Visiting
Their father says to keep quiet. He needs sleep. He has to wake early this week to feed the cattle, and then drive to Eastman to plant corn on the family farm with Uncle Jim, and then drive back here to feed the cattle again. Hazel and Liz are in charge of the cats.
But it’s a ritual. Hazel visits Liz’s room before bedtime. At night, Liz stretches the telephone cord into her room and wraps a hair band around the receiver. She keeps Doritos and a flashlight stashed in her headboard. Hazel crawls under her sister’s rainbow covers, and Liz waves the flashlight beam across the dark room, revealing in swoops the yellowing ceiling tiles, the gold chains that turn their necks green in the summer, hanging from dresser knobs, the crack running along the grain of the bedroom door. Liz drops her voice and calls, “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” The beam lands on a poster of Jordan dunking. They both laugh like crazy, and she does it again. The beam lands on Kirk Cameron or a porcelain cat their father won playing skee-ball with Uncle Jim at the county fair. “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!”
Some nights, the beam lands on Hazel, and Hazel improvs—usually a song and something like the Charleston.
Liz teases her bangs in an impressive way. They are nearly as tall as one of Hazel’s snap bracelets. She is known throughout Grant County as the Girl with the Hair, and has lots of dates—Hazel keeps track of the boys in the margin of her diary, just in case Liz has passed up on a gem. The bangs take a lot of hairspray; the bathroom mirrors are permanently fogged. Hazel scratches her name through to the glass. In a week she does it again.
In summer, the boys from the high school get drunk at Bill Neemer’s shack down the road. They walk over to lie on the front porch, belly-down, and hiss Liz’s name through the screen door. Neemer’s thirty, but he throws the best high school parties because he can buy beer and grows pot. Their father thinks he’s a bum. At night, Hazel can hear the drunks’ tires hit the asphalt and squeal. Their father has to pull a car out of a ditch with his tractor at least once a year. On these nights, Neemer’s a bum and an asshole.
Sometimes Liz sneaks down the road, and Hazel covers for her. She tiptoes from window to window, trying to listen to the noise of the party, making sure cops aren't sneaking down the road, trying to make a bust. But what could Hazel do if they were? She tiptoes from the windows to bed, where she tries to write in her diary or read one of Liz's romance novels. These nights, Hazel sleeps in Liz’s bed with the phone tucked under her arm, worried and fielding calls.
August 12, 1990
Last night, the boys thought Dad was Liz. He fell asleep on the couch watching Star Trek again. When the boys started hissing, Dad stumbled to the door and said, “Identify yourself.” The drunks rolled all the way down the porch, under the railing, and into the barberries.
Their father has farming in his blood. Grandma Jo says her own mother wasn’t even a twinkle in an eye when the wagon wheel broke right there, just outside of Eastman, Wisconsin. Before they got around to fixing it, the farmhouse had already been built. The family has been tilling the same stretches of land ever since. Even now the front yard has two rusted-out Buicks with the hoods up and a truck up on blocks, an oil pan waiting beneath it. They’ve been that way for as long as Hazel can remember.
Grandma Jo and Uncle Jim work the family farm now. The girls and their father live an hour away, on a small cattle farm. This distance, the family thinks, is because their father got worldly. As a Marine, he sent postcards when he back-floated atop the salty Philippine seas, and when he star-gazed from the Aleutians. He has a degree in engineering.
“Can’t beat it out of ‘em,” Grandma Jo says to the girls while violently kneading dough. “Boy’s got a damned college degree and he still wants to shovel shit. Scared your pretty mother away. If I would’ve been smarter, I’d be long gone too. Now look at me.” She takes a knife and chops the dough down the middle.
Liz tells Hazel stories about their mother. Liz keeps a picture of her sunbathing in her dresser, where their father won’t see it. Liz tells Hazel that their mother had to get away. She says she’ll do the same thing soon enough. “You’ve seen Grandma Jo.”
February 22, 1991
Liz was in a mood today again. Had a fight with Dad. Whenever that happens, she tells me stories about Mom, about the days before she left:
Liz and Dad and Mom were out in the barn all day, weaning cattle, and they were filthy—manure up to the brims of their four-buckle boots. Liz was wearing our brother's old clothes and a Doboy seed corn cap. Afterward, Mom went inside to wash up, and Liz and Dad went up town to fill the rusted-out Ford with gas. Liz was staring at the candy bars while Dad was outside pumping gas. Then, a man in khakis came over and bought Liz a candy bar and gave her a twenty to give to Dad. When Dad heard, he laughed and told Liz she could keep it. At home, when Mom heard, she bent down in the sink and took a long time washing her hands. Then she turned to Dad and said, "You won't work me to death. Not the way your father worked your mother. No way."
When Liz tells this story, she points at the picture and says, “If I looked that good, I wouldn’t put up with this farm shit either.” After Liz says this, she walks away and sits on the corner loveseat, staring at the picture for hours.
Hazel’s brother is older. He is away, out East, and will never be a farmer.
The day their grandmother has her first stroke, Hazel is in the bathroom watching her sister line her lips with "Frosty Red" Maybelline. Liz is going to be a junior in high school this month. Hazel will be in fourth grade.
“So, what, Haze, you think you love him?” Liz asks, and pouts her lips at the mirror. She motions for Hazel to sit on the toilet seat, and Hazel does. Hazel has just fallen in love with Jack Rikser. She married him in preschool, but that was preschool. They’d both worn sweatpants, so it didn’t count. But this year he sits across from her in Mrs. Thompson’s class and has grown the longest, blackest eyelashes. Hazel penned his name in a big heart on her thigh, where no one would find it. Liz found it last week. She was showing Hazel how to shave her legs.
Liz tilts Hazel’s face up, and pouts her lips the way Hazel should now pout her lips. Liz smears red on them, says, “Rub,” and Hazel rubs her lips together. In ten minutes, she will look like a miniature strumpet.
Hazel shrugs. “Maybe I do.” She kicks her legs a little, and sighs. Liz pulls Hazel’s limp bangs up, sprays them, backcombs them, and sprays them again.
“So, what do you think I should do?” Hazel asks, and tries to glance up at Liz, but the plastic yellow comb is fast at work, creating a cloud of brown frizz between them.
Last week, she and Jack kissed behind the softball score board at Legion Field. She hasn’t told her sister this yet—she’s waiting for the cue, for the advice. And since Hazel can’t keep this to herself much longer, and more things like this are sure to come up, she’s starting a new diary today, July 17, 1991. It’s purple, with a heart-shaped lock on it. She’s already written the date at the top of the first page, and beneath it, In here, I will confess my love for Jack. An inked flower grows out of the “K”.
A door slams and their father yells up the stairs. “Girls!” He never yells.
Liz and Hazel run. In the family room, their father is pacing. “Your grandmother had a stroke. We need to go. Now.”
Liz’s mouth drops open; she stammers, “I can’t. I have practice. Basketball.” She pulls at her earring and looks at the floor. “I’ll meet you there, after.” She is long-legged, and almost the star.
“Fine,” he says. “Fine.” He makes for the door. “Hazel, let’s go.”
“Liz,” Hazel says, and grabs her sister’s wrist. “Lizzy, you have to come with us.”
“I can’t, Haze. I’ll see you there.”
“Hazel.” Her father grabs Hazel’s other hand and pulls her away.
As Hazel is pulled away, she looks behind, at her sister, “Liz! Lizzy, come quick. Fast as you can, Lizzy.”
In the hospital, Hazel’s grandmother babbles in the railed cot. Her head falls side to side; her loose tongue slurs into her pillow. Hazel’s father covers his face with his hand. His whole body shakes silently.
Uncle Jim is permanently stooped. He wants to know what took his brother so long to get here. “Why do you have to live so far away?”
Eventually, her father replies, “It’s just an hour.”
Uncle Jim found her fallen outside the chicken coop this morning, her crate, emptied, the eggs scattered and cracked on the sidewalk. “The dog was barking like crazy,” he said. He never would have found her if the dog hadn’t run and jumped up on him, muzzle full of yolk. He looks down at his jeans; they’re still crusted with yellow.
Hazel walks to the bed. She is tall enough so that she can just lean over the rail. Her eyes trace the lines of tubes as they run from bags, down her arm—running parallel to veins, to scratches from the fall.
“Look,” Uncle Jim says to her father in the corner, “You need to take the dog.”
Her grandmother groans. Hazel looks at her face, bleary-eyed, skin sagging to the side she lies on, and thinks she has never seen her lying down. She wonders if her own mother was right to get away.
That night, after they leave the hospital, Hazel and her father stop at the Eastman farm. Her father goes into the milk shed to find dog biscuits. They will take the dog, Bert, back to their farm tonight. Hazel walks up the sidewalk, past the rosebushes, and catches the comfortable scent of apple pie baked into the house’s wood, and of real milk and filthy chore clothes hanging on the porch. She walks to the side of the house, in front of the kitchen window to visit the statue of the Virgin, who stands over the small white crosses of babies she is related to, who’ve been baptized in the sink and buried here in the red clay.
“Hazel. Let’s go.” Hazel helps her father lure Bert into the back of the station wagon with dog biscuits. Bert is not small or tame. One Christmas, when Liz was six, he pulled her by her turtleneck collar across the wrapping-papered floor in front of the tree. The grown-ups would have had a real problem with it if they hadn’t been drunk on Old Milwaukee. Instead, they took Polaroids.
The dog could tear the station wagon apart, but it already is. The wagon is old, the ceiling upholstery held up by yardsticks that are held up by duct tape. Small piles of seed corn gather in the corners from bags torn on the jagged vinyl. The smell that comes through the vents makes Hazel light-headed. They get in the car. Bert barks for the first twenty minutes. Hazel rolls down the window, and listens to the cicadas singing through the gushing wind. Liz didn’t show.
August 29, 1992
Went to see grandma again today. We stayed in the room while the nurse changed the feeding tube, and flipped her to her other side. They play BINGO on Sundays sometimes. I handed out the nickels today. I gave a nickel to a man in a wheelchair. He grabbed my hand. “A baby,” he said. He petted my head, and my headband fell off. “A baby. What’re you doing here, baby?” I couldn’t pull away until the nurse came and helped. “She’s not a baby, she’s not a baby, Hank,” she kept saying and rolled the man back to his room.
Her father talks the whole way to and from Eastman each Sunday. He seems to like the trip. “An hour,” he says. “Just a quick trip. Nice scenery. Look at those trees. Look at those horses.” He talks about the crops they drive through, the rows of corn that were planted too early, too late, the cut hay that will never dry because of this weather they’ve been having. “Too humid. Whole batch’ll go bad.” He shares his engineering degree and talks about parallax, moving his hand along an invisible 180 degree curve. He tells her that when she looks at the speedometer and sees 50 mph, it’s really 60. He points down a dirt road and tells her that right down there, that’s where your Great-Aunt Noreen used to live, and that when her husband died, Grandma Jo sent him to live with her for the winters, chopped and stacked wood and what-all. Noreen made the best roast beef. He points down another dirt road, and there is another great-aunt. This one made corn bread. He tells her that he helped lay this stretch of road that summer he returned from the Philippines, and that after he built it, he drove it every weekend back from college to visit. “An hour or two. Just a quick trip. And boy, did your grandmother crack the whip on me just a’soon as I got home.” He laughs and nods. “It’s a good road.”
She and her father travel the long hour to the nursing home each Sunday, but Hazel travels elsewhere, lets her mind run off. On Sundays, she travels to Paris and eats the croissants with Bert in her lap—a tight fit. Or she is an artist, or anyone who does things that people applaud. An artist in the city—she is even in a city sometimes—away from the corn fields. She goes to make-out parties at Neemer’s with the high-schoolers. Jack is there. The music is loud and thumping. Sometimes she imagines her father is driving somewhere else, and Liz, back from college, or even once their mother, is sitting in the passenger seat of the station wagon. Then Hazel can lie flat on the backseat, humming a song and flipping through a magazine, feeling that even though they are traveling somewhere, she is in the right place.
November 27, 1993
This morning, Dad and I bought Grandma Jo a stuffed dog, a small one. It was in the check-out aisle at the supermarket when we went in to get some milk. I saw it and held it up for Dad to see. "Look," I said, and Dad nodded. It looked enough like Bert for us to buy it.
At twelve, Hazel’s legs stretch long beneath her skirt. Outside her grandmother's room, she does half spins, letting her skirt flower and twist around her knees. She stops and blows a bubble until it pops. She taps her hand flat along the ceramic brick wall and looks down as she balances on the heels of her Mary Janes—clunking, sounding strange, because, in the home, people shuffle.
She just had to leave the room.
Grandma Jo is much better now. She can sit up, and she can move most of her mouth and almost make words. “Ber,” she said when she saw the grocery-store dog. “Ber.” And then she laughed, and moved the dog across the bed with her good hand, up and down her thigh, and made growling sounds, and laughed again. Hazel’s father was beaming. He was happy to see his mother well. There she was, healthy, and playing with this stuffed dog, prancing it across the sheets.
Then, just as quickly as she lit up, Grandma Jo began sobbing, “Ber…Ber….” Her head dropped down to her neck, as if a string had been snipped. Her face became crumpled and pale, looked like a trampled tissue. Her head fell to the side, and began to shake against the sheets.
Hazel burst out crying and ran to the single bathroom in the lobby. She sobbed on the toilet seat until someone started knocking on the door.
But now, she is outside the room, someplace else completely. A nurse spots Hazel and her puffy eyes as she leaves her grandmother’s room. She touches Hazel’s shoulder and startles her. “Darling,” she says, “That is such a pretty skirt, just look at the way that thing spins.” The nurse takes Hazel by the shoulders and leads her back into the room. Her father has his hand to his face, and is leaning back into a chair. Grandma Jo is no longer sitting up. The nurse sits on the edge of her grandmother’s bed, “Just look at this girl spin, Jo.” She shakes the woman’s shoulder gently. “Jo. Look at this girl.” The nurse adjusts her grandmother’s head on the pillow. She nods at Hazel. “Go ahead, girl.”
And Hazel spins. Slowly, arms out, hovering in the air, then faster, arms twisting
around her, her black skirt billowing out like an inverse tulip, blossoming, as she spins
for her grandmother, her father, the nurse, on those new legs. She spins until she loses herself completely.
June 14, 1995
Today, we tore up the carpet in our house. Last month, I spilt a liter of Pepsi on it. The pop just blended in. We dabbed the big pools and went to the carpet store the next day.
We cut the best squares out for Bert’s house, and threw the rest out with the trash.
Hazel sleeps in her sister’s room. Her own room has become something like storage—a trash heap for large items. At night, she sleeps in Liz’s bed, under the pilling rainbow covers. She keeps the phone tucked under her arm.
She has just fallen asleep, the light still on, both her algebra homework and journal spread out on the bed, when the phone rings. She rolls the hair band away from the receiver. It’s Liz, and she has boyfriend problems.
“You’ve dated him too long,” Hazel says. “Get rid of him.”
“But I’ve dated him so long.”
“Exactly,” Hazel says, sitting up. She looks down at her journal. She reads February 21, 1996—Things with Jack aren’t so good. She remembers she forgot their anniversary and when he brought it up, she laughed. Then, there was a spiraling. “Of course you didn’t remember! You never remember,” he’d said.
“Rough time of year,” Hazel tells her sister.
“Things with Jack?”
“Not so good.”
“I’ll be home soon. Soon-ish,” Liz says.
“Good.”
Hazel and Liz watch Speed every day, for a month—that long month between Christmas and more school. Liz is on vacation from her third year of college. She’s just finished a major break-up with the boy she’s dated for too long, plus some. The girls slip rum into the eggnog and get good at Keanu impersonations. They crouch low and stretch their hands out to each other—a move like a rescue. Sometimes, this is how they hand each other the leftover candy canes. For Christmas, they gave each other the movie posters. Now, walking down the hall, past their bedroom doors, to the bathroom, Hazel sees Keanu running away from exploding buses, airplanes. She’s missed her sister longer than she’s been in college.
The nursing home calls during lunch one day. It’s spring. Hazel and her father pulled two calves that morning, are behind with chores, and now the cattle are hungry and bellering.
Yesterday was Hazel’s last day of class. She’s finished with her second year of high school. Last night, she sneaked out, down the road to Neemer’s. She met friends. She realized that Neemer’s carpet is really her old carpet—he took their carpet. She could see the places she vomited when she was five, seven. She kept shouting over the music, “But we gave the best part to the dog!” She spilled beer on it on purpose, then she danced on it. She danced on Jack. He said he hadn’t seen her happy in a long time. His fingers played with the belt loops of her jeans. He tugged at them to pull her closer for a kiss. “Where have you been, Haze?” She shrugged.
She’s been hung-over and silent all morning.
The home says that Grandma Jo has had another stroke. Hazel and her father abandon their sandwiches. They hang their chore clothes and take turns in the shower.
On this trip, her father does not tell stories. Above the clanks and spits of the aging wagon is a heavy silence that lasts until her father pulls the wagon into park in the home’s lot. He says, “If this ever happened to me, happened to me or even your mom, wherever she is, you kids would never visit. You’re different now. Look at your brother. Your sister. You’re all different.” He stares ahead, at the words as they leave his mouth, drops his head, and gets out of the car. Hazel watches him walking, and then follows him.
In the room, he shakes his mother’s soft shoulder gently. “Ma.” The hospital gown is so loose it is almost falling down too far. He pulls it up, and ties the strings at the back tighter. “Ma. Ma, wake up,” he repeats as he leans over her. Hazel sits in a chair, and lets her eyes wander over this room that her grandmother has occupied for the last six years. On the corkboard over the nightstand, are long rows of school pictures—cousins aging into high school, into grown people Hazel barely recognizes. Hazel is up there. So is Liz. Hazel knows that if her grandmother would wake up right now, she would not recognize Hazel, would not recognize her own son. She has been on a feeding tube for six years, and she won’t wake up.
November 6, 1997
Bert’s dead. Dad and I were putting up fence right by the road. He’s not usually that close to the road. Bill Neemer took him with his truck. He didn’t stop. I ran after him to his driveway.—You killed our dog! He walked to the end of his drive. Bert was limping over to Dad. —Dog looks fine to me. Then he walked back to his house.
Dad fed Bert some venison that night, and in the morning he was dead. We buried
him in the yard, in front of the kitchen window. At night, Dad stands on the front porch
and glares at Neemer’s.
At Garrity Funeral Home, Hazel mostly stays in the reception room in the basement. Her brother has brought his wife and kids. They drink Pepsi and eat shortbread cookies.
“Thanks for coming,” Hazel says, and nods. She means it. “Liz should be here soon. She’s bringing coffee.” His kids, girls, crawl all over her, and call her Aunt Hazel. They twirl her hair.
“Girls, leave your aunt be.”
“It’s fine, really.”
“We should have come a long time ago,” he says. Hazel nods again. She says she should go check on their father, and excuses herself.
Upstairs, Liz walks through the door, and Hazel rushes up to her. “You’re late. Where have you been?” she asks. Hazel looks at her sister’s empty hands. “Where’s the coffee?” Liz pulls on her earring, and shrugs; she tries to smile. Hazel can remember when Liz had bangs and was almost a basketball star.
Hazel takes hold of Liz’s shoulders, and says, “I’m glad you're here.” She holds
her tightly. She feels like the room is spinning the years back. Feeling Liz’s silky hair fall down her back, Hazel wonders what happened to the bangs.