Smooth Seas Don’t Make Good Sailors
I clicked the button on the edge of the tattered brown leather recliner, propping my legs up as I ran my fingers across the rips. It was weathered for sure; we both were. The recliner was the first thing that I had bought with my enlistment bonus. It reminded me of my own father’s chair that he had placed strategically in the living room so he had a clear view of the news and the front door. I must’ve gotten that from him, among other things. It was because of that that I saw my granddaughter, Elizabeth, waddle in from the front entryway. She quickly made her way over to me, tugging on the end of my pant leg.
“Papa, can I come up?”
I leaned forward in the chair and scooped her up. Her mother wandered in the door behind her, waved sheepishly towards me, and wandered down the hall to the bedrooms. I held the girl loosely as she wormed around in the recliner, before settling in on a spot that she was comfortable with. Craning my neck slightly so that I could look beyond her blonde pigtails to the evening news that was blaring through the television. Nothing much had changed since the early afternoon broadcast, but you always had to stay aware.
“Papa,” Elizabeth cooed. “What’re those thingies for?”
I followed her fingers, with my eyes, towards the glass shadow box that sat newly strung across the coffee table. Beneath the glass sat my service medals and ribbons that I had placed there after my retirement. I had treasured them, I was proud of them, but now they sat splayed across the coffee table, dusted over.
“Well, honey. A long, long time ago, Papa was in the Navy.”
Elizabeth gazed back, a bit perplexed by my statement.
She nodded, settling her head back down to my chest. The silence didn’t last long, however, as most 4-year-olds do, she had a follow-up question.
“What about Grammy? Was she also in the Navy?”
I smiled at that.
I told her about the first time I was on the ship, how I kept a photo of her in my coveralls, took it everywhere that I went. No matter the time or place, Grammy was with me. One morning, I sat down at breakfast and went to fish it out of my pocket, but instead, I found nothing. Immediately, I panicked. I checked every pocket, I retraced my steps in the galley, and I even checked the inside of my boots. The photo never turned up. That morning, I trashed my breakfast early so I could go check my rack for the photo, and there it sat, neatly folded on top of my sheets.
That photo went through hell, oh boy, it did. By the time my boots were back on the ground, it was faded and ripped. The ink had smeared, and the silhouette was almost unidentifiable, except I knew, I knew that only my wife could wear a smile like that.
Elizabeth’s eyes bubbled in awe as she stared back at me.
My daughter rounded the corner of the hallway, grasping a ball of fabric in her hand. It was yellowed and dirtied. Unraveling and fraying around the seams, but the blue and pink stripes that flowed throughout the fabric were still just as identifiable as they were the day that we brought her home from the hospital. While my wife was giving birth, I was out somewhere in some country. On some base. I wasn’t aware until several hours after my daughter had been born, when I had gotten the call, that I was newly a father. They sent me home relatively soon, but every hour I had spent without my wife, without my daughter, for the betterment of my country felt agonizing. The blanket looked brighter.
That night should have been laced with pleasantries and joy, but the overwhelming feeling of dread hung over the room. You could not ignore the American Flag dangling off the porch, and over my head.
When I told my wife I was going to re-enlist the following year, she threatened me with divorce. For a second, I was angry; I thought she was giving up on the very thing that was making it possible for us to live. Later, I understood that I may have been the only one living.
I felt a hand come down on my shoulder and squeeze.
“Alright, Dad, we have to get going. Ellie has a birthday party.”
I nodded and responded, setting the girl from my lap back onto the floor. Elizabeth grabbed her mother’s hand, dragging her to the door.
“Bye-bye, Papa.”
I shifted back into my recliner, pushing my legs out so that the back lowered itself, and returned my eyes to the television. The news, again, hadn’t changed from the earlier broadcast. It droned on about what it had been for days. Cookie cutter. That was the issue my wife had had with this neighborhood. There was no difference, the world spun in the same direction. Each house hung an American flag and had a houseplant decorating its porch. The grass stayed neatly cut in the same patterns, on the same day. Grass clippings bagged neatly to the right of the driveway.
Each house had a life cycle; when the older couples had died or divorced, they were replaced with the newlyweds pushing strollers. The widow at the end of the street was soon put in a home; she wasn’t allowed to live alone, it was too dangerous.
My hand gravitated towards my shirt pocket, grasping the photo that lay inside. I unfolded it carefully. It was fragile and flimsy, ripped through the corners. Ink fading, gradually, unexposed to the elements. My wife, my daughter, myself. Standing on the porch, the very one that she hated so much before. But we stood, smiling, my hand on her waist. Both of our hands on our daughter's shoulder, squeezing.
The next day, we stood at the front of the church in the same position.
Friends, families, strangers all lined the building, flowing one by one up to the front of the church. Each person brought a new version of the same story. The “I’m Sorry’s” began to run together like the years that had passed before it. Beside the box, there were lines of photos of her. I stared quietly at the photo of us at our wedding. There we stood, hand in hand. I was in my dress blues, she wore a traditional white, fluffy gown. We were smiling together. That morning, we bickered back and forth. The kind of argument brought on pure nerves, wondering what would be.
We stood together as the American Dream. I suppose I never really understood that there were hidden implications to that dream.
My mother and father stood the same on their wedding day. I stood in front of them, gap-toothed and sideways. As a child, I would never stay still. I used the couches as if they were trampolines. My mother would always tell me to stop: I never did. Eventually, one day, I did fall off the couch onto the coffee table. I cried all the way to the Emergency Room, until I had no voice, and they stitched and bandaged my eyebrow. My mother still never yelled, though; instead, she held me closely. After that, I stopped jumping on couches.
“We are gathered here today…” The pastor spoke.
I never believed in God. Traditionally, per se. The second time I came home, there was a bible that sat on my wife’s side of the nightstand.
“When did you start believing in God?” I questioned her.
She answered in a roundabout way. Never fully explaining how she directly got there, but rather began telling me about how one day, when I was gone, she had taken a trip to the grocery store, but instead of driving to the Walmart, she had stopped off at the church that sat at the end of the neighborhood. She never said why, but that day, it felt right. Later on, she said she picked up a bible and began reading it nightly. Never in order, though, she had just flipped through pages until she felt compelled to read the stories within it. It was a foreign object to me. I came from a home with no Bibles, just good liquor for my father and a new bouquet of flowers, sitting in a vase on the table every time he brought home a new bottle. After that night, I never mentioned the bible to her, just like Mom never mentioned the empty bottles in the trash can.
On Sundays, she would leave in the morning, drive back to that same church for the Sunday service, and come home around noon. She never asked me to go with her, but I can’t say I would’ve accepted. She never talked about the service either, or the nightly bible passages that she would read in bed at night. Sometimes I assumed it was because I had never asked, but I also believed each of us had to have things to ourselves, and her relationship with God was one of them.
When the pastor spoke now, I came to wonder what would’ve happened if I had asked about the church. Maybe then I would have a different understanding of the words that I have heard so many times.
Eventually, I wandered up to the podium. I stood facing the room of piercing eyes, and for a second, I was back on the ship, standing on the edge pulling into port. Looking out to the crowds of people all craning their necks, wondering which one of these individuals was a part of their families. My wife was out there somewhere, doing the same thing. I stared back and cleared my throat. I named off the strengths of my wife one by one. How she was always a wonderful woman. I talked about how she was a wonderful mother to our daughter, and how my daughter had the best woman to learn from. How she will be missed. How much I missed her already.
But then I paused. I surveyed the room, counted the number of heads nodding along to the words. The words that I uttered were regurgitated. They were out of the same dictionary, the same reference book that everybody used when writing a eulogy, and she deserved so much more than that.
When I opened my mouth again, I found myself telling stories. I spoke about our first date, where I took the photo that I had kept in my pockets all those years, even if she hated the way it looked. I spoke about the first Christmas that we had shared with our daughter. When we took her to meet the mall Santa, she cried so hard she threw up on the red suit. The next parents in line never forgave us for that. I told them about our house, how my wife always insisted on planting a garden, and the first summer we tried it rained so much that the seeds had washed away, and instead of flowers, we were growing mud. The neighbors had complained about the look of it, but my wife insisted that it stay; one day it would grow. I especially remember the first photo I got in the mail when I had gone away the next summer. I was expecting a photo of her, our daughter, maybe even the dogs or the cats, but instead it was a photo of the garden, speckled with stems and budding flowers.
By the end of my speech, the room had a different feeling. The heavy somberness was replaced by a lighter feeling of gratitude. The ‘smile because it happened’ sort of gratitude. My cheeks were soaked with tears, but there was a faint smile that crossed my face.
I descended the step from the podium and walked one last time over to the box, where she lay. I pulled my hand up into my shirt pocket, feeling around until I found the folded square in my pocket. I unfolded it quickly, staring admirably at the photo of us.
Last Thanksgiving, she had begged us all for one more photo, so we agreed. The two of us, our daughter, and her little family all sat neatly in a row on the front porch step of our home. My granddaughter stood in the front, sideways and gap-toothed, never sitting still. We all smiled at a phone camera, propped up on a rock lying in the entryway.
My daughter had uploaded it to a digital picture frame that she had bought for us the Christmas prior. She had explained to me that the device would make it easier to keep all our photos together, new and old. I never knew how to use it, though. She showed me many times, and after the sixth conversation that we had about it, I finally convinced her to have it developed for me.
I pulled it up to my lips, kissing it softly before I tucked it neatly into her folded hands. This time, I hoped she would use it to remember us.
Amanda Loesch is a fifth-year undergraduate writer at Virginia Wesleyan University, specializing in both creative and analytical writing. Outside of full-time work and study, Amanda shares a home with two cats, a dog, and five hermit crabs, who offer both companionship and occasional chaos. Previously published for her poetry, Amanda is eager to expand her reach and continue sharing her work in a variety of literary spaces.