greg sanders

garage door

While passing through my childhood neighborhood on the way back from a job interview, I stop at the house I grew up in and tell the owners I want to buy their garage door. A man slams the front door in my face, but I knock again and he opens it. His tie hangs loosened around his open collared white shirt. He’s probably taken the train up from the city and has just sat down for dinner a few minutes ago, just a regular business guy with a start up family who has to break his ass to make it all work. His two kids and wife are watching me from behind him. Probably she works all day as well. I want to tell them I’m not dangerous, that I know every corner of their house, that my childhood lurks in every crevice, though that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

"Please listen to me," I say. "When I was six it was 1971 and my mother and I painted flowers, peace signs, and the words ‘Love and Peace’ on that garage door. It was late summer, August probably. I remember it clearly; it’s one of my most vivid memories in fact. When I was ten it was 1975 and my parents put this house on the market. The first thing they did was paint over the flowers and the peace sign and the words."

"It’s a strange request mister, and we’re eating dinner now," he says.

"Strange request? Yes, okay, I’ll give you that." Then I remember how my mother outfitted me with a little painter’s cap that she had folded and tied out of a rag. And my father was also out back digging an irrigation ditch at the low point of the yard to prevent it from flooding whenever it rained hard. He was shirtless, skinny and tall, sweating, and his black body hair stuck to his skin like paintbrush bristles.

"Come back tomorrow," this young father says, "and we’ll see what we can do. But I’m not making any promises." And he closes the door again. I take a look down the driveway and there it is, same garage, presumably with the same garage door. They’ve put a hoop up over it so their kids and the kids in the neighborhood can play basketball. That’s good, I think. We should have done that, but weren’t big on athletics or kids bouncing basketballs all day in our driveway. I wonder how many layers of paint are insulating the flowers, peace sign and words from the abuse of these kids. It’s white or off-yellow--it’s getting dark out so I can’t quite tell--with scuff marks all over it. What I failed to tell the owners of 66 Quinby Avenue is that I now live an hour-and-a-half’s drive away.

Even so, I return the next day at around noon, with my pickup. I knock on the front door and ring the bell of the house I grew up in but there’s no answer. I wait, knock again, ring again, and still there’s no answer. I walk around and peer in through a set of windows, but the place is empty and dark inside. Behind one of the closed windows a fat calico cat is stretched out on the sill in the summer light. When it sees me it rolls over and arches to expose its soft underside. A cat, that’s also something we didn’t have.

I back my truck down the driveway, take out my tool kit and ladder, and get to work. It doesn’t take long to remove the door from its track and because it’s articulated, it folds into fourths and slides neatly into the back of the pickup. I take a piece of my stationery, write them a note thanking them for the door, and slip $100 in cash with it into an envelope. This is money I don’t have, cash I took out of an ATM as an advance on my Visa. A damn good deal for them. I put the envelope in their mail slot and start the drive home.

When I get there my son Alex is out back getting ready to launch an Estes model rocket. "You won’t be able to get that back if you launch it from here," I tell him. "Wait until Saturday and I’ll take you out to Robin’s Field. You need lots of space."

He ignores me for about a minute during which time I stand there waiting for his acknowledgment like a lonesome clerk awaiting his next task. "I’m experimenting," he finally says. "I’m gonna find an ant and stick it in the nosecone. It’s like when they launched the dog into orbit. We just learned about it. Were you born yet?"

"I don’t remember. I don’t think so. Anyway, they let the dog die," I tell him. "The Ruskies. They never planned on getting it back." Alex stops his myopic hunt for an ant and looks at me.

"Die? It never came back?" He stares at the ground blankly. "My ant’s gonna come back though," he says, turning over a small stone and raking the dirt beneath it with a stick. I head inside.

My wife, Nadine, is in the kitchen frying up chicken livers and onions, which--along with boxed macaroni and cheese--is all we’ve been able to afford. I’ve been out of work for about six months now and the money’s all but gone. Luckily, Nadine makes a little off the books cash cleaning houses during the day and I’m about ready to join her.

"Rice?" I say to her.

"On the stove." I lift the top off the pot and there’s the clumpy Minute Rice, the scourge of my life.

"Tomorrow night I’ll make some good old fashioned rice," I say, "instead of this freeze dried crap."

She scowls. "Same story I get every night."

"I will, I swear it." Alex comes in and I tell him to wash his hands. I set the table as my wife finishes the cooking.

I married too young. That much I’m sure of. Nadine is still beautiful, still young. She was my first love, my only love, is the only woman with whom I’ve made love. A sprinter in high school, she’s managed, seemingly without effort, to keep her athletic looks. Meaning she’s slim and tenacious, wiry and strong. But lately I’ve noticed some new lines, worry lines, around her eyes. I’m their cause. One of those inexplicable laws of marriage says that spouses can grow distant, that they can lose sight of the qualities that first drew them together in perceived inseparability. First loves have a certain pungency as well, a juvenile association with the discovery of sex and intimacy and shared lives that’s bound to grow old fast. Our son, product of one of many lusty nights Nadine and I spent with each other during winter break from our respective colleges, is the one who will pay the price when we split. Alex will be the loser, that we both know, and yet neither of us have addressed it directly.

We sit down at the table and eat in silence. Alex is thinking about the dog in space, starving, suffocating, or freezing, Mission Control--or whatever the Soviets called it--observing the blips of its last heartbeats. Just a dog, just an ant. I shouldn’t have said what I did about it. Poor kid. I was about his age when my mother and I painted the garage door.

After dinner I stand in the kitchen alone and wash the dishes. I hear a muffled British voice coming from the television in the living room and know that Nadine and Alex are watching "Nature," David Attenborough describing the mating rituals of Peruvian butterflies, or something like that. I stare out the open window above the sink. It faces our backyard and blackness. The night is steamy and though the window’s been open, the kitchen is unbearably hot and the air is still; not even the slightest current comes in through the screen. Over the sound of the television the crickets sing. A mosquito’s been buzzing me all along, a hypodermic needle with wings, as I imagine it, that’s found its way to me.

When I’m done with the dishes, I sneak out, carrying with me my work gloves, wearing a thick thriftshop workshirt that has "Ambrose" embroidered on the pocket. Outside, by the shed, I set up.

Knee-high in thistle, I work illuminated by a lamp on an extension cord and the dim light coming from the house. The Interstate hums a half-mile away. In the thick summer air its sound carries well. I brush a light coat of paint stripper on the garage door, which I’ve propped up on the outside of the tool shed. A spider living in the joints between the garage door segments falls victim to the paint remover fumes. It withers, its legs interlocking like spiked teeth around its aspirin-sized body, then is still, except that it rotates one way then the other on a single strand of web, its last bit of life transformed into kinetic motion. A moth or two circle the lamp on the ground a few feet away. The fumes form an insecticidal shroud around me. Nothing comes close, but I hear the tiny buzzings and the flutter of rice paper wings in the dark all around me. After a half-hour the first layer of paint, a kind of piss yellow, blisters and falls away with a little light sanding. There’s another layer, of gray, beneath that, and it too falls away with some work. Beneath it is white and I can see beneath that some faded figures and letters, bright colors trying to break through.

I’ve now been outside in the dark for several hours but nobody seems to care that I haven’t returned to the house. The television’s still on, I can see, throwing its muted multi-color flashes against the living room ceiling. Probably Alex staying up late, which I shouldn’t permit. I suppose Nadine can see me from the bedroom window and she considers that I’m involved in yet another innocuous project that has nothing to do with getting us out of debt or nullifying the marriage, or at least trying to satisfy our sexual needs. Very carefully I remove the layer of paint that obscures the flowers and peace sign and words. It comes off slowly but beautifully, flaking away in dime-sized flecks, revealing the bright fuscias and yellows, the innocent, youthful blue, the peace sign in black. It’s all there, just as I remember it. Mom was my age, I was Alex’s. I step into the darkness, away from the work lamp, out of the fumes, because I want to see how this remnant of my childhood looks framed by the night. It is displaced, ludicrously propped up in the tattered present.

A mosquito buzzes past my ear. No doubt it will drill into me and painlessly extract some blood for its sustenance. In this, I believe, I am a good find.