a language felt

excerpt from the forthcoming memoir ‘The Cherry Burn’

It is June 27, 2010 and my stepfather is dying. Every time my phone rings these days it is my mother, and I’ve stopped answering. I don’t call her back. I cannot make the call. To call is to be needed, and I cannot be needed.

My stepfather has been dying for a long, long time.

Mark is sitting on my kitchen counter, batting a cabinet door back and forth on its hinges between his bare feet. I like the way the wooden door sounds as he does this — plunk. Plunk. It is better than the cat meowing outside the window, better than the bird squawking at the cat. Plunk. The sound travels across the kitchen tile, reaches the soles of my feet and up the back of my legs like a vine of ivy overtaking me. It stops at the crevice behind my knee and this sound, the tile, my knee, transmit a language felt.

There are piles of dishes in the sink next to where I lean my backside against the counter. Bits of food, souring milk, a dead fly — I cannot complete the task at hand. I cannot be attentive.

Plunk. Plunk.

I think of wood, log rounds split into quarters, the way the pieces fall with a plunk. Sometimes when you go for the strike, the pieces are hurtled in opposite directions like magnets flipping over, once connected, then apart. The meat of the wood shredded and exposed. This is the fuel that heats our bodies, part and parcel of our nests.

Why don’t you call? Mark asks without looking up at me. His feet stop now, waiting, perhaps anxiously, for my reply. In his hand, my telephone, his thumb caressing the glossy screen. This phone, it’s so small, he says. That’s just how they make them now — people think they’re easier to carry around, more convenient, I explain. Mark puts the phone to his ear then shifts it down to his mouth, then back again. I tell him about those phones you can just put into your ear and speak. You just talk? Into the air? he quizzes. Yes, you just talk into the air, and you are heard. Maybe you can get one of those, he says. His feet begin to move again — plunk.

For a moment I think back to 1987. I am eleven years old, and my mother is working a job that she dresses up for and my stepfather is working a job that brings strangers into our home to test out the product that is stored in an assortment of pill bottles and baggies on a tray slid beneath our couch. I never sit on this piece of furniture, and I begin to bypass the living room altogether, sometimes just climbing in and out of my bedroom window. And while I discovered the benefits of avoidance several years prior, my brother, Dale, had not.

Dale is thirteen and he is being beaten in his bedroom by our stepfather. I am alone in my room next to his, listening, and in a way, we are both caged animals. Ear at the door, I listen, then back away, then listen again, then retreat into my closet. I repeat this according to the sounds I hear, afraid to move, afraid to make it worse. The longer the pauses in between the yelling and the crying, the sooner it will end I’ve learned, and so I wait in the bottom of my closet. Passivity is not without its benefits. I suppose I am the favored child who is never drawn and quartered. Instead, when I need to cry out, I reach up in my closet, pull a shirt down from a hanger, put it to my mouth and scream.

When I stop, I hear a weird sound — my stepfather, low and growling. What are you, a fucking faggot? Stop sniveling! And then: Come here, pussy! I listen to him drag Dale across the wood floor of his bedroom; in Dale’s voice is the fear of an animal, the slowest in a hunted pack. And then suddenly, nothing, until: Plunk. Plunk. Tiptoeing out of my bedroom, I stand in the hallway, far enough away to peek in, but ready to sprint. I see Dale’s red face rise and fall, the rest of him obstructed by his bed, my stepfather’s hands around his throat lifting him up and then slamming him back down onto a newly polished floor that reflects the light coming in from the window. I am unseen and when I reach the phone in the living room, I dial my mother, as I have been instructed to do in these situations, when, as she explained, it gets really bad. She is in a meeting and I am hysterical, but I am left to hear the soft sounds of the hold music, the plunking behind me shuddering in my chest.

Pick up, pick up, pick up! And she does. And she listens and my heart races and I am letting it all out now — he’s, choking, Dale, and I — I, I don’t know what to do. I’m relieved I have made the call as instructed. I am puzzled by her pause, but she quickly provides the solution:

I don’t have the time to deal with this, god damn it, you figure it out. Click.

Mark is holding my phone in his hands, fingering the edges when it rings. His chin now rests on his gently rising and falling chest. Slowly, he sets the phone down on the counter beside him, so softly I don’t hear the touchdown.

Maybe, call her tomorrow? He almost whispers. The cabinet door at a standstill now, and all that’s left is the ticking of a nearby clock.