Barnstorm: Contemporary Wisconsin Fiction

As It Is in Heaven

j As It Is in Heaven Kelly Cherry A fter my father had been dead for about nine months, he began to appear in the kitchen. I’m referring to the kitchen in England, where my parents had chosen to live in their retirement. They were musicians, and what they wanted to do with their retirement was listen to music, and England is a place for that. They bought a small red brick house in a village outside Reading, within commuting distance of London. After six months in quarantine, their dog was allowed to join them. They had been careful to buy a house with a fenced-in backyard, the fence hidden by a hedge ten feet tall. A munificent oak held court at the far end of the property, scattering a largess of acorns for those squirrels willing to brave the dog. The day came, of course, when the dog could no longer chase the squirrels and my parents could no longer make the long trip to London . My parents now watched telly most of the day; at nine o’clock at night, they moved to the kitchen for ice cream. My father scooped up three dishes, setting one on the floor for the dog. The three of them were crowded into a kitchen barely big enough to hold the appliances . The furnace was in there too, inside a cabinet, warm as a hand, so that being in the kitchen felt like being held in somebody’s palm. Whenever I visited them, I ate the mandatory bowl of ice cream and had that feeling of being held, being clasped and enclosed. When the dog died, and my father no longer felt needed, sadness took over the house. Such sadness is not unlike what the English call “rising damp,” a pervasive mold in rainy climates. My father declined rapidly. He was diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s, and within a year, he was dead of a stroke. My mother weighed seventy-eight pounds, and had lost the use of one of her legs. She had end-stage emphysema. She could no longer manage the stairs. On my last visit there, which I had made wanting to see my father while he could still recognize me, I had gotten them a replacement for Blaze, the dog that had died. Oscar was a Shih Tzu who’d been born with a hernia that rendered him ineligible for breeding and who, at six months, was just a bit too old for consignment to a pet shop. Now he and my mother slept together on a single bed that had been set up downstairs in the dining room, next to the kitchen. When my mother wrote to me that she had seen my father sitting in his chair 90   91 As It Is in Heaven in the kitchen, I wondered if her mind was going too, and perhaps it wasn’t even Alzheimer’s—I knew from experience that losing someone you love can sensitize you to every memory of him, so that his memory is as present to you as he used to be. It would surely not be difficult to confuse the presence of the memory with the man himself . “Dear Nina,” my mother wrote back, when I suggested this, “don’t be a dope. I do not have a sentimental bone in my body, and if your father is not in the kitchen, who the hell is sitting in there scarfing ice cream every night?” I was, myself, when I read this letter, ensconced in my Green Bay Packers chair—a club chair I’d bought years ago, that had a Green Bay Packers emblem on it; the department store was eager to unload it because even in Wisconsin nobody had been a Green Bay Packers fan since the days of Vince Lombardi—with my own little dog curled up beside me. My daughter was rocking in her rocking chair in front of the radio. Madison, which is so relentlessly populist that it feels that every musical faction, like every political faction, must be served even if it means that everybody winds up feeling shortchanged, refused to have an all-day classical station, and just then, the afternoon jazz program began. My little girl will tolerate nothing but classical. “N-O!” she shouted, stamping her foot on the floor. It was clear that if she had been old enough, she would have retired to England. I got up and...