Are You Sitting Down? (18 page)

Mark was a narrow minded guy who’d never known a day outside of this town.
He’d been born and raised here, gone to work here, raised his
own
family here, and he’d die here.
When his glory days of being the quarterback and prom king were over, he was lost.
An assembly line factory job was the only option for someone who didn’t want to go to college or join the armed forces.
His arrogant
haughtiness
kept Ellen at home to raise the two kids, but broke his pride when he lost his job and was no longer the bread winner.

Landing a job at the funeral home should have been a metaphor for the end of the road for him.
I figured any job that required him to do more than punch a button or turn a key was going to be a challenge.
Steady work would not keep his family from falling apart though.
While Mark thought he was picking up the pieces, and Ellen thought she could help him out by going back to work, the mirror they’d been looking into shattered all over again.

I think Mark pretty much gave up after that.
By the time the judge’s soap opera was revealed and their names were in the morning paper, Mark had forgotten how to reach out and touch his wife.
I doubt Ellen wanted to be touched.
It wasn’t her fault.
The
touch of a
ny
man was the
feeling
of the judge’s hands crawling on her.
She froze up
even
when I hugged her. She didn’t want it to be that way, but it was like the terror of looking upon
a
gruesome
auto accident.
Those images and fee
l
ings were burned into her memory and could not be washed away.

I think he tried to be there for her
in
the very begi
n
ning.
He
sat beside her and
held her hand in court.
He cheered when the judge’s sentence was announced
, and when Ellen’s repar
a
tion check came.
He mistakenly felt their story now had a happy ending, and Ellen could somehow magically go back to being a happy house wife
since
he was working full time again.
Mark was impatient though when it came to her healing pro
c
ess.
He
fell
out of love with her.

Sebastian had wanted to treat Martin and me to
lunch
the weekend that we helped him move.
After a long
morning
of tran
s
porting his belongings across town, he took us to a bistro called Poteet’s where he once worked.
It was a sports bar steakhouse type place
, with outbursts of yelling at the telev
i
sion and rounds of high fives,
adjacent to the shopping mall and the movie theater.
The three of us sat at a pub table in the far corner of the restaurant, away from the busy activity su
r
rounding the bar where everyone was watching a baseball game.

I was tired, but leisurely enjoying just sitting there and people watching while Martin and Sebastian talked.
That’s when I noticed Mark sitting at the bar nursing a pitcher of beer.
I immediately noticed there were two mugs sitting in front of him, and he wasn’t acting like a tired guy grabbing a cold one after a long day at work.
After all it was the middle of the afternoon!
He was smiling and seemed joyful, with his eyes glued to the overhead television like ev
e
ryone else around him.
He didn’t notice us.
Rather than point him out to Martin and Sebastian, I waited to see who joined him.

It was not Ellen who returned from the restroom and sat down beside him.
It was a young buxom blond who reminded me of a stereotypical cheerleader in a pink fuzzy sweater from some B movie.
She giggled and fell into him when she sat down, a bit intoxicated.
He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close, whispering into her ear as she smiled and flu
t
tered her eyes.
He filled their beer mugs.
I could tell she was rubbing his leg beneath the bar.

If Sebastian and Martin were not with me, I would have approached him.
I still refrained from telling them because I knew they’d run over and knock him off his bar stool.
He d
e
served that, but I kept quiet.
My mind refused to believe what I was seeing.
This town was so small and although I didn’t know anyone in the bar besides us, chances
we
re half the waitresses had gone to my high school, and half the patrons either worked t
o
gether, lived next door to one another, or went to school with each other.
Everyone in this town knew everyone else, either by face or by name or both.

Certainly more than half the restaurant knew Mark’s wife if they didn’t know him
personally
.
Her name and picture had graced the pages of the local newspaper for months
, pi
c
tures of her coming out of the courthouse or getting out of her car at home
.
So, I couldn’t believe Mark was
public
ly cheating on
Ellen
right here in one of the busiest restaurants in town.
Maybe no one cared.
Maybe everyone minded their own bus
i
ness, or maybe the testosterone filled air made everyone relate to him in some sick way.

I was frozen in anger as I stared across the bar at him.
I imagined Ellen sitting at home with the kids.
I wondered what lie he had told her about where he was tonight. How long had this been going on?
Staring across the bar at him, I failed to notice right away that Mark caught me looking.
The icy and empty look of his eyes snapped me out of my daze.
I squinted my eyes at him evilly disappointed.
He looked away from me
,
asking the cheerleader if she was ready to go.
He threw some bills on the bar and they left.
At the door, he
turned and
looked back at me
one more time.
I hoped the expression on my face was enough to let him know he was making a mi
s
take.
He was aware.
It just took something like this to bring it into focus for him.
I wanted him to lie awake at night, worrying over the day I’d tell Ellen what I saw.

But
I
’ve
never
told
anyone
to this day
.

Martin

The doctor had diagnosed me with high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and he said I should lose about twenty pounds.
That wasn’t exactly the news I was hoping for at my age when I went to have a physical.
Marline had done a good job of trying to correct my eating habits.
She bought less junk food, fried fewer foods, and made me eat more vegetables.
Why did I never listen to my mother back home and finish my spinach or carrots?

A
fter lying on the examination table with a doctor’s finger in my rear
,
hearing that everything else about me was fine
was
a relief
I guess.
The doctor reminded me that Dad had died of a stroke.
If I kept up my eating habits and current lif
e
style, I’d be seeing Dad again sooner than I wanted to.
So I took the doctor’s advice and started walking.
That was last summer shortly after Travis’s boyfriend died.
I’d lost twenty-five pounds since then, but I still k
ep
t
up the walking.

We live
next door to Mom
,
and
the distance between our property and hers
is
equivalent to a
lmost a
n
acre
.
I’m pretty sure the four acres
our house s
its
on
w
as
once part of the
Dogwood
family orchard
many years ago
.
A
few old
spindly
apple trees
lapsed
over onto our land
back when we bought the house.
I had them removed since they no longer produced fruit and we replaced them with a row of dogwoods all the way down the property line
, paying homage to the neighborhood
.

Marline liked looking out the windows on that side of the house in the springtime and seeing all the pink and white blo
s
soms.
I like
d
seeing the
kids
running and playing beneath the trees as the petals rain
ed
down.
It remind
ed
me of my own childhood
back
when I played hide and seek with Ellen in the orchard while Mom and Dad picked apples.

I prefer
red
to walk early in the morning before the sun
wa
s up.
A year ago I was doing it because I didn’t want anyone to see me out walking.
I
didn’t want anyone
I knew to drive by and frown at me the way people do when you are struggling to get into shape.
They pity you for being out of shape, rather than applaud you for trying to do something about it.
I’
d
always been an early riser so getting up and walking at that hour
was
not hard to do.
Even back when I was the only kid in the house, I remember being a light sleeper
and crawling out of bed as soon as I heard Mom stirring downstairs.
She a
l
ways tried to make me go back to bed, but I wouldn’t go.
She’d fix me a glass of milk or a link of sausage, and then turn on ca
r
toons for me in the living room while Dad finished sleeping.

Standing at the sink
now
,
I fill
ed
the pot with cold w
a
ter so the coffee w
ould
be ready by the time I g
o
t back.
Looking out the window, the dogwoods
resemble
d
boney hands sticking out
of
the ground
. T
heir branches
we
re
covered in the fluffy white snow
that f
ell
in the night. We live
d
up a hill, so from the kitc
h
en window I c
ould
just see the roof of Mom’s house over the branches.
A billow of smoke r
o
se from
her
chimney and disa
p
pear
ed
into the
cobalt
morning sky.
I was admiring the fading stars when I saw a light come on in one of her upstairs wi
n
dows.
Like always,
she
was
awakening
to start her day too.

The crunching of the snow beneath my boots
was
the only sound as I wander
ed
around the yard for a bit before
starting
my two mile walk.
Although we only ha
ve
four acres, walking the property
was
an old habit I’d picked up from Mom and Dad.
Mom hated the thought of selling off part of the property back when Dad died.
With Dad gone, it was as if enough of the house was gone already.
Why should she downsize anymore?
When the old barn crumbled, I asked the new land owner if he would
n’t
mind cleaning it up and hauling it away.
I offered to help him if he needed me to. We’d told Mom the guy had just torn it down.
It’d break her heart to know that barn caved in right after Dad went.
It had been
their getaway from the world on Sunday afternoons when they went out walking.

After a slow amble around the property to stretch my legs, I walk
ed
to the end of the gravel driveway and turn
ed
in the opposite direction of Mom’s house.
Back when I first started walking, I would go in her direction because it felt good to pick up the pace by having to walk down the hill.
Once, Mom had just stepped out to pick up her newspaper and saw me.
Of course, I stopped to say hi and see if she slept okay.
The day after that she was sitting on the porch waiting for me to come by.
She waited by the road for me a few days after that and d
e
cided to join me for the walk.
It was nice because I had not spent much time
alone
with her in quite a few years.

We talked about my work a lot of the time.
Like my f
a
ther, I bec
a
me a
B
iology teacher.
I share
d
my stories of the week with her, having already recited them to Marline at the end of the day before.
I think Mom found them
consoling
b
e
cause Dad had done the same thing at the end
of his day.
Protozoa, bug collections, plant
phylum
, animal kingdoms, and frog di
s
section were parts of regular conversation at our dinner table then and now.
Mom was always eager to listen to Dad, and to me.
I knew that she found my classroom stories co
m
forting because they reminded her of him.

Teaching school was much different now than when Dad did it.
My stories often involved confiscating knives from st
u
dents, breaking up fights caused by racial tension, or going in early to monitor the metal detectors as students entered the building.
Sure, dad had to break up fights, but those were over girls. He searched lockers monthly and picked up porn magazines and cigarettes.
Students could come and go through the doors as they please
without having to have their bags x-rayed
, unlike now
.

Walking each morning was not only working on the gut, but it also helped to clear my head.
I felt much better about fa
c
ing the day after accomplishing a brisk stroll.
In the
early
spring,
I watched the grass turn green and the flower stems
stret
ch for the sky.
Rabbits and quail greeted me along the roadside, awake from the long winter.
In summer the flowers bloomed and baby rabbits chased each other in the tall grass
es
.
I watched the leaves change in the fall from lush green to crispy brown and orange.
I always looked forward to that first mor
n
ing dew of the season and knew it’d be time to pull my windbreaker out from the top of the closet.

This walk was practically meditative on the days Mom didn’t go with me.
The quick wave of my arms, the cadent steps of my feet, and the r
ising
heart beat inside my chest w
as
the percussion of nature’s sympathy around me.
Birds chirped in the trees and the crickets s
et
tled down from the
ir
night
song
.
Wind whistled in the limbs o
verhead
that hung over the narrow road.