Orange Suitcase
The Orange Suitcase
Joseph Riippi
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“Something (Entirely True) About Your Grandfather”
“Something About Perfecting A Love”
“Something About Marriage, Part 1”
“Something About New York City”
“Something About Borges and the Blind in Chelsea”
“Something About The Unpublished and Unfinished Novels”
“Something About A Valentine's Day”
“Something About Ipek (On A Valentine's Day)”
“Something About Drinking In Baton Rouge”
“Something About Someone Else's Poem”
“Something About Marriage, Pt 2”
“Something About the Orange Suitcase”
“Something About Swimming With Sea Turtles”
“Something About Remembering A Couch Or A Person”
“Something About Vegas: A Note on the Second Edition of a First Novel”
“Something About Last Time At The Cedar Tavern”
“Something About Marriage, Pt 3”
“Something About My Blood And Yours”
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for my family
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“Let's start again.”
A baptism. Seattle, Wa. 1983.
“H
e was carrying an orange suitcase when we met. Wearing his crisp green dress uniform and carrying this absolutely hideous suitcase. I remember it clear as day. He approached me in Point Defiance Park, rose bushes and daffodils around us, bees, a blue sky, Mt. Rainier. I was on my lunch break, and he invited me for an impromptu picnic under a white gazebo. Such a handsome man. He just appeared out of nowhere and asked if I would do him the honor of joining him for lunchâit was quite scandalous in those days, let me tell you. Anyway, I remember sitting there with him and thinking to myself, Now what kind of a lady would fall for a man like this? A man who carries a sandwich and coffee thermos around town in an orange suitcase? No kind of lady I know! But later my mother told me: You can hate the suitcase, Bernice, but still love the man who carries it. And that's just what I did, and he carried the damn thing for the next 63 years.”
T
his happens: I am sitting in the basement of the old house in Tacoma, in the leather chair my mother will make my father sell the summer we move to the valley. I am trying to make sense of the huge metal computer on the desk. I can't find a mouse; the keyboard is a sheet of heavy metal. Childhood photographs of my sister and me are set in small faux-wood frames before the wall. Then I hear a voice behind me: You look old, it says, and I turn and there's Ben Jensen, my best friend from grade school. He doesn't have braces yet; his front teeth stick out like white erasers. He must be around seven years old, and I look down at myself and see that I am still 26, still the me that went to sleep in New York after too many beers. Ben is holding a bow and arrow, the kind we used to make from the springy cedar saplings in the empty lot next door. Slice a notch in either end with a Swiss army knife, his dad taught us. Bend the stick and tie a length of weed-whacker string between its notches. Arrows were straightish sticks; pop cans on railroad ties were enemies' heads; our squealing sisters were moving bulls' eyes. Ben reaches behind his shoulder and shows me the arrow he's made, the tip whittled to a jagged point. He raises the weapon, pulls back on the orange weedwhacker, fingers' tips at his cheek. Whatever happened to you? I ask, but I know he can't reply. I remember your dad left when we were in sixth grade. I remember he abandoned your family so he could be gay, so he could live with the orchestra teacher and move to California. I remember my mother told me this when I asked her, years after we moved, Whatever happened to Ben's dad? All she could explain was: He left Ben a note. But what did the note say? I've always wanted to ask you that. What did it say? And did you understand? Does he call you on your birthday?
W
e were sitting at the café on our third date. The waiter brought us our drinks: a cappuccino for me, loose-leaf tea for her. Monk's Blend? I asked. Monk's blend, she replied, and ordered it always thereafter. We fussed with the mugs and saucers for a bit, and then I coughed and looked at her, still a bit nervous in those early conversations. So, what's the funniest joke you've ever heard? I asked. She didn't say anything, just dipped her tea bag up and down in the browning hot water. She laughed to herself. I sipped my foam and was about to say something when she asked: How do you get a nun pregnant? I shrugged. Prayer? She shook her head. You fuck her, she answered. She stressed the hard consonant and squeezed the wet tea bag between her fingers; she pursed her lips to blow cool air across the surface of the drink. I remember her stare over the rim of the mug. I remember her fingers, her bracelet, music.
W
hen I think of our wedding I think of a blonde curly-headed child dressed all in white, pouring slow water into the ocean from a great glass pitcher. It takes both hands, and a very long time passes before all the water has passed. The sun sets and the moon rises and the sun sets again. There is warm wind; the arcing water is the only sound. I think maybe we are the water leaving the pitcher, or maybe the pitcher. Maybe we are the ocean, or the moon, or all of it. I know none of this makes sense.
W
hen I was maybe ten or eleven years old my grandfather hammered a nail into a tree with his bare hand. My cousins will tell you it didn't happen, but we called his bluff; we didn't believe him when he said that, as a carpenter in Tacoma after the war, he'd never used a hammer. He boasted: My hands are like the Finns. My hands are stronger than Russian tanks. And then he did it, right there in front of us. He held a three-inch nail against the cedar tree and swung his gigantic frame, no hesitation. When he pulled away that nail stayed sticking out, a monument, humongous, gray and wet, with a piece of skin as its rainy flag.
1
I
lean back from the roof and wipe rain from my faceâfingers 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 and 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, revealing more original layers beneath.
I climb down and wipe my hands on the sides of a borrowed jacket. Sniff my fingers and breathe on my palms. You look exactly like your grandfather's older brother, my grandmother said when I put on the coat. I watch her hurry to the bookcase, watch 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 took the photograph away, left me to walk into the rain alone, not knowing 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 looks back to 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. I kick my feet on the mat. The lights only work halfway again, I say. Should I 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 some more, watch her not watching me.
3
She pretended not to see me take her car keys. She pretended not to notice when I took a cigarette from the pack hidden in the junk drawer. An hour later she pretended not to hear me ripping lights from the roof, replacing 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 if no one is watching. 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 on 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.
Grandparents. Tacoma, Wa., 1942.