newlyweds passed the phone back and forth while standing at the hostess station.
Everyone got a little too drunk and kept eating. They put away plates of meat and baked beans and iceberg salads with ranch dressing. A distant cousin ate only creamed corn. David and Franny sat at the table with his father and the hygienist and her husband. Davidâs father lifted a spoon of mashed potatoes. âOnce, this was all underground,â he said. The hygienistâs husband ringed his big arm around Davidâs neck and told him it was good to marry a strong woman who could get herself out of trouble. David imagined Franny pinned under a grain thresher, hefting it overhead into a hayloft.
At the end of the evening, Franny placed a dish of pudding by one of her parentsâ memorial plates and started to cry. The guests had mostly left, save for a patron of the restaurant named Chuck who produced a flask of whiskey and sat with his back to the wall. Franny wiped her eyes with her motherâs memorial napkin and took a pull from the offered flask.
That night, Franny and David lay in bed together, immobile from the pleasures of the buffet. She slept, and he examined the muscles twitching under her skin. In those early years, Frannyâs body lacked the twin mysteries of scent and softness that had initially allured and eventually drove him from the bedrooms of his few previous girlfriends. His wifeâs scent that night was of a wet rock, as if she had been created from the stream that ran behind his childhood home.
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18.
OVER A LIFETIME of experience, Davidâs mother learned that institutional food was more or less the same, regardless of the location, purpose, or quality of the institution in question. If they could make a fruit out of a chunk of Styrofoam, they would do it. Davidâs mother felt certain that she had once eaten a synthetic pear served to her by the institution. She could discern the pearâs flavor but it registered only vaguely, as if she was experiencing the pear under sedation or in a dream. Its texture was of a wet sponge soaked in chemicals.
She fumbled to peel the crimped foil on her orange juice container. It evaded her fingers, which felt thicker with every yearâs birthday card she opened from her son, her old fingers failing even to separate paper from adhesive. He sent old cards, even a few she had given him for his own birthdays. The other ladies read them to her. David sometimes sent the letters her sister had written before she passed. This was before she settled into a less-demarcated timeline of growth and weakening. Her hands lost their power to the point where she had trouble turning a doorknob.
Davidâs mother fantasized about being able to turn doorknobs. There was the unyielding chill of metal under her strong hand, which gripped and turned so easily, feeling through her fingers the internal mechanism of the door. Her blindness heightened her sense of touch, allowing her to experience an even purer form of pleasure. Each joint in her body moved with a similar efficiency and silence. Shoulder and elbow, wrist, knuckles, fingertips; synchronous. She slowed down the motion in her memory of it, fingers grasping, tucking under the metal with such precision. She could feel the seam where metal met turning metal, the knobâs joints meeting her own. In her fantasy of it, she felt so strong that she could rip the knob off the door and hold it in her hand like a stone.
The women at this particular institution guided Davidâs mother through open doors in the distant way that they would guide an old woman at any institution. They sat her at empty tables and helped with her playing cards. The ridges and grooves in the cards greeted the sense of touch in her hands, which she still refused to admit was dimming.
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19.
ONE NEW MESSAGE. Three saved messages. First new message. From, phone number three three zero, three two three, seven four nine eight.
Tracie Peterson, Judith Pella