Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl
“Wow! Look at those guys go!” Jamie yelled, wild-eyed with enthusiasm. “Dynamite! Those guys are dy-no-mite!”
We were watching footage of the Chinese men’s table tennis team. It was in the news that day that Mao Zedong, whom we then called Mao Tse Tung, had invited the U.S. team to visit China, one of the opening moves in the diplomatic ping-pong that led to Nixon in Beijing, which we then called Peking.
“They’re gonna kick our butts,” said Jamie. “Chinks are amazing at ping-pong. They must all play it like, all day, every day.”
The Chinese team was amazing. The ball moved so fast it was almost impossible to follow it. Still, I couldn’t let Jamie’s stupid remark pass.
“Chinese people can’t afford ping-pong tables, Jimbo,” I said, as snidely as possible. “Those guys are an elite corps selected and trained by the government, like Russian gymnasts. And don’t say ‘Chinks,’ you Polack-kraut.”
“Chinks, Chinks, Chinks,” said Jamie. I flung a sofa cushion at his head. “Greet for me Valhalla!” he shouted.
Jamie would do that when he got excited, just suddenly yell something that made no sense. I was compelled to needle him about it.
“What did you say?” I asked superciliously.
“Never mind.”
“You said, ‘Greet for me Valhalla.’ What does that mean?”
“Don’t blame me if you can’t figure it out.” Jamie would never give an inch.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“It means I saw you in the quarry with Lori.”
“You’re nuts. You’re bonkers.”
I knew Jamie was sort of peculiar and annoying, but I never seriously considered the possibility that he was actually mentally ill. After he was diagnosed I stopped telling him he was nuts, but I never stopped feeling guilty about having said things like that to him. I probably said it this time because I was afraid Jamie might actually have seen me at the quarry, which was the neighborhood teen make-out spot, with my girlfriend, Lori.
“It means,” said Jamie without missing a beat, “that any Chink could kick your butt at ping-pong.”
“Maybe, but you can’t.”
Jamie gave me a look out of the corner of his eye and a crooked-mouth grin that said, “You’re on.” Without another word, we leapt to opposite ends of the ping-pong table our dad had set up in the basement, grabbed our paddles, and started whacking the little white ball back and forth across the smooth green tabletop. Ordinarily, Jamie gave me a run for my money in spite of our age difference, but on this occasion he ill-advisedly tried to employ the grip used by the Chinese players, with the thumb in front on the forehand. He had never practiced that way, so I was beating him handily when my mother’s voice rang down the stairs.
“What about homework?”
“All done,” I shouted. Jamie didn’t say anything, and I suspected his wasn’t done. He struggled in school, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
“Dinner’s ready in ten minutes. Jon, set the table. Jamie, bring in the mail. Pronto, pronto!”
“Whoever loses the last point,” I said to Jamie, holding the ball out in front of me ’twixt thumb and index finger, “gets the mail and sets the table.”
He assumed the pose of a shortstop with men on base, up on the balls of his feet. I served conservatively, and he struck like a cobra. He had switched back to his usual grip without me noticing. I dove ineffectually at the spiked ball. Jamie whooped and danced around the basement with unreserved joy.
I know that I had no premonition about the white business-size Bank of Wisconsin envelope mixed in with the regular bills and junk mail, because when my mom asked if we got anything interesting, like she always did, I said, “Nope.”
My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing wrinkled chinos and a plaid flannel shirt with the top button buttoned, reading the newspaper as I set the table. He had a softly constructed face, with low cheekbones and thin, tentative lips.
The table, which had a fake marble laminate top and tubular steel legs, is still in the same place where I would drink a glass of Old Crow thirty-six years later, and it still seems way too big for the room. Back then, the Formica was gray and flat, not yellowish-brown and curling up in the corners.
My father had just recently begun using reading glasses, and I thought they made him look old; the black frames brought out the gray at his temples, and the lenses exaggerated the puffiness around his thoughtful eyes.
“How was school?” he asked, with a sing-songiness that mocked the triteness of the question.
“It was fine,” I said, echoing his cadence.
“What did they teach you today?”
“English and math and social studies.”
“What social things are you studying?”
“The war.”
“Did you talk to Lori today?”
Naturally, I had no appreciation for my father’s bland, predictable questions, his attempt to show interest without being intrusive. I didn’t disdain his efforts, but I was never aware of how the gentleness and regularity of his mealtime inquiries contributed to my equilibrium, the safety there was in the expectation that no matter how perfunctory my answers, he would keep asking. I suppose nobody appreciates this sort of thing about their parents at seventeen, or even notices it, unless it suddenly stops.
I don’t remember what we ate for dinner that night. Other than the Chinese table tennis team I don’t remember what we talked about. I wish I did. I wish I had a clearer recollection of the countless dull, normal, placid dinners my family had before my father opened the envelope from the Bank of Wisconsin. I wish we’d had a video camera back then and I had taped some of those family suppers before the letter, suppers that I now recollect only vaguely in the soft focus and pastel colors of old faded snapshots.
I remember that my father would make corny jokes that elicited gentle scolding from my mother and giddy laughter from my brother, but I don’t remember the jokes. My father would often over-compliment my mother’s cooking, and she would accept the praise with the patently false modesty of an Oscar recipient. But I don’t remember what my parents said, what their exact words were. I wish I did.
I remember thinking that we were happy, but I don’t remember what it felt like.
After dinner that night, my father took the mail and sat down in his red and gold striped overstuffed easy chair in the living room. He read by the light of a brass floor lamp. My mother sat cross-legged on the sofa, knitting. Most evenings we were all in the same space reading, knitting, studying, playing games, whatever, always with the television blaring the whole time. We had an obsolete black and white Philco console with a cabinet the size of a washing machine. I was on the floor reading the sports page of the Milwaukee Journal and half-watching The Mod Squad when I heard my mother say, in a tone of voice that alarmed me, “What’s wrong, David?”
I looked at my father. He held the Bank of Wisconsin letter in one hand, while with his other hand he squeezed the side of his face so hard it looked like it must hurt. Behind the black-rimmed reading glasses, his eyes had an expression of terrible agitation. Jamie was glued to the TV set, unblinking and oblivious.
My mother put down her knitting and asked again, “What is it? David, what’s the matter?”
* *
My hand is shaking as I put the letter down and look again at my father’s obituary. The item is accompanied by a tiny black and white photo that the Press-Gazette must have gotten from my dad’s employment file at Falls Dieworks. The portrait is barely an inch high, less that an inch wide, and grainy, but even so I can see that my father has optimism