I wonder whether or not this room will still be mine. Certainly, it will most likely be reserved for me should I ever want it, but will it feel the same? There won’t be Grandad to wake me up with his usual “are you going to sleep all day, boy?” There won’t be birdhouses or parks or Baskin-Robbins. Grandma will still be here, but as much as I love her, she doesn’t understand the subversive joy of ruining your supper like Grandad did.
I try once more to tie this tie.
Grandad is dead.
The thought hits me for the first time. I know that he’s dead, but it feels like something made up rather than anything concrete or definite.
Grandad is dead.
Everything we’ve done together becomes one event and I have trouble distinguishing one summer from another. Did I learn how to swim the same summer the hurricane blew the biggest tree in the backyard over? Was this the same summer that I wove a hundred lanyards, tied a thousand tiny knots of plastic, and tried to sell them door-to-door? It all becomes one summer, one Christmas, one Thanksgiving, fifteen years of conscious thought compressed into a single year.
I look in the mirror.
Over and around and through.
Through.
I’m through dwelling on it. Grandad wouldn’t want it this way. He’d tell me how little time we have on God’s green Earth and to go read a book or do something, anything but sit around and mope. So I dry the tears I hadn’t known that I’d been crying with the corner of my tie. It’s wrapped around my neck and the knot is in place, although a bit lopsided.
I look at it and then at the reflection of my room in the mirror. Everything is backwards and I can’t read any of the titles of the books on the shelf, but nothing is out of place.
There’s a knock at my door. “Rob, are you ready? It’s time for the procession to Shady Oaks.” I open the door for my father. “What have you been doing in there? You’ve been in there for a while.”
“Just teaching myself how to tie a tie, Dad.”
|