On Losing Their Father by Sue Goyette - Room Magazine

On Losing Their Father
SUE GOYETTE
Eventually our grief, in the guise of a funeral home,
settled and we were offered the exhausted upholstery
of ritual. When we couldn’t speak, we sat. The dreaded
silence was navigated by polished shoes and Kleenex boxes
reincarnated as kindling for the fire. Later, we will burn.
But for now we watched the framed print of Flowers
in a Vase narrate this wilderness. We knew, for example,
that our stems had been cut on an angle. That we’d been placed,
artfully, in a glass vase that reflects or rather infers the rest
of the room. One of us had dropped a petal and the rest of us
were flowering as hard as we could. Anyone with any heart at all
will feel for these chairs and the work they’ve got ahead of them.

The parking lot was the first indication. There was a series
of flower boxes in the insistent bloom of winter: the tulips of coffee cups,
blue bells of cigarette butts. What were we to make of any
of this? The taxi driver adjusted his small talk and what started off
as leashable and wagging ended up coming out of the woods quickly,
furtively for a drink in his rear-view mirror. He gulped in the red eyes
of our watches and their slow tick of too soon. He barely could take
our money. We barely could give it to him. It felt like he had come
to a full-stop
at every tree, that he yielded to the Atlantic and signaled
before turning
to the inevitable. We pressed our hands into his hands
and waited
as if there was luggage to retrieve and a ferry to catch.
The laundromat
across the street was open. We watched a woman
balance an impossible
load and turned before she dropped anything.
There was only so much,
at this point, we could give.

My children were like alders in the way they bolted
to tree. People stood at the roots of them and looked
up. They lined the hall to be in their shade. No one made room
for the small animals that had tangled their hair to scrabble
now, panicked by the walls. The carpets had been sprayed to resist
any kind of forest and here they were in full-leaf. Some people
wanted to touch them as if they were monks steeped in loss
and had tea to offer brewed from stories of broken bowls
and mountains to soothe them all. Some of them plucked their names
and carried them off to add to their evening meal of what they did
and who they saw. My daughter teetered first.
Later. When she was alone with the river that had been
her father. It was like she didn’t mean it to happen,
that all she had wanted was to lean over
and drink.

I want to say that a tree fell, the way a tree falls and offers itself
across the water and when we encounter it, we don’t see the fallen tree
but a way to get across. But she didn’t fall across the water. She fell into
her father and I stood for many, many months at his shore and waited
for her. When evening came, I gathered wood and lit a fire.
I read the cursive line of ants and studied the emerald of bird song.
I ate mushrooms for the stews they’d make and drew maps
of the sky on the hind leg of moonlight. I picked river rushes and sewed
a small boat that could only carry the weight of my voice. In it, I packed
all of her
names. Her secret names, her bedtime names. I stood
at the back door
of her childhood and called to her with supper
in my lungs. I bellowed
her bath time and urged her to run
towards the net with the ball,
to give it a good and final kick. I sat up
with her and spelled the difficult words
of farewell.
Finally, I addressed her as woman. I combed the long hair
of her absence and sent fish scurrying with my feet.

She returned as a stranger and begged for a meal. I cut an onion
and heated the oil. When I offered her a plate, she had lost her appetite.
Often, she’d turn her head as if someone was approaching from a great
distance. She’d complain of the cold and then of the heat. Her treasure
was a small jar filled with her father’s voice. She’d wake in the morning
with seaweed in her hair and a vague memory of low tide.
The distance between them was oceanic, she explained, which was why
she spent so much time at sea. She made films of herself wading
into the ocean
and studied the angle of her heart to her arms.
She choreographed her entry
into water to correspond with moonlight
and the fine prow of memory.
When she heard a girl call for her father,
she rescued the word
as if it had flown into a window. To see her crouch
and pick it up,
soothe its eyes of terror and coax it back to flight.
Once I saw her
open her treasured jar and quickly dab a paint brush
into his voice.
All her portraits, when she was a girl, had their hands
behind their backs.
She was no good at hands, she had explained,
so she hid them.

I decided to follow her. Her hair has always been a lantern
and she cast an easy light. There is mining in my blood
which is why she chose me. I marked my trail with thorns
and seldom flowered. I stood far enough away that I couldn’t hear her
but saw the tender poise of her loss as she pleaded with an ocean
so sullen the waves broke silent. There is blood in my mining
which is why she chose me and so I rolled up the night and beat it
free of dark. I stood until I felt myself being tasted by the trees.
Eventually, they consumed me and in this way I could talk to him.
There was a marsh around our marriage that I sunk up to my knees in.
But none of him mattered and I had been consumed. My voice,
when I pulled it
from the ground, sputtered the way root vegetables
held to the light sputter,
freeing themselves finally of dirt. Listen, I said.
When I could.

My leaves are uncertain and so I speak the truth. This is the ceremony
beginning. It isn’t my voice that has his attention but my breath:
the little sparrow that flits past my heart and smells of home.
He is so young on this shore and has taken apart the only compass
he owned. His name is a flock fishing the shallow water, the wind
pushing it apart; the water, holding it under for too long.
He is surprised to see me. Surprised that I allow myself to be split
into boat. This is the work of marriage long after it has ended.
The paddle I push him off with is the vow I had once made.

A woman moves against the tide at the funeral home
while we’re being offered strawberries and tea. She approaches us
as if we are without rock, our shore, sandy. Her name is Susan.
She speaks as if we are planetary, giving off such a light
that she is bathed in its blessing. She looks at my children
as if they are children. I found your father, she tells them. I was the one
who found him. Suddenly, they do not know what to do with strawberries.
Suddenly strawberries are something to be cared for, tended.
Nurtured. Should they sit down with the strawberries, they wonder.
Should they make a small bed for these berries and turn off the lights.
They are such small children to be making these decisions.
They are such small
children that when she breathes the breath
she has been holding for them,
they feel him with such force,
they are blown close to sinking.