Grandmother told me of the day she lost my father. We were having an impersonal restaurant dinner on my father’s fifty-sixth birthday, when Grandmother, urged by the simple fact of Time’s effect on my father, recalled that strange day, sometime in the forgotten ‘70s of the Soviet Union, in the Cotton Republic.
During the recounting my father remained uncharacteristically silent. I ascribed his lack of interjections, corrections, or hijacking of the tale told to his memory’s failure, which deprived him of the advantage he usually enjoyed: exhibiting superiority to his mother. Grandmother said he was five or six years old at the time of the disappearance, if not younger. Seamstress that she is, she grasped the memory by the bright, white point of the suit my father wore that day—labor of her golden hands: a miniature, tailored suit made of gleaming, white fabric, resplendent in the morning sun. She had crafted the three-piece suit with pride and dignity following the rupture with that wayward boxer of a husband she had—my grandfather, who’d thought it permissible to use his strength to reprimand her. So, lone mother that she chose to be, not thinking of how children can drift off, hoped the angelic suit would keep him on the straight path to school and back, kissing him goodbye.
At this point, Grandmother’s retelling took on urgency and lost the initial warmth at the thought of what Father looked like in the suit. She reached the point of replayed panic, that wild dread. Father remained quiet, sitting across at the table, eyes low. Expecting to hear his additions to the memory, I kept looking at him.
The time for Father’s return from school came and went. She, with my uncle in tow, rushed to and fro across the streets, from neighbor to neighbor, in the vicinity of the school, searching for any sign of her vanished son. On the ladder of possibilities, she’d naturally jumped to the topmost rung—he must’ve been taken and would not be returned. Only return he did. He returned by his lonesome, at the turn of day to eve. It happened uneventfully, without any guilt or understanding at having spent the entire day who-knows-where. It was at this point I regarded my father to test whether he did recall. He turned away—busy trying to flag a waiter passing between the tables. He seemed frustrated. When he managed to get the attention of one, he rose from his seat and left for the restroom.
Grandmother continued to address her rapt audience of myself and my father’s wife. The only sign he bore of his truancy was the fact his pristine suit had been ruined. After the initial shock of relief, she noted how his suit was muddied by a motley of stains on his knees, chest, elbows, and cuffs. His hands were grimy, shoes caked with mud, hair wild. Despite the mess, he seemed calm and oblivious, confused by the reception upon his return. Through his mother’s teary embraces and questions, he insisted on displaying what came home with him: slimy tadpoles stuffed into his breast pocket. No, into nearly every pocket his little suit allowed. Some wiggled and fell, others lay still in his palms.
My father came back to the table with an air of impatience, of having had his fill of dinner. Before Grandmother continued, at that juncture in the memory, I turned to him, unable to contain amusement and the closeness I felt. I asked about his whereabouts that day, about the tadpoles, his reason for it all. Why? Where?
He sighed, his forehead creasing as he raised his eyebrows and eyed his empty plate. Matter-of-factly, he said he came across some boys by a river, who’d been playing there, throwing rocks into the green water, looking for frogs. He’d watched them, enthralled by their play, and seemed to have forgotten all about time. Grandmother listened as he told the version she’d known and grown to accept, looking across the table not at my fifty-six-year-old, graying father, but at that muddy boy in his pearlescent suit. He met neither of our eyes. Two waiters approached—one with the bill, the other to take care of the table.
The entire day? I asked, having noticed he never said he’d joined the boys in their play. Well, yeah, I suppose the entire day, he answered, and looked at me a tad longer as his wife offered her scoffing bewilderment. Grandmother already allowed the memory to slip into the past as she fussed with the bill, hoping to take care of it first.
He lied, of course; he lied. I later regretted seeing through the lie, still do. So, you see, something else happened that day, at the shaded green river’s bank, where the Cotton Republic boys played and lobbed rocks at frogs, capturing slimy amphibians, caring little for what their play did—there, my father shed his suit.
And was a frog.
Alexei Raymond’s work has appeared in Underbelly Press, Some Words, and Dodo Eraser. He serves as a fiction editor at Blood+Honey.