2nd Place (tie)

The Sitting Room

by Stacy D. Flood

“DO YOU EXPECT me to feel sorry about that?” my father says over dinner at Toi; he swirls the wine in his glass and stares at the makeshift sconces to his right, not so much to admire the design but to let his words sink in, to accentuate his scowl, and to pretend that he isn’t enjoying this. Last month my mother, his second ex-wife, lost her job at Boeing, and in a mere four weeks the bills piled up to the point she desperately needed to ask for help, even his. She didn’t want to meet him, so she sent me instead. My father always said that she would never make it without him.

My father never feels sorry for anything; disaster, he feels, is inevitable at some point in life, whether at your own hand or at another’s. It’s not that he dances through life or has not faced hardship, and he does believe in regret; it’s just that he finds the past, even his own, even his successes, crippling. For a while in the early ’90s, he was something of a New Age therapist/guru, who acquired his followers more for his distinguished salt-and-pepper-tinged looks than for his theories, and it was then that he learned to sever his past and consider apologies obsolete by their very nature.

“That’s not an answer, Dad,” I say after my sip of water; given the circumstances, and since I’m not paying for my dinner, I’m trying to be as frugal as possible.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks, as if we both know what he is going to say anyway and what his final answer will be. He adjusts his $300 tie and nods a greeting at the waiter passing by.

What I don’t want to happen is that he ask me about my life and that we slip into pleasantries as always, as if he is afraid of anything except for the word “fine” anywhere around him. And there, in the middle of my entr饬 I realize how delicate his facade really is.

MOST AFTERNOONS, with a cup of decaffeinated coffee, my grandfather listens to the jazz program from the local community-college station; as often as I try to convince him to at least get a better radio, he insists that jazz sounds best with all of the scratches and static intact. My grandfather rarely leaves his apartment, and his son, my father, rarely visits. Neither one asks about the other. My grandfather hasn’t seen a movie in years, nor will he, as he believes that movies consistently make men look stupid.

I try to visit as often as I can, and bring a few groceries or a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, his favorite poison. Unlike the homes of either of my parents, my grandfather’s apartment is built for comfort, and every time that I’m there I just drift into his lumpy antiquated couch while he leans back in his patchwork La-Z-Boy; the entire place smells like the same bottle of Aqua Velva that he has had since I was born. Ever since Sept. 11, everyone has been so serious; all of my friends are reassessing their lives and trying to determine whether they really were successful or happy beforehand. My girlfriend, as well, has started living as if the world were one large Playboy Mansion, partying as much as possible before the end—which she believes is closer than any of us can imagine—pounces.

But my grandfather’s apartment hasn’t changed. The jazz still plays. We talk about the influence of Coltrane on Davis and vice versa. Most afternoons, I wish that I could stay there forever, just listening to time pass, but I can’t. Some days, to stay there is all that I want in the world.

Yet a mere hour later, I’m sitting in traffic on my way to see my mother, hoping, somehow, that the news that I’m going to deliver will be different.

I HAVE A KEY to my mother’s condominium, and though I usually knock, from inside I can hear the sound of water running, so I let myself in. More carefully than usual, I take off my shoes in the hallway and pad my way into the kitchen as not to disturb some religious ritual in the making. My mother cleans as therapy, the squeakiness of each plate as her enlightenment.

I try to smile when she sees me; instead, she smirks and shoves her hands deeper into the sink filled with porcelain and scalding water.

“Don’t tell me,” she says instead of “hello.”

“OK,” I answer, and dig my hand into the glass bowl of cashews on the counter. “What’s your next plan?”

“You think that your father wasn’t my last resort?”

“I have a little money saved up.”

“Not enough, baby.”

With her fingertips she teasingly splashes me with water, and we work at our smiles. The television in the kitchen is turned off; during her first couple of weeks of unemployment, my mother would glance at the soaps and the daytime talk shows. She quickly tired of that—even of making fun of them—and the empty screen now reflects a strange parody of the entire room: carrot stalks too tall, a silver toaster with an odd bend in the middle, my face elongated to make my eyes stretch into a clownlike droop.

My mother takes off her rubber gloves, dries her hands on her dish towel, and tells me that she is going to lie down for a while, but as she passes by me I can see tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She softly closes the bedroom door behind her, leaving me standing there, hating every surface that I can see my reflection in.

FOR HER BIRTHDAY, with what little money I have left, I take my girlfriend and two of her closest friends out for drinks. Into her third Cosmopolitan, my girlfriend starts kissing every guy in the club; afterward the men look more confused than charmed. I’m leaning with my spine against the bar as my girlfriend dances over to me and gives me a big hug, nearly spilling her drink in the process.

Beside us two men are looking up at the television mounted above the bar. On-screen is the local news with pictures of the bombing devastation in Afghanistan.

The taller of the two men—in thick black glasses and with his head shaved—leans over to his friend and nods toward the newscast. “Now there’s proof that we are not the most intelligent life-forms in the universe,” he says.

My girlfriend looks over as if he is talking to her. “Wait a minute, what if we are? I mean, someone has to be the most intelligent, even in something as big as the universe, and what if it’s us?” She then looks up at the screen. “What if this is the best that it gets?”

I’VE BEEN ACCUSED of not being able to fall in love; maybe it’s because I haven’t had the best role models. For that reason, more than one of my friends has insisted that, with all of the hate and fear and bigotry around, this really has been my year. But what I have always been in love with are moments, in each increment of time that passes, especially the ones that we forget to cherish—standing in a patch of unbroken snow beneath a clear night sky, or the flash of sunlight reflected from the chrome of a passing car, or that rustle of wind in the trees that you can hear rather than feel. Because in one second, everything could change. In one second, I could be someone else, somewhere else. One second from that, my parents might not be frightened anymore. One second from that, my friends might feel safe in their lives. One second from that, I might be happy. It’s all in the possibilities.

Redmond resident Stacy D. Flood has studied and taught creative writing at San Francisco State. He won a Getty Fellowship for his work.