Sputterpub's Blog

Pete was starting his meal with the white corn soup and she was trying the heirloom tomato gazpacho when Lily told him she thought the most powerful god was Morpheus. “Yeah. God of Sleep,” she confirmed, leaning over her bowl. “Everybody seems to want to nap, to sleep in, to sleepwalk through life on drugs or on autopilot. Yeah. Sleep is very seductive… but I don’t get it. Why aren’t people resisting? They can sleep when they’re dead.”

Lily realizes as she recalls this that she is often like that with him, coming at him out of nowhere with one of her ideas. He fields well, though. That is one of the things she likes about him. They seem to think at the same rate. Pete had looked up at her, smiled, and tipped his wristwatch at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may be time instead of sleep. I mean,” and he leaned back against his chair, straining his white shirt across his medium-sized middle-aged paunch, “I always look forward to the weekend thinking I’m going to sleep in, relax, take it totally easy, and 45 minutes into that I’m bored and looking for something to do. No, I don’t think it’s really sleep we want. I think it’s time away from this taskmaster,” and he rolled his wrist again.

“But you’re self-employed! You’re the boss; you have a lot of control over your schedule.”

“Yeah, but I can’t ask others to be in the office at 9 and then not be there myself. Maybe it’s the old army habits, but I feel very controlled by work time.”

Lily stops pacing and lets her body drop into a chair. It’s getting to where she can’t take the silence. She wishes her father would come home, no matter what he has to say. She’s about to try Pete again on the phone. As she reaches for the headset it rings.

“Hel-” she begins and she hears the beloved voice: “Mom?”

“Zachary?! Are you okay?”

“We’re fine. We got lost.”

“Lost?”

“We forgot to hang the packs and I guess a bear got into them last night. We lost our compass. We got turned around hiking out.”

“Oh Zack. Is Eli all right?”

“We’re both fine. Just a little hungry. You know what saved us? My watch. Remember how you taught me to use it as a compass?”

“Ahh. When will you be home?”

“We’re on the way now. We’ll stop for a quick bite. See you in about four hours.”

“Good.”

Her father walks in seconds after she hangs up the phone. “Where are Zack and Eli?”

“On their way. They got delayed a little. Hey, Dad: want to wear your old watch?”

Lily’s father smiles at the timepiece as she hands it to him. Lifts his face and smiles wider at her. “It’s a nice watch,” he says and he sets it carefully on the table between them as he sits across from her. “You keep it.”

(Her father taught her: Any daytime but noon, aim the end of the hour hand at the sun. Find the spot halfway between the hour hand and the 12, and that’s south. Really.)

If Lily’s father comes in he’ll ask after Zack, so maybe she should distract him with the watch. She doesn’t want to talk about her son. Zack went camping with his girlfriend Eli, and Lily’s father doesn’t approve of premarital camping. He’s much more gentle on the subject than he was when Lily was young, but even so he can be tiresome. She doesn’t want to defend Zack’s sex life to her father. She doesn’t want the conversation to then proceed, as she suspects it will, to her affair with Pete, and what her father thinks of that. Most of all she doesn’t want to share her growing worry. Zack and Eli are late reporting in, and Lily is beginning to freak out. She thinks her father will agitate rather than soothe her.

Thinking about Pete, Lily phones him. Gets his voicemail. Leaves no message. She wants someone to talk her down from her mounting anxiety. Zack and Eli are only a few hours later than she expected. But she has crossed some worry threshold and is now completely distracted.

She looks around her study and notes her old broken clock/radio. It’s a battery-powered machine and the clock doesn’t work, but she keeps it around because the radio is good and the clock amuses her.

She likes to have an analog timepiece near her bed. She doesn’t want a lighted display; she can see the hands of a clock face even in the dim of middle night. She needs battery power because she’s short on outlets and her neighborhood often loses electricity. Her old clock/radio was perfect until she dropped it: the black blade-like minute hand somehow fouled with the red wand-like second hand and now both sweep around the face together, once a minute. Lily likes to say her clock is absolutely correct every minute of the day and it is: for exactly one second out of that minute.

She wasn’t able to find another battery-powered analog clock/radio. She wakes now to the beep of a battery digital. So she keeps the old clock/radio around, tuned to an all-news AM station, for those quick reports after earthquakes. And it entertains her to watch the clock hands sweep around the face. She appreciates the metaphor and keeps replacing the battery.

Lily begins pacing, desperate to hear from Zack. Her Luddite son refused to pack a cell phone. She tries distracting herself with erotic thoughts about Pete, but all she can recall is their last lunch. She paces some more.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

Her eyes are nearly fifty years old but they can still accommodate close work. Lily feels unreasonable pride about that. As if she could take credit for the elasticity of her lenses.

She can read the tiny characters etched into the back of the old watch: A.F.U.S. ARMY/TYPE A-11/SPEC.NO.94-27834-B. Et cetera. She remembers when she first took it for repair, a few months after her father gave it to her. The watchmaker was delighted, because all he had to do was read the back of the steel case to ascertain what parts were needed.

It was a simple job and he didn’t charge much for it. But even after that and the addition of a black leather wrist strap, Lily didn’t wear the watch as often as she thought she would. It gained five minutes a day. It was so heavy that it tended to slide sideways on her wrist and she kept banging it into door frames and furniture.

When her father first showed her his old Air Force watch, he told her that the creamy numbers and hands glowed against the black-gray face in cockpit light. The second hand stopped when the pin was pulled out, so the instrument could be synchronized with others.

He gave her the watch a few years later. It had lost its band by then. When she spun the stem the mechanism raced, the minute hand a dizzy whirl and the hour hand sweeping like seconds.

Her father lives with her now. With her and her 17 year-old son Zack. Lily’s father is 78 and was in love with his wife her mother all the years (53) of their marriage. Lily’s parents gave her a brilliant example of happy union but the lesson didn’t take. She’s twice divorced and disinclined to try again. She knows that her parents loved each other and were happy – she was there and witnessed it – but she also believes that each would have been a better person alone.

Her mother died of a massive heart attack four years ago. She never knew what hit her, which was a good thing, because Lily’s mother was not a patient woman. Her father stayed put in the old house for the year everyone advised, but he was miserable. And he couldn’t bear the idea of an old folks’ home as he called it, for he was an active anti-social septuagenarian. He moved into Lily’s big house with her and Zack. The three of them get along pretty well.

If her father comes in and sees her playing with the old Air Force watch, he’ll make a remark about wanting it back. He’ll start reminiscing about what a great watch it was, how they don’t make them like that any more. He has a problem discarding any machine that works. Lily got him a new phone when he moved in. He came to appreciate its features. But he hasn’t tossed his old one.

(to be continued tomorrow)