Joseph Riippi
1
I lean back from the roof and wipe rain from my face–fingers smell like wet pine and cigarettes. My grandfather used to say he built this house with his bare hands. He laid these shingles and hung this gutter. Beyond the wooden peak and weathervane the sky is a dripping scrim. Are you watching me? I pull the green string of Christmas lights and hook the final length around a bent nail and wipe my face again. He pounded this nail decades ago. He carried railroad ties on his shoulders. He crushed rocks between his fingers. He threw logs for fun. Now I stand at the top of the ladder and peel white paint from the gutter. Dry flakes fall away like fake snow, original wood revealing itself.
I climb down and wipe my hands on the sides of the borrowed jacket. Sniff my fingers and breathe on my palms. You look exactly like your grandfather’s older brother, my grandmother had said when I put on the coat. I watched her hurry to the bookcase, watched her come back with a photograph of a great uncle. He left the farm in Finland to go and fight the Russians, she said. That was the last time your grandfather saw him, you know, when your grandfather was still a little boy. She’d taken the photograph away and left me to walk into the rain and wonder how the story ended.
I flip a switch in the metal box on the side of the house and look up. Less than half the lights work; the last reflects off a knot of electrical tape, one of the ancient splices holding the long strand together.
2
I walk into the kitchen where my grandmother sits with a cigarette and a yellow romance novel. She smiles when I open the door and then looks back at her book. These books get dirtier and dirtier, she says, pretending surprise. I wipe my face with the sleeve of the coat that makes me look like a dead soldier, kick my feet on the mat. The lights only work halfway again, I announce. Should I just drive into town for some new ones? She pretends not to hear me and flicks ash on a dinner plate. How often does she pretend? Maybe the aids are just for show. Maybe she smoked even when my grandfather was alive and this isn’t so new. Maybe she’s nothing at all like the grandmother I remember. I stand in the doorway and kick my feet again, watch her not watching me.
3
She pretended not to see me take her car keys. She pretended not to notice me take a cigarette from the pack hidden in the junk drawer. An hour later she pretended not to hear me rip down the lights and replace them with a brand new set.
The rain fell fat and slow, like very wet snow.
I wrap the clean white wire around the rusty nail and pretend I am setting a bomb to kill Russians; the sky is growing dark and no one sees me peel off the price tag and crumple it in my jacket pocket. No one sees me pick a scab on my thumb. No one sees me do anything anymore. No one will notice, I tell myself, not until January when my father comes to take them down, and I’ll be gone by then. I walk back inside. My shoes are soaking wet and squirt on the linoleum floor. Merry Christmas! I yell, to be sure she hears. Lights are up! She brings me a towel and a bowl of meatballs and mashed potatoes. I take off the coat; it is heavy and I feel more like myself without it. She smiles and sits next to me and pats my head, pretends not to notice the empty coat and puddle forming around it. She kisses my hair and sniffs it like a dog would a stranger.
–
Joseph Riippi is the author of the novel Do Something! Do Something! Do Something!. His new book, The Orange Suitcase, is forthcoming March 2011 from Ampersand books. He lives in New York.
