Today is the anniversary of my father's death. I wish to pay him homage in some small way, even if to an unknown audience, so I've chosen to share a story I wrote shortly after he died. Perhaps my catharsis may be yours as well.
Douglas Christopher Towers ~ April 11, 1953 - Oct. 1, 2004
A simplistic man may not necessarily be one synonymous with a man of simplicity. My Dad was a man of simplicity. Intelligent, articulate, ridiculous, silly, and charming. Soft spoken, yet stubborn. Patient, yet competitive. His name is Doug.
Last of September, I did not write because of my experiences within the industry (i.e., service), but my experiences certainly shaped how I wrote it. I am not 'Alice', but Alice is a whole lot of me.
She was born into a family with bad teeth and bad eyes. Alice was, on both accounts however, the exception. No dental debt owed to anyone, nor accruing optometrist fees. Her ivories had miraculously sprouted row-evenly-upon-row. As for those peepers, nature had been generous in that only the green had been passed through the genes. Hers, greenest once evoked. Whether it be melancholy or mischief, when passion struck the flint within her, it was her eyes that sparked something surreal.Last of September
The difference between her green and that of the rest of her family was that Alice looked through to the world unencumbered. Unaided, unabated. Twenty-twenty jewels nestled within her sockets; as opposed to the rest of her family, obliged to contend with perception enhanced only through the use of various filters. Be they of the thick-crafted, 'pop-bottle' variety, or the flimsy genre, saline soaked in plastic webs upon a bedside table while the eyes they served slept - the lenses were necessary for clarity to all but she. Clarity seemed not her problem, rather the fact that often she felt stung by it. Her acute, specific sense of vision, blinding at times. Perhaps one could argue, feebly, that this was the reason she appreciated liquor. Without a definable physiological requirement she had found, groping through youth, a filter of her own. A smart girl with poor strategies.
It is the last day of September. A Thursday. The film of autumn slowly descending. Trees just shy enough in their turning to awaken anticipation and curiosity. In a week from tomorrow she will be twenty-nine. The last of her decade's birthday celebrations.
She had closed the bar last night and had set neither an alarm, nor an agenda for her day off. It is sometime after two p.m. that she is awakened by the digital ring of her cell phone. Why she hasn't heard the phone from the other room may be attributable to the late-night routine she has developed over many years. Alice does not usually find Sleep a willing participant. She is beginning to disappoint herself with things which she relies upon; wishing she were strong enough for hobbies over habits. It is for this reason that Alice finds herself, in her work, not desensitized, but paying increasingly particular attention to her female clientele. The women she watches are not too unrealistic a stretch from where she may find herself, sooner than she cares to acknowledge. Alice is not concerned with a romantic vision of the tragic-once-was-beauty, lost to circumstances beyond personal control. It is women of weakness she has been watching. Women who bemoan their lives. Failing in sloppy innuendoes and pathetic attempts at retribution. Women who do not choose to live up to the choices that they have made; scuttling to hide consequences within elaborate charades of regret. Woefully adorned in self-pity; bejeweled in dull, languidly intellectual idioms. Queen fools, perched on their bar stools; lapping at the free booze, offered by the fool's fools. Lapping at the neck of false prospect. Lonely fuckers. She is lonely too, but she won't do that.
Alice fumbles for the phone on the floor. She fumbles again for the 'talk' button, all the while negotiating the civil war brewing between her brain and her eye-lids.
"Hello?" she offers in a grainy voice.
"Oh my God. Oh, Alice."
His voice pierces through the static of her cheap phone and peels through the static in her head. The tone of her name, evocative of neither endearment nor casualness, plucks at a warning chord within. Her name, perched precariously upon panic. This is no social mid-day ring. She squints at the glare of the sky and the water outside of her window. Alice, a little unsteady on one elbow, props her head within her right palm. She waits.
"God, I'm so glad I finally got you. I've been trying your phone. I've been trying your cell. Your mom called me. You need to get to the hospital. I can pick you up. When can you be ready?" The single, longest word in human history.
"Is it my dad or my grandma?" she asks, eyes wide in the instant of fear before realization. The simplicity of the question traveling through some far, hollow space; reaching her brother-in-law on the other end of the line.
"It's your dad," Thomas responds very softly.
The echo of tears spilt, audible to her now. With Tom's response, the birth and death of plump, blurry babes muddles Alice's view. Outside, the blue of the sky becomes that of the water; the gleam of the sun on the river becomes that of the sky. Pulled in strands of light through her window, the bedroom appears to be melting with everything else. Tree tops and water-sky. Her room and herself. All come barreling back toward her. Yanked through space. A vacuum fueled by adrenaline. She feels the whack, as if struck by matter, and all that has ever mattered.
"I'll be ready in twenty minutes," her voice a little more alert and less restrained than it had been fifteen seconds earlier.
"I'm on my way." Tom is sobbing now.
"Thank you."
Alice hangs up and pauses briefly. A last glance at her life, intact as she knows it. She suddenly feels frantic and begins leaping from room to room, crying and disorganized. Washing her face. Grabbing her wallet and her phone and her make-up. Stuffing the whole mess into her bag. Snatching clean pants as she darts back to the washroom. She is simultaneously brushing her teeth, taking a pee, and changing her clothes. Speaking nonsense aloud in her empty apartment to steady her breathing.
Seventeen minutes since she had hung up the phone. She has got to get downstairs. Her answering machine is flashing red. Everything about her feels as though it is flashing red. Alice scrambles with the sleeves of her jacket and hits 'play'. A robotic, vaguely female voice responds, "Thursday, 10:31 a.m.", followed by: "Alice, it's mom," her voice foreign, crisp, and sad; all mushed together. "You need to get to the hospital to say 'good-bye'."
Good-bye. Good-bye? Fucking Christ!
She hasn't spoken to her mother in ten months. It has been longer since she last heard her father's voice. Thursday. Last of September. He is dying.
She is locking the door. She is in the elevator. She is outside, stumbling toward the car idling for her. She is watching her reflection creep closer in the passenger window. She looks unfamiliar to herself; outside of her own life.
"This is not, this is not, this is not
really happening...
You bet your life it is,
you bet your life it is..."
Amos is singing and re-singing and singing, for her only. Alice reaches for the door handle. It is cold. She hears the springs of the hinges and the song in her head. The sun is out. It is a gorgeous afternoon and this strikes her as strange.
Alice's eyes have never appeared more green.
Tom pulls away from the curb.
m
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