The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,7
implications of this song, I did. Knew them in every part of my breastless, motherless body. As verse moved to chorus, I became louder and more desperate, pressing my lips to the blue plastic. I sang like my father while he tenderly washed brick red plates and worn wooden spoons. It was an old Irish folk song he had taught us, that my mother’s Irish uncles had taught her; because it was about a woman named Mollie, I understood it as written for my mother. The song is about a faraway city and a dead woman, once beloved, who died suddenly, still haunts the streets with a wheelbarrow full of mussels for sale. My father loved it for obvious reasons.
When the song was over, I pressed my ear to the radio, hoping for some sort of aquatic transmission from the ghost I was singing for. Jackson and I took turns listening. I paced up and down the bridge, hoping ghosts got reception three steps northwest. They didn’t.
At five thirty, we stood where we’d started, silent. Even James was disappointed, though he couldn’t tell why. He was the first to step down from the throne, then me, then Jackson.
The crowns bobbed as the river slowly pulled them past the homeless man, who had switched his face away from the bottles of urine.
Their father’s face is clear in my mind from the photographs that surfaced once Jackson and James were “old enough,” but I do not recollect any of the times he showed up on our street to smile and squint at James and Jackson through his thick Buddy Holly–esque glasses.
The pictures of Thomas are of a birdlike man dressed in ill-fitting suits, thin ties, and sharply angled dress shoes. He looks both embarrassed by and friendly toward the camera, and seems always to be leaning: it’s like all the objects of the world constantly presented themselves to him in support. The sun often in his blue eyes, which are so light they seem almost diaphanous. He has the slight smile of a person who is in on a joke you are not.
Jackson later put up a photo of him in our apartment. It came not out of a sentimental place or an effort to miss someone he barely knew, but rather a black humor that most found disturbing but I, as someone who was also parentally ghosted, found hilarious. In it, Thomas is nearly literally dancing on a grave. The background is a Confederate cemetery he stopped by on a road trip at twenty-two or so; he has his hands out on either side of him, a bottle of beer dangling somehow from between the middle and index fingers of his left hand. His right hand is four inches higher, his feet placed one in front of the other. The photo is taken from the back, and the wings of his coat indicate motion; he doesn’t know there’s a picture being taken, but his face is turned just enough to indicate he is smiling.
Jackson had it blown up to a 14-by-16 and hung it between the two windows we frequently kept open despite the weather. The enlargement resulted in a graininess, and friends or acquaintances visiting our apartment for the first time liked to cluck their tongues and remark how striking it was, sometimes even going so far as to assume it was this writer or that artist captured by such and such a photographer. On one occasion, when the asker was particularly thoughtful and mistakenly convinced of her cultural awareness, when she went so far as to insist she knew the image of this obscure poet walking on a graveyard and had seen it in a gallery in London, Jackson and I looked at each other and laughed, inclusively, at length. When we finally calmed down enough to explain that the washed-out image was no poet but rather just the long-dead, drug-addled father of Jackson here, no one thought it was very funny. Many people don’t understand, I suppose, that while respecting the dead is important, it’s not always easy and it’s generally pretty boring.
What we perceived as an enmity between our parents was not quite that—though Julia often sold it that way. There were feuds and sideways looks, snippy comments to us about the other’s parenting that we were meant to deliver. A couple times, when we were younger, our parents had taken battle stances on our respective front porches and hollered. It would always be pretty late when