Falmon Entries

(Concluded) (Goto Part One)

Of course Pops never argued directly with her. He just sat in his chair. Overstuffed and reupholstered red, in a modern plastic material. Indestructible. Long ago, Anna had Dee haul the thing down to the valley, to College Village, where she'd discovered the furniture craftsman, after calling long distance twice. Anything out of the Absalom exchange was long distance. "I know it's not an emergency," she'd said, "but Pops' a working man. Deserves his chair." Somehow that had been a sort of last straw for the maturing daughter, who ran off to the city shortly later. Now, it's worn to yellow atop the arms. He rolled another cigarette before responding to Karen. A few more aromatic crumbs fell into the cushion crack.

Karen's father often sat, doing nothing. He was a man who could look comfortable, sitting and doing nothing. Sometimes he held things, besides cigarettes, literature mainly. Often he held his Eagle. It came out weekly and sometimes he held it the whole seven days, in his leisure time, after supper mostly, three hours maybe. Sometimes four even. He might have wanted to sit all night, instead of sharing a bed, but that wasn't playing the bargain fair. He'd hold the week's issue every evening, turning a page once in a while, as if absorbing the local boostering and gossip one inky character at a time.

"We can't all be the bodhisattva picking berries," she said, "sitting papaver, there in the rolling drum. While the breasts of sativa suckle honeyed milk into tumbling cascades." She met his eye as might a thespian Medea, in Acropolis' lee, sure of the demigoddess' power. "See my roundness," she recited, "see my firmness. See with the blue eye of fertile bounty mindless. Roll with me to the ground kundalini my oneness. Visit the breath of oughtman." She stood elegantly tall against the tiny living room's papered board walls. Wearing a man's plaid shirt with round tails, which she didn't tuck in, and slim black pants which she'd retailored herself. Capri-style. She gestured with an unlit filtered cigarette which sometime tomorrow she'd smoke. Unless he drove her crazy. She managed to voice the poem carelessly, and with a nicely measured sarcasm, but she pronounced it "BAD-hissed-AH-vuh." And misspelled atman. Bongo-backed recitations of the poem hadn't exactly brought her the meaning clearly, but she figured somebody spending three weeks picking huckleberries one at a time and naming each one; she figured that person and her Pops had a lot in common.

She bent close to him, in a perfect coax.

"Oh, don't you see, some people just need to breathe? Me. I just need something to bust loose. It's fine for you, to sit there like a porcupine on a limb. Like the world can't touch you. Some of us need to let the light in."

The cabin was clan property, with Grandpa granted occupancy by Falmon elders. That would be Sybil and Uriah. Snake and mongoose. Occupancy granted against a lien of repairing labor. The living room's only window was set in the front door. Through it Karen saw light from a bare bulb. Pops had wired it knob and tube under the too-high ceiling of the tin shed he built for a porch. Just knobs actually. Too hard to drill the pole rafters for porcelain tubes.

"I mean it Pops," she said, grabbing his silver Zippo and straightening up. "I really really really mean it." She worked the lighter on the first try and got lit up. She gestured wide. "Just look." She pushed her method-acting emoto-celerator to the floor, revving up to red line. At the same time she lost grip on the lighter and it dropped to the thin carpet, open but unlit. She incorporated this impromptu flamboyancy with mere glance.

"Maybe next month," he said. If he glanced, she couldn't tell. He balanced his smoke on a square glass ashtray, a heavy one with a circular dish in the middle which looked like a tiny fish pond. A half-dozen of his butts swam there, all headed away from him, schooled up like stubby brown roach-fin minnows. "We'll see what the mistress says."

"Her," Karen exasperated. A subtle hiss crept into her voice. A note of danger added to the modulation, like scoring a staccato violin behind the heroine's theme. Or cutting in a shot of the adder in Cleopatra's basket. Karen's mother had a fragile grip on the dynamics of even her nuclear family and marrying the quietly serious logger from up in the hills had engendered tangled marital connections. The one who ended up calling her 'the mistress.' He seemed so solitary. Anna was a tall woman who believed in sanitation. She was a pioneer in household disinfectants. She didn't at all mind being called that name, which might just as well mean lady in charge. In intimacy, it made her giggle. Karen inherited most of her mother's height but she filled it out better. Karen was sort of proud of having better "meat on her bones," compared to the mistress, and sometimes, in unguarded enthusiasm, brought the question into her family's bosom. "Looks pretty good," her brother'd tease then, "but turns to horsemeat around the snout." Robert fished the evening rise most days, sneaking in late. Not that many flies hatched in March, on the chilly upper Neshilo. But Robert always attempted escapes, he hated sitting around almost as much as being sociable.

"The mistress won't decide anything," Karen said. She soared on the wave of her delicious thespian release. "Anything! ANYTHING! ANYTHING!" The epitome of projection and diction. In absolute pitch. Precision without prissy. As good as Barbara Stanwyck telling off the lawyers.

Spot on cue, she threw her best turn-on-the-heel dismissal, right in his face. He had to watch the shirttail semaphoring outrage and disgust. It flapped in her hot breeze like the signal for 'enemy in sight.' In five haughty steps Karen gained the kitchen. Exit was stage right, down the back hall; three doors opening into the little box. One her room. The dialogue had to be timed for the turn. "I don't know why you all must be so hateful," she said. The final line delivered so her pose carried beyond the wall, into the box. The last scene her audience could observe was directly into her despairing face, posed in the ever dramatic over-the-shoulder shot. Not needing to turn anticlimactically away. She'd made the perfect exit and it carried the flesh of her father out of her life forever.

The still quickened flesh of Karen's already long absent Pops picked up his cigarette. It had gone out, his cigarettes always went out, unless he actively puffed them. With two fingers he probed his shirt pocket for the Zippo. He remembered it was on the floor. Grandpa Falmon was still wiry enough to reach it with a slippery sideways stretch. His feet never had to leave the ground. Flipping the lighter shut, he held it in his fist to restore some wick vapors. He flicked and lit. He puffed the coal hot. "Still," he mumbled smokily, "maybe next month."