Sweet & Crazy

AUGUST 2001 The cricket hot night my husband died, my four year-old son, Pete, looked at me and said, "Now you're a window," and I did not correct the child. I was thirty-nine years old and worked at the local YMCA, which meant I gave workshops on how to record your life story. Pete said I taught "scribble scrabble." My students were butchers and bakers and confused people. I also worked in the library at the community college where Ed taught world history. The night Ed died, I stayed up weeping and ironing his shirts. We lived in a little yellow house in Ash Creek, Ohio. Ash Creek is not a suburb of anywhere. It's a mostly white town, but the two gas stations and cleaners and pizza place were owned by Indians from India. There's an air force base not too far away. I'm a homing pigeon. I grew up in Ash Creek, went one hundred miles west to college, and I came back. *** I'm not quite sure what to do with this widow thing. Some people turn away when they see us on the street, and others give Pete and me a look that makes me feel like we're supposed to be inside with the shades down. Last night Pete lay in bed, kicking his sheep and-donkey sheets off him, and said, "Why don't you get to be a baby twice?" I lay next to him for a while after he fell asleep. Then I got up and threw a pair of my husband's old shoes in the garbage. This morning when Pete saw the shoes in the garbage, he pulled them out, brushed off the eggshells, and said, "Don't you ever throw anything away of Daddy's ever." He dragged a chair to Ed's closet and yanked down all of Ed's shirts, then hauled them to his own closet and hung them on the pole next to his little shirts on little hangers. One of my students confided to me, "I stopped lying when I turned seventy." I feel like I'm seventy. My aunt Barbara says loss doesn't make you stronger like they tell you in books. She says loss makes you weaker. I wouldn't say that, just that when I walk down the street, I'm stunned there are so many people who are alive. p0 Ed died at five thirty in the afternoon. Pete and I were sitting on the couch watching a Blue's Clues video from the library. The tape was a little wobbly. I got up to adjust the tracking, and then I went in to check on Ed. He lay there still as a board in his hospital bed. I ran in to get Pete. "Daddy is going to stop breathing soon," I said. "How do you know?" said Pete. "Come here." I held out my hand. "Don't rewind it," said Pete, pointing to the video. We went into the room holding hands, and Pete climbed onto his father's bed. He climbed up on Ed and kissed his face. I held Ed's hand, and he stopped breathing. "He stopped breathing," I whispered. Pete didn't look at me. He just kept kissing Ed's face and said solemnly, "I guess you won't be having any more birthday parties." I called the funeral home, and they said, "We can be right over, ma'am." "No, please," I said. Now a thunderstorm was crashing outside. "No, please give us two hours." I cannot account exactly for those two hours. There was a time in the Middle Ages when the king decided to change the calendar and people marched around with signs that said, "Give us back our twelve days." I had the sense that someone had altered time like that in those two hours. I do know that Pete kept doing cartwheels, over and over. Two men in suits and hats, who appeared to be from the 1950s, showed up, shaking rain off themselves. Pete kept saying to them, "How are you going to fit Daddy out the door?" but they did not respond. We have a narrow front door and back door, and the hallway hooks around so that we had to return a refrigerator we'd ordered, because it was too big. They told us to leave the room while they wrapped him up, and then they put him on what looked like a hospital gurney and wheeled him out. They tipped him up around the corner. TheyDann, Patty is the author of 'Sweet & Crazy', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312316679 and ISBN 0312316674.