My dad uttered the term “dignity” for the first time when I was sixteen. Its connotations and contradictions were boundless. Dignity was an inherent possession of all beings. Dignity was a state of mind. But dignity was dependent on action.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
The Hollows of Maine
Dignity made up the gaps in our diet. It settled over our skin like invisible film, shielding us from the draft by the window, the corner of the bedroom, the front door. Dignity patched the bottom of my father’s threadbare socks.
For eighteen years I fell asleep to the sound of wind against the walls of our trailer. Our home shook during storms, but in the summers became a suffocating cage. The ceilings were so low heat had nowhere to go, and it settled in the curves of our collarbones, the spaces in between our fingers, and where our stringy brown hair was parted.
Harsh winters grew milder each year I grew older. When I was five, six, and seven, snow mixed with the dust beneath our trailer. Our park was surrounded by dirtied piles of pure, glistening water that became yellower with every minute the sun remained levitating. There were dense woods next to the park. My father scooped me up – sixty pounds of muscle, the rest a floofy orange parka that belonged to my mother and looked like a wedding dress on me – and brought me to a small pond. It was an oversized puddle-
“It’s an ocean, when you close your eyes,” my father whispered. Electrified, I took his chapped hands and squeezed my eyes shut. His fingernails poked through my mittens as he guided me across the ice. Water seeped into the bottom of my sneakers, but between the flashes of color that fought their way through my closed eyelids and the vertigo of spin, after spin, after spin, I was numb to cold. I was a ballet dancer, and I showed my father how far up on my toes I could go.
“Wow,” he said, suddenly still. “You’re really good.”
But I wasn’t. I was the off-brand version of the dream we couldn’t afford.
Ice cracked under my weight. “We keep going,” my father declared. A trail of bright orange swept the ice. My father ran over frozen leaves and I was dragged after him, giddy because of breathlessness and frigid air.
When I was eight, nine, and ten, water ran from underneath the ice of that pond, and the sun warmed the ground until the trailer began sinking into the mud.
“We’re the foundations of the house,” my father told me. “Who cares if this pile of junk can’t stand straight?”
When I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen, he taught me how to sew. The sun torched the back of our necks as we hunched over, fingers aching, picking apart rough fabric. My experience as a child was one of backwards femininity. I have vague memories of a woman’s voice in our kitchenette, of the clatter of pots and pans, of palms slapping skin, counters, walls. I was familiar with yelling, a man raging at a woman’s insolence and a woman screeching at a man’s ineptitude. I do not remember my mother’s face, or if I ever fit into the curves of her body as we slept. I do not remember the way her hands felt when she held me. She left me motherless when I was three.
And so my father did his best to fill the gaps in my knowledge. He clumsily mastered the womanly arts of dancing, cooking, and sewing. He tried to explain the laws of school politics, and told me that all men were dangerous until I found one that matched my love. It was his way of temperance. I inherited little masculinity from him, but we did share a love of manly activities. We went fishing in comfortable silence. His job was luring fish in and yanking them out of the water; my job was slicing their stomachs open with a sharpened quarter. I made paper cut incisions into their twitching bodies then cradled the little animals as they bled out. While we waited for fish, I dangled my feet into the sun-warmed water and gazed at the quick joyful minnows below.
I started school late, so these years were an endless summer. My father took me hiking and camping. Every time, he set up an old camouflage tent, carefully tying it in place and piling blankets and bug spray inside. He slept underneath an ocean of glittering ink, and if the moon was ripped into a jagged edge, or if haze settled over the map of stars in a way that changed its topography, he gently shook me awake and wordlessly ushered me into the cool air to tilt my head up. In the mornings we packed up quickly.
“Keep going,” he called back to me as we trekked through trees, down a mountain, alongside a river.
When I was fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, my absences from school became a problem. The weeks of missed days I had been “too sick” to attend caught up to me in high school, and my father began forcing me to attend classes I’d never had to before. My lack of early education, coupled with my lack of care for education, created urgency in the Totarthe, Maine school system that only a flailing but polite, unexceptional and unrefined teenage girl could. My counselor, managing hundreds of students, called me into his office to briskly inform me that I was flunking out. I was pulling Fs in math and history and D minuses in science and Spanish. My only saving grace was a C plus in literature and an A in gym.
I nervously relayed the news to my father. “Keep going,” he shrugged. It was all he had to offer. My mother was a community college graduate. She earned her associates in teaching before leaving to manufacture a life she hoped would be larger than a two year degree could support. My father did not understand the correlation between material desires and fulfillment, and therefore never grasped the importance of a college or high school education. He did, however, understand basic survival. Food was always scarce in our home, and a teenager incurs many more costs than a toddler. I learned about vaccinations in school. The words measles, mumps, rubella, and polio haunted me. I needed more food, larger clothes, history books, and a plan for adulthood. I was not particularly good at anything except maiming fish and walking long distances, neither of which led to a suitable career for a woman. I could not type, I had poor people skills, and I hated the sound of high heels on linoleum, which prevented me from becoming a secretary.
My dad uttered the term “dignity” for the first time when I was sixteen. Its connotations and contradictions were boundless. Dignity was an inherent possession of all beings. Dignity was a state of mind. But dignity was dependent on action. Dignity was not the tramps that sometimes smoked near our trailer after working hours; it was living comfortably.
New clothes were clothes we took from church lost and founds, new books were skimmed from library donation bins, and charity we accepted from no one. Dignity was self-sufficiency, but dignity was not abject poverty. Dignity was stargazing, the humility of a father and daughter freezing halfway to death in the face of the force that brought them into existence. Dignity was not flunking out of a dirty, man made institution whose sports facilities smelled like pee.
“Show them you have dignity, they’ll think you have class,” my father told me. “Then you will have class, because you do, and you’ll find work somewhere.”
He meant it with no malice. This was the life he was able to provide for me. He had no qualms about telling me, frankly, how to escape it.
One of the few friends I managed to make, Maggie, was a straight-B student and offered to tutor me for free. I began staying at her house, often sleeping over out of convenience, three nights a week. We began spending time together on weekends, too, and my circle broadened to Maggie’s brother and two sisters, her cousins, her old friend from childhood, a mutual friend from school, and so on. My father became a truck driver to mitigate our mounting cost of living. When I did sleep at the trailer, I usually slept there alone. He was gone six nights a week. I was gone four nights, and if I did come home it was at one or two in the morning. The trailer was a mess. We were both exhausted. School was monotonous, drinking was monotonous, and my father’s job was draining both of us more than we recognized. Still, boxes of pasta and cans of beans began greeting me in larger numbers than ever before.
Once, when I was seventeen, I made the mistake of bringing my new boyfriend, Jed, back to the trailer. This was a terrible idea for three reasons: the first was that we had been drinking. Intoxicated, with bleary eyes and breath that stunk, I led Jed over hardened ground and opened the cold metal door. The second reason was that Jed was not used to my way of living. His eyebrows raised when he saw the cramped mattresses shoved together to make walking space. They raised even more when he saw the third reason: the slouched, sleeping form of my father against the wall. It was Sunday night. My father was home. He had walked into the trailer, flung himself onto his mattress, and slept.
“Get out,” I told Jed softly.
“Well . . .”
“Get out,” I whispered.
It was about four in the morning and the sun was already rising. I made my mattress, tidied up as best I could, opened the windows to air out the permeating smell of alcohol, and woke my father.
“Hey,” he said weakly. “You were gone when I came in.”
I graduated when I was nineteen. I got my grades up to a C average and left formal education, happy with my counselor’s encouraged mediocrity. My father did not attend the ceremony; he was away driving. I told him that he should quit, that I was my own responsibility now. The money he made dried up quickly, I wasn’t scared of measles if he wasn’t, and he looked far older and thinner than his thirty nine years.
I took a job in the library making barely enough to afford gas and food. Maggie became a nurse, her two sisters became typists; all moved away.
“Keep going,” my father reassured me. “You’ll inherit the trailer soon anyway.”
It took me five years to question it. Once I did, I started working as a waitress and a cashier as well as at the library. Over the next thirty years we lived in that trailer as Huntington’s Disease ate away the dignity that glued our lives together. I had to lock my father inside the trailer during the day and every other night while I worked my shifts. I collected old newspapers to keep his mind sharp, but he lost focus within sentences. I bathed him, fed him, and struggled to keep us afloat and in ownership of our home. I quit drinking at twenty three, took up cigarettes, and never looked back. I burned my diploma as campfire fuel when I was thirty. Had I not needed books, had I not had lofty ideas about vaccines, had I not dated men named Jed, we could have saved the money my father earned. My C average had killed us in our sleep.
“Keep going,” I commanded my father while he struggled to walk.
“Keep going,” I pleaded with my father as he suffocated in his own head.
“Keep going,” I told him after the tenth year.
“Keep going,” I told him after the twentieth.
I was almost forty when I found, by accident, a box of pasta that was crammed between a cabinet and the trailer wall. The box was hollow, but inside sat pristine, crumpled white slips of paper. For two years after I graduated high school, my father had written down the date. Every day. The penmanship was illegible on the paper scraps near the top, but each chunk of paper I pulled out was more readable than the last. I threw the paper in the air like snow to grab more, to see the earliest date he wrote, while my father shook on his mattress and lost me.
March 24, 1968
My graduation year.
He died before he was forty; a ghost drove his body for the next three decades.
I was fifty years old when my father’s body, crippled with a disease that was born of him, born in him, finally began to kill him. For the second time in my half century of life, and for what must have been only the third or fourth of his, we sat in a doctor’s office. We looked disheveled. A woman rifled through her purse looking for her health insurance card. My father’s vacant eyes met mine. Heat crawled up my neck. I missed two shifts at the library and half of one at the supermarket.
The diagnosis was bleak – end stage heart failure. We were given time.
Every room and every thing in the hospital was neutral – doctors, nurses, walls, clipboards, stethoscopes. Dust particles danced past the window.
We were shoulder to shoulder in gray.
I read often during my time at the library. We always had newspapers lying around. A few days after we visited the doctor, an article caught my attention. I skimmed it over, then read it over. The next morning, I dedicated all of my spare time to selling the trailer.
“Take it,” I hissed at the man who was hesitantly contemplating the mold in the corner.
“Take it,” I smiled at the young couple who would give me nothing but politeness.
“Please,” I said to the young mother who offered to buy our mattresses, pots and pans, and bedding. “Yes.”
I left the trailer where it sank.
Within hours I wrapped my father in my mother’s old orange parka, quit my three jobs, and bought a map. I paid in advance to use a neighbor’s old car for three months.
My father and I drove over three thousand miles, a fraction of what my father drove in his working days. We drove slowly and slept in the car. I stopped at every rest stop that had anything resembling foliage or forests. My father was barely able to hold onto me. His hands trembled at his sides. He hadn’t spoken in months, just wheezes and unintelligible moans.
We crossed into the land of death at sunrise on the seventh day. The idea of dining and dashing to get breakfast occurred to me, but it was implausible. My father was too slow. Instead I called Maggie, my old high school friend, using a stranger’s flip phone. Her elderly mother had run into me two months prior at the library. Apparently Maggie had settled on the west coast after she got married and stayed there after she was widowed. I expressed an interest in calling my old friend. Her mother dutifully handed me a number, a smile, and a retreating back.
Maggie had become Margaret, and had adopted a different last name. Her curves, so enviable in high school, had melted into a voluptuous, formless figure. Margaret was nurturing and condescending. She had turned her average grades into a small and cozy home in an Oregon suburb. Her last child just started college. She gave my father the extra bedroom and set up the couch for me.
My father was confused. “He sleeps on a mattress,” I explained to Margaret.
“Oh,” she pursed her lips.
“Always,” I finished, against my better judgement.
“Why are you here?” she asked once my father’s door was shut.
“His death.”
“On the phone you said he was sick . . . I thought you had come for special medical treatment . . . I didn’t remember you having family all the way out in Oregon,” Margaret prompted.
“We don’t. He has a terminal illness. I read . . . we came for his death, Margaret.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh Lord Jesus,” she whispered, even though I knew she picked up on what I meant at the beginning of the conversion. “Oh honey, well, you can’t.”
“I won’t let him die in your home, no, they have facilities.” I rummaged through my pockets to find a newspaper article I stole from the library. Margaret clasped her hands in mine to still me.
“He can’t consent,” she said kindly. “He is terminal, but he can’t consent.”
“I’m caring for a corpse,” I argued in disbelief. “His soul isn’t there. His mind isn’t there.”
“He can’t consent,” she repeated. “He isn’t in his right mind.”
“But he isn’t real anymore,” I contended. “You don’t understand-”
“It’s the law,” Margaret interrupted.
“This is the only place,” I was weak. “There’s nowhere but Oregon.”
In a great act of kindness, Margaret asked if I was broke. When I told her yes, she offered her home and her food for the next six to twelve months. “He can die in a bed,” she said.
“He lived on a mattress,” I answered angrily. “And he lived with dignity.”
“You both did,” she shot back, but it was laced with the judgement of someone who knew they had done better in life than their defiant counterpart.
That was two weeks before the turn of the twenty-first century.
In month one, I cared for a man with no dignity.
In months two, three, and four, Margaret and I prepared a naked, embarrassed, husk of a living being for death.
In months five, six, and seven, I figured out the deciding factor. Souls have dignity. People have pride.
My father and I lived in the hollows of Maine. I care for a stranger’s body in Oregon. I live without pride, but with as much dignity as I can. My father sleeps on a bed. Month eight passes. Month nine. My father’s spirit sways on tree branches in Maine.
Author Biography: My name is Amelia Borawski and I am a full-time student from Reading, MA. I have always loved reading, and have a strong passion for fiction writing. In addition to writing, I love to dance and play the piano. I enjoy studying the French and Russian languages, and am enthusiastic about history. I currently write for my local paper, and hope to pursue a career in law or journalism.