James Flaherty

Doing dishes at night in the dimly lit kitchen as his grandson slept and his daughter and her husband talked in hushed voices in the living room was when he thought of Irene, because over 40 years of marriage she rarely explained anything about herself, except one evening as he was doing dishes. She said a few sentences she’d clearly prepared in advance, explaining she was prepared to die and it was best in her opinion if they didn’t talk too much about the matter. And he remembered his response, his non-response, its fussy, self-conscious pieces, mostly thought instead of said. He ought to have said nothing. He saw her in the kitchen of their old home, saw first her distraction and discomfort, then her absence even as she spoke, then her walking away, then her absence extending back from that moment, decades into the past. Irene never needed his response and in that respect she was the easier pill, easier than his adult daughter, who always and only wanted him to talk. There was nothing of his except talk that his daughter needed anymore and yet here he was doing dishes at night in the silent kitchen in Boston, his daughter’s kitchen, his grandson’s dishes—dear God, why were there so many plastic containers?—and Irene was gone, like she wanted, and the loss was full-throated, an enveloping loneliness, but at least nobody was there to watch and make him talk. 

The steel and ceramic dishware he stowed in the dishwasher, the greasy length of baking sheet and cast-iron skillet he rinsed and dried and put away. The three dishwasher racks he checked over again for any woods or plastics that may have snuck past him. Then he turned reluctantly to the tower of tupperware stacked on the counter and counted eight sets and grimaced and summoned patience to wash each lid by hand. He was in fact prohibited from running them through the dishwasher, bound by some inflexible preference of hers, some preference disguised as health threat. Don’t hate your daughter. Just do it and be done. Don’t hate the daughter who speaks her mind and articulates her wishes. Do it and then lie down. Sneak a drink. No. Don’t sneak a drink.

It was so dark, the kitchen felt like outer space. No overhead light, only the lamps mounted under the cabinets. The windows were shut and locked against October cold and the last faint crickets. He left the blinds open to admit glimpses now and then across the small side yard into the first-floor apartment of the neighboring house where a slim couple, probably in their twenties, led an unmarried, unhurried Wayfair lifestyle stunningly unlike his daughter’s. They stayed up late, hosted parties on their patio, and did yoga in the living room. At that very moment they sat at the bar of their kitchen counter casually eating a home-delivered gourmet dinner and sipping dewy bottles of craft IPA and watching a crime show on a laptop computer. How he missed TV, another of his daughter’s prohibitions. How he missed having a real living room. Theirs was minimal and austere. A single two-seat sofa and two neon-painted spindle chairs and overstuffed bookshelves. (Her husband was a poet: bearded, portly, deferential, with no opinions of his own.) Mid-October already and not a single NFL game. He snuck scores off his phone. More than the games he missed falling asleep in front of big screens, submerged in noise, the comfort of the room as he was wrapped, spaced, and transported. He remembered fondly years past, when she was little, eating late Friday dinners in front of Star Trek: Voyager, drowsy and rapt, journeying in the space of the same room. These were, he believed at the time, their best moments as a family. It was the dependable, weekly fulfillment of his vision for them—church without church—as they gave their attention to something they all enjoyed without aggravation. More commonly one of them made an allowance for the others and silently suffered. Their common charity. Voyager, though, went down easy and without concession. They united. They found a lovely shared slumber. Come nightfall in his daughter’s home, however, they came together to sprint through a joyless routine of bath then toothbrushing then books then bed, at which point his grandson was tucked firmly away in a dusty corner and, for each weepy reappearance, returned with the command to sleep. Two bedrooms sat off the kitchen and the child slept in the larger one, wrapped in white noise, lightly snoring. The other bedroom, the smaller one, was his. And in the living room, typically, his daughter and her husband retreated in silence to conspire, so his paranoia saw it, a conspiracy of coercion whose objective was induced epiphany and confession and, as the dreadful Book of Common Prayer always put it, amendment of life.

Over the running faucet, he heard the whimper of his grandson waking. A loud mutter and then a cry. Hearing, the child’s grandfather flinched and splashed suds across his front. He imagined the blushing, half-sleeping face. His own face in a soft, lightly shaded miniature. His daughter and her husband didn’t see it and he didn’t dare draw their attention to it: He and the child had in common a balance of cheerful oblivion between their small eyes and mouth of perpetual frown. Not like Deirdra. Deirdra’s eyes were incisive and crafty. They evaluated you against designs. Her mouth was wide with feelings and precise tastes. It was Irene’s mouth, a mouth of madness. But unlike Irene’s, it knew no restraint.

If tonight he could admit his paranoia, he could also admit his fear that doing the dishes was his only use. That may have been an exaggeration, but it was how he felt. It may have also been an exaggeration to say he’d been doing dishes for the past fifty years, but he felt that way too. His back ached. Across his belly, his shirt was damp. Fifty years contorting himself in airless enclosures to satisfy other people’s expectations, so that elsewhere money and goods could amass and blunt the bleeding edges of costs that were, like the expectations, phantom and beleaguering. Better, or less frightening anyway, to stoop than to question, better to stoop than to try to prevent physical ruin. He was ruined already. To try and fail would be an embarrassing inconvenience. He drank too much. His stomach was too big. His heart bolted away unpredictably. He blamed her. He just hated washing tupperware. Why did they have to go through so many? Once the drying rack was loaded and the counter was clear, he would feel valuable again. His heart would relax. Why did he cling to these things? Why did he feel so crowded? The home was a shoebox, a single floor of a triple decker. Creaks, dust, tilt, clutter, rot, mold, lime, asbestos, horsehair plaster. No room to breathe. No room to protect his grandson, to hold out an arm and shelter him, and no permission from the child’s parents to try. Unable to protect, he could at least be useful. If he’d ever wanted anything out of family, and after dark, bleary, he couldn’t be sure he ever had, it was to trust without question that someone loved him. Discarding that, doing the dishes would have to do. His little indispensability. 

He ran a dishrag along the gusset of a lid, where if you weren’t careful food lingered and seeded mold. He squinted and then raised the lid higher and in the paltry orange lamplight he saw it, the mold stain. He remembered this spot, remembered he’d goddamn cleaned it yesterday, soaked it in vinegar water and wire-brushed it. Or he’d thought about doing that. His precious grandson had eaten something mold-adjacent because of him. He pictured the little face again, the dreamy eyes. Did the boy look malnourished? Worse, did he have his grandfather’s nose, his knobby monument, his escutcheon? He looked back at the drying rack, at tupperware he’d already cleaned, and he checked another lid. It was mold-stained too.

He went to the pantry and lugged out the one-gallon distilled white vinegar and a clean casserole dish and with a frustrated gasp set about soaking what he’d already washed so he could wait twenty minutes and wash them again. He didn’t slow down or pay attention when pain joggled in his chest and the edges of his eyes slid with tears and his mouth filled with the stringent taste of loose change. He tipped out a few sloshes of vinegar and righted the bottle and capped it and cleared his throat. The marble countertop, under his fingertips, was cool and he tapped it so the sensation ran an almost soothing counterpoint up his arms.

He talked to himself out loud, quietly, so nobody would hear: “Fill it with ice. Run the disposal. Run cold water through the disposal. Run the ice and cold water through the disposal, the ice and the water together.” He cleared his throat again and shook his head because he was still dizzy, and then: “Ice and water decongest the disposal. Run it regularly. Clean the disposal. Check for leaks. A leak from the bottom cannot be repaired. Run it through with ice and water and extend the life of the unit. Average ten years.”

Feeling steadier, he gathered the lids from the drying rack and distributed them around the dish and swirled them around. Behind him, in his grandson’s bedroom, a small version of his agony coughed again in its sleep.

He wished his grandson liked him. When the child looked at him, what did he see? A mottled face. An overworked cheer. Grandfather was just scared. He was scared he was unloveable and didn’t want his grandson to reject him.   

He flicked his hands dry and took his phone from his back pocket and glanced at the time. He looked at the chair by the window but didn’t dare sit. Anytime he sat, he passed out—a trait he’d carried since 30, a trait not drinking lately had done nothing to improve—so he stood beside the refrigerator and crossed his arms across his chest and glanced at the clock over the stove, waiting for the vinegar to kill the mold. His eyes periodically closed. He heard, once or twice, his daughter’s voice coming closer, out of the living room, and the creaking of the floorboards. He ought to prepare in case she came in. They behaved badly when one wasn’t prepared for the other.

First his daughter built an adulthood that didn’t require him, then a family. She met their needs on her own, then outsourced a choice few among her community—that insufferable word she was so fond of. It rendered the role of a grandfather optional, sentimental, and small. Babysitting she doled out to teenagers from their nondenominational church. Any advice she got came from local parents—stable, resourced, and lacking, in his suspicion, true understanding of why she was asking and what she was really after. Which was righteousness. Which was his problem: In her sight, he was unrighteous. And wasteful, pragmatic, and careless. Convenience was his only value. She previewed this contempt during a Thanksgiving visit in her early twenties when she casually reported, “The problem with my childhood was you never taught me to talk.” At least that was a blame he and Irene could share.

After twelve minutes of ignoring the pleading of his legs, he hoisted up one knee, then the other, and walked a circle around the kitchen, feeling so tired the mold surely must have been dead. He threw a glance up the hallway and, seeing the coast was clear, went to the sink and emptied the casserole dish, flicked on the faucet, turned the lids under the running water so that the rank sour smell bloomed in the air. It was in this moment that at the end of the counter his daughter appeared—he never saw her coming and she never entered rooms, she simply materialized—and asked, “Are you finished?”

He replied without thinking, “Sorry for the noise.”

“Come sit with us.”

“Pardon?”

“You never sit with us,” she said.

His hands were moving on their own, lathering the dishrag and rinsing the container lids.

“You’re so devoted.”

“What’s that?”

“No one asks but you do the dishes anyway.”

“I have to earn my keep.”

“Jared and I were just talking about your little rituals.”

“My what?”

“Rocks and drinks. Peninsulas of pleasure. Yours and Mom’s.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh and you owe for October.”

“How much?”

Her eyes were large and tired behind thick lenses. She only wore glasses at night. They made her look softer, more like the girl who grew up with him. She asked, “What are we really talking about, Dad?”

Something in her tone of voice, or something he kept hearing in her tone of voice, signaled to him the conversation was over and she was leaving, but when she didn’t walk away, when she instead came back with another comment, he was jolted.

“Have you grieved yet? Do you want help? Are you open to a process partner? We don’t want you to languish. Are you feeling bogged down?”

“A process partner. Look, don’t worry about me and don’t bother about my—well, my whatever you want to call it.”

“What are you worried about?”

“What am I worried about? I don’t know. I’m saying you shouldn’t worry.”

“Is it money?”

“Yes, well, young families have to think about money. Young families have to plan. Plan for the future. I might as well pitch in. Wouldn’t be conscionable to drain you. I have to think about your future too.”

“Mom, you mean.”

“What about, Mom?”

“Mom planned for the future.”

“Uh huh,” he said, emphatically. A meaningless banality said with force. “Was there something you needed?” he asked.

“Dad.”

“It’s alright, I’m sorry, you don’t need my permission to talk about your mother. Talk about your mother all you please. It’s alright.”

“I’m thirsty.”

She was holding an empty filtration pitcher and angling toward the sink. “You?”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure?”

“No, thank you.”

She was tall and long-limbed, like him, and without coming any closer she passed the pitcher. With a free and trembling thumb, he lifted the lid and filled it. She came a step closer for it and held it in the pale, pointed tension of her fingers. Then she was just standing there, watching the water drip and quiver and running a dishtowel over the handle. She’d laid a planner on the countertop and it was now open and she studied it. He admired her look. Copious and healthy. Her belly, like his, was pouchy and he was proud of this, her formidability. Her hair, though, he didn’t admire. It was straightened and dyed blonde at the ends—erased, anonymized.  

He glanced out and across the yard at the neighbors.

“You should have dinner with them sometime ,” he said, gesturing. “The young couple. I could watch Francis.”

Instead of answering, she asked: “Gas?”

“I haven’t touched the thermostat,” he said. “The only time I use hot water is the dishes.”

“And your shower.”

“Yes, my shower, that’s right.”

She made a note in the planner and then put a hand on her hip—that heft of handsome self-containment—she pressed a hand on it and looked at the sink and doubtfully considered the lid he was lathering.

“Again?”

He looked at what he was doing, then at her. “I don’t want anyone to get sick.”

“Why would anyone get sick?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who—well, never mind.”

“You wash them twice every night?”

“No, not every night. I found mold.”

“It’s just a lot of hot water when you leave the faucet running.”

“This is cold. I rinse with cold.”

She made another note in the planner. “What do you mean about us getting sick?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm?”

“I said I don’t mean anything. I’m making sure they’re clean. Would you rather get sick?”

“What are you really saying, Dad?”

“Do you want to get sick?”

She tapped the end of the pen against the marble countertop. “Dad, this kind of conversation would have driven me crazy when I was younger,” she said. “But it’s exactly the kind of conversation we need to have.”

“It is?”

When he dared to look at her, he saw her staring not at him and not into the planner but through a window he couldn’t see, a gap where some inevitability, some excoriating female truth was legible to her alone. “It’s the conversation we need to be having,” she said and then added, “You’re doing a good job.”

“I’m doing a good job?”

“You’re doing a good job not drinking.”

“Well, that’s nice of you to say. Thank you.”

“Have you washed this lately?” she asked.

It took him a moment to realize she meant the pitcher.

“No,” he admitted. “Should I? Give it to me.”

She raised it level but high enough they could both lean and see. Underneath the base were streaks of gluey brown. Gelatinous matter flecked in black. It looked, he thought, terribly similar to the heavily lined, chronically dirty bottoms of his daughter’s husband’s feet. His daughter’s husband was always bare-footed, so his feet were always visible. 

“Jared hates the dishes,” she said, lowering the pitcher. “I used to have to do them. I was always yelling at Jared about it.”

“I never hear you yell.”

Up the hall, his daughter’s husband was stepping into the bathroom. He called out, “Methinks it’s tea time.”

“I do yell at Jared,” she said. “Just about other things.”

“I never hear you argue. I thought you two agreed about everything.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Just two people so different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Just different.”

She stared at him for a moment. “Spouses can agree and still argue.”

“Of course. I know all that. Did you and Jared agree about me?”

She studied the planner and only replied after a moment, “There was concern we would struggle prioritizing each other romantically.”

“Oh, well, I don’t—I don’t—”

“There was concern you would neglect yourself if you lived alone.”

“That’s very considerate. How nice of you to think of me when you have so much to handle already.”

“Do you regret saying yes?”

“Of course not. No. No, I’ve never. I’ve never thought anything like that.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, very little. Very little. Take my word for it.”

“You must have given up something.”

“Nothing I haven’t forgotten. Do you want me to wash that?” he asked, meaning the pitcher.

“Please don’t stare at them,” she said sharply.

“Stare?”

“At the neighbors.”

“I wasn’t,” he said, glancing out the window again.

“Electric?”

“I was going to charge my phone tomorrow,” he said. “Oh, that reminds me. I wanted to show you something.”

His hands were shaking a little as he swiped them quickly across his front and pulled his phone from his back pocket. Without a word, she reached in front of him and turned off the faucet. Then, sighing, she took a mason jar down from the cabinet, poured herself enough water for one sip, and drank. She smacked her lips when she swallowed.

Meanwhile he found what he was looking for and raised the phone level with her eyes. But she didn’t turn to look. She didn’t look even when the music started, strings and horns crowding through the tiny speakers, the G-major grandeur jostling the outdated hardware, which seven years earlier Irene had purchased for him. He hurriedly lowered the volume, muttering more apology—“Do you remember this?”—and she said nothing, didn’t react, just lifted the mason jar and consumed the final drop. The theme music from Star Trek: Voyager played into their silence for a minute and a half and he was unable for that entire time to look at his daughter and worried she didn’t remember the show or remembered and was just annoyed. But when he finally did with extraordinary bravery lift his eyes, he was surprised, repulsed, to see instead of his daughter her husband, her husband listening to the music and enjoying it. He was standing directly beside her, leaning into the counter, chin to fist, thoughtfully scooping his beard in the palm of his hand, staring past them out the kitchen window and mumbling: “Outer dark. Magnificent. Is this John Williams?”

“What is this to you, Dad?” she asked, not looking up from the planner.

He felt suddenly like he was falling. “Friday night,” he replied quietly.

His daughter’s husband spoke loudly but nobody listened to him. “Soaring bold. Against the dark. The milk-spill stars. Decent and American. Decent on-the-move. The news is on at 9 Eastern. News unfolding—like this, this good feeling, this god-almighty glistening feeling, this caravan feeling. There on the current. No fear. I want to be young forever.” Still frowning with concentration, his daughter’s husband stood upright, moaning a little, letting his beard flop free, and he exhaled and as he did an aroma of spice seemed to emanate across the kitchen.

He raised his arm and beat away the reek. And not noticing, his daughter’s husband reached for the kettle and asked, “Tea?”  

At the same time, his daughter crossed behind him and began to pick up the container pieces and run a dishtowel over them one at a time. He changed hands with the phone, pointing it toward her, though she still didn’t look, just kept doing the chore that was his.

Over the concluding phrase of the Voyager theme, his daughter’s husband went on: “I love this feeling. Young captains. Lonesome graduation. Affirmative action. Signal sweeping the dark. Anybody out there? Are we alone? How long do we go on? There’s no road out here.”

He pocketed the phone and pulled a deep breath and said, not hopefully, “I thought you might remember the tune.”

She seemed focused on the stack of containers, already three sets high. Her absent-minded reply: “I wish you would let us put you on the phone plan. I’ll upgrade that relic.”

“If you don’t remember the tune, it’s fine,” he said and crossed behind her and leaned into the window and peered out.

Her husband touched a hand to her arm and leaned and asked, “Tea, babe?”

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Gape at our neighbors.”

“I’m not gaping,” he said, turning back. He gestured a shaking hand at the drying rack. “I was doing that. Let me.”

“Three teas,” his daughter’s husband said, opening the cabinet beside the stove.

“What are we really saying, Dad?”

“I’m asking you to let me finish these. You don’t have to raise your voice, Deirdra.”

“I’m on the last one.”

He raised a hand and shushed his adult daughter and pointed at the bedroom door and said. “He’s sleeping in there.”

“Let him hear,” she said. “I wish he would hear. I want him to learn to argue. I want him to hear a real argument.”

“I don’t want to have an argument, Deirdra.”

“This isn’t an argument.”

“Good, I don’t want one.”

“You never taught me how to argue.”

“You’re doing fine. Don’t be hard on yourself. ”

“For his sake I wish we would.”

“You’re so hard on everybody. ”

“I agree, Ted,” his daughter’s husband said.

He took his phone absent-mindedly out of his pocket and set about cleaning the screen on the front of his shirt.

“I’m hard on everyone?” she asked.

“Sure. No. I don’t know. Never mind. I was doing that. Give it to me.”

His daughter’s husband had taken something out of his pocket, a bracelet made of fabric and stone, and he held it out to him and said, “Want to wear it?”

He flinched at the remark. He was still trying, helplessly, to ignore his daughter’s husband, but the musky, friendly figure wouldn’t go away or stop talking.

“Give me the towel please. They’re still wet. They mold when you put them away wet.”

“There’s no mold,” she said.

His daughter’s husband was still offering him the bracelet. “It helps with will.”

“Would you just look at that lid, the one you’re holding. That’s mold, Deirdra.”

“It’s not mold.”

“Oh, it’s not? What is it?”

“It’s food. You missed a spot.”

“I wore it to work today. It works. Give it a try.”

“You missed a spot. But just forget it, it’s fine.”

“Deirdra, this is too much.”

“Huh?”

“It’s too—What is your husband talking about?”

“Mom’s crystals.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mom’s crystals.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know, Dad.”

“No, I don’t.”

“For will,” his daughter’s husband said.

“The flow is good for will power,” she said.

“Piezoelectricity.”

He looked at the husband. He looked at his daughter.

She shrugged as if his confusion was a deliberate aggravation, one of the many.

“Pizzo-what?” he stammered.

“She didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Didn’t talk about what with who?”

“You know how private she was. It was something Hejal suggested. ”

“Hejal?”

“Hejal the master healer, Dad. You know.”

“Master healer? . . . This is nonsense. Irene didn’t have a master healer. She didn’t have a Hejal. She didn’t have crystals.”

“Don’t rewrite the history you don’t like, Dad.”

“She didn’t have any healing crystals. It’s preposterous.”

“She was a private person. She made up her own mind.” She end-punctuated this statement with the snap of a lid upon a container. The snap and the droplets visible behind the plastic and the smell and sound of the husband—it was too much. He closed his eyes. 

“All right,” he said, after a moment. “Let me.”

“For will, Dad.”

“Let me.”

“They’re done already.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re done.”

“No. No.”

“You can come with us in the other room and relax.”

“I’d rather,” he began, speaking with his eyes shut, releasing it quietly, so quietly his words might have been missed: “I’m sorry, I’d rather yank your tongue out and rip it apart.” No one spoke. He waved a hand in the direction of his daughter’s husband and without drawing a breath and in the same tone of quiet harmlessness: “You can just take that kettle right in the throat. I don’t care about you. Or your goddamn poetry.”

He crossed behind her and gathered the containers against his front and dumped them in the sink. He stared into it and fumbled in his pockets for a handkerchief so he could clean the sweat off his face. Into the silence the whistle of the kettle slowly rose.

“You never said how much I owe,” he said carefully, dabbing the back of his neck. He couldn’t hear himself over the kettle. “Is someone going to get that?”

He washed the containers again, piece by piece, more quietly this time, in the safety of his private thoughts.

The improvement of storage containers during his lifetime was one of those modern conveniences that, like other Millennial productions, concealed a disheartening reality. Made in the USA, BPA-free: boastful, golden promises that were excusable on the basis of their sincerity when they failed. But they failed. And they required, unforgivably, more work instead of less. They heaped a thousand trying tasks in your lap. They weren’t convenient at all. They were fickle and laborious. They were new inconvenience displacing the old. You were at least accustomed to the old. He never complained about it, and he never complained about tossing out used-up tupperware every once in a while either, those flimsy cubes that scuffed easily and melted a little in the microwave and layered food with indelible chemicals. How many hours he’d spent in offices staring through orange light and smeared fingerprints at rotating glass, hours comfortless and hungry in the wafting air as his precious food was pummeled, a nuclear mash either too hot or too cold. Yet he did eat it. To what end? The true end, like so many of his contributions, was possibly, if she was correct, a strike, an oversight genetic in nature, a fatal fault against his matter, self, and family. She mentioned something called endocrine disruptors, which he didn’t understand. Something to do with fertility and brain development. Just his, he hoped—his best wishful hope, that the only rot be his, be him. If she was right neither of them could control it and there was nothing to do. The poison had snuck through and grafted onto his grandchild and manifested allergies and emotional disorder and muting dread and violent mania and incurable loneliness whose origin was the microwaved lasagna Grandfather ate in 1986. And sure, he could process, he could do the dishes, he could sneak scotch in his room—but no, he hadn’t, not tonight, and he was proud and he was proud his daughter had noticed. He was glad, even as he felt the pressurized mass, the clogging in his chest, the crowding of his breath, the cemented silence. He was glad she noticed. He wanted to be seen.

His grandson was coughing in his sleep. A chesty rasp. He could hear it through the whistle of the kettle.

He snapped off the faucet and looked up. The kitchen was empty. The end of the spout shrieked. He crossed to the stove and turned off the burner. When he glanced across the kitchen, someone, a young man, was there already.

The faucet was running. He had never turned it off. Steam wafted against the backsplash and against the young man’s body. He leaned forward with a dishrag, scrubbing plastic cutlery and setting it out to dry. He stuck his face in his elbow, stifling a cough, then another. He ran his nose over the rounded wad of a rolled-up sleeve. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. He reached for a mug and drank.

The sound of two young children arguing about a toy carried from the living room. One child squealed, then it shoved the other. A piece of furniture scraped the floor. A picture frame clattered falling off the wall, and the other child wailed running after the first. He stopped what he was doing and leaned to the side, poised to intervene, to yell. But his head throbbed. He paused. Nothing would get any better if he yelled. His children would keep fighting. He reached for the dishrag. Nobody was going to finish the dishes off tonight except him.