In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place: World War II in the Central Pacific

Blooms Lined Up Like This

130 Blooms Lined Up Like This Mid-March—that wet trampled month, time of rashes and sopping lawns and garden gloves changed constantly—the postcard arrived. Discovered by my thirteenyear -old son Mason back from an egg run to the corner store; he came into the kitchen heralding our mail piece by piece—Junk! Junk!—saving the postcard for last. “Dear Frank, this is important,” Mason read and then silently read the rest. The postcard pictured a lighthouse, so probably from my ex-mother-in-law’s collection. But why addressed to my husband? “If it’s bad news, read it quickly,” Frank said, retrieving Mason’s backpack thrown by the door. “Please stuff the postcard in the garbage disposal,” I said. At our oak table thick as a butcher’s block, I promised my day to a piece of paper. Zodiac Flower Article. Review Season’s Amaryllis. I wrote monthly for The Floriographer, a comprehensive flower magazine I’d founded and then a year ago sold, though it had been much longer since I’d filled the house with fresh-cut flowers . I once fully supported the effort for true good moods; there remained vases in each room, in every cranny, empty. To write my articles these days I took my laptop to the community garden and on a bench pretended. New blooms! Fragrant sweet pea! Knock you out tulips! Blooms Lined Up Like This 131 Mason ignored me. The backs of his jeans were soaked to the shins and dotted with heel-kicked muck; he was pale and bleached and wore a necklace of red beads and shark teeth his father had left him in a pen-scratched will found beneath a pile of needles and torn-up matchbooks. Mason had a black bicycle he pedaled recklessly through the neighborhood; neighbors sometimes dropped by to wring hands over his gusto. I regularly grounded him to the sidewalks, though what could I do? For fun, his father had walked often in the gutter. Before Mason we were nearly impoverished, subsisting on heroin and plain pieces of white bread, our hearts dropped and wild, and Mason’s father figured why not own the trope. “I guess Grandma’s dying again,” Mason said. “Please don’t say it callously,” Frank said. “You don’t mean it like that.” Frank was a child psychologist. He disciplined Mason with mock-sternness, a trying-out of fatherhood that didn’t really fit. Though his lectures to Mason and me about what was possible in this life were consistent—Pleasantness! Happiness!—they were one reason—it drove me crazy—I loved him. “What do you expect?” I asked Frank. “Every year’s another death-sentence miracle.” Harriet contacted me a couple times a year by way of handwritten letters and postcards, detailing her health and unmet expenses and memories she had of me beautiful, distant, and sad. Come back to us, she pleaded in one letter, and then boasted in the next: I’m still alive. Don’t need you in the slightest. Turns out I’m a miracle. You’ll likely die before me. Ha Ha! “Flippancy about sickness is disturbing, emotionally,” Frank said, nodding to my son. Mason thumbed the postcard, watching me. “I wouldn’t mind seeing a lighthouse for once in my sorry life.” “Your life’s not an apology,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing one in my grateful life either.” 132 IN THESE TIMES THE HOME IS A TIRED PLACE Mason had become too much like his father lately—abrupt and distracted. I took the postcard from him. A lighthouse, a cliff, a sky darkening. Harriet’s life obsession with such a helpful structure made as much sense as her pinched-cent affection for charities,her appreciation of the well-groomed viewed from her own falling-down house. When asked why lighthouses she sometimes moaned,“Because life’s a dark stretch of shore!” When in a good mood she said, “Because I’m a lighthouse. A too-bright illuminator of everything.” On the back of the postcard, I didn’t find the florid print I expected. The note was scribbled in green ink, my ex-sister-inlaw ’s scrawl, the slant of icebergs. Kay wouldn’t lie to us for her mother’s sake. It’s reached the point, the note said. Three months. And though it had lain dormant beneath the skin for years, on...