Insect Parade

CONTRIBUTED BY SONA AVAKIAN (San Francisco, CA)

Herb barely looked at me when we ran into him today at the grocery store. He’s uncomfortable my wife Marie keeps telling me. Oh, he’s uncomfortable. I was lurching from the celery and carrots to the mixed nuts bin. He’s symmetrical. But he’s uncomfortable. Plus Marie has to drive me everywhere now.

I started chauffeuring at the limo company part-time after I retired. Just to get out of the house. So I wouldn’t have to face Marie every night and day. Herb fixed it up for me and things were going well. The accident changed everything. It wasn’t my fault but still they took my leg and I got fired; it was my right leg. Plus I was bad PR for a limo company; nobody wants a one-legged driver. Not on their wedding day, not to a loved one’s funeral. It should’ve been Herb driving that night. But he was home sick with the croup. At least that’s what he said when he called me to go in. “I got the croup, Lionel. You gotta go in for me.” The croup. He was always pulling things like that. But I went in for him knowing there was a double bill of John Wayne movies on HBO that night and that Herb doesn’t even pay for his cable.

“Lionel, you’re a train wreck,” Marie says when I’m grasping at the furniture, lunging toward things. And then she laughs at her dumb joke. Oh how she laughs. She’s a good wife, could’ve—maybe she should’ve left me long ago. Lord knows her brothers wanted her to. But we’ve been each others’ cross to bear for a long time now.

The car accident happened on a rainy night. I was driving two teenage couples to the prom. The girls wore black dresses. I noticed that—funeral dresses on young girls. When Marie and I went to the prom she wore a pink gown and looked sweet, like a flower. Anyway. The driver of the SUV who plowed into us died. Autopsy reports showed a blood alcohol content level of .26. Marie and I did not send condolences to his family.

The limo went like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the air and over a guardrail and into a ditch. But the screams coming from backseat were from horror not joy. When we landed my right leg was crushed under the steering column. Luckily, all four of the kids were unharmed. I couldn’t live with more death. And they were quick thinkers despite their fear. One of the young men covered me with his tuxedo jacket, the other called 911. Later, at the hospital the doctors told me they would have to take my leg to save me. But nobody asked if I wanted to be saved. They probably didn’t ask Marie either.

Marie and I married young. We were nineteen and twenty. Our son Sean was born that first year. We were happy, but it was a brittle, New England winter happiness. The kind that takes a twig off a branch with the slightest touch. I worked at the insurance company and Marie was a seamstress and worked at home while Sean napped or played by himself. But she must’ve been restless—just after Sean’s fourth birthday she said she wanted to take a painting class downtown on Saturday mornings. You know, to get out of the house. Sure, I thought, it’d be good for her. But then she’d go out after with her classmates, her girlfriends, she called them. They’d linger over lunch, even had a glass or two of white wine and when she’d get dropped off she’d be giggly, slightly tipsy, happy. But as she sobered up and the afternoon slipped into evening she’d become sullen, terse. She’d snap at me, at Sean, at the static on the television set. Every week was like that and I never saw a painting she made. She could’ve done better than me, I know, married someone who didn’t chew with his mouth open, someone not so socially flatfooted.

But the only time she ever heard me swear like a truck driver was the Saturday Sean drowned in the river that runs in the woods behind our house. I beat at the bank, wet up to my waist screaming Goddamn it! God fucking damn it! cursing the cold hard water that had taken him from us. I sloshed around, howling like an animal, then tried to hold myself under until the neighbors pulled me out, soaking. Marie didn’t talk to me for weeks, her evil eye just followed me around the house. How many times could I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know how he wandered off. What was I doing? Reading the paper? Watching a baseball game? We’d had a lot of rain that fall and the water was high. I’m just making excuses. At Sean’s funeral Marie tried to throw herself on the coffin as they lowered it. Her brothers held her back. Her family didn’t blame me. But they did. They did.

“Into every life a little rain must fall,” Marie says to me. She’s been such a good sport; she’s not repulsed by the ugly marks the prosthesis leaves or the stump itself. She rubs soothing oils onto it every night. Phantom pain is no joke; it feels like there are bugs on me—insects dancing, having a parade. Marie doesn’t mind that she has to help me take a shower or that we had to move our bedroom downstairs. But I know she’s happy I lost my leg. I bet she wishes it were more than just my leg. She’s like that. Sweet on the outside, but with a hidden vicious streak. I know that now. Or maybe I grew it in her. One day I couldn’t take it any more and I swore again. “A little rain. Bullshit. You call this a little rain!” I screamed over the television. “This is a missing limb that’s what this fucking is! This is not a little rain!” And Marie’s eyes grew small, her chin stubborn. And I knew what she was thinking.

***

After Sean drowned we didn’t move. The gush of water from the river was constant in my ears. Marie took up smoking. She put on a good face though she never quite forgave me. I haven’t either and I can’t for sure say how I’d feel if our roles were reversed. We had two daughters after that, Amy and Tanya—but it wasn’t ever the same. Needless to say Marie never let the girls out of her sight. Never let me spend an afternoon alone with them. We made them share a room because we didn’t touch anything in Sean’s and they grew up with his ghost. It probably wasn’t healthy that Marie made them look at his baby book so often.

Marie still sewed while Amy and Tanya were at school and I was at work. As the girls grew older she expanded her business to custom-made wedding dresses and there was laughter in the house as happy brides to be came and went for fittings. Our girls aren’t brides, never will be. Tanya, she ran off, to join the circus. I’m not kidding. We don’t hear from her that often, maybe once a year at most. I’ve been having fantasies myself of leaving, hobbling away—but how far would I get with this prosthesis? Plus, who would help me shower? Amy, our younger daughter, she lives close by. She’s a lesbian—the butch kind. It took her years to tell us even though we kind of knew. What kind of teenage girl buys herself boys’ underwear? Marie enjoyed having daughters; she taught them to sew, to cook, play the piano. Sometimes the four of us would play Monopoly or go bowling. In the winter the girls would make a snowman they’d call their brother. I’d take a picture of the three of them.

But almost nightly Marie would get up before dawn, smoke cigarettes and try to muffle her cries. I couldn’t comfort her. I just stayed in bed, my heart breaking over and over. Sometimes one of the girls would get up. I’d hear them, “Ma, you can stop crying now” which tore me up even more. I’d picture them standing by her chair, in their nightgowns, their faces full of sleep, full of anguish, patting their mother’s heaving shoulder. At breakfast Marie’s eyes would be dark. The girls ate their cereal in silence and I’d take a thermos of coffee to work with me.

And somehow we made it to now. To that stage of life that isn’t middle age anymore, but not yet old age. Except my right leg. That didn’t make it. And Marie talks to our granddaughter Madeline, the little girl Amy’s wife, Vanessa gave birth to and refers to Sean as “Your Uncle Sean,” as if Sean were alive and just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes. Amy, Vanessa and Maddie come over for barbecues. I run the grill. Marie makes the drinks. She makes them strong. After supper we all watch Maddie play in the backyard, the river out of sight, but not earshot. Amy and Vanessa holding hands, Marie lighting one cigarette off another. And me, with my stump, Sean’s death gnawing at my conscience. I’m just waiting to meet my maker. We all are I guess. Herb, at home with his free cable, his phantom croup. Tanya, who cut us out of her life. Amy and Vanessa—little Maddie. Marie with her smugness about my leg and her bitterness over Sean’s death all tangled together. Our family sits there as the barbecue coals cool off, the sun goes down and the light changes on the grass. The ice in our plastic cups melts and the river gushes on tormenting my beating heart.