Things of All Sizes by Max Fisher-Cohen

          I live with my mother.  My older brother is here too, but only since Thanksgiving, which was about three weeks ago. He was supposed to head back to D.C. a few days after the funeral. Mom won’t stop talking about how he should have gone back, he’s going to lose his job, on and on.  Me, I only work part-time, and I spend some time with my girlfriend, Ellen, but I also spend a lot of time at home watching TV, or with my mom.

My father died three weeks ago.  It’s like my brain is holding me hostage, keeping me the same person, following the same chain of thoughts that it did before.  It’s like, look! in the closet, right next to where I’ve hung my jacket, is his tweed coat.  He must be home! You know, I’ve never seen this sock before – it doesn’t match any of mine – I bet it is his, but no, I’m not going to tell him.  Socks are always disappearing.  I need all the socks I can get.  Man, this is that episode of Friends, the one that I finally convinced Dad to watch; he laughed for a second, but then refused to admit it.  Hey, it snowed last night. Maybe if I stay out of the house he’ll just pay one of the neighborhood kids to shovel. Then I have to turn and tell my brain that he’s not here anymore, and the poor organ was so caught up in the moment that it hurts like new every time.  Sometimes I call his cell phone just to hear his voice in his voicemail.

In my parents’ room, my mom’s room, a novel still sits parted on his side table, his watch on his bureau, his jar of change, which he cruelly used to pay my allowance out of, stuck at some unknown amount forever.  Some things my mom has had the courage to put away – his slacks lay parted over the chair in the corner of his room for a week, but now they have disappeared.  I guess slowly everything, big or small, will disappear, and then I’ll feel just fine.

Right now I am in the garage, a place that, as far as I know, my mother hasn’t ventured into since she found him dead. I’m here because my dad thought he was a carpenter.  On the weekends, he would disappear into his workshop for hours, and emerge with some useless gift for one of us.  It was never a big deal.  I don’t even know where most of that crap is anymore, but this is the central place that my brain keeps harping on, keeps telling me, go back there, there’s something in there that you need to know about. Right here on his worktable, a four-by-eight foot piece of plywood that rests on two sawhorses, is an unfinished project.  It’s a spice rack with some small seashells glued to it.  It feels dumb, but I am thinking about trying to finish the spice rack for her.  It seems like there isn’t much left to it.  The glue and the shells are right here.  But not today.

---

          As I enter her apartment, Ellen, as she always does, wordlessly helps me out of my jacket and hangs it in the closet.  She looks me up and down.  I stand there and let her study me.  It’s a nice feeling, her eyes hungrily taking in my body, the fresh images stimulating her imagination, her remembrance of what is beneath my clothes.  It’s a nice feeling, but it’s a feeling that lacks mystery.  I wish there was a bigger space, something more that we explored between each other than just the thin layer of material that covers our bodies. We have no hopes, plans, designs that we are building towards.  One day this thirty-one-year-old woman who works for a fashion magazine got lonely and asked this twenty-year-old bus boy who works at the restaurant she eats at if he’ll walk her home.  And we go from there. She puts her left hand on my cheek and kisses me, and I kiss back.  When we separate, I have nothing better to say than “Hi.”  She kisses me on the cheek, and I smile, drop my hand onto her hip.

          “Here, try one,” Ellen says to me, holding a chocolate chip cookie to my lips.  “I made them for you.  I think you said you like chocolate chip cookies, right?”

          I smile.  I never told her anything about liking chocolate chip cookies, but it was nice of her.  I slide my finger down her right wrist, the one that is still holding the cookie, take the fingers of her left hand in my own, and take the cookie from her.  “It’s really good,” I say.  She’s always treated me fair, so, you know, it is what it is.

---

I just got home, and I’m sitting on the couch, flicking through channels. I worked a day shift at the restaurant downtown today.  National Geographic is showing a special on grizzly bears, and I guess I’m on a nature kick because I don’t even flick through the rest of the channels, but after a minute of a grizzly pawing at the base of a tree it goes to commercial, and I mute it.

          I hear keys skipping across the lock outside, and I know it’s Mom.  She’s carrying groceries probably.  I jog to the door, and open it for her.  Her face is white from the cold, and her thick lipsticked lips look almost black in the evening light.  As she steps through the door, I take two paper bags filled with groceries from her hands.  I put them on the kitchen counter and return to the car to get what’s left in the trunk.  When I come back in, she is standing by the kitchen table.  The keys rest on the corner of the table, her purse to the right, then her thin red leather gloves, her big black hat, her scarf.  She is unbuttoning her jacket, surveying the condition of all her gear.  My back is to her as I unpack the groceries, but I hear her opening the closet door, putting everything in place.  These last few weeks, I’m learning the place for everything.  I look back over my shoulder as she steps into the kitchen and hold my breath as she straightens her blouse over her big bosom, down over the belly she has developed in the last few years.

Mom is in the kitchen now, taking out some items that I’ve just put away, and I’m sitting at the dining room table watching her grease a baking pan, a family sized package of chicken drumsticks and thighs to her right.  I spin her car keys around my finger, close my eyes, flex them upwards, trying to look into my brain, find some words.  Then I worry that she will be irritated by the noise and lay my hands down on top of the keys, feel the still cold metal.

“What’s on the TV?” she finally asks.

“Some nature show,” I say, staring at the side of the counter.  “Grizzly bears,” I mumble.

“What?”

“Grizzly bears.  It’s a nature show about grizzly bears.  I just got home like fifteen minutes before you.  I didn’t watch any of it.”  I look up at her, and feel all dizzy.  The oven, kitchen cabinets, knife rack all look cartoonishly huge behind her.

“Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.  Probably in his room.”

“He’s been up there all day?”

“I don’t know, Mom.  I told you, I just got home.  I worked at the restaurant all day.”  My tongue feels tired, drugged up.  My words slur together.

She starts putting the chicken into the baking pan, turns around and switches the oven on, then she opens a cabinet, starts pulling spices out. I look for a reaction from her, but instead of making a remark about the spices or dad or anything, she just says,  “Go tell your brother that dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

I look doubtfully at her, open my eyes wide.  She stares back at me, stares me down.  She is telling me to let her have this hope, and I can’t argue with that and head towards the stairs.

“Nathan,” I yell, banging on the door with my right hand.  “Nathan, wake up.”  Nathan sleeps all day, or so it seems.  He locks his door, and usually takes a long time to respond to me, so I assume he is sleeping.

“What.”

“Mom says that dinner will be ready in a half hour.”

I rest my hand on the doorknob, try to twist it, push my way in, but the door is, as expected, locked.  I wait a little longer for him to respond, but he doesn’t.  I have delivered the message, done what has been asked, and I feel okay to turn around.  I walk straight through the kitchen and into the TV room, sit down on the couch and watch a grizzly slapping its huge clawed paws into a river, white water spraying up around its legs.

---

          It’s the morning and I’m on my way to the shower.   On my way up the steps, I hear Nathan’s door snap shut.  I leap up the last four steps, clasping my towel to my waist, and lay my hand on his doorknob.  I feel the weight of his hand on the other side.  I clear my throat, and in a soft voice say, “Nathan.”  I feel the weight leave the doorknob then hear the lock click.  “Nathan,” I say, louder now, my voice cracking at the end.  I hear his bed creak.

When I finish with my shower, I hear my cell phone ringing, and I race down to my room to answer it.   It’s Ellen, and we say hi and that kind of stuff, and then she says to me, “So,” and she just waits for me to say all the stuff that’s happening in my life. I don’t say anything, so she starts again, “So, how… are… things.”  What does she want me to do? Give a book report? She doesn’t want to hear any of this stuff.

“Things are fucking awesome,” I say.

“I’m serious,” she says.

“I’m serious too.  You don’t know how great it is, what with life insurance money and everything.  And I even inherited his car.  We should have a party.”

Now she is silent, so I say, “I’m sorry,” but I’m really not, and you can hear it in my voice.  I just don’t give a fuck either way, and if this is where it ends, then I’m certainly not going to go out of my way.  I listen to her breath for a few seconds, and then she sighs and hangs up, and I slip the phone in my pocket and leave the house, drive downtown, dawdle away the afternoon, browsing the shops downtown – the record store, the bookstore, the thrift store.  I want distraction, but nothing seems big enough to move me.  It’s like I’ve got new eyes.  I go and sit in the park for a while, and it’s a sunny December day, just warm enough to bring people out.  I watch the people walk by in their bright colored clothes and wonder how everything can look so the same – mothers and nannys brushing sand off of kids’ pants, a dude throwing Frisbee with his golden retriever – and yet everything feels so different, so far away.

---

I walk into the front door, look into the garage, and there’s Nathan, wearing the threadbare Pearl Jam t-shirt that I tried to wrestle away from him shortly after he graduated from college and moved to D.C.  I figured, why not? He had said that all he, all anyone ever wore down there were slacks, button downs, and ties.  His face looks saggy and pale, with several weeks’ worth of tangled scruff. I wonder what his coworkers would think of him now. He is picking up shells from the ground and placing them on a sheet of newspaper, the glue by his side.  I walk into the room, kneel down, and begin to help him.

“We should throw them away,” he says, after we have picked them all up.

I nod.

“There’s no sense to keeping this stuff around,” he says.

I nod again and look over to the garbage can in the corner.  He follows my eyes to it, and we both stand there contemplating the garbage can for a while.  “Whatever you think,” I say.  Nathan drags the garbage can over to the table.  I feel short of breath, light headed.  It is good to see and hear my brother, and I can see that he’s hurting.  I know he’s hurting.  I act on the impulse to hug Nathan, but I trip over the garbage can and fall forward.  My brother grabs me by the arm, steadies me, stands me in front of him, and it’s like he did it on purpose, like he saw the memory floating in the air directly in front of him, and held me right there so that I would occupy the same space as it did.

---

I was eleven years old, and Nathan was walking me home from school.  We had walked a few blocks.  It was winter, and the hood on my winter jacket made my voice sound muffled in my ears.  That day a kid had stolen what was perhaps my most prized possession – the Spiderman watch that I had bought with my own money.  He had knocked me to the ground and demanded the watch, and when I refused, he had sat on top of me then crawled up my body, placed his knee right down on my wrist.  At first I screamed in pain, but after he left I lay there and screamed until all my breath was gone, then breathed in again and kept right on screaming.  No one seemed to notice.  I lay there, mute, for what must have been ten more minutes and listened to the shrieks of the other kids as they played football, dodgeball, tag.  The rest of the world seemed to be moving without me.  I was outside of it. 

When I told Nathan, we just kept walking, the ice crackling under our feet, and I looked up at him, and he reached over to my head, rested his hand around my neck, then moved his hand up onto my head, squeezed it.  I focused on the feeling of his fingertips through my hood, his palm pushed down against me.  It started to feel like his hand was sinking through the hood, through my head, down into my brain, mingling with the ideas in there, and I felt like maybe Nathan thought that this head here was an okay place to spend some time in.  The watch didn’t matter.  For the next two years, until Nathan left for college, I did my best to be close to him whenever he was around, to mimic his confidence, his smile.

---

Nathan isn’t smiling now.  I try to smile for him, to do for him what he did for me, but what comes out is screwy and squinted, nervous and wholly insincere.  Nathan sets his hand on the side of the plywood table, turns away and looks down.  “Stop,” he says, but I can’t.  The muscles in my face are paralyzed. Nathan pulls the garbage can under the table and thrusts the shells into it.  I watch, screwy smile still stuck on my face, as he wipes the shell dust on his pants then drags the garbage can back up against the wall.  He asks, “What do you want from me?”

I clench my jaw and pull my muscles free, relax my face.  “What happened to the shells?” I say. “How did you drop them?”

Nathan looks up at me, and then away, shakes his head.  “Fucking douche bag,” he mutters.  He paces insistently back and forth across the room, like a dog that has lost the scent of the animal it is trailing.  He finally takes a handsaw off of the tool rack, cradles it against his stomach. He says, “Who are you, man?  What are you doing in this house?”

I feel like the ground has just been pulled out from me, and like in the cartoons, I’m floating there in midair, waiting.  Waiting.  I breathe.   “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Yeah right,” he says, looking down at the saw, running his fingers along the teeth that are its belly.

My brain is spinning.  All I see is red.  Words ride a red-hot wave out of my mouth.  “Where have you been?  Where have you been?  I’ve been out here trying to make it through with Mom.” I stare at the floor a second, feel my arms tense, my hands curl into fists.  I look back up at him.  “I’ve been alone here since you left for college, and Dad was like, ‘You’re gonna leave too one day! You’re gonna leave too!’ But I didn’t want to leave.  I didn’t have any big plans for myself, and North Jersey, living with our parents… who I love, who fed us and raised us, and paid your way all the way through freakin’ Boston University, seemed as good a place as any.” I step across the room as I’m speaking. I feel bigger than Nathan for the first time, and I want him to feel that.

Nathan turns his back on me, walks over and closes the door, leans back against it, then moves quickly toward me until he’s right in my face.  He grabs my face up from under my chin and squeezes.  “Feel that?” he says.  “Imagine me squeezing a thousand times harder.  Your face would turn into mush, nothing, some pulpy mess that I could wash down the drain.  That’s Dad right now.  As good to me and you as-”

I pull Nathan’s hands off my face, and, trying to keep myself from yelling, say, “We ate pasta sometimes for weeks in a row, just so Mom and Dad could afford to send you that check for your Philosophy 101 book.  I remember.  I remember Mom having these whispering conversations with Dad about the dimes we were saving and how far they were going to take you.  And here you are, back home, stuck, thinking they owe you more.  Where in God’s name have you been? You have no right.” I shove Nathan, and he falls back into the table, knocking the plywood off of the sawhorses.

---

She said, “He’s gone,” and as she completed the sentence, it was like she had lost a pair of ribs – she shrank down, arms came forward until they were like towels hanging limp over her shoulders.  Her face darkened, her knees showed, bent a little, through her long matronly dress. She looked like a troll, or like an old woman that I didn’t know or care to know.  I left her there, and before I came to the door it was already in me: Dad was dead.  I walked slowly into the garage, saw him slumped there, heard the sound of approaching sirens.

I went to Nathan, sat down next to him on his bed, and said, “Dad’s dead.  He’s in his workshop.  He must have had a heart attack.”  I cried tears that felt right, like I knew Nathan knew exactly what they stood for.  Like I knew Nathan knew what they meant.  But Nathan didn’t say anything. Eventually he stood up and went to the workshop.  I followed.  The medics had already loaded the body onto a stretcher and taken it out to the ambulance.  He walked out the garage door to the ambulance, walked around it in a complete circle.  A medic got out of the ambulance and said a few words to him, laid his hand on his shoulder, then got back in.  Nathan put his hands in his pockets and set off down the street. He didn’t come home until early in the morning.

--- 

Nathan flings the saw harmlessly behind him as he reaches back to break his fall, but in that moment I picture it, I see it specifically – Nathan instead releasing the saw right at his waist, and his knees pushing it up into him, cutting him open.  I see him looking in shock down at his opened up belly, feeling a pain quite close to the one that has been coiling in my stomach for these last three weeks.  I close my eyes and reopen them.  I say, “We’re all hurting here, Nathan.”

Nathan blinks three times.  “You’re hurting.  That’s fancy.  Hurting people are the ones who are trying to move on.  Move on, eventually you’ll feel better, you’ll feel normal.  It’ll be okay.  That’s what people whispered in your ear at the funeral.  And you listened.  What if I don’t want it to be okay?  What if I want to respect the fact that my father, the man who raised me, fuckin, fuckin’ threw baseballs around with me.” He makes a vague motion like he’s maybe throwing a baseball.  “Fuck that – the man who took us to the Chinese restaurant when Mom worked late and had us all memorize the Chinese translations and make sentences.  You know… use the word in a sentence so we were all making English sentences with Chinese words all mispronounced, and the waiters stared at us.”  He shakes his head and takes a deep breath.  “What the fuck am I talking about?” He smiles for a moment.

I sit down on the ground near him, hug my knees, lean back against a sawhorse.  “I forgot about that,” I say. 

Nathan licks his lips, and as an afterthought, or as if the words are coming only as he speaks them, “That’s cause you were little.  Mom had stopped working late when you were probably like nine or ten.”  He reaches behind him and lifts up the spice rack, holds it out to me.  I look away.

“Yeah,” He says, and he throws the spice rack into the wall right in front of us.  It lands a few feet to my left and still appears to be intact. 

I don’t know why, but I laugh. “That was some good craftsmanship, Dad,” I say. 

Nathan stands up, walks over and punts it into the wall, and this time the joints where the dowels, upon which the spices were to rest, separate from the side panel of the thing.  “What the fuck was wrong with you, Dad?” Nathan asks, and I hear panic in his voice now.  “A fucking spice rack.  And that bookshelf in my room that you made...” He takes a deep breath, then walks out of the room, and a few minutes later comes back with the little bookshelf.  He drops it onto the ground.

“Get up,” he says, small beads of sweat on his forehead.  I stand, and he pulls a hammer off the tool rack and hands it to me, then leaves again.  I look down at the bookcase.  It is already falling apart, cloudy blue paint flaking off, a leg missing.  I swing down into the bottom shelf, and it collapses so easily that I nearly clip my leg with the hammer.  I reach down and pull the sides to the shelf apart, exposing the dozens of little nails that held it together.  I pull the middle shelf free and Frisbee throw it into the tool rack.  The tools jump up from the impact; a hacksaw drops to the ground.  I pick up the remains of the shelf and throw it down at my feet.  It all comes apart, and I look down at it for second, then close my eyes and see my father wearing this too big shirt with paint stains all over it, and cut up jeans that he must have had since the seventies and only wore when he went out to his shop, and his eyes, focused, steady, studying these boards.  The only thing on his mind are these boards and the way he will fit them together.  I open my eyes.

Nathan walks back in, arms full, and sets what he has collected on the ground: a jewelry box, edges poorly mitered, one hinge broken, a coat hook made of a piece of plywood cut into the shape of a head, mouth and eyes crudely painted on (you were to hang your coat on a dowel which doubled as the man’s nose), a rubberband gun, and a magazine rack…  “There’s more,” Nathan says, turning back toward the door. 

I look down at the stuff, and all I can see are the flaws, brownish nails exposed everywhere, marks from missed hammer swings. I wonder what he was thinking.  He never seemed to notice that after a week or two most of it would end up hidden in a closet, and he made little to-do about giving the stuff away.  I remember the face he had – he’d walk up to my brother or me with this perplexed look on his face, like a person who wakes up after a night of heavy, blackout-inducing drinking, little bits of what had just happened to him, what he had just done, passing in and out of his head.  Then he’d say our names: “Nathan, Eli…,” hold whatever it was out to us like maybe we could make better sense of it than him.  We’d stand up, walk over and examine the thing, take it from him, and as he was walking out the door, Nathan would say,

“Thanks Dad,” then elbow me in the shoulder. 

“Yeah Dad, thanks!”