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91 F The daffodils were up after Jay died. Dad insisted on cutting the tree down and he dragged the limbs of it through the daffodils . He dragged the limbs into the swamp behind the house, to where we couldn’t see them. He’d have the stump out too, he said. But that would take some equipment, which Mom didn’t want in the yard, not before she’d hosted the reception. People ate egg salad off paper plates and spoke quietly. Everyone looked older, these parents, than I remembered. The kids from the neighborhood came in ties and didn’t joke about anything . It was hot for jackets and I took mine off. I sat on the stump to drink and no one spoke to me there. After Jay died my parents started going to meetings. Middleaged hippies wearing too many scarves came by our house. My parents stood with them on street corners and held signs, they stood on the corner by the convenience store. They marched on town hall by the dozen slowly. My parents didn’t know the songs. They started talking about the war and mispronounced everything. 92 Later tiger lilies bloomed in the ditches by the roadside. You could find dead deer among them, hauled over, swollen. People wanted to interview us. I tried to talk at a meeting once, college students soft-eyed before me, but halfway through I had nothing to say. I moved out. I didn’t go to grief counselors. I didn’t talk to other families. In the paper the bodies piled up. The numbers ticked up. Missiles, precision-guided, landed in the wrong places. The photos of hospitals showed dirty bandages on dirty floors. Are we redeemed? This was my question. When Jay died I became closer to the war, closer to the knowledge I wanted. I knew what loss was then. I used him for this. I believe he wanted this for me. He didn’t leave a note and I wish he had. I don’t remember our conversations exactly, just the idea of them, I don’t remember what words he chose. I don’t remember the feel of him, though his hand was sometimes on my shoulder, though we slept with only a wall between us. Every country has its dead and that country is no different . In the graves, heads nestle next to one another, hands not touching. His silence is no less foreign to me. I would rather have laid his body in some field with theirs. No one would have noticed one more loss in that country. I would have added his bones to theirs and so I too would have joined them, bound myself to them. We would do anything to bring him back, my parents say, in the interviews, in the living-room meetings, in crowded college halls. You don’t know anything anymore, I want to tell them. ...
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