My Eighteen-Foot
Starcraft
by Duggles
if
evers you feel lonely
if
evers you feel blue
if
evers you would only . . .
there's
only one of you
"Sweeter
than all the world." Who in all the world, I asked myself one morning, would
come up with foolishness like that? I asked myself this as I handled my
daughter's laundry. I was folding it because it had been left on the spare bed.
I had been restless in the night and finally risen and brought my bedding to
the spare room. There were stacks of laundry on it, folded. I estimated there
to have been twenty plus piles. It was too dark to see them but I could tell
by the time it took to throw them off the bed into the corner. I put her jeans
on four stacks, her blankets on three piles, her shirts on six piles, her various
tops and tanks on six piles, her towels and linens on eight piles, her panties
and bras on two piles, her socks on another big pile and so on. It took an hour
to fold it all, maybe more. She lived downtown, five miles away, and had gone
home on her bike with her daughter yesterday just before dark. I would need to
bring these to the car and deliver them.
She has had six serious boyfriends since
she was eighteen. Now she is twenty-six. They are always young men who have
part time work. They work on construction during the summer months from April
to October or November and go on pogey from November to March. They go to
Guatemala or Honduras for the winter months and have friends at home send in
their UI claims. They learn to snorkel when they are there. They know the names
of the beer available in South America and Central America. They do not know
the names there of cities, hills, ranges, cars, families (though I wish to be
careful not to vilify them), buildings, politicians, train routes, ships, bays,
islands, books, authors, paintings, artists, underwear, clothing lines, shells,
roadways, restaurants, bordellos, ice-cream, or churches.
One was a body builder who stayed at my
house once for four nights even though I told him when he arrived from Missouri
that he could not be here in the morning when I woke. Another talked slowly and
made you listen much longer than you would like to by working successfully the
pace of his words and the steadiness of his gaze at your eyes. The third one, a
little man with narrow shoulders and a massive beard, read the papers a great
deal. You could find him with his face in a newspaper at twelve noon, at two
p.m., at four p.m., at six p.m., at eight p.m., at eleven p.m., and at one a.m.
Number five did marijuana frequently and was quite loud. He drank a lot of beer
and wine. He engaged me in strong conversations without patience or listening
built into them but full of bravado. He wanted to be loved and admired. All of
them smoked cigarettes.
I love her little daughter. She is a
sweet girl. She has blonde hair, quite wispy and fine. The other day, when her
mother said, "Let's cut your hair," she cried loudly, loudly and with
vigor, and sounded terrified. I was in the bathroom shaving and called out to
her what was the matter. She just cried some more so I went to the living room
where she was sitting at the dining room table with her head on her arms,
sobbing. When I asked what was wrong she cried even louder and said that mommy
wanted to cut her hair. I held her and stroked her hair and said no, it was
fine. I did not think mommy would cut it. She was just teasing, I said. My
daughter told me that she was not really serious but didn't know what to do about
the stain she had got in it and it was sticky and clumped. My daughter has
raised her very well. The little one has quite a temper and if it had been me
raising her I am afraid that I would have resorted to hitting sometimes, to my
shame. Certainly yelling, and probably a little shaking. But my daughter
doesn't hit or shake. She does not even yell. She hardly raises her voice but
somehow, often by stern tones and certainty of purpose, gets the little one to
obey, even if it meant, in the early years, a dreadful tantrum that left
me running for the door to get outside and go for a walk till it blew over.
Yes, my daughter is exceptional at raising her girl and being good to her.
My wife works in another town and comes
home Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights. She drives her Accord, though sometimes
she commutes with a carpool. She and I have found ourselves speaking less over
the last five years. She can speak more easily with friends and acquaintances
than with me. I can speak more easily with people who are not close to me than I
can with her. When you love someone, I think, you converse with
difficulty. She does the laundry and I do the dishes. That is our work-sharing
system. I build fences, check oil in vehicles, keep tires secure and filled, do
house repairs and such. She cleans, makes food, organizes the division of labor
around the house, and generally is the domestic general contractor in our
domicile. We live at 679 Niagara Street. You can tell the place by a large
ugly, too-old evergreen in the front yard, reddish-brown brick on the corner of
the street entrance, a Honda with rust spots and two missing hubcaps and a high
planter out front. The neighbors have two dogs and one of them barks. I don't
want to start a feud with them. The other neighbor is a widow of seventy who
got us to give her a part of our ally way dirt space right up against the
garage when we first moved here three years ago. She came the first week and
outright asked for it. We did not know her well or any of the neighbors and
wanted to fit in so we gave it to her. My wife wishes she had it back to plant
rhubarb in.
I am in the process of changing the
plumbing in our house. It is galvanized and cast steel and needs to be upgraded
for sanitary reasons. I intend to go back to work on that when this piece of
reflection is finished. My son has moved home again. He works for a landscaper
who is not around much and so does not require him to be there at given hours.
At least, he cannot check if he is working. My son has slept in again this
morning. It is getting on toward ten o'clock and he is supposed to start at
eight. In Kenora, K-Sport is putting a new ninety-horse Honda outboard on my
eighteen foot Starcraft. It is very exciting for me. I feel tingly inside like
a little kid.
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