Tell Me About My Father

   

         When Marge shut her mother’s front door behind herself she looked around the familiar front room of the house. The walls, the floor, the furnishings were both very familiar and alien. The blank black rectangle of the TV screen stared at her mutely. She felt that she was coming back from a place very far away. The room seemed smaller, insubstantial.
            Her hair was still damp and she was tired, wrung out.
            “Marge,” yelled Enid from the kitchen, “Where in Heaven’s name have you been?”
            Thinking that the appeal to Heaven was oddly on point, Marge walked into the kitchen where Enid was wrists deep in a bowl of ground beef.
            “I’m sorry, Mom. I was just enjoying the snow and the meadow so much that I just kept going,” said Marge.
            “I tried to call you, and it went straight to voice mail,” griped Enid. “I never know with you. Shall I call the sheriff, or just wait and figure you’ll show up!”
            “I must have gotten into a dead spot. I’m tired. I think I’ll go take a shower and go to bed,” said Marge.
            “Don’t you want some dinner?” said Enid, disapprovingly.
            “I don’t think so,” said Marge. She was hungry, but it didn’t seem important.
            The strangeness continued. Her bedroom looked like a doll house belonging to someone else. Someone she used to know maybe. The familiar buff colored walls looked both solid and permeable. She experimented with placing a hand on the nearest wall. On became in and she withdrew her hand hurriedly, with a gasp. This was going to take some thought. Marge laughed.
            She had her shower. The hot water felt wonderful after that river made of snowmelt. She was beginning to get used to the not-there-ness of walls.
            In her bedroom she sat on the side of her bed looking at her desk, where Twigg’s  basket sat. The salal leaves were still tucked into the lid, dried up and brown. Again, she wept a little because of the beauty of the thing and something else, hard to define.
            And then to bed. The same twin bed, the same quilt, the same pillow and sheets. Then to dreaming. She was a very tired girl that night.
            When she awoke, the light coming into her room had that white opaque quality it gets during a snow storm. Looking out her window, Marge saw that it must have been snowing for hours. Winter had arrived, seriously. She couldn’t help loving it. She wouldn’t be driving anywhere today anyhow.
            Breakfast at the table with Enid and Arthur was fairly jovial. Eggs and toast, butter and blackberry jam, coffee and cream. There was a streak of gray in Enid’s 1950s hairstyle now, but true to form, she was dressed, literally. She wore a cotton print dress, and stockings!
            Looking at her mother there at the table fussing around with scraping just a bit of butter across her toast and frowning a little, Marge was filled with pity or maybe just mercy. She saw her mother for what she was. Essentially she was pretty harmless, capable of being a micromanaging pest. She probably had her reasons.
            Amiable, gray whiskered Arthur, drained his coffee cup, and patted his plaid flannel tummy, said, “Thanks Enid, honey,” and wandered off to switch on the TV.
            Once it was rumbling along, Arthur was a little deaf, Marge said, “Mom. Tell me about my father. Please. It’s only fair. I know nothing about him.” Enid looked up, startled.
            “Oh, Marge, really? I’m sure I must have,” Enid started to say.
            “If you did, Mom, I was too young to remember. Please,” said Marge. “Where was he from?”
            “He told me he grew up down by Mt. Rainer in some little place called Ashford. He never said much about that,” said Enid.
            “Do you have a photo? I have no idea what he looked like even. Do I look like him? I don’t look much like you, do I?” said Marge.
            “No, you don’t look much like me. I’ll get the picture I have. Stay put,” said Enid. She came back from the bedroom with an 8.5 x 11 manila envelope. She laid it on the table and slid a big black and white photo out of it.
            The man in the photograph looked very large. His black hair was shoulder length, and he had a full beard. His eyes were brown and his brows were heavy. He was bare chested and heavily muscled. The photo was from the waist up.
            “His name was Erwin. Who names a defenseless infant a thing like that?” said Enid, barely looking at the photo.
            “Where did you meet him? What did he do? Where were you married? How did he die, Mom?” said Marge all in a rush. “He looks very big, Mom.”
            “Marge, he was 6’8”, OK? He was tall and broad. I met him at the U. I was in business classes and he was taking biology. He wanted to be a doctor. We were going to get married, but then he decided to climb Mt. Rainier. That’s the last anyone ever heard from him. No body was found, nothing, but he left you behind for me to raise alone,” said Enid. Her façade shifted a bit, and Marge could see the girl her mother had been, alone and worried.
            “I’m sorry. Thank you. It must have been hard,” said Marge.
            “My mother said he was wild, and that he would leave me. Then he did. She said he looked like a Wooly Booger! He did not! He wasn’t nearly hairy enough! I didn’t speak to her until after you were born,” said Enid.
            Marge had to laugh. “I remember her! She took care of me until school, and then after school. I miss her. I had no idea she said that!”
            “He couldn’t have been more than half!” said Enid.
            Marge sat back and took a deep breath. “Wow, Mom!” she said. 

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