Ah, Like Dirty Dishes

° AH, we're really going this year," said Father. He patted the little plastic
moosehead that hung on the wall by the fishing poles. Ralph looked up from
a Cheever short story. Father's eyes shone with water and emotion, and he prayed
out loud:
"The Rock Bound Coast of Maine."
"Oh no, Pop, not that again." Ralph pulled at his own short beard frustratedly.
"Ah, this year I've decided, the whole family's going together."
"But .
"No buts."
Ralph went to mother, who was shucking peas in the sink. He talked softly,
lowering his voice below the sound of the running water. "Ma, Pop wants to
camp out again. We can't; we'll starve." Ralph's real motive was the wish to
avoid the embarrassment he would feel around a grown man bumbling in child-
wonder.
"He's just being silly again, dear, don't worry." She slit a pod and expertly
forced out the peas with a crooked finger. Ralph meditatively snapped the garbage
can lid up and down with the foot peddle.
"I don't know, Ma, he really got mad this time."
"Your father's always serious about being silly."

After the Meal
 

"They teach you to grow hair at college?" asked Father. He gingerly passed
Ralph a hot bowl of peas across the dinner table. The twins giggled and Isaac,
the twin on the left, pulled on Ralph's lush black goatee. Gramp was between
Mother and Father, and he was scowling.
"Hairy, hairy . . ."
"Ouch." Ralph put down the peas, crossed his arms, and squeezed both their
noses, one to the left, one to the right.
"Stop that at the dinner table, you three," said Mother. The twins began
kicking Ralph under the table in rhythm as he started to spoon out their peas.
"They teach you to grow hair at college?"
"Sure Pop, it's required."
"Ah, it looks like an idiot."
"That's why I grew it."
"Shut up everybody and eat." Grampa grew up in East Europe, and when you
had food over there it was too serious to talk. Everybody else grew up on this side
and ignored Grampa on all levels all the time.
"You going to work?"
"Yes Pop, I got a job in the post office until Christmas day."
"Pepper," Gramp mumbled, and Ralph passed it. Grampa covered his mountain
of mashed potatoes with a black snowstorm, to kill any plague.
"Then?"

"Then I'm going to New York to see some shows."
"Maybe you could be around a few days before school . . . ," Father studied
his own lightly peppered potato mass a moment, "and plan some equipment we're
going to need."
"Pop," Ralph exploded.
"So we could go right after school's out."
"Now, now," Mother soothed.
"Shut up and eat, everybody."
Ralph decided, ok, he'd go, that night while he lay deep in the covers of his
old bed and listened to the conversation coming up out of the heat grate on the
floor. Whenever Mother and Father had a serious conversation Father sat in the
chair by the covered duct in the sitting room and all his words came right up
the heat column.
"Ah, dear, I was talking to Harry in the store, and he said he could make us
the lend of a tent, and I got some lanterns, and we could get one of those check-
lists in Camper's Guide
"But the twins . . . ?"
"The twins are old enough, we've always had somebody too young to do it.
Gramp stays, he can take care of himself."
"What about Ralph?"
Father's voice lowered, so Ralph leaned out of the bed and cocked his ear
toward the heat grate.
"Ah, Ralph is too nervous maybe to go. He wants to study something in the
summer." "We'll go without him if he wants.'
"Well, we'll see."
Ralph dug deeper into the wrap of his blankets and listened to the snow
sighing through the outside perma-screen on his aluminum window. Father
bought them for the whole house after seeing a T.V. demonstration. Ralph felt
a little shame and a little love, peeled back the blankets, grabbed a robe, and
paddled barefoot down the narrow hallway and down the stairs.
"God, how tiny this house is," he thought. Three months of dorm life shrunk
the huge house of his childhood to a tight shell around the presence and ritual
of family.
"Pop?"
Father looked up from True, and his bald head caught the light (like mine
will, thought Ralph with uneasy affection). A new flannel hunting shirt swelled
with a soft belly. Father's eyes switched from open dreaming to wrinkled question.
"Yes?"
"Pop, I'll go."
"Ah, Ralphie."

Birds sang, the twins ran and shouted dialect like naked savage children, Mother
threatened, Father called:
"Ralph, bring the fishing poles out."
"Yes, Pop."
Ralph rolled underwear into a gymbag and ran the aluminum window frame
down. White clouds moved slowly in the June sky. "A good day for driving
anyway." Mother snatched clothes off the line, Father fitted lanterns into the
trunk of the Ford, the twins ran with abandon, shooting each other in animal
excitement, Gramp sat mumbling in a chaise lounge. "Oh God, what am I doing?"
Ralph turned from the window and stuffed a Robinson Jeffers book among the
rolled up underwear, got the fishing poles, got in the back seat of the old Ford
fresh from the greasers.
"Ok, we go." Father reverently turned to look out the back window and began
slowly to back the Argosy down the alley. The twins chanted "We go, we go,
we go."
"Watch that car."
Pop slammed the gears and burst out of the Ford. He shouted something in
his foreign tongue that Ralph never heard translated. He had never had to.
Somebody going to the grocery store across the street had parked a car just
enough in front of the alley.
"Ralph, come here, we'll roll the damn thing."
"Don't talk like that in front of the children."
They released its brake and rolled the damn thing up two feet. Its owner was
just coming out of the grocery store, and he shouted over "What the Hell . ..
but Father was red with rage, got in the Ford, and backed up too fast.
"Not too fast, dear."
He swung around and drove carefully out of the less nice streets of Stamford.
Ralph held his breath until they were on the Connecticut Turnpike, fearing that
some stupid kid would run out under the tires and kill himself and reduce Father
to a black pool of obscenity.
"The Rock Bound Coast of Maine." Father was triumphant as the car wheezed
up to 60 on the turnpike, moving away from the smoke towers and power com-
plexes of the city; speed affirming spirit's ultimate victory over matter.
"What are you going to do when you get there?" Ralph asked Simon and Isaac.
"Kill the deer." Both began to spray the car with machine gun bullets.
"You learn that in school?"
"Sure Pop, it's the war of the generations. We prepare for it starting in kinder-
garten. March of progress. That's why we're so sharp and quick and hard to pin
"Ah," and he laughed.
'The car went through a black smudge of smoke rising around the bridge, and

Ralph looked down into the greasy inferno of the Norwalk Dump, half hulls of
homemade boats, pocked weedy mud flats on its fringes. Behind the scenes of
the great Connecticut culture. In the next lane and on the tracks all the movement
was opposite to theirs, heading back to the city of New York for the day. Then
the Westport mud flats went by; they were clean with trimmed swamp weeds
you could play tennis on. Ralph wondered where their garbage was and whether
it was clean too.
Father relaxed as, Odysseus bound to a different destiny, he passed road signs,
oblivious to Siren calls of pools and T.V., Maine would come, and he accepted
the land he would endure until then; then there were stars and trees and sea and
outside. Ah. The long white road was their easy wake.
The twins awoke, Mother looked up from the map on her lap, Ralph looked
up from Jeffers, a little flock of hardy northern sparrows passing the car five
feet above the left front door lost a wing-beat as Father curekaed:
"There she is."
Beside a little fringe of bushes a squat brown sign faced them: "Arcadia Na-
tional Park of Maine." They entered triumphantly under an arch of pine logs
and on the rise saw the whole park as it stretched to the sea. Trees stood densely
together like a lawn and became blue like mountains far away. The trees the
Ford passed were individual robed priests waving in benediction. Father looked
around like a beggar in the Temple and drove off the road. They stopped. A
deer family and the human family looked cyc to eye over twenty yards of pine
needle carpet, praying for different things. When the engine shut out they could
hear the sea.
"Here."
Everybody got out, and the twins ran off to machine gun the deer as, with
surprising grace, Ralph and Father and Mother set up the tent. They had
practiced a few times in the backyard. Ralph went down to a small path to
locate the public latrine that the park literature promised.
"It has running water even."
"That's good, we're not that native yet."
"Let's look at the breakers."
They called the twins and proceeded to the top of a great jumbled cliff of
locked stones, the wind filling their clothing with the incense of pine smell and sea.
"The Rock Bound Coast of Maine."
The sea crashed cleanly all over the base of the rock bound coast. Ralph looked
at his father standing with his mouth parted and felt a tinge of embarrassment.
It was impressive though. The twins climbed up from the rocks, and they went
back in the dusk, and Mother cooked and they ate, and everyone went to sleep
except Ralph, who sat and smoked a pipe for a while, felt ok and a little ridiculous,
and then went to sleep in a bag under a tree.

The next morning everybody woke at dawn, and Ralph ate a pound of outdoor
bacon and would have ripped apart any man or beast who tried to stop him.
"You glad you came?"
"Sure Pop."
"Ah, you want to fish?"
Ok." It was Father's excuse to get in front of that ocean. But there was nobody
in sight who could see them as another rube camping family using flat fish poles
against the surf, and Father was too hung up on the sea to start a man-to-man talk.
They fished for a while and caught nothing and started to beachcomb. Ralph
saw it first. It was just a movement far ahead of their careful climb over the
tumble of boulders. They were both looking into cracks at crabs and rope ends
and getting just touched by the tossed sea. Ralph pointed and shouted over the
roar of the water: "Waterfall." Father smiled. They lost sight of this new goal
for a moment as they picked a path to bring them out above it. Ralph stood up
there alone for a moment.
"Oh God, not this."
The waves below uncertainly jostled with the falling stream, but the stream
was not clear, nor just water. Its source was a four-foot wide culvert coming just
out of the stones: the outlet of every latrine in the park.
"What?"
Gulls froze in the air, the sun dimmed; the wind and the world and Ralph
watched the emotions twitching across the face of a middle-aged pilgrim who
stood before a stain on the mural Perfection of God's Universe. Father slapped
Ralph on the back and almost tumbled him off the cliff. In the brief instant
before Ralph grabbed his balance he thought wildly: "I've been sacrificed in
expiation." Father shouted the word in his foreign tongue that Ralph had never
heard translated, and then Father began to laugh.
"Ah, the bowels of the earth," he said roaring like the sea water in great swirls.
He sat down so he wouldn't fall over. The gulls started flying again, the sun
lit up, the sea went more cheerily about dealing with the compost of human nature
and ingenuity. Ralph sat down and voided himself of laughter, as his father did,
leaning against him.
When they calmed down they watched the sea for a while. They felt the com-
radeship of common affection towards the universe that, like a great tapestried
circus elephant, had just made a mess in the center ring. Yet it was still a mys-
terious beast. They climbed back to their fishing poles.
"It's inevitable."
"Ah, like dirty dishes after the meal."
When they got back to the tent Mother looked up from the kerosene stove.
"Get anything?"