Brewster in Three Parts: One (ii)

This is the second installment of the first chapter in the short story Brewster in Three Parts. I’ll post the last two installments in the days ahead. You can read the Preface here.

Beth Lewis, Brewster’s mother, was a homemaker from Hoboken. She lived in the same house for thirty years, ate the same vegan food for ten and received the same eight magazine subscriptions for seven. There’s stories in all three but the most personal was how she went about getting her eight subscriptions.

She ordered all eight exactly two weeks and a day after her husband of forty-two years died suddenly while mountain biking in Tahoe. Her husband, Steven Lewis, took the trip to Tahoe every year, without Beth, to visit Brewster’s older brother, a real estate agent and adrenaline junkie of some local repute. The year after Steven’s death would have been the tenth anniversary of his annual Neverland trip, as he called it. Some the the more memorable father and son activities during their annual bonding had included sky diving in 1999 and getting lost in the Sierra’s during a 2002 backpacking trip.

Beth didn’t exactly approve of their activities. She considered sky diving and motorcycle racing a class of activity she’d file under potential life ender, but she wasn’t about to cheapen the fun by playing the disapproving wife. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair. All she could do was express her concern, judiciously, and occasional, with the tact of an aging women, suggest they make Las Vegas the permanent destination for their Neverland trip. Beth figured the worst that happens in Vegas is a hangover and bad eggs.

“Las Vegas is fun,” she once said. “Hell, go get yourself a hooker. Or two.”

Steven remarked that at his age a hooker was as dangerous as sky diving. If not more so. They cost about the same besides. Beth’s hooker hook was her last attempt at drawing her loved ones away from the pull of adrenaline. She also realized their time together was more than just basking in the surge of testosterone and manly-ness. They were father and son. They need their own time together, away from the curse of practicalities and economy. A time together to exist outside the matters of household and career.

In this way, Beth was able to separate her needs from the needs of her husband and son, though in some ways their needs were the same. They all wanted to love one another. Her fear and concerns were, in effect, motivated by love. She only desired to love her husband on this earth until natural causes interfered. Natural causes preferably being a death together, in bed, at a ripe old age somewhere in the nineties. Spooning often entered the equation if she lingered with the thought.

She actually forgot herself once and mentioned her fantasy to her husband, of them dying in bed, spooning each other at the age of ninety one. He remarked that he didn’t think ninety year olds were flexible enough to spoon. She didn’t have to say that his manufactured wisdom was besides the point.

The point, which Steven didn’t feel up to addressing, was tethered to the time it was made. Specifically, Steven was getting up in years and old men were supposed to stay at home with their old wives. They didn’t slalom down geological trophies on mountain bikes. Her concern for his mortal life, and her emotional one, eventually bore fruit.

Her husband died when he fell off his mountain bike and tumbled down a hill. His helmet had come off and the subsequent collision with an unforgiving Oak tree was more than his brain could take. He died three hours after his fall. Two weeks and one day later Beth ordered her eight magazine subscriptions.

It was an impulse buy, her subscriptions. Beth was walking from the back bathroom into the hallway when she suddenly realized she was heading to the den to rouse her husband. The bathroom faucet was dripping. Surely Tom could fix it or that’s what she was thinking. The realization felt like a deep bite into her side and it was all she could do to find safety in the living room, on a couch.

Losing a loved one is a painful process because you lose them more than once. Every day you die little deaths. Moments where the one you love dies all over again. Sudden realizations that they are actually gone is a cruel process. Some days are good. Others are bad. For Beth this particular one was bad and she found solace in a New Yorker Magazine sitting on her coffee table.

After she had exhausted the contents, she jumped on the internet and ordered seven more subscriptions. From that day on, until she died while napping one afternoon at the age of ninety-four, every week the postal service delivered eight magazines to her split level, vinyl siding ranch home.

One day, a few years after her husband’s death, Beth was reading an article in Science. It made her consider, which she was fond of doing. It made her consider the qualities of truth and time. Beth decided time has a way of reducing today’s truth to tomorrow’s quaint notion.

Everyone’s had this experience on a personal level. Romantic love being the most obvious truth bending culprit. When lust meets time the result is often embarrassed memories. How could we have so blindly scrambled after a truth that in retrospect appears so cruel? Happens to even the most restrained and proper among us. But evolving truth isn’t simply a personal experience. Truth, what we believe to be real, changes in even the most fundamental aspects of our existence.

The air we breath, the sounds we hear, and the sky we once questioned as children all have a history of changing truth. What was once so for them is now archived and forgotten. Replaced by a grander understanding and a cleaner honesty. Science, the study of what is so, our most formidable and heavy of pursuits, cannot escape the tide of truth. Looking back, there’s something endearing about our ancestor’s assumption that the ground they stood upon was the center of the cosmos. What was once a scientific fact espoused by giants wouldn’t leave the lips of a child without a goofy grin and a chuckle nowadays.

Over the centuries people have come to believe science’s conclusions on a matter are as close to the truth as one can come. Throw a baseball into the air and it’ll eventually make its way back down. Gravity is true. It’s certainly more honest than your local bookstore’s nonfiction section. But even science is not immune to truth’s relative nature. Throw that same baseball in space or underwater and it’ll never make its way back down. Gravity is true depending on where you are. It’s a relative thing, as is the pursuit of truth.

Science and earnest research are prey to a contextual universe and human subjectivity. Things change. It’s inevitable and because things change our thoughts about them change as well. The beauty of the process is they frequently change in fractured and tempestuous ways within the same time period. One need only to peek into the research on global warming or nutrition studies to see a competing kaleidoscope of theories. Science, while good for assurance, is as fragile as the environments and people it studies.

These thoughts, a few about the stew she was cooking, enveloped Beth as she read the Science article about children and their socialization. The article boldly proclaimed that a child’s peers and not her parents have more of an impact on social development. A scant ten years ago it had been the opposite. Perhaps in ten more childhood development will be ruled by a talking, walking iPod Beth thought. It doesn’t make much difference she decided as she put down the magazine and picked up the Entertainment Weekly. Peers, parents, iPods, they’re all beholden to the child’s in-born sensibilities.

If you happened to be a guest at Beth’s home that day and you were the conversational type, she would have told you that child are born into this world with a particular grace that is unique to them. Peers may mold it. Parents may nurture it. iPods may accentuate it, but in the end, a child’s fate is born of something far more ethereal and mysterious. It’s personality.

No one knows where it comes from or why it varies from child to child but any parent will tell you no two babies are the same. Similar perhaps but every child enters this world with a unique personality. There’s not much anyone or anything can do about it.

And if you happened to be a guest in Beth Lewis’ home that day and were of the inquisitive sort you might press her on her theory. And if you did she’d begin to tell you of her third and final son, Brewster Lewis. Brewster proved her thought, that sometimes a child just is and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it.

Her first son took the path least traveled, her second, conformed as best he could, and Brewster, well Brewster never did quite accept being a person. As he told his one day dad, when he was five, while they shoveled snow off the driveway, “Dad. I think I’d make a better turtle.”

…continued in Part II, coming soon.

July 06 2006 12:28:09 AM EDT