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Legacy
The electric shaver had been used once and only once before. My mother had bought it as my father lay wasting away to cancer. The chemotherapy had taken away his hair. I had always felt safe knowing that I'd have a full head of hair late into my life and now it didn't make a whit of difference. To compensate my father had started growing a beard, a thick black bushy beard.
My mother didn't like the beard, it made him look like a different man. Not the man she had married. Not the man she had raised two children with. Not the man she had run away from only to come back to. The beard made him someone different but she had always been more forward thinking than my father so she bought the electric shaver.
When I write the book though it will be a straight razor. It will be kept in a leather pouch along with a white badger hair brush and the bar of soap she will use to lather him up. When I write the book I will be over six feet tall and my sister will have a quirky mental illness that has been a burden on our family but one that we cherish her for and she appreciates it. When I write the book I will feel something more profound.
The day he died was like letting out a breath you have held in so long that the taste in your mouth has gone stale. Your eyes are half closed and your lungs squeeze. You expel the air like an evil spirit and as the muscles ache the feeling is like cramp inside. You realise this is how it feels to be empty inside; the next breath won't fill you up again. Nothing will, not for a long time, not until you adjust to the loss.
My mother went upstairs and took the electric shaver with her. She broke open the security tag and pulled out the contents; the booklet with a smiling clean-shaven young man being stroked by an elated blonde on the cover and instructions in seven languages, health warnings in nineteen, the samples of shaving gel and aftershave, the plastic cover, the recharging dock and wire, the travel case. Everything fell to the floor as she climbed the stairs, holding just the electric shaver.
When I write the book she will have tears in her eyes at this point. She will be supporting herself on the banister. She will be pulling herself up the stairs. She will be physically dragging herself closer to the man she intends to say goodbye to. When I write the book I will be strong at this point, and resolute. I will make a promise to my dead father that will see me through the plot. At the end I will lay his ghost to rest.
I followed her up the stairs and watched as she held the electric shaver to his face. She pushed the only switch on it. The device remained inert and she checked to see if it had caught on his beard. I left the room and returned with the charger. I took the shaver from her hands and realised that she was shaking quite badly. We sat for a few hours in silence, waiting for the shaver to charge up. When it had charged my mother removed the beard, first with the trimmers, then with the flat discs. When she finally revealed the man she had loved underneath, the tears flowed quietly down her cheeks and she kissed him goodbye, running her hand across his cool smooth chin.
When she was done she got up and left the room. She gathered up all the pieces and put them back in the box. Then she handed me the electric shaver, good as new. But as I say, when I write the book, it will be my father's straight razor, and I will cut myself with it and swear a blood oath to his memory.
I think of all these things as I stare at his face watching me from the mirror as I shave.
Feb.27.2007