Do we ever grow past what our parents didn't give us -- or gave us?
It's a quandry.


IT WAS MISSING


Everyone’s dead now, but that doesn’t mean that anything’s changed here. Eddie is just as alone in this house as he was when he was five or fifteen or forty.

Sure, he had family, a mother, father, older brother, but he also had a big wall between him and them. When he was a little kid, he accepted that wall like his skin color or the shape of his teeth. But when he was eight or nine, he stared dreaming about it. He’d wake up shivering from the snow on his side. In his dream, there was sun on the other side, and words and laughter being passed around like a picnic. But no matter how high he jumped or how loud he hollered, he stayed hungry.

When he was ten he asked his brother about it. “What do you do about the wall Gerry? How do you get through it? Can you see over it?”

“What wall?” Gerry said, and just kept on thunking his baseball against the side of the garage. Klonk. Klonk. Klonk. Their mom was in the kitchen but she kept on washing dishes like she couldn’t hear. Eddie had thrown the ball against the garage door a few times himself, then quit. Because no matter how hard or soft he threw it, she’d be out the door, slapping his face, snatching the ball away from him. She never did that with Gerry. Since a klonk was a klonk in Eddie’s view, he never could figure out the difference.

When he was a teen-ager, he asked his friends – most said what Gerry had, but one skinny kid they all called Pretzel cause he was so nuts said, “I don’t got a wall, but I got fog, does that count?” Like it was something good.

Eddie moved out when he was seventeen, barely finishing high school. He was surprised that the wall didn’t move with him. But at a Psych. 101 class in Community College, he finally figured out why. The Prof. told him his parents had built that wall, and it was a relief to learn he hadn’t had a thing to do with it.

He had a string of girlfriends then, but none of the relationships took. Fear of wall, he’d joke to him self. He met Karen in Alameda. She lived in the duplex next to his and there was a five foot wall between the yards. She talked to him over that wall all the time, planting her elbows on the top blocks or resting her chin there. It made him laugh.

When he took her back to meet his family, she shivered in the car all the way home, and kept saying, “Oh Eddie,” and “God! They’re so fucked up.”

They tried to go back every few years, but Karen finally said, “No more, Eddie.” He went back alone for his father’s funeral, but the wall was still there.

He didn’t know his mother was dead until he ran into Pretzel at some airport and he said, “Sorry for your grief,” to Eddie.

“What grief?” Eddie asked, and that’s how he found out. Even so, he still hadn’t cried about it, just kept seeing his mom snatch that baseball out of his hands.

Two months ago Gerry died in a hit and run on I-15 and left no will, he’d never married. A lawyer called Eddie and told him the house was his.

He walked through the house looking at all the left over junk like he was at a stranger’s yard sale: assorted clothes, furniture, plates, cups. There was nothing here for him. The realtor would be around tomorrow to let the Salvation Army guys in, what was left would go to the dump.

Eddie walked outside, shutting the door behind him, touching the lump in his pocket. Then he stood in front of the garage – pulled the baseball out of his pocket and started doing the one thing he’d come back for. Klonk. Klonk. Klonk.