water
Over the years, my father has erected monuments to his prosperity. These are: a gazebo, built from South American hardwood buried in North Dakota granite; an unattached four-car garage, complete with heating and air conditioning; a new wing on the house that is longer, wider, and a story taller than the original building; and, most recently, a Lincoln Continental, which I don’t see as my taxi drops me off in our hedge-lined gravel driveway. I try to pay the driver, but she waves me away, saying she’s already got her money. Bea, my stepmother, kisses me at the door, dressed for gardening in old jeans and a halter top that exposes her thin, thin back and arms. A pair of dirty gloves flop over her belt, and her exposed skin is shiny with suntan lotion. She smells of sweat and cocoa butter.
She speaks as if distracted, waving a hand at nothing. “He’s been sleeping at her place in town. Did you notice the well?” She steps past me on the porch and points across the yard.Near our forest’s edge squats a small brick cube topped by a wooden-shingled roof. “One hundred and twenty feet,” she says, already yards away from me on her way to the garden. “It’s amazing how deep you have to go to find water in Kansas.” She stops at the well, leans in, and her back muscles ripple as her arm works an invisible crank. I expect to see a bucket of water with a pewter dipper appear from the shadows, but instead plastic sprinkler heads pop from the ground and begin rotating slowly, their measured streams just overlapping at the edges. “His newest toy,” she calls over the sound of squirting jets, and then she watches the lawn until it begins to glow in the sun and water. “It’s yours if you want it, John.” “The well?” I call, confused. “The house,” she answers, and goes in the garden. She closes the gate of the rabbitproof fence behind her. Each of the sprinklers contains its own circular rainbow; they look like multicolored flowers, and I stare at Bea’s back through the mirage as she works in the half-grown patch of corn. Then the water stops, the rainbows disappear, and the sprinkler heads retreat into dampened earth. Across the lawn, I hear machinery humming as the well mines for more water.
“I DID IT all for love,” Barclay crooned Friday—yesterday—as he flounced across the small cluttered ruin of his apartment. “I lived for love and I shall die from love.” He smiled and rushed to a cracked mirror, checking his makeupto see if any red splotches were visible on his smooth cheeks or the brown dome of his bald head. He learned how to apply foundation in the early sixties, “when a flawless skin meant everything.” I’ve never known his age; he’s at least as old as my parents, I think, but somewhere along the line the effects of illness overtook the effects of aging. On the day he dies, he’s said, he will awaken early to do his face, and then lie back and smile, and let us find him like that. “It will probably be you, dear John, won’t it? Coming in here in your nice white shirts and loose black jeans. No more spaghetti-string tank tops and shredded cutoffs for you. Ah, how I miss the old days!” He giggled like a child at himself, then poked a finger in the brown bags on the table. “And now you bring me all these yucko healthy groceries. What do we have today?” he said, his thrice-weekly soliloquy concluded. “The usual,” I said, and pulled out organic vegetables and whole-grain pasta and rice, vitamin supplements, soy milk, and unprocessed bread. “Yucko, yucko, yucko,” Barclay moaned. “Macro-bioto yucko,” and he grabbed a handful of radishes and tossed them in the air with his limp wrists. They fell to the floor like cherry bombs attached to tattered green parachutes. As I picked them up, Barclay rushed by me, his stick-thin legs poking from his embroidered paisley dressing gown. His feet stepped silently in vinyl imitation-gentleman’s slippers, and he
Over the years, my father has erected monuments to his prosperity. These are: a gazebo, built from South American hardwood buried in North Dakota granite; an unattached four-car garage, complete with heating and air conditioning; a new wing on the house that is longer, wider, and a story taller than the original building; and, most recently, a Lincoln Continental, which I don’t see as my taxi drops me off in our hedge-lined gravel driveway. I try to pay the driver, but she waves me away, saying she’s already got her money. Bea, my stepmother, kisses me at the door, dressed for gardening in old jeans and a halter top that exposes her thin, thin back and arms. A pair of dirty gloves flop over her belt, and her exposed skin is shiny with suntan lotion. She smells of sweat and cocoa butter.
She speaks as if distracted, waving a hand at nothing. “He’s been sleeping at her place in town. Did you notice the well?” She steps past me on the porch and points across the yard.Near our forest’s edge squats a small brick cube topped by a wooden-shingled roof. “One hundred and twenty feet,” she says, already yards away from me on her way to the garden. “It’s amazing how deep you have to go to find water in Kansas.” She stops at the well, leans in, and her back muscles ripple as her arm works an invisible crank. I expect to see a bucket of water with a pewter dipper appear from the shadows, but instead plastic sprinkler heads pop from the ground and begin rotating slowly, their measured streams just overlapping at the edges. “His newest toy,” she calls over the sound of squirting jets, and then she watches the lawn until it begins to glow in the sun and water. “It’s yours if you want it, John.” “The well?” I call, confused. “The house,” she answers, and goes in the garden. She closes the gate of the rabbitproof fence behind her. Each of the sprinklers contains its own circular rainbow; they look like multicolored flowers, and I stare at Bea’s back through the mirage as she works in the half-grown patch of corn. Then the water stops, the rainbows disappear, and the sprinkler heads retreat into dampened earth. Across the lawn, I hear machinery humming as the well mines for more water.
“I DID IT all for love,” Barclay crooned Friday—yesterday—as he flounced across the small cluttered ruin of his apartment. “I lived for love and I shall die from love.” He smiled and rushed to a cracked mirror, checking his makeupto see if any red splotches were visible on his smooth cheeks or the brown dome of his bald head. He learned how to apply foundation in the early sixties, “when a flawless skin meant everything.” I’ve never known his age; he’s at least as old as my parents, I think, but somewhere along the line the effects of illness overtook the effects of aging. On the day he dies, he’s said, he will awaken early to do his face, and then lie back and smile, and let us find him like that. “It will probably be you, dear John, won’t it? Coming in here in your nice white shirts and loose black jeans. No more spaghetti-string tank tops and shredded cutoffs for you. Ah, how I miss the old days!” He giggled like a child at himself, then poked a finger in the brown bags on the table. “And now you bring me all these yucko healthy groceries. What do we have today?” he said, his thrice-weekly soliloquy concluded. “The usual,” I said, and pulled out organic vegetables and whole-grain pasta and rice, vitamin supplements, soy milk, and unprocessed bread. “Yucko, yucko, yucko,” Barclay moaned. “Macro-bioto yucko,” and he grabbed a handful of radishes and tossed them in the air with his limp wrists. They fell to the floor like cherry bombs attached to tattered green parachutes. As I picked them up, Barclay rushed by me, his stick-thin legs poking from his embroidered paisley dressing gown. His feet stepped silently in vinyl imitation-gentleman’s slippers, and he
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