The Things They Don’t Tell Us

We look for clues about the things they don’t tell us. Of course, the home movies, first back and white and then color. Mom pregnant in most of the scenes. That must be Pam, that must be Steve, that must be Mary, that must be Bob, and then a gap in time, and then that must be Kevin and that must be Gerald. In one reel, we’re in capes for some reason, running across the yard, screaming in ecstatic happiness or fear, running from something or someone.

We wanted Dad to tell us about World War II, but he really wanted to talk more about Denver, where he was stationed for six months before shipping out to the Philippines. Because he was married and because his commanding officer, Colonel Somebody, had been friends with my father’s family before the war, my parents were allowed to live in a small apartment off base.

When my father got his orders to ship out overseas, my mother said she “…took off my apron and threw it down on the counter of the soda shop and quit right then and there.” Whenever she said this, she made a neat little burlesque twist to show how she’d ripped off the apron and thrown it down on the counter. She never quite explained the significance of the move, but there was an implication of a certain boldness. “Right then and there,” she’d say, “right then and there.  I went home and stayed with Momma and Poppa. We did okay. We had some boarders. We had some chickens. We had a dirt yard, and I wanted a yard with real grass.”

Other than his soldier days, my father lived all his life in Texas, and he was intrigued by winter. “At night we put the milk bottles outside our bedroom window, and the milk was cold in the morning. Sometimes it had a little ice in it.”

When I was older and living near Denver with my own family, when we’d have a storm, he’d call and say, “Bob, are you snowed in?”

I lived two blocks from the supermarket, a block from Starbucks, but I’d said, “Yeah, Dad, snowed in. Totally snowed in. It’s rough out here.”

They hardly traveled, but when they were older, after my mother was already becoming ill, they made it to Paris and London, wore trench coats and too large sunglasses, resembled inept spies out of their league, wrecked a car. Sent real postcards! But they didn’t contain much news. We learned about the wrecked car later.

She typed my early stories, inserted her own lines, created romantic situations where none had existed. What’s this? I’d ask, I don’t recall Paul kissing Laura. I thought you needed a little spice, she might say, though the lines were more for herself, I imagine, as she gave voice to wishes she had never talked about. In truth, they weren’t bad lines.

With all of us children to raise, she’d never gone to college when she was young, but she was a big reader. In her sixties, she signed up for a creative writing class at the community college. Her teacher praised her efforts when she read aloud. I pictured her reading in-between whiffs on her inhaler, somehow bold in her frailness and shyness. There was a concluding scene where a young woman throws down her apron on a counter and quits, “right then and there!” She left the story open-ended. Where was the girl going after that? After she’d passed away, my father got teary one day and said, “She could have been a great writer if she’d started earlier. She had so much to say, but she always kept it to herself.”

He said he’d always wanted to be a writer himself. After he retired, he rolled a sheet of paper into my mother’s electric typewriter, and the sheet sat there blank year after year. Maybe you could write about the war, Dad, I suggested.

“I really liked Elitch Gardens, riding the Ferris wheel with your mother, the snow cones. You could get a snow cone for a nickel. Sometimes they’d give it to you for free if you were in uniform.”

Then write about that, I said, or maybe some stories of us all growing up.

His eyes turned upward, as if he was searching back through time. He lowered his head and stared at me, and there was a sudden glint of malice in his eyes, as if he were recalling some misdeed of my youth. I would have welcomed even the recounting of that, but he sighed and blinked, attempting to absolve me. “That’s a good idea. I just have to decide where to start.”

On visits home, I did see him sit at his desk and stare at the sheet of typing paper, his fingers on the keys, frowning intently as if the right words might mysteriously appear.