Before Anything
Jennifer Murvin
When it looked like he was finally going to drown where he stood, Papa had one of his lungs removed. The other lung remained alone in his chest, and I always saw it like a single balloon hanging from a day-old birthday bouquet, and sometimes when my mom was busy in the evening I spread the yellow paste onto his incision, resisting the urge to push into his back, to feel the empty space where the lung used to be. He took shallow breaths, and he winced and made jokes and watched men box on the television as they split each other’s skin with only their hands.
He and Dad had built the small poolhouse where he lived in our backyard, and for a year my sister and I had played a sort of hopscotch over the long strings they used to mark where his bedroom would be, his closet, his living room where we sat now in the growing darkness, the avocado tree holding what was left of the sunlight in its leaves. Papa was a painter and an engineer. He kept the clock General Motors gave him when he retired and set it on a high shelf. It ticked and looked golden in the light, like a watch but bigger. From since I could remember he had lived at the river, the Colorado River, even though it was in Arizona where his house sat on a bank and had its own dock. There were small shells there. I could never understand how a river had shells. His old house had a smell like old cigarettes and boat diesel, a smell his house in our backyard didn’t have, and we would drive to the river through long nights with moons so large I was afraid the world was ending. One time there was a cloud shaped like a net, and it really truly looked like the soft orange moon was a basketball in that net.
He was falling asleep. He did that now, fell asleep quickly, even mid-sentence. I watched the boxers circle each other, each one hopping a little from foot to foot. One was bleeding. I wanted him to win.
“Jen,” he said, and I jumped. He didn’t open his eyes. “Get me a beer, will you?”
I got up and went to the fridge, feeling more awake with each step. His refrigerator was empty except for beer and leftovers from the dinner my mom made last night and a few blocks of cheese. He only drank beer from cans. He gave me sips from them when we were up at my family’s lake house in Paso Robles, and they tasted like he and Dad smelled, like lake days and sawdust.
He coughed and coughed and spit into his little trashcan. He always did this. I tried not to think of what he was spitting out. It had been worse, before the surgery. I wondered if he felt as uneven as he was.
“Tell your father he needs to change the oil in the boat,” he said. “And in the truck, too. I bet it’s shit by now.”
“Sure,” I said. My mom always talked about how Papa needed projects, filling the shop with tools, building a gazebo in the backyard by the eucalyptus tree. He and Dad had never had a relationship before this, I heard her tell one of her friends on the phone. They had never really talked, never really had anything until now, she said into the phone. It was like a second chance. She was proud of taking Papa in. She mentioned it to a lot of people, in a way that seemed like she was complaining but I knew she wasn’t. For me, it was normal to have him around, he and my dad always doing things around the house, planning our trips up to the lake. We never went to the river anymore, but he didn’t seem to miss it. I cleaned our boat so often I could do it in my sleep. My job was bleaching all the seats. My hands would turn white after a week of it, even though the rest of my body was as tan as any of the girls who came up to the lake for nothing else.
He sat there for a while before opening his beer. He was a recovered alcoholic, I knew. Scotch was his drink. My mother never kept it in the house and always told us how my dad would never drink Scotch, ever. I wondered what had been done to my father. Papa seemed all right. He only drank beer nowadays, Old Milwaukee from cans.
“I’ve been thinking about your grandmother,” he said. “I feel sorry for her.” He and my grandmother had been divorced for years and years. She was a Jehovah’s witness now, and I guess she was back then, too, it was a part of why they split up, the whole thing, door to door and Awake magazine and lots of yellow highlighting in her Bible. My dad called her a religious nutcase, but we went to visit her all the time, and my sister and I spent the night there at least once every month and watched The Sound of Music. Papa had been with another woman at the river for a long time, but she wasn’t in the picture anymore. When his eyesight got too bad for him to drive his boat or his car, he moved in with us. My parents did not like the woman he had lived with, though they never said so. Grandma lived in a little mobile home just across the valley, surrounded by a garden of tomatoes and roses. She canned jam and shelled walnuts. Sometimes she made wax flower arrangements, and I would dip my finger into the hot wax and wait to peel it off in one long shell. Every night she studied the Bible and she went to meetings and conferences and prayed with us to Jehovah. A few times she let us spend three dollars at Pic n’ Save, anything we wanted. She was tiny and healthy, and I had already figured out even then she was religious only because she wanted to wake up one day from being dead, all young and beautiful again.
“You know, there was someone else before your grandmother,” Papa said.
Papa was a great dancer. At my cousin’s wedding, he had taken me out on the dance floor and spun me and pushed my back so I could move to the music the right way, and he pushed me kind of hard but I got used to it as the song went on. I could see my grandmother watching him from a table in the lacey pink dress she had sewed herself like all her clothes. She and Papa had not spoken to each other. Dancing was against her religion, like celebrating birthdays or holidays, though my mother always gave her a birthday card and present anyway, just the day before or after, and she never sent them back, did she, my mother would say.
“You understand what I’m saying when I say there was someone else?” Papa asked. The couch was the same one he had at the river, and he had lost so much weight since he had been here, the dent in the couch where he had always sat was too big for him now, so I settled in there, too.
“It was a woman before your grandmother. Before any other woman. Before anything, really,” he said. A fit of coughing took him over. He spit into the trash can, and the little bag rustled with it. I thought I saw watery blood. “We had this roller skating rink where we’d all go. Like a bar, get it? Her name was Julie. We’d dance together. I’d watch her skate. I was eighteen, a kid.” He always said this about when he was in the war. That he was a kid. They were just kids. He’d talk about a guy who’d died, and he’d say, He was just a dead kid. “She got pregnant.”
Papa was a man who told stories. When he was in the South Pacific during the war, he’d have to bring up the movies on a rope from the small boat that delivered supplies to the ship. One day, as he was bringing up the movies, the knot slipped, and the movie reels all fell into the ocean. They made him tie knots for hours every night for a month before he fell asleep. He showed me some of the knots, how to make them, and it was like his fingers were dancing. They were beautiful. His hands were so slender, and Mom always said he should have been a piano player. She said that about me, too, but I was.
“Back then, that was a big deal. Not like nowadays.” He coughed. Marriage was a thing for young people, he told me once. “We got engaged. I didn’t have any money, you know, I was working at the plant. She got to be a couple months along. Hey, get me another beer will you?” I don’t think he drank the one he had until I got up for the other one.
I went into the kitchen. The light was off and I left it that way. Papa’s story sounded like something out of a black and white film or the photographs of him from the war that looked more like paintings than anything else. I glanced over at Papa and imagined the empty space where his lung used to be. If air wasn’t in there, what was? He looked smaller on that side. I saw him shift his shirt away from the incision. He held his chest. This was normal, my mother said, people did this after any kind of chest surgery, like for protection. That made sense to me. I put my hand on my chest, too, and it did feel safer.
“Thanks,” he said as I handed him the beer. We had about a half an hour before my dad would come home from work and walk out to find us.
Papa opened the beer and took a sip. Some of it dripped onto his shirt. The shirt was one of his favorites, the one with a Gary Larson cartoon on it. On the shirt, a mosquito feeds on a large human arm, blowing up like a float balloon, while another mosquito yells in a large bubble, “Pull out, Rita! You’ve hit an artery!” He had three shirts he’d rotate, and the same shorts every day, and he always smelled spicy like his dandruff shampoo, and before he moved here, he had smelled like the house at the river.
My grandmother had a roommate once, Pamela. She always gave us watermelon gum. One day Pamela had a stroke. It was a bad one. She had fallen onto the floor behind her bed, on the other side from the door. My grandmother came home and was there all day and all night and half a day again before Pamela’s daughter called my mother, concerned. My grandmother went into the room and finally around to the other side of the bed and found her there on the floor. Pamela spent only two days in the hospital before she died. My grandmother got another roommate right away. Mom said it took a special kind of woman to get over something like that.
Papa’s bare feet tapped together on the coffee table. He had long toes, and no hair on his legs at all. “She was a couple months along. I was a little overprotective, you know, we were young, she didn’t know how to take care of herself. I told her I thought she should stop skating. Keep out of the dancing. Julie was hard-headed, a little like your grandmother in that way. She was only eighteen years old. A kid. I shouldn’t have expected her to listen to me, it’s just I was going to war. I didn’t want anything bad to happen.”
Papa stopped. The fighters were together tight on the television screen, like they were hugging. They held each other for a long time, and I wondered if they had both needed a rest, and for whatever reason I remembered how Dad’s face had looked in the hospital after Papa’s surgery when he told my mother, how could anyone take that kind of goddamn pain?
“So I went to the club after work one night. You listening? People were skating, and I was with the fellas. Julie was out there like I had told her not to, skating. It was smoky as hell. And then, I lost her. She fell. I didn’t see it. Some other girl landed on her with the skates. You get me? She lost that baby right there in the rink.”
He took a sip of beer, and his hand was shaking, but it did that sometimes. His hand was wrinkled and thin. My sister and I always played with his flappy skin, on his hands, under his arms.
“I went over to her house. She was okay, but then I shipped out to San Francisco and then the Pacific. I wrote her letters. And then I got one saying she was getting married to some kid back home. She asked me stop writing, so I did.” I wanted to lay my head on his stomach like I used to, but I didn’t know the new rules.
“So here’s the weird part. It’s years and years later, and your grandmother’s throwing a shower for one of her church women, and she comes out to me when I pull up in the truck. She tells me there’s a Julie in the house, some woman who knew me way back when.” I held my breath, and I think he felt it. Was he thinking about my two lungs, me holding all that air in there? I breathed out again, then back in, and felt it inflate my entire body. All that air inside me.
“I didn’t go in.” He had more beer and I shifted further into his dent, closer to his body. His incision from the surgery was getting better. I thought I might miss rubbing the ointment in.
The form of my dad appeared against the light of our house as he walked toward us. His knee was hurting again, I could see. I thought about how old everyone was getting. I thought about my father’s lungs, his knees, his little parts inside of him that kept him coming toward me. Had Pamela heard my grandmother walking around in the mobile home all those hours, listened to her pray to Jehovah? Had she smelled my grandmother’s gas and her breath and her cooking? What secrets had she discovered, lying there, looking under her own bed.
“Does Dad know about her?” I asked.
“No,” he said. I felt like a little girl, which is different from feeling young.
Maybe he wanted to get up then, to stretch. It would be a while before he could move like he wanted again. The doctors told my dad the other lung would get bigger as time went on. It could get as big as the two lungs had been before, he said. One super giant lung. His air could be as much as anybody’s.
Dad slid the door open and let in the great scent of the eucalyptus trees that made such a mess, my parents said, and each summer they got rid of another one from our property. Papa got onto Dad about the oil in the boat and the truck and they were arguing like always and making plans. The fight on the television was over, and I didn’t know if the bleeding boxer had won. I looked at Papa and thought of how he’d carried this story for so many years, maybe in his broken lung, but now it was gone and only the story remained, and what could be done about it now?
“A paradise Earth, girls, that’s what we have to look forward to,” Grandma told us every time we visited, her eyes looking past us, fixed somewhere between the window of her mobile home and the edge of the world. There were pictures around on her walls of herself during the war, portraits like they never make anymore, when she and three other women lived in an apartment in San Francisco and kept their food on the balcony like it was a refrigerator. “That’s the hope Jehovah gives us,” she said. “A paradise Earth. Everyone will be brought back to life at their most young and beautiful, and we’ll stay that way, forever.”
The night Papa died, my dad and uncle drank Scotch out of water glasses until they were both so drunk my dad threw up. My sister threw up too, but right when she heard Papa was dead. It just came right up out of her and onto the patio. Even though my Papa had wanted his ashes scattered, my uncle would keep them in a box in his guest room closet. When Grandma moved into the poolhouse, the rooms began to smell like freezer ice, and when she was ninety-two she fell in love with a forty year old married man in her congregation who helped her with her walker once, and she dyed her hair blond from a box. Grandma is alone and old and my mother says she will never die. She might believe this.
I am all of the women in this house: my mother, my sister, my grandmother, Julie. I throw up when people die, and I take care of scars and men. I am young and in love, I am old and in love, and it is the same. My skirt brushes against my panty hose when I roller skate. Cigarette smoke is perfume in my lungs. Inside my stomach, there is a baby. I wonder how my body has grown up before I have, if I will ever feel like I have grown up. The world is spinning around me as I skate, and the feeling is lovely and familiar until it is gone and I am falling down, down, and my wheels slip and I am smelling old wood, spicy blood, but in my head I am still skating. In a way, I am saving her. I am eloquent, weightless, avoiding the puddle of her blood, my blood, spilled out on the rink floor like lemonade. But I keep skating, because music is playing, I am young, my whole life laid out before me like this smooth, grooved rink, this circle that never stops.
Jennifer Murvin’s essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, Mid-American Review, Midwestern Gothic, Cincinnati Review, Baltimore Review, and Huizache, among others. She teaches writing at Missouri State University and is an MFA candidate at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. Jen lives in Missouri with her little son and is working on a collection of short stories and essays. For more about Jen, please visit her website at JenniferMurvin.virb.com.
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