Looking up from his work, Daniel had to shield his eyes from the afternoon sun beaming through the kitchen window as he looked up to answer his father’s question.
“It’s a modern house. Like the Noonendork. This is the infinity pool.” He nodded toward the long rectangular section of blue Legos that ended abruptly at the edge of the breakfast table.
“
Neuendorf,” Theodore corrected him. “So who’s your client?”
“It’s ours, we are the client. You, me and… Amy, I guess?”
“Amy? Really, you want her to come live with us?”
Daniel shrugged and gazed blankly at his structure, “Maybe. If you do.”
“Well… if we had a house like that I might ask her.”
“I’m going to build it.”
“You’re doing a great job so far.”
“No really, I’m going to build the real version. This one is probably like… one-millions-scale.”
Theodore smirked with pride at his son’s grasp at the concept of scale, “Okay. I’d like to see a real house made of red plastic bricks.”
Daniel shot a quick smirk with bulging exaggerated eyes back at his father then continued work on articulating the grounds around the infinity pool. “I need more greens,” he said.
Theodore was ripped in two and clenched his jaw to repress a bowling ball of emotion below his ribcage that threatened to vault up into the carriage, poised for a strike. He was proud of his smart 9-year-old son, and knew his mother would have been too. He photographed everything Daniel built and wished he had the space and the funds to permanently store every model and resupply the Lego like it was clay. But their two-bedroom apartment and budget didn’t allow for that. Every construction Daniel built was consequently torn apart in order to make something new.
He’s a little Zen architect, Theodore thought. Daniel never showed any regret about not preserving what he had made, but Theodore longed to give him something more permanent.
Currently, Daniel was working on a house based on the
Pawson-Silvestrin Neuendorf house in Mallorca, Spain . The house was just completed a year ago and Daniel reacted equivocally to his father’s excitement at the pictures he showed him from the July 1990
Architectural Digest. Daniel’s version was proportionately taller and more fortress-like with a couple rampart towers for defensive archers and ports for pouring boiling oil onto attacking Visigoths, but Daniel’s house showed much of the minimal rectangularity and sense of openness to the sky and environment that flowed through the
Neuendorf house. This was a house Theodore himself would have loved to design when he was a working Architect. The bureaucracy involved in the few apartment complexes he designed during the first years of his marriage to Selma had turned him off to corporate projects. But without them he suffered financially. When Daniel was born, he found alternative steady work in the landscaping field, something he loved yet compromised for after being disappointed with the reality of his first chosen occupation. Essentially, he had become a gardener, but it was steady work that supported his family, and by the time Daniel was 4, his insurance covered most of Selma’s medical bills. When she passed away in 1987 he and Daniel moved from the San Francisco bay area to San Diego.
Now, Theodore held his composure in a glass of tequila and lemonade as he watched Daniel realize the models of his dreams of formidable domiciles on the kitchen table of a cramped La Jolla apartment. It was a muggy August Sunday afternoon and Theodore likewise retreated to his own dreams with some Hemingway, fishing off the Florida Keys.
“Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“Chris Fremont’s mom is dead too.”
Theodore lowered the book into his lap. “Oh really?”
“Yeah.” Daniel paused. “Chris Fremont says his mom is in heaven and he’s going to see her again when he dies.”
Theodore took a deep shakey breath. “Hey Dan, why don’t you come over by me on the couch for a minute.” Daniel scooted off his chair and walked over to the living room where his father sat in one corner of a brown leather couch—feet propped up on a beech-wood Ikea coffee table. Daniel traversed his father by lifting one leg at a time over the bridge of his father’s legs, then plopped himself down in the opposite corner of the couch. Facing Theodore, he slouched into a reclined position until his dirty white sock covered feet rested against his father’s thigh.
Theodore took off his reading glasses and set them down with the book on a side table to his left. “ Do you wish you could see Mom again?” Daniel nodded. “Me too,” Theodore blinked hard a few times. “Do you still talk to her like I told you to?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes not as much as I used to. Sometimes… “
Daniel went quiet and Theodore could see his eyes moisten. “Sometimes?”
Daniel sniffled. “…well, I just don’t remember what she sounds like.” Tears rolled silently down his cheeks.
Theodore wiped a tear from the well below his own eye and he cleared his throat. “Yeah. Slide over here next to me, Dan.” Daniel shifted around like a worm and bent his legs beneath him, leaning against his father’s side. Theodore put his arm around him—he did this to comfort Daniel, but mostly he did it to keep from seeing his son cry, and to keep Daniel from seeing him cry. The two men sat side-by-side and stared facing the clean cold unused fireplace. “That’s better,” Theodore said. “I told you that you can always talk to mom, right?” Daniel nodded. “Because she’s a part of you and me now. Her body is gone, and the part of her that was your mom is in you, and the part of her that was my wife is in me.”
“I know,” Daniel said shortly, “…and I talk to her like you said, and she tells me stuff too.”
Theodore let a smile of relief spread across his mouth, “She does? That’s good. That’s what I told you.”
“Yeah.”
“What does she tell you?”
“Just stuff. I don’t know. She tells me what to do.”
Theodore chuckled with hearty sadness, remembering Selma’s comforting bossiness, “She does, eh?”
“Yeah but she doesn’t tell me answers in math or anything like that.”
“No, of course not. That wouldn’t be fair, would it?" Theodore paused. "Listen, pal. Everybody believes something different about death. But there’s only one true thing that happens. It’s just that, once that thing happens, no one can come back and tell anyone what it’s like. We’re all gonna find out eventually, on our own. Anyone who is alive and thinks they know what happens when they are dead, well they’re just guessing. Have you ever been to Paris?”
Daniel frowned, “No,” appalled at the rhetorical question.
“Me neither. Are you going to believe me when I tell you what Paris is like; what it smells like or where the zoo is?”
“Nope.”
“Okay then. But now, don’t go telling Chris Fremont that he’s not going to see his mom in heaven, okay?”
“How come?”
“Well, do you think Chris believes you talk to Mom?”
“I don’t know; I don’t tell anyone about that.”
“Well that’s good because that’s just a private thing between you and Mom. And other people aren’t going to believe you can really do it. They will try to tell you it’s not real because they can’t hear her like we do, and they’re gonna think it’s a pretty crazy idea. But you know why they can’t hear her but we do?”
“Because she’s inside us.”
“Yeah, that’s right, and you know why she is inside us?”
“Why?”
“Because she loved you very much and you loved her back. And she knew that, so she never wanted to leave you. But she didn’t have a choice. Her body got sick and she couldn’t stay in it anymore.” Theodore stopped and he could hear the taps of tears dripping off Daniel’s chin onto the leather cushion. Then he heard Daniel take a deep shuddering breath. Theodore eked out a light, “Comprendo, amigo?”
“Comprendo.”
“And you let Chris believe what he wants because it makes him feel good.”
Daniel sparked up, “But then when Chris dies he’s going to be disappointed. He should know he wont find her.”
Theodore could not think immediately of how to reply to that.
“Well, like I said, no one knows what it will really be like. But here’s what I think. I think that when you die you don’t feel disappointed or sad or anything like that. You just understand everything, and when you really understand everything, then you don’t even need feelings anymore. You just feel okay with everything, you know? You can just be kinda like a tree. Like the grass. I cut the grass in people’s yards every day. I keep coming back every week to the same grass and I keep cutting it. You think that grass is mad at me?”
Daniel giggled, “
Yeah.”
“
Haha, okay, maybe. But the grass doesn’t give up. The grass just keeps on growing. And it never looks sad or depressed or mad. I think it’s just okay with being cut down all the time; no big deal. It never gets disappointed or frustrated or mad.”
“So when I die I’m gong to turn into grass?” Daniel replied, his sarcastic spark returning.
“Hey, I don’t know, smarty pants. What do
you think?”
Daniel considered this. “I think… Here’s what I think.”
“’Kay.”
“I think that Chris is gonna get to see his mom when he dies.”
Theodore concerned yet intrigued, asked, “Is that what you want, to see Mom when you die?”
“ummm… No, not really. Because she’s here already anyway.”
Theodore was relieved again, “Why don’t you ask mom what I should make for dinner.”
Daniel released a big sigh and then said, “Ok." He looked off into one corner of the ceiling. “She says to make her favorite: spencer steak and artichokes and rice with butter and soy sauce. And mushrooms.”
Theodore, taken slightly aback, “That’s her favorite alright. Man, you better tell Mom to look at my bank account first!”
“You didn’t ask that you told me to ask what we should have for dinner. That’s what she said!”
“Right, right, you’re right. Okay.”
“I want macaroni and cheese though.”
“Okay.”
