Whichever Bright Frontier
by Sorrel Westbrook
My father, one morning, forgot how to get dressed. He left the house with his tie knotted around his eyes, like a blindfold. I was sitting at the kitchen table, pretending not to see him out the window, where he stood in the yard. He tapped on the dull windowpane and moved his head back and forth like the blind man we had seen on television the night before, trying to get my attention.
“Willy! Come on out and shoot me,” he said. The tie was dark blue with yellow ducks printed on it. I had given it to him years earlier, when I was in middle school, and I regretted the inevitable childishness of my taste. He was holding a green apple.
“Like Old William Tell! You remember!” He lifted the blindfold and his eyes looked bright and shocking there in the center of his face. I spooned through my cereal, dredging for marshmallows. There were none left. The milk was green and grey and left a film of grease on the back of my spoon.
“That’s not how that story goes. You shoot me, not the other way around,” I shouted at the window.
“Too smart for your old man,” he said. “Boys don’t like a know-it-all. A busy bee doesn’t know the taste of honey, you understand.”
My father’s wisdom was always like that-- aphoristic, incomprehensible, charming, often shouted through a windowpane. My name is Wilhelmina, but my father used to call me Willy as a joke. The joke was that he hadn’t wanted a daughter. Especially a plain daughter. My mother, like many women who find that the man they have married is merely an impossible child, a madman with strong arms and a weak mind and an obscure sense of always being logically correct, went to Alaska three years earlier with a quiet man she met in a parking lot on Easter Sunday. She offered to take me with her, but I can’t stand the cold. Nor am I someone who takes pleasure in beautiful sights, far away places, mountains, strange birds, and the sound of the sea. I like where I am.
After she left, a box came filled with touristy trash like salt and pepper shakers in the shape of jumping salmon and a jar of juniper berry jam and some caps and shirts that made puns on the word “grizzly.” My father suggested that we burn these offerings, out of a sense of duty more than anything, but the little leaping salmon still leap on our kitchen table, and there’s a carved bear on our front step holding a piece of wood that has the words welcome to our frontier burned into it. My father used to call him Chuck. As in, we should have chucked him when we had the chance. I would remind him that we still had the chance. Every day is a new opportunity to throw Chuck away. But for my father, Chuck had been around long enough that trashing him was out of the question. He had, as my father might say, emotional squatter’s rights.
The same winter that my father decided we would eat no more meat (The screams, Willy! Imagine that chicken nugget as it once was-- a baby chicken, possibly a genius, possibly an artistic chick, perhaps a great lover of chicken feed or its sisters and brothers--and we will never know), he rented a helicopter for a day.
We did not have a lot of money. My father and I lived in my uncle’s guesthouse, on the back of his property in the orange tree belt of Southern California. My uncle Tweedy is not my father’s brother-- he is my mother’s brother. Tweedy and my father always liked one another, though. And no one was using the guesthouse.
When I left the house for school that day, my father was still at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He had a yolky smear in his moustache from breakfast, and he was humming that song about love and distant beaches. When I came home that afternoon, there was a note on the table that read: Gone to Tijuana--Direct all messages to secretary Chuck. Wish me luck, my serious Willy.
My father was a very handsome man, with deep-set eyes and a quiet way of shrugging his large shoulders and a long raised scar that ran across his chest and showed at the collar of his shirt. My mother is beautiful as well, with lovely white teeth that click when she speaks in her clipped accent. Nobody knows where all that potential washed away to, because I am as plain as an empty box on a mantle, and nearly as charismatic. For this reason, I always felt sheepish around my father, apologetic and indulgent, as if I had slighted him when we first met, and I was forever making amends. When he came home the next morning, I poured him a bowl of cereal and made coffee and asked him how he felt.
He told me that he had gone to Tijuana to make our fortune. Actually, he said my fortune. And that he had succeeded, against grand odds. He drank the green and grey milk from the cereal bowl and swished coffee in his cheeks like mouthwash and then pulled a key ring from his pocket. On it swung a small silver key that looked cheap, like the key to a girl’s diary. He held my hand open in his. His fingers looked elegant, like he could play piano or write sonnets. In his hand, mine looked like the stubbed paw of an animal, short and square fingered. He placed the key in my hand and closed my fingers over it. We had seen, three nights before, a television advertisement in which a very tanned husband did the same thing to his wife, only with a diamond necklace. I tried to well up with joy and smile winningly with my very white teeth.
A year after he gave me the key, my father planted a vegetable garden. He wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes. The tomatoes didn’t come, and my father lay down on the sofa beneath a Denali-themed quilt, and stopped speaking to me. My uncle Tweedy came down to the guest house and asked that my father clean up the mulch and wheelbarrow and small shovels he had left across the lawn between their house and ours. My father called him faggot and environmental terrorist and reminded him that fat dogs have no chance at flight, not even shallow flight. My uncle is a very good man, but sometimes he gets angry enough to shut off the power and the water.
I was surprised by my father’s death. I had always assumed he would outlive me. He had written an elegy for me when I was born, and he would read it out to me occasionally, line-editing with a purple pencil. Curious and cautious--does that still sound like you? Do you think of yourself more as a dove or a swan, Willy?
He died of blood clots, apparently, although he had always seemed too quicksilver for that. I wrote a very poor elegy for him, all my metaphors dry and straight down the long road of greeting-card sentiment. My mother came for the funeral, the first time she had visited in eight years. She stayed with me in the guesthouse for three days. She had a new tattoo of purple blossoms across her back (forget me not, she said when she saw me staring, and I said that I hadn’t) and took fish oil every morning along with saltines. I would not have recognized her if it weren’t for her teeth that clicked prettily when she told me that it was time, finally time to start your own life.
My own life, I had always assumed, would be constructed to fit alongside my father’s life, like a landscape painted hastily to give the impression of life and wilderness behind taxidermied animals in natural history museums. Always visible on the periphery, essential in its small drab way, but nothing you might notice, or, having your attention called to it, nothing you might be able to comment on beyond, yes, that is there as well. And now, in the empty hustling time after his death, when the sun seemed to move across the sky with a sinister ease and the nights were loud with traffic and crickets and other men’s voices passing in the street, I found that my mother was right, and my life was sadly, emptily, my own.
I found the key in the early morning after a night spent searching for it and other small treasures like it in a long pang of nostalgia and terror. I missed my father dreadfully, and was worried that I had hurt him many times, like when I had once screamed that he was an evil, reeking man for instance. And perhaps when I had tried to run away the second time, because that time I had gotten all the way to the airport. He had given the key to me a few years before he died, but it still looked new and slick in my hand. I searched the guesthouse for locks, but found none. My father was the kind of man to pull all of the papers out a file cabinet, all of the canned food out of the pantry, all the toilet paper off the roll. He was not one for confinement, for secrets.
I took the key to my uncle, who identified it as belonging to a safety deposit box. His lips stitched themselves up in suspicion, and I reminded myself that I would have to add find a new place to live to my list, below grieve and research heirloom tomatoes.
I took a blue bus with beige plastic seats into town, and then walked up the long hill towards the bank. The day was beautiful, with bright cherry blossoms softening the black bark of the trees and a breeze that blew white and yellow plastic bags down past my ankles. There was a truck selling ice cream next to a truck selling newspapers next to a truck selling meat wrapped in paper cones. A young boy in a tiger suit and soccer cleats broke free of his mother’s hand and ran screaming into the park, and his bright shrieks echoed dully in my mind as I entered the bank.
Inside the bank, it smelled of wrapping paper and wood polish and my steps clicked cleanly on the floor as if I was someone important, someone there to solve the mystery of a late father’s hidden treasure. A woman with brown hair that clung to the shape of her skull took me to the safety deposit box room. At first she didn’t want to, because there are laws, privacy laws, she said as if I might be unaware of the concept. I wondered if I have always been unpleasant to look at, to talk to. If I am the woman that people hope will not sit next to them on the bus, or stop to ask directions of on the street. But then we found that my name was on the paper, that I own the box, and there was no problem.
In the small room, the walls were all colonized by small boxes with small locks on the fronts of them. It was close and comforting with no windows, and the soft light came from somewhere I couldn’t see--there were no shadows. When she unlocked the box that was my father’s and brought it to the table, it looked like it was covered in black velvet and my mind swelled with the nauseous possibilities, picking at them ravenously like a birds thrashing above the sea.
There were loops and loops of poison-green beads strung on cotton thread. All of them are tangled together and they looked endless and dense, as if you could have pushed your hand into them all the way up to your elbow and felt the cool glass rounds of them on your skin. I lifted one up and its fellows slide slid back into the box with a small sound. There were also purple beads, I saw, and red beads and shimmering gold beads. They were glass. I pulled out another strand, and then a handful. One of them had a tin amulet strung on it. Then they were all on the short table in front of us, and the box was empty. I realized that the light was coming from the corners of the room, and that it always had been.
Five years before he died, in the summer, I left the kitchen to play William Tell with my father in the front yard. But when I stood beside him outside, in the sweet morning air, he had forgotten how, and he looked at me questioningly. I took the green apple from his lovely hand and bit into it. It tasted dull and muddy after the cereal I had eaten. I bit it again, fiercely, and filled my mouth with the tough core of it. I coughed and spit the rough fruit into my hand, and my father plucked a glistening brown seed from my palm.
“Johnny Appleseed was the last American man,” he said. “Remember that.” I wanted to kiss him at the base of his throat, where his compulsive swallowing had left a high ridge of strange muscle. I did. He smelled stale, like long sleep and quick sweat.
Johnny Appleseed died drunk, beneath a tree somewhere. The people stupid enough to take a bite from one of his apples would hack them up--too sour. They called them spitters. I try to think if it means anything, and I can’t be sure. Then I think, also, about my father’s fortune. Perhaps he thought the beads were precious stones, but probably he knew they were trash and still locked them safely away. He might have known something about the way time passes, and how it can work on ugly materials to make them shimmer and sparkle. Most of the time, though, I am sure that he was a liar.
I put the beads back into the safety deposit box and then I threw the key away in the park outside the bank. I wanted to know, at least, that they were not anywhere else in the world. I like to imagine my father walking down the strange, dusty streets of a new city. And I like to think of them there in that small dark room, within their own small dark box, those unfathomable jewels.
“Willy! Come on out and shoot me,” he said. The tie was dark blue with yellow ducks printed on it. I had given it to him years earlier, when I was in middle school, and I regretted the inevitable childishness of my taste. He was holding a green apple.
“Like Old William Tell! You remember!” He lifted the blindfold and his eyes looked bright and shocking there in the center of his face. I spooned through my cereal, dredging for marshmallows. There were none left. The milk was green and grey and left a film of grease on the back of my spoon.
“That’s not how that story goes. You shoot me, not the other way around,” I shouted at the window.
“Too smart for your old man,” he said. “Boys don’t like a know-it-all. A busy bee doesn’t know the taste of honey, you understand.”
My father’s wisdom was always like that-- aphoristic, incomprehensible, charming, often shouted through a windowpane. My name is Wilhelmina, but my father used to call me Willy as a joke. The joke was that he hadn’t wanted a daughter. Especially a plain daughter. My mother, like many women who find that the man they have married is merely an impossible child, a madman with strong arms and a weak mind and an obscure sense of always being logically correct, went to Alaska three years earlier with a quiet man she met in a parking lot on Easter Sunday. She offered to take me with her, but I can’t stand the cold. Nor am I someone who takes pleasure in beautiful sights, far away places, mountains, strange birds, and the sound of the sea. I like where I am.
After she left, a box came filled with touristy trash like salt and pepper shakers in the shape of jumping salmon and a jar of juniper berry jam and some caps and shirts that made puns on the word “grizzly.” My father suggested that we burn these offerings, out of a sense of duty more than anything, but the little leaping salmon still leap on our kitchen table, and there’s a carved bear on our front step holding a piece of wood that has the words welcome to our frontier burned into it. My father used to call him Chuck. As in, we should have chucked him when we had the chance. I would remind him that we still had the chance. Every day is a new opportunity to throw Chuck away. But for my father, Chuck had been around long enough that trashing him was out of the question. He had, as my father might say, emotional squatter’s rights.
The same winter that my father decided we would eat no more meat (The screams, Willy! Imagine that chicken nugget as it once was-- a baby chicken, possibly a genius, possibly an artistic chick, perhaps a great lover of chicken feed or its sisters and brothers--and we will never know), he rented a helicopter for a day.
We did not have a lot of money. My father and I lived in my uncle’s guesthouse, on the back of his property in the orange tree belt of Southern California. My uncle Tweedy is not my father’s brother-- he is my mother’s brother. Tweedy and my father always liked one another, though. And no one was using the guesthouse.
When I left the house for school that day, my father was still at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He had a yolky smear in his moustache from breakfast, and he was humming that song about love and distant beaches. When I came home that afternoon, there was a note on the table that read: Gone to Tijuana--Direct all messages to secretary Chuck. Wish me luck, my serious Willy.
My father was a very handsome man, with deep-set eyes and a quiet way of shrugging his large shoulders and a long raised scar that ran across his chest and showed at the collar of his shirt. My mother is beautiful as well, with lovely white teeth that click when she speaks in her clipped accent. Nobody knows where all that potential washed away to, because I am as plain as an empty box on a mantle, and nearly as charismatic. For this reason, I always felt sheepish around my father, apologetic and indulgent, as if I had slighted him when we first met, and I was forever making amends. When he came home the next morning, I poured him a bowl of cereal and made coffee and asked him how he felt.
He told me that he had gone to Tijuana to make our fortune. Actually, he said my fortune. And that he had succeeded, against grand odds. He drank the green and grey milk from the cereal bowl and swished coffee in his cheeks like mouthwash and then pulled a key ring from his pocket. On it swung a small silver key that looked cheap, like the key to a girl’s diary. He held my hand open in his. His fingers looked elegant, like he could play piano or write sonnets. In his hand, mine looked like the stubbed paw of an animal, short and square fingered. He placed the key in my hand and closed my fingers over it. We had seen, three nights before, a television advertisement in which a very tanned husband did the same thing to his wife, only with a diamond necklace. I tried to well up with joy and smile winningly with my very white teeth.
A year after he gave me the key, my father planted a vegetable garden. He wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes. The tomatoes didn’t come, and my father lay down on the sofa beneath a Denali-themed quilt, and stopped speaking to me. My uncle Tweedy came down to the guest house and asked that my father clean up the mulch and wheelbarrow and small shovels he had left across the lawn between their house and ours. My father called him faggot and environmental terrorist and reminded him that fat dogs have no chance at flight, not even shallow flight. My uncle is a very good man, but sometimes he gets angry enough to shut off the power and the water.
I was surprised by my father’s death. I had always assumed he would outlive me. He had written an elegy for me when I was born, and he would read it out to me occasionally, line-editing with a purple pencil. Curious and cautious--does that still sound like you? Do you think of yourself more as a dove or a swan, Willy?
He died of blood clots, apparently, although he had always seemed too quicksilver for that. I wrote a very poor elegy for him, all my metaphors dry and straight down the long road of greeting-card sentiment. My mother came for the funeral, the first time she had visited in eight years. She stayed with me in the guesthouse for three days. She had a new tattoo of purple blossoms across her back (forget me not, she said when she saw me staring, and I said that I hadn’t) and took fish oil every morning along with saltines. I would not have recognized her if it weren’t for her teeth that clicked prettily when she told me that it was time, finally time to start your own life.
My own life, I had always assumed, would be constructed to fit alongside my father’s life, like a landscape painted hastily to give the impression of life and wilderness behind taxidermied animals in natural history museums. Always visible on the periphery, essential in its small drab way, but nothing you might notice, or, having your attention called to it, nothing you might be able to comment on beyond, yes, that is there as well. And now, in the empty hustling time after his death, when the sun seemed to move across the sky with a sinister ease and the nights were loud with traffic and crickets and other men’s voices passing in the street, I found that my mother was right, and my life was sadly, emptily, my own.
I found the key in the early morning after a night spent searching for it and other small treasures like it in a long pang of nostalgia and terror. I missed my father dreadfully, and was worried that I had hurt him many times, like when I had once screamed that he was an evil, reeking man for instance. And perhaps when I had tried to run away the second time, because that time I had gotten all the way to the airport. He had given the key to me a few years before he died, but it still looked new and slick in my hand. I searched the guesthouse for locks, but found none. My father was the kind of man to pull all of the papers out a file cabinet, all of the canned food out of the pantry, all the toilet paper off the roll. He was not one for confinement, for secrets.
I took the key to my uncle, who identified it as belonging to a safety deposit box. His lips stitched themselves up in suspicion, and I reminded myself that I would have to add find a new place to live to my list, below grieve and research heirloom tomatoes.
I took a blue bus with beige plastic seats into town, and then walked up the long hill towards the bank. The day was beautiful, with bright cherry blossoms softening the black bark of the trees and a breeze that blew white and yellow plastic bags down past my ankles. There was a truck selling ice cream next to a truck selling newspapers next to a truck selling meat wrapped in paper cones. A young boy in a tiger suit and soccer cleats broke free of his mother’s hand and ran screaming into the park, and his bright shrieks echoed dully in my mind as I entered the bank.
Inside the bank, it smelled of wrapping paper and wood polish and my steps clicked cleanly on the floor as if I was someone important, someone there to solve the mystery of a late father’s hidden treasure. A woman with brown hair that clung to the shape of her skull took me to the safety deposit box room. At first she didn’t want to, because there are laws, privacy laws, she said as if I might be unaware of the concept. I wondered if I have always been unpleasant to look at, to talk to. If I am the woman that people hope will not sit next to them on the bus, or stop to ask directions of on the street. But then we found that my name was on the paper, that I own the box, and there was no problem.
In the small room, the walls were all colonized by small boxes with small locks on the fronts of them. It was close and comforting with no windows, and the soft light came from somewhere I couldn’t see--there were no shadows. When she unlocked the box that was my father’s and brought it to the table, it looked like it was covered in black velvet and my mind swelled with the nauseous possibilities, picking at them ravenously like a birds thrashing above the sea.
There were loops and loops of poison-green beads strung on cotton thread. All of them are tangled together and they looked endless and dense, as if you could have pushed your hand into them all the way up to your elbow and felt the cool glass rounds of them on your skin. I lifted one up and its fellows slide slid back into the box with a small sound. There were also purple beads, I saw, and red beads and shimmering gold beads. They were glass. I pulled out another strand, and then a handful. One of them had a tin amulet strung on it. Then they were all on the short table in front of us, and the box was empty. I realized that the light was coming from the corners of the room, and that it always had been.
Five years before he died, in the summer, I left the kitchen to play William Tell with my father in the front yard. But when I stood beside him outside, in the sweet morning air, he had forgotten how, and he looked at me questioningly. I took the green apple from his lovely hand and bit into it. It tasted dull and muddy after the cereal I had eaten. I bit it again, fiercely, and filled my mouth with the tough core of it. I coughed and spit the rough fruit into my hand, and my father plucked a glistening brown seed from my palm.
“Johnny Appleseed was the last American man,” he said. “Remember that.” I wanted to kiss him at the base of his throat, where his compulsive swallowing had left a high ridge of strange muscle. I did. He smelled stale, like long sleep and quick sweat.
Johnny Appleseed died drunk, beneath a tree somewhere. The people stupid enough to take a bite from one of his apples would hack them up--too sour. They called them spitters. I try to think if it means anything, and I can’t be sure. Then I think, also, about my father’s fortune. Perhaps he thought the beads were precious stones, but probably he knew they were trash and still locked them safely away. He might have known something about the way time passes, and how it can work on ugly materials to make them shimmer and sparkle. Most of the time, though, I am sure that he was a liar.
I put the beads back into the safety deposit box and then I threw the key away in the park outside the bank. I wanted to know, at least, that they were not anywhere else in the world. I like to imagine my father walking down the strange, dusty streets of a new city. And I like to think of them there in that small dark room, within their own small dark box, those unfathomable jewels.
Sorrel Westbrook is from the high desert of Bishop, California. She is working on her first novel, and has been published in Bartleby Snopes, Covered with Fur, The Masters Review and The Harvard Review. Her work is forthcoming at The Bennington Review.