I'd like to think so.
By Zoe Rose
At eighteen, I consider myself tentatively lucky to still have a great-grandparent. 91 and just only now starting to disappear behind the thicket of dementia, my mother’s mother’s mother is held in my family much like the beautiful antique platter we once had- treasured, requires the most careful of handling, only seen at Christmas.
Not that it was always like this. Maw, as we seven youngest group of descendants call her, she used to be so, well, here. Aged, yes, but she refused to let anybody be able to call her an old lady. I spent elementary summers in quiet awe of how much she was able to at her age, all on her own, while the four others I had known went so quietly into the ground that I can hardly even recall that they were once more than just a figure in the frames on the wall.
Too many errands ran and dinners cooked and nights spent to really pick apart the specific memories of Maw before now. And I was too young to be able to get anything but the essence of things from then. The accumulation of time stretches out like a landscape, blurred and somewhat consistent, peppered by the rare oddity or importance.
But there is one.
I can’t remember how specifically old I was, but it had to’ve been when I was still young and small enough to have been comfortably sleeping on Maw’s loveseat in her living room. An overstuffed structure held together by cool, plastic-y leather, I usually would find myself up with the sun almost directly following saying goodnight. For some reason, on some night, I had been pulled back to consciousness by a very loud, chug-a-lug type of noise.
I do remember keeping my eyes closed for a long time. I figured I’d fall back asleep if I mimed like I actually still was. Eventually the noise became piercing, all-around, too much to ignore. I sat up.
Pushed up against the wall on the other end of the couch was a large, matching chair. It usually sat vacant, but not then. I had opened my eyes to a man sitting there- pants and shoes and an old-man belly visible through a tan shirt- and he didn’t seem one bit out of place with the scene. The prickle of fear that I’d have had nowadays went unfelt then. I was not scared. In my child-mind, he looked even natural to be there.
Most of his face was covered by a great opaque mask that stretched from nearly over his eyes to past his chin. From it ran a long tube that snaked off his knees and onto the floor.
We stayed like that for a while. Even in the Ohio dark, I could see him well enough to make out a struggle in the rise and fall of his chest as he took in air. My mind was so unbothered by the presence of The Man with No Face that I could even conjure up sympathy for him. An asthmatic since kindergarten, I knew what it was like to not be able to take that simple function for granted. I can remember most sharply how bad I felt that this stranger had to live with that loud mask.
But I never said a word or made a motion, and neither did he. I blinked at him. I think he blinked at me. Then, after some time, I squirmed back down onto the couch and fell asleep.
In the daylight, eating pancakes with my brother and Maw and waiting for my mother to come take us all to the movies, the incident felt like nothing more than a really silly dream. I knew how my brother and cousins would laugh- Ha ha ha, a man in the chair. And ha ha ha, he had a mask. The adults would say I was making things up again. I’d get another lesson in truths versus not-truths, and I already knew well enough.
So I had a secret. I once saw a man in Maw’s chair and I was almost proud to have never even whispered it at sleepovers. And after so long of not calling that night back to tell to others, it became far and enough away that I very nearly forgot it happened.
It wasn’t until I was something like sixteen years old when I thought about it again. Maw had finally agreed to move into an assisted living and put her home of about sixty years on the market, and I had come up north to help my grandma and mom clean everything out while Maw settled into a place where (much to our relief) she would never be alone like she had since 1989.
Something about rummaging through an old basement- curling newspapers nestled into the corners of a ripped pool table- inspired such a nostalgia within my mother that she got talking of the times when she was “my age”.
And my age then happened to be the same approximate time within my mother’s life that she had seen her grandma go a widow and herself lose someone that, she admitted with this little pull in her voice, that she cared about very much.
He was a photographer for a local paper. Good one too- almost won the Pulitzer for capturing a “Terror on the Mad River!”. Mom likes photography. Mom is like her grandfather.
And he had a whole life before the bad time, something wholly different than what I had seen. I don’t know if I really believe in God, or monsters, or a world past this, but I’m sure, I’m sure, that we all leave an imprint- an electrical little pulse that grabs hold of what’s around and tells others that dammit, we were, once.
But it didn’t really matter how he lived. This man with the camera, searing the history of Dayton in a fearless bulb- Beatles Here Today!, Mayor Elected, Man Captured- marching only forward, always forward, to an early, choked death. The man who captured everything forever, his own true history lost.
“It went so quick,” She said to his box of negatives on the broken wicker chair in the corner, “At the point he was at, the doctor just sent him home. He had this big, loud breathing machine to keep him comfortable, but that was it. We were all there. Grandma had left the room for a few moments, and that was when he went.”
And you wanna know where? Do you really, really want to?
Because I think you already do.
We stayed like that for a while. Even in the Ohio dark, I could see him well enough to make out a struggle in the rise and fall of his chest as he took in air. My mind was so unbothered by the presence of The Man with No Face that I could even conjure up sympathy for him. An asthmatic since kindergarten, I knew what it was like to not be able to take that simple function for granted. I can remember most sharply how bad I felt that this stranger had to live with that loud mask.
But I never said a word or made a motion, and neither did he. I blinked at him. I think he blinked at me. Then, after some time, I squirmed back down onto the couch and fell asleep.
In the daylight, eating pancakes with my brother and Maw and waiting for my mother to come take us all to the movies, the incident felt like nothing more than a really silly dream. I knew how my brother and cousins would laugh- Ha ha ha, a man in the chair. And ha ha ha, he had a mask. The adults would say I was making things up again. I’d get another lesson in truths versus not-truths, and I already knew well enough.
So I had a secret. I once saw a man in Maw’s chair and I was almost proud to have never even whispered it at sleepovers. And after so long of not calling that night back to tell to others, it became far and enough away that I very nearly forgot it happened.
It wasn’t until I was something like sixteen years old when I thought about it again. Maw had finally agreed to move into an assisted living and put her home of about sixty years on the market, and I had come up north to help my grandma and mom clean everything out while Maw settled into a place where (much to our relief) she would never be alone like she had since 1989.
Something about rummaging through an old basement- curling newspapers nestled into the corners of a ripped pool table- inspired such a nostalgia within my mother that she got talking of the times when she was “my age”.
And my age then happened to be the same approximate time within my mother’s life that she had seen her grandma go a widow and herself lose someone that, she admitted with this little pull in her voice, that she cared about very much.
He was a photographer for a local paper. Good one too- almost won the Pulitzer for capturing a “Terror on the Mad River!”. Mom likes photography. Mom is like her grandfather.
And he had a whole life before the bad time, something wholly different than what I had seen. I don’t know if I really believe in God, or monsters, or a world past this, but I’m sure, I’m sure, that we all leave an imprint- an electrical little pulse that grabs hold of what’s around and tells others that dammit, we were, once.
But it didn’t really matter how he lived. This man with the camera, searing the history of Dayton in a fearless bulb- Beatles Here Today!, Mayor Elected, Man Captured- marching only forward, always forward, to an early, choked death. The man who captured everything forever, his own true history lost.
“It went so quick,” She said to his box of negatives on the broken wicker chair in the corner, “At the point he was at, the doctor just sent him home. He had this big, loud breathing machine to keep him comfortable, but that was it. We were all there. Grandma had left the room for a few moments, and that was when he went.”
And you wanna know where? Do you really, really want to?
Because I think you already do.
No comments:
Post a Comment