- Creative Writing -
Fingerprints of Family
By Melanie Chopko
In the earliest of images that blink before my brain like a slide stuck in its
projector, I cannot take my eyes from the think lines which quiver as they stretch
across the stubby carpet of a dark room. The filleted blinds, each strong and
confident, are a testament to an attempt to create comfort as I sit in my grandpa's
lap, my bare calves itching from the brown gauze of his polyester pants. He
wears these pants in each of the square photographs from his jaundice world,
Arizona, and when he walks behind my thoughts, the first memory shadowing every
memory to come.
These squares of memory, like all the others in the place I should call my home,
are hidden--in wallpapered boxes, cream baby books, the shuffle of paper. My
mother keeps her father underneath the organizer in her thinnest drawer, only
meeting those pants when they fall from the back of the tray to meet her own.
She picks him up from the floor or carries his name away from a terse phone
call from the woman who exhausted him until his death, and responds the same
way she has for fifteen years: by gazing upwards, a martyr, as her eyes glaze
and her lips flatten down against a shuddering chin. "Why can't he just
rest in peace?"
When his descendants are left with only those photographs, squares of the past
excusable (forgiven and forgotten), we shake our heads and redefine peace to
mean the calm sorrow that exists over his face in each image, a reflection the
mirror shows me when I am not expecting it. Despite the silence of death a decade
ago (that which we want to call peace), his hands are never at peace, for they
have formed a living memory.
My mother inscribed the honor of silence on her genes as she sat each morning
at the breakfast table as a girl, her legs swimming in the air above the floor,
and watched the newspaper drop only momentarily, a slide-like movement showing
her father's tired forehead. To change this lack of reaction and acknowledgement
of her identity, she marries my father, a man who will lower his book and thoughts
to keep her from sighing the way his mother sighs in his own world of squares.
My mother teaches blindness, telling me with her pressed lips and a lowered
sigh to doubt the ache of my spirit (its longing for reciprocal energy) and
to wait for the stamp of the newspaper ink on the placemat-the stamp of definition,
acceptable identity. She wrings the ink from my father's energy when he walks
into the kitchen each night with the insulated blue lunch bag she fills each
morning, He moves away from the dog's deluge of energy, but stands still as
my mother hangs herself from his neck, a housewife of the 1950's without oppression
or pearls. There is nothing in my stomach while I sit at our table but a heaviness
that watches my father avoid the blankly beaming eyes and the musical pose that
surrounds him. It is the same when I am sitting in the passenger side of our
red van, the space between her lifted chin and my bored eyes growing to become
a void filled with the noise of generations. She deliberately punches the volume
buttons of the radio that was my own focus for the car ride, and forces her
comments into the created foundation of silence. And every day I am taught the
secrets of accommodation, that perhaps peace, however false, is greater than
truth.
***
He was from the same city as I was, but I had to leave it to meet him. We would
become children again at eighteen, the weekends our recess, flicking plates
of salad and stealing things just for the excuse to return them, with hands
(content) in our pockets as we shined at each other.
I asked him once if he knew what time it was (freely embracing the urge to sing
that Chicago song) and he found the smooth, round watch at the bottom of its
silver chain, explaining with grinning honesty: "I always wanted to be
that guy-the one with the pocket watch."
And he was that guy-the one who cringed at spending three dollars on a checked
shirt at the Salvation Army and wore plaid blazers instead of coats when it
snowed (his salutation-"Want to buy a used car?"). His hair wrapped
around his head without regard for arrangement. When a haircut imposed some
sense of order he sighed and lifted his head. "Yeah, shit happens."
Over a month we grew up together. I had never known that stumbling freedom:
walking side by side with a being of my exact height, finding breath for every
though in the curl of his mouth and the angles of his fingers. I left my understanding
of the familiar to feel his shoulder align with my shoulders as we slumped against
a wall and to watch his knee find mine, telling me that I am here now. And this
shared space centered my body in a new awareness.
And that night I saw his hands, his paws. I had my mother's hands-short and
timid, with a length that never quite stretches my fingers to strength. But
his hands were of a medieval painting, two reaching creatures of assembled knobs
that ease into thin lines and channels. After hours of words, we ended in silence
with a dance of hands, palm to palm, our fingerprints each contributing but
unnoticed. But my blood would deny all of this, telling me as it always did,
to knead each lyric, each song, to create balm for an ache that was not my own.
I remember swiveling next to him in our pair of orange bucket chairs, trying
to climb back into that playful freedom, that dance, the songs said I had lost.
One day I looked up from those lyrics to see I had taped a library receipt to
my dorm room wall. My stomach curled into heaviness, recognizing that I had
not remembered the familiar sight of our basement door at home covered with
flaps of paper, Each note card was cut in half to extend the supply (though
it was not waning) and then attached to the oak wood, the tape always leaving
its skin behind when the relevance of the note had long expired.
I scratched the tape off my wall, my world, with the same frustration I have
scratched my mother's door, forgetting the due dates of my books in the hope
I would also obliterate what had been written on my the skin of my palms. No
matter the decades or the minds that separate us, the hands of my mother, creased
from searching to satisfy each need, were so familiar that they replaced my
own.
Everything would come to create half the reason why he stopped shining through
his rose-window eyes at me, and, when I see him now, he just looks through me
and does not say my name. On a day neither of us want to remember, in a room
of flat yellow light, (bordered by less confident blinds) he averted his head
from my questions and this formed body of mine, this blood of doubt and fear
with which I returned every day to meet the man on the worn path behind my thoughts.
I have learned perhaps only one true thing since I have left the place that
is my home-truth can never be heard in only one language of need, for the heart
cannot be narrowed. It must breathe with each nuance of the senses-the five
I was given and the hundreds that are growing within me. I could not just listen
for the words that would comfort the needs of my hands, for I stopped listening
to all the other words he had to tell me-in touch, sight and sound.
And now, every night, I walk into the public space of browning tiles and let
the faucet's water spread over me like his hands did in my dream, learning every
bone and line to smooth away the doubt and exhaustion for this dance. In this
daily baptism, the blunt water falling on my brain, a silence surrounds me,
enclosing my mind in its rest as it washes the dirt of old paths away
And my fingertips wilt with the water, the prints made my own.