CONVERSATIONS IN THE DARK
ANNETTE PEARSON
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
— Wendell Berry
1
At your dead father’s viewing, you hear your sister ask Half Betty for some ashes after the cremation. She does this because you dared her to, and you promised to buy all the drinks later.
You can tell that your sister is trying not to smile as she adds, “To put in a necklace.”
A convincing touch, you think, as this is apparently what some people do with the “cremains” of their dearly departed—they stuff them in a locket and wear them around their necks. You know this because you googled it earlier when your sister was talking about the variety of receptacles designed for that purpose. Neither of you really wants to keep burnt-up bits of BL in a box or a jar, and you are never going to have the desire to wear your father like a special piece of jewelry.
2
A few years ago, you attended a memorial service for a close friend, held at her home. Her two grown daughters handed out plastic Easter eggs, mismatched pastel halves, into which they’d scooped their mother’s ashes. Your egg was purple and pink. Everyone hiked down to the creek behind the house, cracked open the eggs, and dumped your friend into the clear shallow water. Something inside yours—some remaining bony bit of your friend—made the teeniest of splashes before it quickly sank, settling with the other pebbles on the sandy bottom.
3
You know that the distance between you and BL has always existed because you have your mother’s breakup story, which has always been yours too:
One evening she leaves you-the-colicky-newborn with your nine-year-old sister and drives over to the other woman’s garage apartment. You don’t know what these two women say to each other (that scene was edited out, but you’ve imagined the anger and humiliation and all those postnatal hormones coursing through your mother); the only dialogue included in this tale is your father’s.
“You need to leave,” he says to her. “Go home.”
She does, and the next day, at the white house on First Street, in the middle of the front yard, flattening the thick St. Augustine grass beneath it, he finds his old black footlocker packed and waiting.
If your mother ran out of words at this point, the conclusion almost suggested a clean clear break, a decisive ending for everyone. Sometimes, though, she wondered aloud how things might have been different if she'd played dumb, pretended to be unaware of things, just waited for him to come to his senses. All those endings vibrated with ambiguity and regret.
4
Most information about BL was gleaned through your mother’s other stories that began with “YOUR FATHER…” and continued in the same tone she used whenever you made a mess or broke something. The tellings included a great deal of hand waggling, as if she were trying to flick something wet or sticky from them. YOUR FATHER could also be found once a month in a return address on a cheap ordinary envelope, his signature on a check left propped on the kitchen counter. For years he was that 8.5-x-11-inch black-and-white student portrait, buried in a frame on your mother’s mahogany dresser underneath the one of you-the-propped-up-hairless-infant—both of you eventually displaced by your sister’s high-school graduation photo. Sometimes alone and bored, you'd sprawl across the scratchy white chenille on your mother’s four-poster bed and disassemble that metallic-edged frame. Full lips, dark eyes, and well-defined eyebrows: features you would recognize years later in your sons’ faces. Your mother must have tired of cleaning your fingerprints from the inside of the glass because, at some point in your childhood, this collegiate version of BL also vanished.
5
What you remember of his first visit:
The summer you were nine, BL was passing through town and thought to call to ask if he could take you for a Coke. He picked you up in a large car that smelled of leather and dry-cleaned clothing and the darkly mysterious spice of after-shave. When he dropped you off an hour later, he hugged you harder than you thought you’d ever been hugged.
6
You and BL became pen pals. You shared information about school, and he updated you on promotions and relocations. You examined the colorful stamps and postmarks, envisioning a glamourous lifestyle for BL in places you had only read about or seen in movies and on television: Los Angeles, London, and Bermuda – you had to look in the World Book encyclopedia to locate that island – and others made exotic simply by virtue of their distance from Bay City, TX, like Hobbs, NM, and Findlay, OH.
7
But here’s the strange thing:
Although BL appeared in the flesh only intermittently, his presence was nevertheless a constant murmuration in the white house on First Street, especially during the holidays. Beginning in early November each year, the Spirit of Christmases Before You Were Born began to invisibly float about. The shady revenant then grew bolder and louder, clanking around on your birthday, at Thanksgiving, with the unpacking of Christmas ornaments and that revolving wheel, projecting colored light onto the gold aluminum tree—over and over and over again, predictably, blue, green, yellow, red. The anniversary of the end of your parents’ marriage “on the very day you were one month old, exactly,” created an atmosphere of such visceral sadness that even now the first seasonal displays evoke a sense of foreboding and dread.
8
At BL’s viewing, you wanted your mother to be there with you so you wore her around your right wrist; you conjured her spirit with that silver bracelet, her favorite, which became yours after she died. She perched unnoticed on the pew between you and your sister, holding onto you both, and her mouth was lipsticked that fiery shade of orange you love too.
9
Your mother visited you shortly after her death, within a couple of weeks—she was never one to procrastinate. You remember as much about that visitation now as you did immediately afterwards, which is, in fact, very little, because as soon as you realized you’d begun to wake, some threshold narrowed, a thin place thickened, and a barrier clicked back into place. Already your hold on the conversation was lost.
A fragment of memory lingers though: the image of the two of you gazing wordlessly not at one another as much as into each other. Your mother is smiling broadly, beatifically, almost, and then she is telling you how good it has been to be with you.
You still don’t comprehend this, but you unquestioningly accept it.
10
A couple of dreams:
One night not long after the viewing, you dream that your house is flooding, that you are standing in the bathroom watching water rise from a metal-grated drain the exact size and shape of a half dollar and surrounded by one-inch white tiles. These details are so vivid that later, awake and standing in the doorway, you are almost surprised to verify what you know to be true that the flooring in your bathroom is not tile and there is, of course, no drain in its center.
Then another dream, more water: In the way of dreams where the implausible becomes both reasonable and unquestionable, you’re attending a memorial for someone you don’t know, someone you have never met, nor do you know the other people at this service. You understand they’re all connected to each other through the person who has died, and everyone is cheerful and friendly. The scene shifts, and now you are ferrying everyone in a small motorboat that you’re having difficulty navigating towards a dock strung with white lights. When you turn the boat too quickly, too abruptly, many of your new friends fall overboard into the dark. There is much splashing, a great deal of laughter, and when you look over the side of the boat, they are standing in the water so shallow that it doesn’t even come up to their knees. All of them are smiling up at you.
11
You’re fairly certain that your father has not visited you, but then these sorts of things are tricky. Visitations often occur when a person is sleeping, of course, and upon awakening, there’s only a vague awareness of having lost hold of something that was just right there, its shape rapidly dimming, memory receding.
You wonder what BL does in the afterlife, as ineffable a mystery as ever. You know he liked to fish so maybe he does that.
About fifteen years ago, you found yourself standing beside BL at some event at your aunt’s, trying to make lucid small talk with him, feigning interest in his boat, which he said he could lower from the dock behind his house at the touch of a button. He “bet you” that your two teenage sons would like to go fishing with him. You’d have bet he didn’t even know their names. Even then you scared more easily so you nodded along and pretended you believed the invitation was a real one.
That imaginary fishing trip still haunts you. You can too easily imagine standing alone on a wooden dock, watching as BL slowly steers your sons toward open water, until only grayness is all you can see.
12
You and your sister both know that Half Betty won’t be sending you shit, not even enough ashes to fill the chintziest souvenir ashtray, because if BL’s third wife didn’t want to share him with you when he was alive, she for sure won’t now. You’ll have to imagine where his remains might end up—like a genie, perhaps, inside some godawful gaudy decanter, high on a shelf somewhere in their house, and you’ll have to imagine this too since you’ve never actually been inside, you’ve only driven past their home. Or maybe he’ll be chased about by the wind instead, scattered privately in some secret location by his third family, Half Betty and her daughters, who are not even blood kin. The details are yours to make up.
13
You wish though that there was a gravesite somewhere with a granite marker for BL. A specific place where you could go and visit if you wanted, where you might trace letters and numbers with your fingers. You might be able to reassure yourself that he once really existed, or that now he’s finally buried, there will be no more sightings.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
— Wendell Berry
1
At your dead father’s viewing, you hear your sister ask Half Betty for some ashes after the cremation. She does this because you dared her to, and you promised to buy all the drinks later.
You can tell that your sister is trying not to smile as she adds, “To put in a necklace.”
A convincing touch, you think, as this is apparently what some people do with the “cremains” of their dearly departed—they stuff them in a locket and wear them around their necks. You know this because you googled it earlier when your sister was talking about the variety of receptacles designed for that purpose. Neither of you really wants to keep burnt-up bits of BL in a box or a jar, and you are never going to have the desire to wear your father like a special piece of jewelry.
2
A few years ago, you attended a memorial service for a close friend, held at her home. Her two grown daughters handed out plastic Easter eggs, mismatched pastel halves, into which they’d scooped their mother’s ashes. Your egg was purple and pink. Everyone hiked down to the creek behind the house, cracked open the eggs, and dumped your friend into the clear shallow water. Something inside yours—some remaining bony bit of your friend—made the teeniest of splashes before it quickly sank, settling with the other pebbles on the sandy bottom.
3
You know that the distance between you and BL has always existed because you have your mother’s breakup story, which has always been yours too:
One evening she leaves you-the-colicky-newborn with your nine-year-old sister and drives over to the other woman’s garage apartment. You don’t know what these two women say to each other (that scene was edited out, but you’ve imagined the anger and humiliation and all those postnatal hormones coursing through your mother); the only dialogue included in this tale is your father’s.
“You need to leave,” he says to her. “Go home.”
She does, and the next day, at the white house on First Street, in the middle of the front yard, flattening the thick St. Augustine grass beneath it, he finds his old black footlocker packed and waiting.
If your mother ran out of words at this point, the conclusion almost suggested a clean clear break, a decisive ending for everyone. Sometimes, though, she wondered aloud how things might have been different if she'd played dumb, pretended to be unaware of things, just waited for him to come to his senses. All those endings vibrated with ambiguity and regret.
4
Most information about BL was gleaned through your mother’s other stories that began with “YOUR FATHER…” and continued in the same tone she used whenever you made a mess or broke something. The tellings included a great deal of hand waggling, as if she were trying to flick something wet or sticky from them. YOUR FATHER could also be found once a month in a return address on a cheap ordinary envelope, his signature on a check left propped on the kitchen counter. For years he was that 8.5-x-11-inch black-and-white student portrait, buried in a frame on your mother’s mahogany dresser underneath the one of you-the-propped-up-hairless-infant—both of you eventually displaced by your sister’s high-school graduation photo. Sometimes alone and bored, you'd sprawl across the scratchy white chenille on your mother’s four-poster bed and disassemble that metallic-edged frame. Full lips, dark eyes, and well-defined eyebrows: features you would recognize years later in your sons’ faces. Your mother must have tired of cleaning your fingerprints from the inside of the glass because, at some point in your childhood, this collegiate version of BL also vanished.
5
What you remember of his first visit:
The summer you were nine, BL was passing through town and thought to call to ask if he could take you for a Coke. He picked you up in a large car that smelled of leather and dry-cleaned clothing and the darkly mysterious spice of after-shave. When he dropped you off an hour later, he hugged you harder than you thought you’d ever been hugged.
6
You and BL became pen pals. You shared information about school, and he updated you on promotions and relocations. You examined the colorful stamps and postmarks, envisioning a glamourous lifestyle for BL in places you had only read about or seen in movies and on television: Los Angeles, London, and Bermuda – you had to look in the World Book encyclopedia to locate that island – and others made exotic simply by virtue of their distance from Bay City, TX, like Hobbs, NM, and Findlay, OH.
7
But here’s the strange thing:
Although BL appeared in the flesh only intermittently, his presence was nevertheless a constant murmuration in the white house on First Street, especially during the holidays. Beginning in early November each year, the Spirit of Christmases Before You Were Born began to invisibly float about. The shady revenant then grew bolder and louder, clanking around on your birthday, at Thanksgiving, with the unpacking of Christmas ornaments and that revolving wheel, projecting colored light onto the gold aluminum tree—over and over and over again, predictably, blue, green, yellow, red. The anniversary of the end of your parents’ marriage “on the very day you were one month old, exactly,” created an atmosphere of such visceral sadness that even now the first seasonal displays evoke a sense of foreboding and dread.
8
At BL’s viewing, you wanted your mother to be there with you so you wore her around your right wrist; you conjured her spirit with that silver bracelet, her favorite, which became yours after she died. She perched unnoticed on the pew between you and your sister, holding onto you both, and her mouth was lipsticked that fiery shade of orange you love too.
9
Your mother visited you shortly after her death, within a couple of weeks—she was never one to procrastinate. You remember as much about that visitation now as you did immediately afterwards, which is, in fact, very little, because as soon as you realized you’d begun to wake, some threshold narrowed, a thin place thickened, and a barrier clicked back into place. Already your hold on the conversation was lost.
A fragment of memory lingers though: the image of the two of you gazing wordlessly not at one another as much as into each other. Your mother is smiling broadly, beatifically, almost, and then she is telling you how good it has been to be with you.
You still don’t comprehend this, but you unquestioningly accept it.
10
A couple of dreams:
One night not long after the viewing, you dream that your house is flooding, that you are standing in the bathroom watching water rise from a metal-grated drain the exact size and shape of a half dollar and surrounded by one-inch white tiles. These details are so vivid that later, awake and standing in the doorway, you are almost surprised to verify what you know to be true that the flooring in your bathroom is not tile and there is, of course, no drain in its center.
Then another dream, more water: In the way of dreams where the implausible becomes both reasonable and unquestionable, you’re attending a memorial for someone you don’t know, someone you have never met, nor do you know the other people at this service. You understand they’re all connected to each other through the person who has died, and everyone is cheerful and friendly. The scene shifts, and now you are ferrying everyone in a small motorboat that you’re having difficulty navigating towards a dock strung with white lights. When you turn the boat too quickly, too abruptly, many of your new friends fall overboard into the dark. There is much splashing, a great deal of laughter, and when you look over the side of the boat, they are standing in the water so shallow that it doesn’t even come up to their knees. All of them are smiling up at you.
11
You’re fairly certain that your father has not visited you, but then these sorts of things are tricky. Visitations often occur when a person is sleeping, of course, and upon awakening, there’s only a vague awareness of having lost hold of something that was just right there, its shape rapidly dimming, memory receding.
You wonder what BL does in the afterlife, as ineffable a mystery as ever. You know he liked to fish so maybe he does that.
About fifteen years ago, you found yourself standing beside BL at some event at your aunt’s, trying to make lucid small talk with him, feigning interest in his boat, which he said he could lower from the dock behind his house at the touch of a button. He “bet you” that your two teenage sons would like to go fishing with him. You’d have bet he didn’t even know their names. Even then you scared more easily so you nodded along and pretended you believed the invitation was a real one.
That imaginary fishing trip still haunts you. You can too easily imagine standing alone on a wooden dock, watching as BL slowly steers your sons toward open water, until only grayness is all you can see.
12
You and your sister both know that Half Betty won’t be sending you shit, not even enough ashes to fill the chintziest souvenir ashtray, because if BL’s third wife didn’t want to share him with you when he was alive, she for sure won’t now. You’ll have to imagine where his remains might end up—like a genie, perhaps, inside some godawful gaudy decanter, high on a shelf somewhere in their house, and you’ll have to imagine this too since you’ve never actually been inside, you’ve only driven past their home. Or maybe he’ll be chased about by the wind instead, scattered privately in some secret location by his third family, Half Betty and her daughters, who are not even blood kin. The details are yours to make up.
13
You wish though that there was a gravesite somewhere with a granite marker for BL. A specific place where you could go and visit if you wanted, where you might trace letters and numbers with your fingers. You might be able to reassure yourself that he once really existed, or that now he’s finally buried, there will be no more sightings.
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ANNETTE PEARSON is a former college writing instructor living in Austin, Texas, and on Galveston Island. She is currently working on a long piece of autofiction about ambiguous loss, displacement, and finding one’s way home, titled This Is Where I’ll Be. Excerpts from that were shortlisted for the 2022 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest and the Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and have been or will be published by SmokeLong Quarterly and Cutleaf.
/// Q: What does it mean to “be kaleidoscoped” ? A: To take part in a dynamic and multifaceted conversation. /// Much of my work explores family losses, particularly those that lack closure and create strange, haunting forms in the emptiness. In this piece, memories and stories seek to both conjure and dispel these spirits rattling about in the shadows. |