The Keyhole Opera Read online

  That got her interest. “Why not?”

  “This is a mystery trip.”

  “What’s the mystery?” I asked.

  “That’s also a mystery,” my father said. I could see only his eyes in the mirror, but it looked like he was smiling. “The first part of this mystery is figuring out what the mystery is.”

  “The mystery is where we’re going,” my sister said.

  “Partly,” my father said. He looked at my mother. “That’s the obvious part. Where are we going?”

  “Nebraska,” my mother said.

  Even though we were passing the Nebraska welcome sign, I didn’t think that was the answer.

  We had lunch at a park in Grand Island—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and warm sodas. My father opened the road atlas and studied it there on the picnic table. On the way back to the highway he stopped to buy us ice cream, paying with coins from a mayonnaise jar that he’d kept under the front seat.

  He started talking to my mother about why Putt A Round hadn’t worked out. “Not leasing something closer to the college was a mistake. Maybe I should have cut and run right away,” he said. “Even handing out free passes, we weren’t getting anyone in to play.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. My friends and I played the nine holes after school every day for a month, but we had played about as much putt-putt as we wanted to by the time my father started charging.

  He had made the course himself. My father was good with his hands, and he had imagination. All the holes were mechanized. My favorite one had the ramp leading up to a tank turret. The turret rotated, and you had to time your shot so that the gun barrel was pointing at the hole when your ball rolled out.

  “Location’s the key,” my father said, “and I knew that going in. I knew that.”

  “The rents were too high close to the campus,” my mother reminded him. “It would have been worse that way.”

  “How could it be worse?”

  “I mean we would have been broke faster.”

  “That’s true. We’ve been broke a lot faster than this.”

  They got to talking about which of my father’s businesses had gone broke the fastest, and then because they weren’t sure they could remember them all, they started counting backwards from the Putt A Round to the aquarium store to the slot car track.

  To keep the order straight, they remembered all the jobs my father had held between business ventures. He had read water meters, driven a snowplow and painted houses. My father had sold shoes, sold soap, sold encyclopedias, and sold vacuum cleaners. He had taken tickets at the college basketball games, installed carpet, tended bar, driven a forklift, delivered phone books and distributed snack foods, sometimes holding two or three jobs at once. He’d never been fired, but nothing interesting ever happened when he was working for someone else. Whenever he quit, we’d have a family party with cake and ice cream.

  We left the Interstate and continued east on a two-lane highway. After we crossed the Missouri River, we were in Iowa, but not for long. Another Interstate took us down toward Kansas City. By then my parents were talking about the wooden circus trains my father had made and sold—or tried to sell—before I was born.

  Watching the sun, I said, “We’re not going east.”

  He looked at me in the mirror but said nothing. I had interrupted. My mother was talking about the first circus animals he had cut out with the jigsaw. They all looked the same. “Like elephants without a trunk,” she said.

  My parents laughed. The older the memory, the more likely they were to laugh about it.

  “We’re going south.”

  This time, he answered me. “South on the map,” he said. “But still east. On this trip, we don’t go anywhere but east.”

  At Kansas City, we changed highways, twisting and turning on the interchanges until the late afternoon sun was right behind us.

  We spent that first night at a motel in Saint Charles, Missouri. My father got two rooms, and my mother hardly argued about it. In our room, I let my sister choose what to watch on TV. I wanted to think about the mystery. Where were we going? The only clues I had were where we had been.

  The second morning, we started out the again with a black sky over our heads. My sister complained about the cold, but she didn’t sleep in the car this time. She saw the stars fade out and the sun rise over Illinois like I did, like we all did.

  “Did we ever live in Illinois?” my sister asked.

  Illinois, my mother told her, was the only state in the country where we had not, at some time, lived and gone broke.

  “That’s not quite true,” said my father.

  After another breakfast of crackers and apples, I asked for the road atlas. Illinois and Indiana were a lot skinnier than the states we had already been through. I traced the line of the Interstate and predicted that we would eat lunch in Kentucky.

  My father bought us a McDonald’s lunch in Lexington to both fulfill and celebrate my prediction. I ate with the atlas before me.

  “We’re going to Virginia!” I announced through a mouthful of hamburger.

  “Through Virginia,” my father said. “Yes.”

  “Did he solve the mystery?” my sister asked.

  “No.” He smiled. “No, he did not.”

  I looked to see where the smaller highways went after the Interstate ended. “North Carolina, then.” It was a state I’d never been to.

  “You’re right,” my father said, “that’s the last place. But that still doesn’t solve the mystery.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  My sister sighed dramatically and explained, “We are going east.”

  We spent the second night in a motel in Richmond, and we had another early start the next morning. The sun came up as we drove over a long bridge, and my father said, “That’s the Chesapeake Bay.”

  “I could get a job,” my mother told him. “The kids are old enough.”

  “If it’s what you want,” he said. Then, on the other side of the bridge, he added, “We’ll get back on our feet.”

  “I know.”

  “And then I’ll have another idea.” He laughed.

  “I know.” There was something strange in her voice, not exactly sad.

  “It might be the right idea, the next one I have. It might be something people want, something that makes them happy.”

  “Anyway, it will sound right,” my mother said. “It will sound like heaven on earth at a dollar a head.”

  After a minute, he said, “Are you sorry?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “So am I,” he said. “At the end like this, every time, it’s like somebody died.”

  They didn’t say anything else for the rest of Virginia. When we crossed into North Carolina, I felt sad and excited at the same time. It was like getting evicted, wondering what would come next.

  We stopped before the sun was halfway up the eastern sky.

  “Elizabeth City, North Carolina,” my father said.

  “Is this where we’re going?” my sister asked.

  “This is just where we’re stopping for the day.”

  I said, “Why?”

  My father didn’t answer, so I said in a fake spooky voice, “It’s a myst-er-y.” That made him laugh.

  We went to a museum that had Indian arrowheads and a room full of wooden ducks. When my mother explained what a decoy was for, my sister refused to believe that real ducks could be that stupid.

  After lunch, we played miniature golf on a course that wasn’t half as good as my father’s. Nothing moved. But my father pointed out that it was just off the highway in a tourist town.

  The rest of the day, my sister and I goofed around in the pool at the Holiday Inn, the best motel so far.

  The last morning was like the others, except that we ate breakfast in our room before we started. The sky was still dark when we drove over the long bridge out of town, and then we were on a ribbon of island with sand dunes on either side of the highwa
y. We stopped twice for my father to consult the atlas, and a salty wind rolled through the open windows of the car. Finally he followed a sign for beach parking and drove to where we could see the ocean. By then, the sky was orange.

  “From here, we walk.”

  We got out. My sister ran ahead and got her shoes wet before anyone could tell her not to. My father took his shoes off and rolled his pants up to his knees. My mother looked at me and shrugged. We took our shoes off, too, and then my father waded calf-deep into the waves.

  “This is as far as we can come,” he said. “As far east.”

  I said, “What about Maine?” and my mother said, “Hush.”

  “No,” my father said. “He’s right about Maine.”

  It made me happy to be right, but I was even happier to be standing in the ocean, watching the sun come up. Three days in the car was a long time. It was worth it.

  We watched the sunlight on the waves. High above the glimmer, sea gulls rode the wind. My father stared out over the Atlantic as if he were looking for something, but there wasn’t anything to see besides the birds, the sun, and the hazy line between sea and sky. The wind was blowing his hair back from his face.

  My sister was busy poking something in the water with a stick, so she missed what happened next. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe whatever she had found in the water was just as important.

  Whatever you remember, that’s the thing that matters. That’s the thing you get to keep.

  Anyway, it was a small thing.

  It was this. My father put one hand on my mother’s hip and rested the other hand on the back of my neck. The wind was cold, and his hand felt very warm. We stood there for a long time, and even after he had taken his hand away, I could still feel it there. Even after I was alone looking as far east as I could see, after my parents and sister were halfway back to the car, I could feel the warmth of his hand.

  Valentine

  INSIDE THE SHOPPING MALL, he stood near the entrance to a clothes store. He thought it was the sort of place where his ex-wife would have shopped when they were married. It probably wasn’t the sort of place where she bought clothes now. The shoppers going in were all much younger than he was, than his ex-wife was. Probably she dressed very differently these days. He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her in years.

  He held a red envelope.

  The way he had imagined it, he would give the valentine to one of the women who was as young as his wife had been back then. But he had already let two such women walk past. They could have been his daughters, if he’d had children.

  So he stopped a woman closer to his own age. She was shorter than he would have liked. Heavier. Her lipstick was too red. But he was already launched. “Listen, I know this will seem a little strange, but there’s someone I wanted to give a valentine to, only I can’t.” He was talking too fast. “If I could give it to you…”

  “Why?” She looked him in the eye. Her eyes were brown and serious. “Why can’t you give it to her yourself?”

  “No, I’m not asking you to deliver it or anything. Just to take it. To accept it as a gesture.”

  She frowned. “What kind of gesture is that? She doesn’t even know about it.”

  “I don’t want her to know about it. I mean, I do, but she wouldn’t understand. I was married to her a long time ago. She lives in another state. But the way things turned out, I wouldn’t want her to think I was asking for anything or expecting anything or…”

  “Then what’s the point of the valentine?”

  “See, that’s it. I want to send it to her twenty years ago. I want to send it to her, to who she was, just after we were divorced.”

  “Divorced,” she said. She shook her head. “You’re a coward.”

  “No,” he said, though perhaps he was. He had thought of sending the card unsigned, anonymously. He didn’t because of the postmark, and because her lover, the man she’d had the affair with, had done things like that, had sent unsigned notes, left flowers on the windshield of her car. Once or twice, he had found these things meant for her. “If I actually sent it to her…she wouldn’t know what it meant.”

  “What’s the point of giving it to me, then?”

  “We were so young, and I…” He stopped. Her gaze was unrelenting. He couldn’t tell this woman, this stranger, about what had happened, about how marriage had been something that he sort of slept through. How, after the papers were all signed, she had made dinner for him. How one thing led to another on the couch, in the bedroom. How she had surprised him, how different she was as a woman than she had been as a wife. He woke up. Making love to her for the last time, when it was too late, he woke up. “My whole life has been different. Better. I’m grateful.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes. Enunciating, as if to a slow child, she said, “Write her a letter.”

  He waved the red envelope. “But the valentine…”

  She snatched the envelope out of his hand. “All right,” she said, raising her voice. Other shoppers turned their heads. “I took the valentine.” Hands shaking, she stuffed it into her purse. “Now you’re under an obligation. Now you have to write her a letter.”

  “I never said anything about writing her a letter!” His hands shook, too.

  “No, you didn’t. But you’ve got to do it now. And you’re going to, aren’t you. Aren’t you!”

  “Give it back to me,” he said.

  “It’s mine now.”

  He reached.

  “You touch my purse…”

  “Damn it,” he said. “I don’t have to write her a letter.”

  “You do, though.” She patted her purse. “You know you do.”

  Again, he said, “Damn it.” But he could hear the difference in his own voice, as if he were admitting something. She nodded. She stepped past him. He watched her walk away, holding the purse close to her body, clutching it as if it contained not an anonymous valentine, but a letter from someone she once loved.

  The Burlington Northern Southbound

  HER NAME WAS CHRISTINE. He didn’t know how to talk to her, so he wrote her a poem in which he compared her to the Burlington Northern southbound out of Fort Collins. He told her about the way he used to stand on the tracks in the dazzle of the headlight. He liked to step aside and stand on the tie edge to feel the thunder in his bones. Between the quaking of the cinders and his joy, the engine would almost bring him to his knees. The diesel throb in his guts would ebb until it was only sound, and then the cars—some shrieking on their springs—would clataclat clataclat on by. He’d choose one car, and at a trot he would swing aboard the ladder. He’d feel the night air in his hair, and the cars nearest him would have a music all their own, a rhythm he could never hear if he only stood near the track as each one passed. The horn would sound for the last intersection, a song sweet as jazz. Then, from even fifty cars away, he would feel the vibration of the engine digging in. He would dream for a moment of hanging on, of riding the coupling platform through the night, riding for weary hours in a white-knuckled crouch until the daylight would show him the red hills of New Mexico and the smell of juniper would be in the air. Then he’d leave the dream to notice how fast the ties were flying beneath him. He’d lean out into the wind at the edge of town, and he’d launch himself into the void and land running with a jar we would feel all the way up his spine, a shock he would sense as a flash of white and the taste of electricity, and he’d run and run blindly and sometimes stumble in the cinders and scrape his knuckles and bang his knee. When he could stop at last he’d hear the blood rushing in his ears for a long time while he felt the train rush on and recede, and he’d watch the stars wheel awhile and when he walked home there’d be a ringing in his ears, but gently.

  He tried to put this in the poem. It was four pages long and ended:

  I want to ride you home, Christine,

  and beyond. I want to ride you into

  mornings sharp and cold and blue

  and never run the same track twice.


  He never heard a word from her, not even to acknowledge that she had received the poem. What woman wants to hear she is like the Burlington Northern southbound?

  The Goblin King

  WHEN I WAS SMALL, MY FATHER would read me bedtime stories, and my mother would say from another room, “You aren’t reading him that poem, are you?”

  “It’s his favorite before bed!” my father would answer with a wink to me.

  I wasn’t sure why my father thought the poem about the Goblin King was my favorite. Every night after he read it I would lie awake for a long time, listening to the darkness. Later, I often woke up crying, and my mother would come and hold me. Nevertheless, every night after my last story, my father opened the book of children’s poems and quietly read the lines about the Goblin King’s spies:

  The Moon is an eye for the Goblin King

  And watches all you do.

  When you pout or cry or shout or whine,

  The spiders tell on you…

  Most of the poem was devoted to children who misbehaved and what happened to them when the Goblin King found out. One little boy disappeared up a chimney, snatched by a nameless black thing. A little girl was dragged into a well. And then there was Annie.

  Little Annie was a noisy child,

  At dinner she banged her plate.

  Her parents sent her to her bed.

  Alas! They sealed her fate.

  The Goblin King has feet of sand

  And never makes a sound.

  When Mother pulled the covers back,

  Here is all she found:

  A shriveled, blackened ball of hair,

  A tooth, a nail, a bone.

  Nothing more of Ann was left

  Except, perhaps, a moan.

  There was a picture of the Goblin King in the book. He sat on his forest throne, grinning. Except for his yellow teeth and eyes, he was made of forest things—branches, grass, sand, mud, and dried leaves. It was hard to see where the forest ended and the Goblin King began.

  One night, the electricity went out in our neighborhood just before my bedtime. I was already in my pajamas, and my father carried me into my bedroom. There was no light for a story, but my father recited from memory: