by Marina Harris
After the War my uncle Rimley disappeared into my closet and we never saw him again. Oddly, whenever I told someone this story, the first question I was asked was: what kind of name is Rimley? His mother probably thought it was pretty for a child born pretty. He was no longer pretty when he returned from the war, more wound than anything. He lived with our family from the time of his demobilization until his dematerialization, which is how I have come to characterize it. My mother often said that was the way to go. Painfree. Painfree was my mother’s highest ambition, a mother who could have admitted that for much of the time life was almost too difficult to bear. I was her only child. Apparently, I had been almost too difficult to bear.
Uncle Rimley’s return was memorable because the kerfuffle at the front door interrupted Boston Blackie on the radio. The kerfuffle consisted of a strange amalgam of joy and shock. Uncle Rimley didn’t reciprocate either the joy or the shock and my mother led him directly to his room with a bed made to military standards, to ease, I suspect, the transition from the war to the suburbs. I knew better than to ask what happened to his face. My mother had put the special embroidered sheets on my uncle’s bed. Those were the sheets I got when I had scarlatina. I didn’t know what was going to happen in the sheets department if I ever got sick again. Although it was pretty clear that my mother was going to have enough on her hands without me getting sick. The sheet maneuver was a warning.
Uncle Rimley spent the days at the Formica kitchen table reading his hands, and once a day rapped on the surface with a terrifying finger nail just before my mother moved his hands to place the soup. He thanked her with a nod and read the soup while it cooled, and on days when my mother peeled potatoes, Uncle Rimley wept, and if I put my arms around him to make him stop, he petted me the way I pet my cat, Sparkles. For my whole life the rasp of the peeler on the spud has resurrected a soft grief.
My mother bought a can of Spam every two weeks. My family had bacon for breakfast and Uncle Rimley had a slice of fried Spam with a pineapple ring. It reminded him of something that brought him comfort for the length of breakfast. What Spam did for me was that I was allowed to use the key to unwind the metal strip that released the lid. Eventually somebody decided that the metal strip posed a mortal danger. Sharp metal edges disappeared from the lives of children along with lead-laced paint chips and real potatoes for Mr. Potato Head. Childhood was more or less finished off by the safety mafia.
At eight, I recognized that war reorganized a man. My best friend Dickie’s father screamed in the night, which made Dickie’s little sister think there was a monster who unleashed his ire at midnight. She stopped believing in Santa Claus before she stopped believing in the night monster. I was a little bit jealous of Dickie’s sister, who got to be terrified by the night monster, being terrified looming large on the list of premier childhood experiences, perhaps a notch above sharp and painful objects. Dickie was impressed by the fact that there was someone who returned from the war who didn’t make any noise. I wondered if the war that Uncle Rimley went to was a place that put a premium on silence, like my school.
Besides sitting at the kitchen table, Uncle Rimley passed time on the front porch when the weather was what my mother called clement. Occasionally I heard a neighbor comment that he shouldn’t be on display. It never occurred to me that a man sitting on a porch was a type of display object. I could see complaining if my mother had set my uncle up among the plaster mannequins in Meyer’s Department Store window. In my neighborhood there appeared to be rules governing what can be seen.
Uncle Rimley’s room was spartan except for my pretty good pencil sketch of Sparkles that won an award at my school, and a photograph of a young woman with nice hair standing next to a man who was probably my uncle, but it was hard to know for sure because the face was scribbled over with ball point pen. In my innocence, I thought that Uncle Rimley would want to have looked at the face he once had.
Both pictures were stuck on the wall with Scotch tape, which was going to be hell on the wallpaper. For some reason my mother didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have gotten away with Scotch tape on my walls, and giving Uncle Rimley my drawing of Sparkles was a way of displaying it without being blamed for the Scotch tape.
There was a young nurse who showed up at the house periodically that I wanted to think was my uncle’s girlfriend, not realizing at the time that it is difficult to have a girlfriend if you never talk and your features aren’t well organized. But it was easy to think that Uncle Rimley was getting whatever it is that girlfriends doled out because she always closed the door and the only sounds coming from the room were rustles and the snap of her bag. I asked my mother if she was Uncle Rimley’s girlfriend. I should have known that a girlfriend would wear something more appealing than lace-up shoes with thick rubber soles.
Dickie’s father was eventually taken away by men in white, the way it happens in movies. Dickie invited me to visit his father in the veterans’ hospital. He was in a large room with other heavily sedated men and managed a smile only as large as the sedation allowed. Dickie’s father had baggy skin. Later, Dickie told me that his dad used to be a big man and the only thing that was left of his big was his big man skin. The war rearranged men in different ways. Dickie and his mother kissed his dad and I said Nice to see you again, Mr. Goddard. After he kissed Dickie, he kissed me. I think he thought I belonged to him. And then I told him that my Uncle Rimley had probably been in the same war. The labored smile made a brief reappearance, then we were taken to the five and dime and told we could have as much candy as we wanted. While we were choosing suckers, Dickie said they were going to fix his dad so he didn’t scare his little sister. When I got home I told my uncle that I had seen Mr. Goddard and it looked like he was having fun. The hospital struck me as the kind of place where they could fix Mr. Goddard’s night noise. I wondered if a place like that could have done something about Uncle Rimley’s face.
My mother and I both witnessed Uncle Rimley walk into my closet. On and off he did a peculiar thing like lie on the sofa and arrange the cushions on top of himself as a way of disappearing. Whatever he did, it was harmless and even a little funny, and it was a relief to my mother to know that her brother hadn’t lost his sense of humor. He was always the funny one, she said. We watched him walk into my closet and close the door, then we forgot about it. I jumped on my bed to read my book. In the middle of getting dinner ready my mother called out to me to check on Uncle Rimley and make sure he was okay. I expected to see him sitting in the corner on a wooden box where certain toys I no longer had interest in were stored. My mother didn’t believe me that he was gone and came to make sure I wasn’t having her on, and that’s when I heard her say, Painfree, whereupon she removed Uncle Rimley’s place setting and decreased the amount of rice for dinner. The minute my father walked in the door I told him at Uncle Rimley was gone, and true to form he didn’t say anything. I wanted to be sad but didn’t know how to be sad in the house. I managed to be sad later riding around the neighborhood on my bike, and then I discovered the trick of watching Uncle Rimley’s breathing in the night and everything was better after that.
At night I left the closet door open with the light on to watch a certain diaphanous article of clothing move with his breathing. I would push the heavy articles to either side and isolate a nylon blouse I never liked. When my mother tried to give it away because I had grown too big for it, I fought tooth and nail to keep it—the evidence of life.
It was odd that Uncle Rimley should disappear in my closet because he was not a closet man. In our house he lived in what had been a storage room without a closet. We knew he was fine with that room because he had almost no clothes.
On the day of his disappearance, the photograph of the girl with nice hair standing next to the man with a redacted face disappeared with him. The Scotch tape scuffed up a small amount of the wallpaper. My mother eventually replaced the wallpaper, noting that she never actually liked the pattern on the original. It had come with the house, a house belonging to someone with plebeian tastes. At the time I had to look up the word in the dictionary. After he was gone I heard my mother explain to a neighbor that her brother felt as if he had overstayed his welcome. There was no closet mentioned. My mother wanted to shape Uncle Rimley into a man of manners. The neighbor was probably relieved to see the face disappear.
For the four years that my uncle lived in our house, I never thought he was doing nothing because his nothing felt somehow full of something. Full, even, of everything.
Some years after Uncle Rimley’s departure, I was snooping around in his room and found a little card with pin holes in a nightstand drawer and it came back to me, the sight of Uncle Rimley escorted to his room by my mother while my father and I tried to hear the end of Boston Blackie on the radio, a card pinned to his army shirt that said MUTE. At the time it had been less interesting than Boston Blackie and got buried under the joy and shock. It hadn’t seemed odd that my uncle never spoke. I assumed he had nothing to say and had no needs that weren’t automatically met by my mother. And his not speaking was not so different from my father’s not speaking. I stole the little card to remind me that MUTE was, perhaps, the approved way to navigate the world as advocated by my teachers.
One day after school I found the woman in the photo seated in our living room speaking with my mother while she fiddled with what I was pretty certain was a wedding ring. I went to my room to hide out and spy and noticed that the shoes on the bottom of my closet were disordered and the disturbing thought occurred to me that this woman had been inside my closet looking for my Uncle Rimley. By the time I put my shoes back the way I liked them, the woman was gone and my mother told me she was his wife and Uncle Rimley never went back to her after the war. She had asked if she could have his things but didn’t take the drawing of Sparkles that I had given him. My mother told me the woman was devastated and I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly except that it sounded sad and I started to get the impression that the inside of this woman was as unpleasant as Uncle Rimley was on the outside and that he may have been in pain although my uncle never seemed to hurt unless it was that my mother slipped analgesics into his soup. I worried that the wife might have wanted the MUTE card and admitted to my mother that I had lifted it. She told me that Uncle Rimley had pinned the card to his shirt so that no one would try and talk to him on the bus ride to our house.
I saw my uncle’s wife in the five and dime looking at hair clips but pretended to not know who she was. I saw her pocket one clip and pay for the other one and it must have been what a person does who is hurting on the inside. Eventually I came to find out that pocketing from the five and dime is common and does something indispensable for the people who do it. Like my friend who punctured her thigh with a sharp pencil when something wasn’t right at home. Many leads remained embedded in her leg. I worried about lead poisoning. I didn’t want my friend to die, but I didn’t know how to make her happy. Graphite, it so happens, is not lethal.
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When I came home from college during holidays, I always brought a certain flimsy summer dress to hang in the closet so I could watch it move with Uncle Rimley’s breathing in the night. It was a dress I bought at a second hand store that was as near to the dress in the photograph as I could find. The dress of a girl to whom a lover never returned after a war. I did it for Uncle Rimley, imagining he would feel close to his good looking past breathing on this dress. It rose out of a type of imagination that can’t withstand the rigors of logic. It rose from the desire I had to stay close to my silent uncle.
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Eventually I grew out of visiting my home, that place where my uncle somehow soaked into my closet and waited for me to love him in the night. My father smoked himself to death watching television after the waning of the radio. My mother died because she didn’t have anyone to cook for and her potato peeler rusted.. There wasn’t anyone I could speak to from beyond the grave about my Uncle Rimley’s lung functions which encouraged me to drop the obsession. I finally accepted that Uncle Rimley was irrefutably dead, crushed in the demolition of my parents’ street in service of the greater good—a strip mall from which a new generation of unhappy women would pocket hair clips.
For many years Marina worked as a costumer primarily for modern dance. She also choreographed works for modern dance and ballet. Her final engagement in theater was a puppet theater for adults. During most of that time she wrote.
