Marian Dzwonnik
05-29-2013, 10:30 PM
Marian Dzwonnik
THE LONELY PLACES
The plastic dinosaur is green, the color of sea foam or pistachio ice cream. The baby holds the toy close to its stomach making dumb, soothing, humming sounds in its throat. The useless little thing sits in its mother’s lap. A blank look on its fat little face. Watching me with those big glossy retard eyes. A clock someplace keeps ticking like a heart pumping from under the aged wooden floorboards. My Dad sits uncomfortably in a chair too small for him, reading a magazine he’d rather wipe himself with. He grunts when he notices the look I’m giving the cover and frowns as if I had something to do with it.
In a way I guess I do. I know he doesn’t want to be here, and I can’t blame him. Mom usually brings me, but she had to go to work today. The doctor calls my name. The others in the waiting room look at me a certain way. The way someone looks at something that is going to die. Good thing I’m used to it. We stand and follow the nurse to the little room with gray paint that smells like sick. Soon the doctor comes in and not having expected to see my father, offers pleasantries.
“How are you feeling,” he says soon after.
“I miss my hair,” I reply.
“The therapy we are giving you will do that. It’s not permanent,” he lies.
I retort by giving him this blank stare and fake smile that I’ve been practicing. The kind that people put on fliers in waiting rooms. I got good at it by sucking in my cheeks so my eyes sink just the right way. My gaunt expression reminds the Doctor I’ve heard that before with a zealousness equal to flicking him in the nuts with a rubber band. I notice how it makes him wince. Basically I have a disease that makes my blood bad for me. Our cousin’s cat died from it. So here I sit, as the doctor turns his attention to my Dad, who now looks like the dumb baby in the waiting room. Staring at me not knowing what to do.
It was the same look he had when mom told him a year ago. Thinking about it again makes my palms feel sweaty.
“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” said Mom.
“But he’s not even twelve years old,” he said.
When Mom and Dad started arguing, I went to my room and looked it up on the internet. I wouldn’t have had to if she hadn’t cried the whole time the doctor was explaining what it was.
I saw words I didn’t understand. Numbers I would hear the doctor tell us later. At first I felt scared. Most of us live as if there is going to be a tomorrow. I started wondering what happens if there isn’t. Being scared was something I wasn’t used to dealing with. Sure my parents would fight every now and again. This time it was different. A blanket of dread washed over our home. I wasn’t the only one that was afraid. I never liked going to school, but now I was happy to get away. When I was home, often my dad was not. I don’t think he could handle my mother grieving and her not-yet- but-soon dead son at the same time. Then I became too sick to go to school.
I needed an escape. I needed to get away from what was happening to me. I needed to get away from my family. So I ran away from home. They found me in a library, not even a day later. There was no where else to go. I had no friends. My parents had another fight.
I remember when my Uncle started coming over to watch me when my parents were at work. I had always loved him. Possibly even more than my parents. He cared about the way I felt about things. Even when I was too young to know what I was talking about. My Uncle was the sort of person that would let you make a mistake just to teach you a lesson. This didn’t make him really popular, especially as a dead kid sitter. But my parents didn’t have the kind of money to really argue with his style. Without him, the thought of being bored to death became more and more real- istic. My cancer would kill me slower than being stuck at home with nothing to do.
He would come over once a week, with a new stack of books for me.
“They can take you places Daniel,” he would say between puffing his thick cigar.
“That thing is going to give you cancer.” I joked.
In the moments I needed to get away, I read. The books became my friends, each one like a lonely place I could crawl into and escape the world. Some were old and broken in, others were new. They were characters in themselves. Without someone to read them they were as sad as I was. In them I would read the classics, I would read poetry. When I was too weak to turn to the next page,
I forced myself. Sometimes Uncle would have to read to me while I laid in bed too tired to open my eyes. It was hard for him, especially in the hospital. I could hear it in the way he spoke. How he would turn into the pages to not look at the IV squirting radiation into my arm. Something about it bothered him. As if his concern transcended my own.
Therapy, as they called it. The last time I went to therapy my Dad and my Uncle had a really bad argument. Dad said my Uncle couldn’t visit me anymore. If I ever had a reason to stay inside it was because of therapy. I felt like a freak. A skinny kid with a giant light bulb for a head. Like one of those kids you see on TV late at night. Why wasn’t any- one able to help me for a mere 25 cents a day. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, why was my family unable to keep me alive. Where was Robin Williams and Reggie Bush?
I suppose that’s the other reason that Dad is here today with the Doctor. They won’t tell me, but I can see it in the way my Dad winces at the sound of his pen marking each of the tests I’m supposed to take. Each flick of that pen costs money. My stomach hurts. My fingers clutch the book I brought with me. Poem’s by Robert Frost.
The book isn’t exactly attractive. It’s pages are yellow with age, but it’s not what speaks to me. Uncle bought it for a dollar at a flea market, at least that’s what he told me. My finger rests between the pages of Uncle’s favorite poem.
“Dad, I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.
“Are you going to throw up again?” Dad replies.
“Yes.”
The nurse shows me around the corner. I can feel the tension in her fingers on my shoulders. Last time I was here I turned her neat shoes a bright shade of orange. “I know the way,” I say. She lets me go on my own with that. I don’t head towards the bathroom. I wait for her to slip into a patient’s room and I start to explore. I know the hospital well enough by now. Besides, I don’t want to be in the doctor’s room when Dad explains they’re going to have to stop my treatments. I’m already angry. I’ve been angry for a long time now. It doesn’t take long for me to find the room I want to be in. Uncle smiles at me as I approach his bed. His eyes speak to me more than his words ever could. Not that he could anymore. His skin was a colder shade of gray now. His peppery black and gray beard was in shaven tatters. I take my book and I open it at the foot of the bed. Right on the baby blue blanket that keeps him warm. I know the words, but I can’t watch. My nose settles into the pages, my eyes on the words as I read them out loud.
“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”
The machine giving oxygen to Uncle’s lungs answers me. As it had the first time, when Mom had brought me. I was too angry to meet his eyes that day. I had felt betrayed. Slowly I close the book and I look at my Uncle for a long time. He continues to have that almost stoic smile, even as the wetness of his eyes make me feel like crying.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I said.
Uncle grasps at the hose on his neck and reaches out his hand. His eyes shift to the marker and board at the nightstand near him. I give him both.
“So you don’t lose hope,” he writes.
This makes me frown. Hope had never really come to mind. People would talk about praying for my parents and I when I had the misfortune of being seen in public, but the concept was alien to me. As if luck or God or some manifestation of chance would take my cancer.
“I don’t want you to die,” I say.
Uncle’s hand moves from the marker board and to my wrist. His coarse hands feel like sandpaper as he moves his arm to embrace me. The hospital smell, the sick that wafts in his clothes don’t bother me.
“I love you,” he mouths into my cheek, voicelessly.
By the time we leave the hospital my tongue is a nice shade of purple. I always pick the grape suckers on the way out. Thanks to my cancer I can stick out my tongue and look like a zombie. The ride home starts in silence. I watch my Dad drive as he listens to music so he doesn’t have to talk to me. He does the same thing when Mom starts yelling about something. I think his favorite spot in the world is in that driver’s seat.
“How is your Uncle,” he says knowingly.
“He’s doing a lot better than last time,” I say.
Another song passes the time between us as I continue to look at him.
“I spoke to the Doctor about getting you admitted to the children’s hospital,” he says.
“Will it cost a lot of money?”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is making sure you get better.”
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” I interject.
The jolt of the car breaking almost crushes the seat belt into my shoulder as my hands shoot out defensively against the faded leather of the glove box.
“Why in the world would you think that?”
“You’re never home. You never spend time with me.” I mumble rapidly.
My book has fallen on the floor mat against my shoe. I wish I could hold it, like that baby with his green dinosaur.
“I’m not home because I’m working. That’s why your mother and I fight sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He pulls the car to the side of the road. Exit’s the car and comes around the front, then opens my door and kneels beside me.
“Daniel, you have nothing to be sorry for,” he says.
“I’m so angry, I’m angry all the time,” I whisper.
“We are going to get through this. I promise. I promise,” he kisses my head.
When something bad happens, a person goes through stages. It took me time to understand why my Uncle had stopped visiting me and why Dad was so mad at him.
Where I was scared and in denial, my Uncle had accepted his fate. Instead of getting treatment he took care of me. He knew it was too late even if no one wanted to believe it. A few days later he died in his sleep.
I’ve never been to a funeral before. The clothes I have to wear feel itchy, and the shoes are tight. The room is full of people. Most of them I’ve never seen before. I imagine that they are Uncle’s students, his friends, the people he loves. When they start to talk about the kind of life he lived I feel my face start to get warm. What kind of person has a funeral like this? In some way I’m jealous. How in the world am I supposed to follow this? My Dad’s eyes are on me and I glance back up at him.
“There are a lot of people here,” I say.
“Don’t be nervous. They want to hear what you have to say,” he replies.
Eventually I’m standing in front of strangers, while the wool of my shirt starts to scratch my neck. I’m about to read his favorite poem. Then I finally see my Uncle in the casket. He looks better than the last time I had seen him. Something comes into my breath. Like the rush that explodes inside of you after someone tries to scare away a bad hiccup.
I want to live the kind of life that people celebrate after I’m gone. I want to leave something behind. Suddenly thinking about when and how I’m going to die seems like a complete waste of time. Something new and beautiful happens.
“My Uncle gave me hope.”
The Lonely Places, Copyright © 2012 MARIAN DZWONNIK. All Rights Reserved.
THE LONELY PLACES
The plastic dinosaur is green, the color of sea foam or pistachio ice cream. The baby holds the toy close to its stomach making dumb, soothing, humming sounds in its throat. The useless little thing sits in its mother’s lap. A blank look on its fat little face. Watching me with those big glossy retard eyes. A clock someplace keeps ticking like a heart pumping from under the aged wooden floorboards. My Dad sits uncomfortably in a chair too small for him, reading a magazine he’d rather wipe himself with. He grunts when he notices the look I’m giving the cover and frowns as if I had something to do with it.
In a way I guess I do. I know he doesn’t want to be here, and I can’t blame him. Mom usually brings me, but she had to go to work today. The doctor calls my name. The others in the waiting room look at me a certain way. The way someone looks at something that is going to die. Good thing I’m used to it. We stand and follow the nurse to the little room with gray paint that smells like sick. Soon the doctor comes in and not having expected to see my father, offers pleasantries.
“How are you feeling,” he says soon after.
“I miss my hair,” I reply.
“The therapy we are giving you will do that. It’s not permanent,” he lies.
I retort by giving him this blank stare and fake smile that I’ve been practicing. The kind that people put on fliers in waiting rooms. I got good at it by sucking in my cheeks so my eyes sink just the right way. My gaunt expression reminds the Doctor I’ve heard that before with a zealousness equal to flicking him in the nuts with a rubber band. I notice how it makes him wince. Basically I have a disease that makes my blood bad for me. Our cousin’s cat died from it. So here I sit, as the doctor turns his attention to my Dad, who now looks like the dumb baby in the waiting room. Staring at me not knowing what to do.
It was the same look he had when mom told him a year ago. Thinking about it again makes my palms feel sweaty.
“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” said Mom.
“But he’s not even twelve years old,” he said.
When Mom and Dad started arguing, I went to my room and looked it up on the internet. I wouldn’t have had to if she hadn’t cried the whole time the doctor was explaining what it was.
I saw words I didn’t understand. Numbers I would hear the doctor tell us later. At first I felt scared. Most of us live as if there is going to be a tomorrow. I started wondering what happens if there isn’t. Being scared was something I wasn’t used to dealing with. Sure my parents would fight every now and again. This time it was different. A blanket of dread washed over our home. I wasn’t the only one that was afraid. I never liked going to school, but now I was happy to get away. When I was home, often my dad was not. I don’t think he could handle my mother grieving and her not-yet- but-soon dead son at the same time. Then I became too sick to go to school.
I needed an escape. I needed to get away from what was happening to me. I needed to get away from my family. So I ran away from home. They found me in a library, not even a day later. There was no where else to go. I had no friends. My parents had another fight.
I remember when my Uncle started coming over to watch me when my parents were at work. I had always loved him. Possibly even more than my parents. He cared about the way I felt about things. Even when I was too young to know what I was talking about. My Uncle was the sort of person that would let you make a mistake just to teach you a lesson. This didn’t make him really popular, especially as a dead kid sitter. But my parents didn’t have the kind of money to really argue with his style. Without him, the thought of being bored to death became more and more real- istic. My cancer would kill me slower than being stuck at home with nothing to do.
He would come over once a week, with a new stack of books for me.
“They can take you places Daniel,” he would say between puffing his thick cigar.
“That thing is going to give you cancer.” I joked.
In the moments I needed to get away, I read. The books became my friends, each one like a lonely place I could crawl into and escape the world. Some were old and broken in, others were new. They were characters in themselves. Without someone to read them they were as sad as I was. In them I would read the classics, I would read poetry. When I was too weak to turn to the next page,
I forced myself. Sometimes Uncle would have to read to me while I laid in bed too tired to open my eyes. It was hard for him, especially in the hospital. I could hear it in the way he spoke. How he would turn into the pages to not look at the IV squirting radiation into my arm. Something about it bothered him. As if his concern transcended my own.
Therapy, as they called it. The last time I went to therapy my Dad and my Uncle had a really bad argument. Dad said my Uncle couldn’t visit me anymore. If I ever had a reason to stay inside it was because of therapy. I felt like a freak. A skinny kid with a giant light bulb for a head. Like one of those kids you see on TV late at night. Why wasn’t any- one able to help me for a mere 25 cents a day. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, why was my family unable to keep me alive. Where was Robin Williams and Reggie Bush?
I suppose that’s the other reason that Dad is here today with the Doctor. They won’t tell me, but I can see it in the way my Dad winces at the sound of his pen marking each of the tests I’m supposed to take. Each flick of that pen costs money. My stomach hurts. My fingers clutch the book I brought with me. Poem’s by Robert Frost.
The book isn’t exactly attractive. It’s pages are yellow with age, but it’s not what speaks to me. Uncle bought it for a dollar at a flea market, at least that’s what he told me. My finger rests between the pages of Uncle’s favorite poem.
“Dad, I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.
“Are you going to throw up again?” Dad replies.
“Yes.”
The nurse shows me around the corner. I can feel the tension in her fingers on my shoulders. Last time I was here I turned her neat shoes a bright shade of orange. “I know the way,” I say. She lets me go on my own with that. I don’t head towards the bathroom. I wait for her to slip into a patient’s room and I start to explore. I know the hospital well enough by now. Besides, I don’t want to be in the doctor’s room when Dad explains they’re going to have to stop my treatments. I’m already angry. I’ve been angry for a long time now. It doesn’t take long for me to find the room I want to be in. Uncle smiles at me as I approach his bed. His eyes speak to me more than his words ever could. Not that he could anymore. His skin was a colder shade of gray now. His peppery black and gray beard was in shaven tatters. I take my book and I open it at the foot of the bed. Right on the baby blue blanket that keeps him warm. I know the words, but I can’t watch. My nose settles into the pages, my eyes on the words as I read them out loud.
“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”
The machine giving oxygen to Uncle’s lungs answers me. As it had the first time, when Mom had brought me. I was too angry to meet his eyes that day. I had felt betrayed. Slowly I close the book and I look at my Uncle for a long time. He continues to have that almost stoic smile, even as the wetness of his eyes make me feel like crying.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I said.
Uncle grasps at the hose on his neck and reaches out his hand. His eyes shift to the marker and board at the nightstand near him. I give him both.
“So you don’t lose hope,” he writes.
This makes me frown. Hope had never really come to mind. People would talk about praying for my parents and I when I had the misfortune of being seen in public, but the concept was alien to me. As if luck or God or some manifestation of chance would take my cancer.
“I don’t want you to die,” I say.
Uncle’s hand moves from the marker board and to my wrist. His coarse hands feel like sandpaper as he moves his arm to embrace me. The hospital smell, the sick that wafts in his clothes don’t bother me.
“I love you,” he mouths into my cheek, voicelessly.
By the time we leave the hospital my tongue is a nice shade of purple. I always pick the grape suckers on the way out. Thanks to my cancer I can stick out my tongue and look like a zombie. The ride home starts in silence. I watch my Dad drive as he listens to music so he doesn’t have to talk to me. He does the same thing when Mom starts yelling about something. I think his favorite spot in the world is in that driver’s seat.
“How is your Uncle,” he says knowingly.
“He’s doing a lot better than last time,” I say.
Another song passes the time between us as I continue to look at him.
“I spoke to the Doctor about getting you admitted to the children’s hospital,” he says.
“Will it cost a lot of money?”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is making sure you get better.”
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” I interject.
The jolt of the car breaking almost crushes the seat belt into my shoulder as my hands shoot out defensively against the faded leather of the glove box.
“Why in the world would you think that?”
“You’re never home. You never spend time with me.” I mumble rapidly.
My book has fallen on the floor mat against my shoe. I wish I could hold it, like that baby with his green dinosaur.
“I’m not home because I’m working. That’s why your mother and I fight sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He pulls the car to the side of the road. Exit’s the car and comes around the front, then opens my door and kneels beside me.
“Daniel, you have nothing to be sorry for,” he says.
“I’m so angry, I’m angry all the time,” I whisper.
“We are going to get through this. I promise. I promise,” he kisses my head.
When something bad happens, a person goes through stages. It took me time to understand why my Uncle had stopped visiting me and why Dad was so mad at him.
Where I was scared and in denial, my Uncle had accepted his fate. Instead of getting treatment he took care of me. He knew it was too late even if no one wanted to believe it. A few days later he died in his sleep.
I’ve never been to a funeral before. The clothes I have to wear feel itchy, and the shoes are tight. The room is full of people. Most of them I’ve never seen before. I imagine that they are Uncle’s students, his friends, the people he loves. When they start to talk about the kind of life he lived I feel my face start to get warm. What kind of person has a funeral like this? In some way I’m jealous. How in the world am I supposed to follow this? My Dad’s eyes are on me and I glance back up at him.
“There are a lot of people here,” I say.
“Don’t be nervous. They want to hear what you have to say,” he replies.
Eventually I’m standing in front of strangers, while the wool of my shirt starts to scratch my neck. I’m about to read his favorite poem. Then I finally see my Uncle in the casket. He looks better than the last time I had seen him. Something comes into my breath. Like the rush that explodes inside of you after someone tries to scare away a bad hiccup.
I want to live the kind of life that people celebrate after I’m gone. I want to leave something behind. Suddenly thinking about when and how I’m going to die seems like a complete waste of time. Something new and beautiful happens.
“My Uncle gave me hope.”
The Lonely Places, Copyright © 2012 MARIAN DZWONNIK. All Rights Reserved.