Invisible Fences (5 page)

Part Two: 

Caution 

A Promise
 

Like most people’s superstitions, mine are selective and irrational. I don’t believe in any form of good luck: rabbit’s feet, lucky numbers, rubbing the belly of a Buddha statue. Superstitions about bad luck, however, have more emotional truth for me. I’ll avoid black cats and the underside of ladders, and will pinch spilled salt and throw it over my shoulder. 

Because the one time I crossed my Mom’s warnings and wandered deep into the woods behind our house, it turned out my best friend would never speak to me again. 

As an adult, I follow most rules to the letter. Not because I respect the rules, necessarily, but because the one time, the one time I edge over the speed limit or underreport my taxes or leave a door unlocked for five minutes, I believe that something terrible will happen. 

Consider which of these scenarios is more likely: 1) someone wins a contest the first time he enters; or, 2) the winner, jumping for joy with his lucky ticket, drops dead of a heart attack. My luck, I’d be the second guy.  

Terrible things may still happen to me, but I won’t seek them out. No bungee-jumping or skydiving for me. I am not the leather faced eighty-six-year-old woman who dares cancer by smoking two packs every day of her long life. Neither am I the wild partier whose slowed, overcompensating reflexes somehow swerve past deserved late-night collisions.  

I’d rather be overly cautious.  

I want to coast into my tragedies. 

• • • 

All this to explain why my life might sound rather dull. 

I’ve stayed in Alabama since we moved here in the early seventies. Pam and I went to a poorly funded elementary school, followed the same small groups of kids through junior high to high school. Pam left Alabama after she graduated, but I went to a small state-run college. After that, I took a job with the local library branch, housed in a former post office, and I’ve worked almost twenty years in the same position.  

Forty-two years old, and I’ve never been in a romantic relationship. I’m fairly average-looking, almost like the movie stereotype of the spinster librarian. Except, of course, I’m a guy. I don’t know if that makes me a sadder case or not.  

Most years, the biggest excitement in my life is when the “theft detector” goes off. Bookmobiles in other states have a better selection than Graysonville Public Library has in its catalog, but we still have a decent security system: not much stuff, but we want to keep it. I’d planted metal stickers in each book myself, small magnetized strips hidden in the binding or beneath the card holder or in the crease between two pages. Libraries have used this technology for years—an early version of the invisible fence designed for dog collars.  

People have this “zapped” look on their faces when the warning buzzer goes off, and it’s easy to tell that they’re shocked. They’re not professional thieves—just absent-minded. Most often, it’s adults who forget to check out their books before passing through the security gates. Kids usually remember. 

• • • 

Pam had strained against the confines of small town life. She was wild in high school, smoking with friends on the front steps between classes, parking with boys in the lot behind the Fruit of the Loom factory on weekends. As soon as she turned eighteen, she left for a job with a New York software firm. We talked on the phone now and then, but not in much depth. Five years ago, I was surprised to learn she’d broken up with a live-in girlfriend.  

Myself, I grew to appreciate the small town calm, and things seemed to get easier each year. Once you were fixed in people’s minds as the librarian, as the “confirmed bachelor,” they pretty much left you alone.  

Except, of course, for Dad, who wanted grandchildren. I was closer, so I bore the brunt of his teasing and cajoling. I was also the “go to” person in case of any emergency, and was expected to visit Mom on weekends while my father immersed himself in woodworking projects. “You’re not doing anything else,” Dad would say. “You don’t have a date, do you?” 

• • • 

Sometimes I thought of my parents as a burden. A continual source of bad luck, perhaps, like a gypsy curse. Other children feel this way too, I know, so it’s not a particular source of guilt for me.  

It’s difficult to express how strange it was to grow up in their home. First, for all Dad’s remarks about needing a drastic change from our Maryland home, the house on Jackson Lane was uncannily similar. It was a single-floor building, since my mother refused to go up and down stairs. The L-shaped layout was the main change, but otherwise it had the same number of rooms. The furniture from the Maryland house followed us, and took its place in roughly equivalent positions. After only a few weeks, my mother had accumulated enough newspapers to reproduce the familiar towers around her living room couch. The same dark green curtains hung over the windows, shutting out light and protecting her from imagined mobs of prying eyes.  

For me, it was as if the new house in Alabama was haunted by the house in Maryland. My mother, especially, added to this impression. I don’t have many memories of the move itself, but I imagine her packed into the dark cab of the moving van, riding the 800-mile distance lying on her couch and facing an unplugged television, at ease amid the crowded stacks of inanimate objects. Over the years, my mother aged like a piece of furniture: instead of wrinkles, her skin warped or cracked like a badly varnished surface; her pallor went from indoor white to a muted gray, as if she were covered by a thin layer of dust. She was a voice from the darkness, a controlling presence that projected from the living room into every corner of the house. 

Even when I visited my parents as an adult, familiar objects from my childhood, shifting piles of junk and strange plays of light and dark, and my mother’s voice through it all, combined to give their home a haunted atmosphere. 

• • • 

I’d mentioned how Pam and I, as children, stayed up late each Saturday night in an attempt to sleep through Dad’s visit to church the next day. As I’d pointed out, we watched a lot of late-night television, with particular scorn for the “fake” horror movies: ones that didn’t show the monster, or haunted house stories that turned out not to have any real ghosts. 

When I speak about Mom and Dad’s house on Jackson Lane as haunted, and it’s only a metaphor, that’s the kind of cheap literary device that really angered me and Pam as kids. 

Be patient.  

Before it’s over this story will, I promise, summon up a real ghost. 

Likes and Dislikes
 

How’s Mom?” I could tell Pam didn’t want to ask the question, but she knew why I’d called.  

“The same. Fever of 102, and trouble breathing.” 

Pam sighed. “She should be in a hospital.” 

“I agree.” 

“You should make her go.” 

“Easy for you to say. You’re not here.” 

“Okay, then. Dad should make her go.” 

“They’re stubborn. Mom cries and wants to stay home. I tell Dad she won’t get better on her own, and he says he has to ‘respect her wishes’.” 

“He’s always done a little too much of that. He should dial 911 and let them decide.” 

“I think he’s embarrassed about the house. The paramedics would need to clear a path through all the junk.” 

“God, I can’t even picture it.” Pam hadn’t been to the house in almost ten years, but I’d given her a pretty good idea of the condition. The main change was due to the Home Shopping Channel and Mom’s convenient couch-side telephone. I think some of the operators at HSC knew her by name. She had more electronic gadgets and kitchen appliances than anybody in Graysonville, some still in the UPS boxes they’d been shipped in. And Joan Rivers jewelry—ones where you could snap out the glass “jewels” to match the colors of different outfits (many of
those
still pinned in flat, laminated rectangles, never to be worn).  

“I’ll come down if you think I could help,” Pam said. 

“Come down if you want to see them.” 

“Yeah, maybe I will. I’ll probably call Dad, see what he thinks.” 

“Good idea.”  

Dad would never invite her down. He’d say not to worry, Mom was getting better.  

Then she’d get worse, then it’d be too late, and then Pam would
have
to visit. 

• • • 

When I was twelve, Aunt Lora stayed with us for a week. Dad cleared out the guest room, basically by moving everything into the garage. Lora was technically my Dad’s sister, but she’d been my Mom’s closest school friend since the eighth grade, so I tended to think of her more as from my mother’s side of the family. Aunt Lora had an amazing obsession with neatness, so it was fun to see her navigate our home. In addition to the guest room, she cleaned the kitchen, the hall bathroom, and the area around the living room chair closest to Mom’s couch. Each of these clean spots were her sanctuary against encroaching clutter—but to her credit, she never complained about the house, and cheerfully sat with my mother for extended in-person versions of their daily phone sessions, and running commentaries on
As the World Turns
or
Love is a Many Splendored Thing.
 

She also cooked for us, which was a tremendous change from peanut butter sandwiches and Dad’s package-mix dinners. The thing I complimented Aunt Lora most on, though, was a lemon layer-cake she’d made from scratch. At the time, I’d thought there were only two kinds of cake—chocolate and “regular,” with corresponding brown or butter-cream frosting. I liked the cake partly from novelty, but the novelty wore off when Dad made his own version of lemon cake for each of my subsequent birthdays. At one point I tried to tell him I needed a change, and he gave me an incredulous look: “You
love
lemon cake.” 

He never let me grow out of my childhood likes and dislikes. Perhaps if I did something he recognized as “adult”—move out of state like Pam, join the Army, maybe, or get married and pop out the grandkids he wanted—maybe then I’d be allowed to change. But I did change, in more subtle ways than he was able to notice: 

The simple pleasure I got from my low-paying library job (“Are you ever going to get promoted?”). My book collecting hobby, with a special weakness for Victorian novels in three-volume editions (“Can’t you get a paperback for cheaper? It’s the same book!”). And my modest apartment, large enough for me, one cat, and a lot of Dad’s bookcases (“If you had a house, I could build you a dining room table and chairs.” Or, less subtle: “I built a wooden crib for the Fergusons. Too bad you don’t need one.”) 

Mom noticed, though. She kept the windows closed tight, but studied the world through her television screen. In the seventies she laughed at the gross innuendo of
Three’s Company
and
Match Game ’75;
she picked up street slang from
Miami Vice
and other cop shows in the eighties; and developed an edgier sense of humor as the nineties brought sitcoms like
Friends
and
Seinfeld.
Dad worked in the real world, while Mom lived through MTV’s version. Ironically, the woman who was afraid to step outside her house had smoother, more adaptable social skills. 

In her last years, I grew to enjoy my weekend visits with Mom. In addition, I’d often call at night to check in—usually after 10:00, once my father was already asleep. We’d talk about what was on TV, what movie I’d gone to see, who’d checked what book out of the library. Back in Maryland, it was my fault Mrs. Lieberman stopped talking to her on the phone. I’d like to think I made up for it, eventually. 

One night we were talking over the late night news. I heard the local CBS anchorman in the background—Shane or Marv, or Frank-something. And she just said: “You’re happy with your life.” It wasn’t phrased as a question—just a simple observation, not even prompted by anything we’d said before.  

I could honestly answer, “Yeah, I am.” 

• • • 

After Dad retired in ’92, Pam and I would sometimes indulge in morbid speculations about which of our parents would die first. It wasn’t exactly a game of choosing your favorite, but had more to do with practical matters.  

—Who was healthiest? They’d both developed diabetes in their old age, but Mom tended to cheat by eating real candy, including
the largest Hershey bar I’d ever seen! Ten pounds, Pam. I don’t know—I guess she ordered it off the TV.
Obviously our father got more exercise.
But Nathan, Dad’s more likely to get in a car accident or fall down an elevator shaft. 

—Who had the stronger will to live? A tough one. After retirement, we worried Dad would go stir crazy. Instead, he found more woodworking projects, did substitute teaching, and played poker and bridge games three times a week.
But Mom’s got her “plays.” God forbid she never find out if Laura recovers from amnesia or if Allison’s twin sister fools the Addison family out of the inheritance. 

—Which of them would be hardest for us to care for? No question, Mom. She was okay during the day, but needed Dad to do everything once he got home: cooking, shopping, laundry, other essential cleaning. Dad was self-sufficient, but Mom would need full-time care.
And what’s this “us” business, Pam? We know you don’t have room in your tiny New York apartment. I’ll be stuck with whichever one survives.
 

—Who would be the best company? I had my answer, but Pam insisted Dad would be less bother.
You always liked him better. You went shopping with him and bought comic books at Drug Fair; interned with him two summers at Pelham Elementary. And those goofy stories which you loved: car crashes and poison ivy and sawed-off fingers. He was your lifeline, Nate.
True. But our childhood likes and dislikes can change. 

Mom finally ended up in the hospital. I called the ambulance myself, while Dad waved his arms and threatened to disconnect the phone.