Visiting day...
Charles J.
Carmody 3200 words
P.O.Box 2104
Wenatchee, WA. 98807
soundsaboutright@yahoo.com
Visiting Day/The Letter
By Rialto Jack
Before entering, I stood outside a massive glass door in a pale blue hallway and spied the occupants. On the other side of the sheet of pale green glass, a great circular room teemed with varying degrees of frailty and awareness. Oblivious to the newcomer standing at the door, nurses dressed in white ushered patients to their waiting visitors. Everyone was moving very methodically, very cautiously. I pushed on the polished aluminum bar and was intrigued as the heavy glass doors pivoted in unison and opened into the great room. An invention of nineteen fifties engineers, invisible pins positioned top and bottom hid the great weight of the sheets of tempered glass as effortless motion coaxed the uninitiated forward. Once inside the art deco waiting room, I was greeted by scents of floor polish and cleaning fluid as they raced past me and out the slow closing massive doors. An added a touch of institutionalism was the brilliant reflection of a hot summer sun on polished nineteen fifties, gray, twelve-inch government floor tiles. Floor to ceiling two foot wide double pane windows encased the circular waiting room with just enough outside visibility to remind a person nature existed, but not enough to allow the daydreamer to forget where they were. Pockets stuffed with imagined obstacles and anxiety somehow abandoned me as I started across the great room. Moments later my reserves of doubt started to fade as I sat down on a bright orange nineteen seventies retro chair. I searched the room in vain for a reason to leave. I was hoping to locate someone sitting across the room who found my entrance interesting enough to stare back. Like an addict, I needed to feel the queasiness of such a situation for an excuse to vanish. Drafted into situations of someone else’s creation always made me feel anxious. Real or imagined, I needed to find the one exquisite excuse that would allow me to leave alone, and without guilt as an accomplice. My heart was pounding as my gaze searched the massive room in vain. Muffled voices from a few feet away only added to the suffocation. I turned to look in the direction of overwhelming sadness as a young woman’s face lost all animation when her eyes met mine, and she realized she had drawn attention to her very personal, very vulnerable situation. Briefly, I was compelled to stare as she whispered to someone who mentally abandoned her long ago. I must have been watching forever and engrossed in her pain when I suddenly realized the subject of the young woman’s attention was looking at me. Noticing the moment, the young woman's compassion was genuine as she turned her attention from her mothers curiosity to mellow her composure while looking out across the great room. I followed her lead, and I too cast my gaze across the room. I soon realized that I was the only person in the room sitting alone! I lowered my eyes just long enough to see the borrowed suit I was wearing had taken on a life of its own. Starch I sprayed on the early seventies silver material before putting the hot iron to it had succumbed to the excitement of the day. Anxiety had started to raise its ugly head again as I looked down and realized my arms were four inches longer than the frayed edges of the shiny James Bond material. With a sigh of exhaustion and sweaty fingers, I released strained buttons from their impossible task and in total submission to my situation, leaned back against the flexible plastic furniture to gather my confidence. Once relaxed, I slipped back into invisibility and started thinking about the day before yesterday when I decided to come and visit. I closed my eyes and sat silently in the plastic chair remembering the sad days before that. I remember after receiving the letter how doubt and self-incrimination tormented me when I compared the wonderful family social models depicted by society’s know-it-alls, and reality of the sixties. While selfishly darting in and out of that memory, my eyes suddenly focused on an older, well groomed woman slowly moving around the edge of the huge room. Obviously intent on finding just the right chair before sitting, she paused, then slowly turned and looked around the whole room. Her gaze ending back where it had started; on a lime green chair she had grasped to steady herself. She slowly turned to sit down, so slowly in fact, she reminded me of a person savoring every moment, as if a last. Like an actor who practices the same exact move over and over, she smiled knowing her own cleverness and agility were hers alone. She had a natural smile. And as I secretly watched from afar, she offered it up freely to all who looked her way. For all I knew, she couldn’t even see me sitting so far away; yet I felt a child’s vulnerability and turned my head as her search threatened familiarity as it passed my way. This was a special day, a visiting day at the assisted living facility; or so the uninvited letter teased. I had never been to such a place and somehow felt guilty for it. I sat there in my borrowed suit by invitation, but I really had no business there. This was a sacred place for caring soles and the listeners. I should be outside in the real world filling my gut with experiences of every kind! Instead, I am tricked by a teary letter stained by the good in one of us. I bit my lip as I remembered the nurse who penned the letter telling me that my father had passed away some years earlier. I remembered how insensitive I was when my first concern was how did the little ‘nightingale’ seek me out? I failed my own rule, never to open official looking mail; but an odd, somewhat non-professional typeface enticed me out of a wonderfully smooth Whiskey fog. I surprised myself at the degree of curiosity that had overtaken me. The typewriter that had written my name and address on the message had done so mechanically. The print was uneven and if you looked closely you could see where the ribbon had brushed the envelope above and below the print. And with that, the last of the amber liquid told me to let the omen rest on the nightstand for weeks before ever picking it up again. The parchment cast a warm glow late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I could always barely make it out in the dark of my small room. Nights passed slowly while my room became a haven for feelings and compassions come to visit the one they had lost. I felt not alone, not my simple self. Even with rain hitting the window and sirens off in the distance, I knew exactly where the letter was. I had a gut wrenching feeling of the acidity of its contents. Finally, after all the wondering, such a simple thing would take me back so far. Return me to a place I abandoned without packing in my haste to leave. For the first time in hundreds of years, all I had escaped from came flooding back when my eyes closed. I laid in the dark thinking we were never close, my mom and I. I closed my eyes and remembered her delightful laugh and innocence. I remembered how excited she would get riding in the front seat next to Dad when he took us to the beach. She would make us the best baloney and mustard sandwiches and pass them around as Dad drove the car ever closer to her favorite place, the beach. To this day I don’t think she ever looked back to see if ‘the kids’ were watching her be herself. She would forget everything but the sun coming through the windows, the breeze entering through the wind wings, and Dad driving her to the beach. Once we arrived, the magic of warm sand and seagulls calling from above and below took over. We had plastic fishing poles and fished off New Port pier until nighttime when Dad would return to pick us up. After all, I did leave home when I was 13 and never looked back. I visited on my way through, but nothing sensitive, nothing touching. Just a quick Hello, stayed a few nights until the stranger became suffocating to the occupants. They didn’t know me, and all I could remember was spaghetti dinners and dad arriving at 3 a.m. in the morning. Muffled discussions on why he had to work so late. He was up at the studio labor pool, hoping to get called. He was too smart for that kind of work, but it was easy for him. The simpletons he surrounded himself with provided him with certain armor. He could fall asleep and his intellectual defenses were unfairly above par. He liked the edge. I loved him for all he was worth, so did mom. His heart broke the day he realized he never fooled his wife. She knew all along he was gambling the paycheck away, trying to jump-start a family of six. The anticipation of Dad's arrival each night was addictive. I remember her bundling up with a blanket on the overstuffed chair while watching the small black and white television...hoping he was all right. She would stay awake all night long waiting for the silence of the night to be broken by the dogs wagging their tails and running to the front door as their keen hearing knew the Studebaker was pulling into the driveway. She knew all along, he just didn’t want to come home a looser again. There was no rush to see her face if his pockets were empty. He would spend every penny trying to hit the big one for his family. There was always one more bet. For him, life was more exciting trying to make something out of nothing. When things got easier, like a city job, he’d screw it up just to give himself a challenge. The redundancy of such a task suffocated him; there was no struggle, no fight to win, nothing to overcome. To retire from a job with twenty years in, doing the same thing day in and day out would have killed him. Like putting an intelligent animal in a cage, he would have purposefully hurt himself if for nothing other than to overcome the pain. Feeding and clothing his family was a past time, too simple. The clothing, feeding, housing, loving a family of six was the other thing he had to do before he started another day getting over on normality. I remember watching and listening from the passengers’ seat as his eyes quickly glanced at the gas gauge, all the while laughing and grinning as the little needle in the gauge dared him to go another mile without refueling! The car reeked of gas fumes. As he called it, ‘the can’ was in the trunk, and the teaspoon of mileage he left in it always evaporated into the passenger compartment. I remember my mother saying ‘Jack I think we have some sort of leak’. Don’t worry about it Jeannette, its normal. The small red can never tipped over, because it stood just fine in the depression the spare tire was suppose to occupy. Unfortunately, that balled sixties fashion statement was traded a long time ago for twenty more miles of 'Jimmy's gas.
I remember how the music made girls cry, and the Temptations gave the world rhythm and made people with nothing feel special. Looking across the room reminded me that, come Friday, everyone laughed and had fun. Seeing her smile as people she had never before seen in her life, walked by. It made me realize how I had forgotten, after all these years, all us kids had to do was get up in the morning and go play in the sun. No worries about clothes, food, a place to feel safe, just 'run the neighborhood' until dark. The difference in people was a big thing. The 'surfers' ruled the beaches, and the 'low riders' ruled the valleys. Wingtip shoes and black shiny points were the only two choices. You either rode the waves, or cruised the strip. Ed Sullivan was the show to watch and someone's "Baby did the Hanky Panky!"
The small tree sitting in the corner of the great room reminded my how it saddened her to see 'the tree' come down. Christmas was a big thing at our house. Neglect of the Christmas tree saddened her when she forgot to water it. The smell of pine was euphoric to her, and if the 'well' at the base of the tree where to dry out, she would somehow think it was her fault that, even if momentarily, our tiny house lost the smell of the forest. She loved all things living. I remember watching her one day as she observed a small bird land on a limb. She watched with the intensity of a new born. She knew she had purpose, if for nothing else than to be precisely standing on that spot, to witness that small bird; that little singing life. The bird was talking to her, you know. You could tell by watching her, she was storing that moment in her special place where she hides such moments, to be pulled back out at just the right second to counteract a broken heart. Unconsciously, I think she tried to save one wonderful part of life, for each un-wonderful part of life. To this day, I think she actually did it. You would never know different by the way she smiled at you, or gave you that suffocating hug at the end of the day. She was thinking of that bird when dad came home especially late. She knew he tried so hard. If only he could win just once. Of all things, she felt sorry for him! She would wish so hard, not for a new dress, or a vacation, but for him to have a good day.
There she sat, across the room in some unfamiliar building with clinical, white, polished floors. I was told, she thinks Jack is going to come walking through one of those doors with another made up story, any minute. With another ‘big win’ in his pocket. The two of them will go out to dinner, or the beach, get some ice cream cones, and sit in the car watching the sunset talking about how it use to be. How they always found some way to survive…..even raising four kids. How things didn't work out quite the way they had envisioned. How the kids all left home early in their lives and moved away. And tell each other stories of why, even though they knew the phone numbers, they never called any of them when they were in dire straits. How they promised each other they would never be a burden to their children, regardless of the consequences or suffering. Like the time Dad was getting operated on in the V.A. hospital and she had to sell the car and live in a 16 foot long trailer parked in the hospital parking lot. It was those times they swore never to call the kids. The two of them hid their suffering like nothing had happened, and as Dad would say "sometimes life throws you a few curves, kid". That bastard, why couldn't he just quit, or give up for a week. Instead, there was always that smile, and "hey kid, what are you doing today?" And he actually waited for a reply from his eleven year old boy before heading out the door to work his magic. I have twenty year 'friends' that never wait for a reply. "Take care of your mother,......and "Jeanette, I'll be home late" and off he would go. I knew he was reading 'the Form'. He was off to the races, Santa Anita or Hollywood Park. I remember those times were the happiest I had ever seen the man. The bills were paid, mom was happy and gave him a few extra dollars, the day was a beautiful California sunny day, and Jimmy's gas was seventeen cents a gallon! He was on top!
I remember one time that lady sitting across the room, the one with the Mona Lisa smile, got a stunning red dress for her birthday. We could hear dad asking her where she was going to ware it. He said it was pretty, but what good is it? The sleepless nights, and worry would get the best of him sometimes, and he didn't realize what he was saying. If he would have, it would have broken his heart to know the silence in the house was because he indiscriminately hurt everyone's feelings. My brother and I mowed lawns with that 'push' mower until we had blisters on our hands as big as marbles to buy that dress. We couldn't even hold the pencil in class to write notes. Unfortunately, he could be a real piece of work sometimes. He knew if he had the money to take her out dancing, he’d be at the track. She was always so nice. She could get mad like everyone else, yet she always gave people she didn’t know the benefit of the doubt. She had wonderful manners and etiquette, a very pleasant person if given the chance. I was amazed sometimes hearing her response to certain situations. “Oh, come on, everyone knows that!” She would say. And she was wrong. Her naïveté reflected frightening, if not simplistic logic on occasion. Her simple love of life and genuine love and curiosity with regard to people she didn't know was legendary. She really didn't want to interact; instead she wanted to watch life from afar. Why she stayed with dad would be anybody’s guess. If you left out her love of the rogue and insatiable appetite for all things impossible, there simply was no reason to stay. Wolves would have ripped her apart on her own. She never believed her children were smarter than what she heard on TV. Why should say it was the TV that kept her company all day. The TV never came home without the promised pay check. The TV never borrowed more than the next check was worth. The TV never needed new clothes. My brother and I were good for something though; the TV never mowed the yard with a push mower or picked the weeds. Those damn California weeds! No water for years, scalding heat, and at times the air was not even moving across the ground; and there in the middle of our yard were big, green weeds! And how about those ‘Bull head’ stickers? It was a dare if you played in one of those fields. Some kind of macho thing. After a game of foot ball, it looked like you were attacked by something. Every trickle of blood ...macho! Enough stalling, it's time for me to cross the room and block her view. The last time I visited her, she gave me a hug, and looked past me to see if her little boy was coming down the road. I wonder how long she'll wait for Dad; after all she doesn't have the dogs now to announce his arrival. Boy we miss him.......I wonder what time he'll get home tonight. All the best, RJ
this one is being worked........