Alan

Machines

###

My father made machines. Nothing practical, nothing he could actually use, just scraps of ideas from the bits and pieces that accumulated in the workshop that had come with the house. He wasn’t particularly deft with his hands, and certainly not the kind of dad who could re-roof the house or build a patio the way our neighbor Mr. Carlson did. No, my father could change the washer in a drippy sink or hammer an extra nail into the squeaky back step, but anything beyond a simple repair required that my mother haul out the tattered yellow pages from its place in a kitchen drawer and call someone who made a living being handy. When the plumber or the electrician would arrive in a rattletrap truck heaving a gleaming toolbox beside him, my father would disappear. Sometimes to take our dog Max for a walk in the woods by the reservoir, sometimes to his desk at the tubing mill where he could lose hours shuffling papers and checking his sums. Occasionally on these days I would ask to go with him—the acrid smell of the factory floor was intoxicating to me and with a little cajoling my father would allow me to check my arithmetic homework on the stolid adding machine by his boss’s desk—but most often the answer was no.

###

“Your mother needs you here,” he would say. “Try to be helpful while Mr. Barnard fixes the sink.”

###

Mr. Carlson next door was a handsome man, even as a boy I recognized that. During the week he was like the dads I saw on television: gray suit, slim tie, hat, his hair Brylcreemed to such a black luminescence that it reminded me of the enormous onyx brooch my mother wore whenever somebody died. On weekends, however, he discarded the suits and favored instead khakis and chambray shirts left open at the throat and rolled above his elbows. During the course of his work, several more of the buttons on his shirt would come undone, revealing the broad brown expanse of his chest. I would lie under the most effusive of my mother’s peony bushes and stare. The blooming aroma above me was heady and distracting, but I found it my inexplicable duty to remain where I was and study the powerful way Mr. Carlson accomplished even the most delicate task.

###

Once, my father found me in my hiding place, but instead of scolding me for being a snoop, he just glanced from me to Mr. Carlson and back, then retreated to his workshop in the garage. Behind me, I could hear the bandsaw come rumbling to life, but I remained transfixed on what was happening next door: Mrs. Carlson had appeared, her belly heavy and swollen before her, and handed her husband a beer. He swallowed deeply then pulled her toward him, and when I saw the lingering way he caressed the back of her dress, I gasped.

###

Weeks later, some boyish impulse induced me to dismantle my mother’s new electric stovetop on a night she was expecting company. She immediately ascended into her standard coloratura of rage, and when I suggested that Mr. Carlson would likely be happy to assist me in righting that particular wrong, my father slapped me hard and sent me to my room. Soon after, I could hear Mr. Carlson’s throaty laugh in our kitchen, and as much as a I longed to sneak downstairs, I knew I had to content myself with imagining his looming presence, his tender hands finessing order out of the mess I had made.

###

That night after the party was done and after my mother had retreated to her room, drowsily humming herself to sleep, I heard the familiar whine of the bandsaw. Looking out my window, I saw my father’s silhouette in the lighted door of the garage carefully considering some object he had made. Curious, I crept through the house and out the back door, absconding myself in the peony bush. My father wasn’t in the habit of showing off any of his machines, and as a boy the dusty shelf where they resided held no appeal to me. But my father obviously saw some order in these contraptions, and this night the one he held particularly so. From my hiding place, I could barely see, but I recognized the familiar materials—wood, nuts, bolts—and even the familiar wobbly oblong shape. What was alien to me was the way my father manipulated the thing, brandishing it like a magic trick gone wrong and considering the parts, then folding it like two unlikely halves finding that together they made a remarkable whole.