Donut Delite: 1969
All summer I tossed wheels of dough into a sea of grease, where they browned and crisped while I smoked half a cigarette. By the time the owner stopped by, the air would be humid with sugar, the bakery cases filled with rows of doughnuts I’d frosted and sprinkled. He’d pull a buck from his wallet to pay for his cruller, his cup of coffee, and show me the photo of his son squinting into the light, smiling like a man who didn’t know he would die at Khe Sanh. On my last day the boss pressed a wad of bills into my hand and kissed me goodbye. When he slipped his tongue into my mouth, I could feel the old dog of his heart rear up and tug at its leash. His breath tasted like ashes. He was my father’s friend. I was sixteen and didn’t understand yet how life can kill you a little at a time. Still, I kissed him back.
Safe
After we buried my mother, we drank beer and told stories in the room where she’d died. The hospital bed was gone and the portable commode I’d helped her settle on, the love seat tucked flush with the window again, long sofa shoved against the wall like always, the same sofa where she’d fall asleep watching baseball while she waited for me to come home from some high-school date, and once, when I wasn’t home by midnight, she threw a raincoat over her flannel pajamas and drove around until she found me mussed and unbuttoned behind the Big Boy, sharing a bagged can of Colt 45 with the second-string quarterback. All the way home and for an entire week, I was punished by silence, a vast black void of disgust. The last time I saw her, I wanted her to speak to me, to lock the front door and turn off the last light, to follow me upstairs, having made the house safe for the night. But she didn’t know who I was.
Wondrous
I’m driving home from school when the radio talk turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit the here and now of the freeway at rush hour, travel back into the past, where my mother is reading to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried seventeen times to record the words She died alone without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention — wondrous how those words would come back and make him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp, the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.