Karl SherlockTHRIFTYour father dies, and for the rest of that week you awaken to a prayer of recollection about all the scraps of his life you'll want to hoard after the burial. This is no time for practical, you think, so, in your mind, you assemble the priceless with the stupid, cheeked into rolled sweaters that fill your suitcase: bric-a-brac wrapped inside his gold-toe socks; those letters of yours he kept, even the painful ones, especially the painful ones. Back home, though, you shred through your luggage and, instead of treasure, you exhume a museum of useless things. You toggle his electric clippers to "on": you knew they'd be comatose, even if the solenoid still grickles. But, like your memories, you hold onto them…you've carried them this far, after all. Plus, in the months to come, your intrepid sibling will be executor to your father's estate, sensibly liquidating the whole of it into a diaspora of on-line auctions, garbage-skips, and thrift stores. The next year, after the house is sold, she'll airmail your father's hiking stick with a Post-It note: "I hope you can use this." You'll flux with guilt about what you've already scavenged out of your father's death, but the home you never thought you'd own will vault upward, around you, with windows taller than you deserve, and your husband will be fixing sandwiches in the solace of your own kitchen, and you'll take him by the shoulder to show him what use you've made of the hiking stick: propped to the left of the front door, within reach of your father's tweed paddy cap slouched onto a brass coat hook. One of you will murmur, "He can always feel at home here." You won't remember which of you. Not even Dad could tell your voices apart. *** The summer before he died, I visited Wisconsin and stayed with him at his house in Greenfield. It was his first time seeing me with my everyday cane, which, in a way that neither of us could fully admit, had made me foreign to him. We had regularly received each other's long distance calls on Sunday afternoons, but his hearing had weakened and, no matter how much mention I made of gabapentin and the spinal tap and using a cane, the last point to round out our talk was always about going dancing: "What happened you don't dance no more?" he'd ask. "You young. Go dancing sometime! It's good for you." In college, I took courses taught by Louise O'Brien, renowned as Milwaukee's "Queen of Ballroom Dance." Under the yoke of her bilateral hip replacement, she had courted a crook-handled oaken staff, which truculently beat against the bleachers whenever we screwed up a step as simple as the Alley Cat. Legs, she warned us, shouldn't be off-key, because dance is about what sings to you below the waist. What your legs can promise you in the throes of those steps, they do because they're sentient and brilliant and limerent. On the phone, my father must have still imagined me as the lithe twenty-something he witnessed on the Elk's Club dance floor, decked in a pleated tuxedo shirt and lamé cummerbund, my polished wingtips jostling through a foxtrot with my mother. And now, at age forty-five I sat broken in front of him, incapable of even the simplest two-step. Not that Dad was any stranger to the disabled. The opposite, really. On Saturdays, while I read in the car or practiced my voice lessons, he visited the local V.A. hospital to volunteer his services as a barber, which confused me at first: why couldn't they just wait until they were discharged and visit a barber, like anyone else. "They don't leave for a long time," he patiently explained. "Terrible. Some of them, very violent, too. They see my scissors and they make terrified." To illustrate, he lifted the bulwark of his shoulders and kerned his head between his stiffened hands. "Some, too, they have no legs. Some of them scarred so badly, so burned…" I tried to picture him with his clippers buzzing the neckline of a burned soldier. In a shiver, he shook his head clear. "It's better for them if I cut here, instead of them in the barber shop." I'd watched him once at the kitchen table with a sibling's birthmark, a small, blood orange scald, shaped like a cat's paw, on the soft inside of the forearm. My father tacitly turned the wrist into the light to steal a glance at it, pretty as decoupage. Over the years, we had all been seated at one table or another flush with extra leaves pinched into place beneath the steam-ironed linens, where people with "conditions" joined the able-bodied for Sunday afternoon dinner. I recollected a man wrestling his prosthetic leg upon the claw of a pedestal table; or a woman moving in dactyls, her shorter right leg rooted into an orthopedic romper-stomper; a man named Eugene danced us in conversation with his real eye, while his glass eye serenely daydreamed; a tongue-lashing furniture salesman wore a fingerless biker's glove over his thumbless right hand; people, disfigured in the war, and men and women whose birthmarks smudged their skin like warpaint, lifted their gazes to one another and talked and ate—all strangely, momentarily, beautiful. Then, they were ordinary again, roughhousing the silverware against china plates, gutting their cabbage rolls over boiled potatoes, everyone galumphing at punch lines. From the time I was six, my mother and I rummaged the junk shops and thrift stores of Milwaukee. She had a yen for antique carnival glass and Flow Blue, and she could discern the fine grain of any wood beneath its sedimentary layers of paint. The downtown Goodwill became her favorite: decades ago it was a contract sewing factory, but now its joists rumbled and rocked beneath our footfalls, and its staircases creaked ominously like the felling of an oak. At check-out, bargains were swaddled in loads of newspaper, and it took great, spacious flourishes from a man with palsy to swipe cellophane tape across the seams. Or, sometimes a sinewy-cheeked woman, louder than we expected, cheerfully tongued a "Thank you" at us. Or a man in suspenders did nothing in particular but rock on his heels and spark to life at hearing the music of the cashier calling his name. Clodhopping broom-pushers and key-janglers and shouters and others who perhaps would never be thought of as dancers, but, all together in this one place, moved to an altogether mysterious choreography that made me feel calm. One day, I was certain, I'd be clumsy in my own way, too. One day, my clumsy and odd life would be graceful to someone. Years after my mother's death, my father met a woman, a Polish widow with whom he could share a common language as well as a war-exiled past. When he underwent triple-bypass, she fixed up a bedroom for him in her home and took care of him during the rehab, after which he sold his house and the two of them merged their estates. He in turn remained steadfast through the suffering length of her pancreatic cancer, then she left him alone in a house that had been built by some other husband. Their combined assets of folk carvings, redolent with shellac, were encamped on doilies throughout the rooms, and flanked with her artificial foliage of every artificial variety. On the walls hung menageries of Baltic amber mosaics, souvenir cup and saucers of reticulated porcelain brought back from Grand Canyon trips, and touristy hand-carved platters from the old country that brimmed with wood-burnt curly-cues and skads of copper inlay—hardly a trace of my mother's thrift store finds among any of it. Also absent from the crowded patch of wall above the credenza was my father's ciupaga, a hand-carved hiking stick with a shepherd's axe for a handle. He liked to take Saturday morning hikes along the Whitnall Park nature trails, but earlier that year, while coming out of the shower, a bad tumble cracked two of his ribs, and suddenly all of us, even my father, became keenly aware that he was eighty-two years old. He tried to make his ciupaga once again be a functional hiking stick, but the shepherd's axe had already grown far too delicate to be used: it had lost all memory of hiking across the footpaths of Tatra quartz with their mountain goats and crocuses breading the marbled snow. Instead, my sister bought him the best hiking cane she could find. Lithe as a birch branch, its shaft tapered into a tip with a built-in spring that pogoed the cane off the floor. You could leash the plastic grip to your wrist, and when your hand rested on it, it was like petting a dog's head. Strangely comforting. "An excellent stick," I told him. "Quality." "Your sister found it, so you better believe it," he replied while a he tapped out our supper onto the china. On the credenza behind him, a regiment of bakelite steak knives fell in line against the red velveteen of my mother's cutlery box. Propped beside it, I glimpsed his forgotten ciupaga. "Oh," he broke into recollection. "Karol, what about Max, poor fellow?" "Max?" "No, tell me…" No didn't really mean "no"; it was Polish for "Well…," (My father's mix and Polish and English had always been as natural to me as breathing.) "While you are here, someone looks out for him?" he asked. "Our friends. They check on him. But he's doing all right. He's being careful." My father loved Max and, though he may not have comprehended all the fine points of his illness, he was sensible of Max's unfortunate past. He knew that, because of the gravity of his medical conditions, Max could no longer travel; he understood the needful parrots back in San Diego belonged to us both. He knew that Max worried about my gate disorder and the results of the spinal tap. I'd answered with complete honesty all my father's curiosity about our healthcare powers of attorney, our status to each other as beneficiaries, and our state and federal taxes. I knew he eavesdropped from the kitchen whenever I scrimmaged that jumble of long-distance digits on his rotary telephone and spoke with Max. He'd heard me worry about Max's health, about his safety and lonesome hours. He knew I asked about feeding the parrots, and if they were bothering the neighbors; about who had called, or not called, or visited; about how we would bear to be apart until Monday of next week. "Good, good," he said. "It's good, the two of you, how you take care of each other." It was, in point of fact, domestic partnership, and I had missed chances a-plenty just to out with it and use the "g" word. I'd even prepared how to tell him in Polish once. But I'd been living with Max for fifteen years and, just as my own ears could not hear my father's accent, I wondered if he had so grown used to the idea of us as a couple that, were I to tell him as loudly as I could, the words would just pass through him. "Remarkable, how always so cheerful he is," he said, and shadowed me while I crambled to the living room couch with my plate of pie. He shook his head and cleared his throat in airy mouthfuls. I'd seen this look of his before, in which he peered sidelong into an imagined dictionary for just the right words in English. "Forgive me," he said, glancing now into his knitted hands, "I feel very bad. I think Max tried to explain me once, but I didn't know what really was going on." "What do you mean? What did Max explain?" Here it is, I thought, he's picked his moment for me to tell him. Instead, he gestured at my legs and cleared his throat. "'Dancing'! So foolish! I feel so foolish. I didn't understand." I pushed off the couch with my arms and grasped his wrist to reassure him there was no offense taken. But he wouldn't let it go, and he murmured again in a low, burbling embarrassment, "Sorry." "Dad," I pressed on, "You know that I'm gay, right?" His eyes searched the drapes for the translation. I tossed it out again, this time in what should have been a term of last resort: "Homosexual," I said, knowing the word's Polish counterpart sounded identical. "No, I—" he shrugged, then slackened his jaw into a hemph! "Okay, then." Not the response I expected. The next day, however, he led me by my shoulder, pleased with himself, and said, "Come. I show you." I followed him to the bathroom. "Wait, now. You gonna see." He draped back the vinyl curtain from the shower tub, in the center of which stood a wire mesh stool, absconded from his patio and scrubbed meticulously, cushioned with one of his best peach bath towels in a prim trifold. "All right," he said. "Now at least you can sit down while you shower." He pointed to a bathrobe hook to our right. "And here you can put your stick, so you can reach it when you come out." He waited while I mounted the bucktooth handle onto it, and the shaft of the cane rocked, then plumbed into an obtuse angle. "Is it good?" he asked. *** During the week of his funeral, I am alone at his house. The hallways pike against my feet and feel like uphill climbs, and the scent of him lingers everywhere, in the bedding and the laundry hampers, and the astringent cool of the bathroom linoleum. I shuffle through my hours by drafting his eulogy, and take breaks by rummaging the kitchen cubbies: sticky plastic keychains, broken wooden chess pieces, scorched potholders, decoupled fridge magnets, shelf-worn matchbooks, chipped souvenir kitsch, dead retractable pens, strewn upon expired coupons and paper scraps that fill the drawers like excelsior. My sister has already put the new shower stool in the tub for me. Dad planned it out and bought it at the drugstore for when I'd come visit next. I christen it the day after his services, where I let myself succumb to the sadness. My own percolating sobs at first are unfamiliar to me, but the more they rush out of me, the more I hear in them the accented laughter of my father, bumbling and graceful. This is that moment when, under the wet curtain of it all, the clock of your grief resets, and your thoughts turn to packing for home. The next day, hugging an armful of laundry, you note the paddy cap beside the basement door. You spend the spin cycle searching buttery cartons for the brass music stand you thought he'd love but didn't, unaware that he donated it to the neighbor girl who played the piccolo. You picture the shower stool deconstructed into the bottom of your luggage, but the seat's just too wide, and Max and you already keep one in the bathroom at home. In that moment of decision, you use your own voice, just to hear it spoken, and say, "No. Yes, he wouldn't pack that either. Sensible." In the airport terminal, however, a queue of strangers pretends not to stare at how much your father's tweed cap is wearing you, and how your cane storks you along, and how the burden of your baggage leads you through its loathsome, beautiful dance. Because, somehow, they've all figured you out: into every rounded corner of your suitcase you've puzzled every last thing of his you could carry home.
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