Free The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott Page B

downtown. I shared it only with Jackson, and it was there that finally we touched each other for the first time since the fall I was seven. (Later, as revenge for breaking his heart the first of a few times, he brought a whole host of people up there. They were too loud, the cops were called, and for insurance reasons they were carried down one by one in a cherry picker. My father happened to drive by and witness Jackson’s abashed descent and declared it one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.)
    They are fenced off now, only available to yacht owners who know the keypad’s code, but the docks then felt placed there for our purposes alone. We sat on them night after night, physically below the town though feeling above it, laughing and separating from the circle to walk a few feet and pee off the side into the river. When the tide was especially high they wobbled in mimicry of our intoxicated states.
    Bizarrely, the post office doors were always open, perhaps for the P.O. Boxers, though we never saw any, and so the post office was ours, too, though the echo of our voices across the marble floor and the tall ceiling was just not as friendly as across the river or the rooftops, and we reserved it for quiet end-of-the-night beers or refuge from the rain.
    On visits home I am sometimes dolorous at the sights of these places, or the spaces they used to occupy. The largerailroad trestle we called The Woodbridge was taken down almost five years ago in the name of flood control, though probably the real reason was that it had been confirmed that a dead kid found floating in the river had begun his night drinking there. Barbed-wire fences have sprung up around many of the places we entered and exited freely, and the narrow, thickly leaved sloping alleys named Pepper School and Telephone, which once seemed forgotten, are now brightly lit and trimmed of excess foliage.
    It’s not that I’d like to bring a brown bag of off-sale whiskey bought from the Central Club down to the docks and pretend that years haven’t passed. It’s that the lack of evidence makes the years spent distributing our weight in these places seem moot, makes it clear that our coming of age was improbable, that it shouldn’t have happened.

 
    T he hiss of my father’s oxygen tank punctuates our phone calls. His having to stop and force air through his lips every twenty seconds makes everything he says important, waited for. It always takes at least three or four rings for him to get to the phone; often he will pick up after I’ve begun leaving a message. He still has an actual answering machine, and I feel grateful in those times he is out to imagine my voice bouncing off the walls of the living room or perking the ears of the cat, who is unbelievably old and drooling at this point.
    My father calls me dear heart even when he is frustrated with me. The fact that Jackson still calls him but not me is painful, and I can’t bear to think of my father pressing Play and smiling while my ex-lover tells jokes or anecdotes into the answering machine. The fact that my father still loves him feels like betrayal.
    I do not ask, but he reports that Jackson is doing phenomenally well; the abrupt disappearance of his problem hasturned out not to be a fluke, although fingers still crossed on the part of Jackson and Shannon. While my father must, must know the sort of reaction even hearing the woman’s name might elicit, it is unclear whether he believes there will be some sort of a therapeutic value or, having long ago accepted Jackson and James as a part of the family, feels the need to remind me that this is still the case.
    She is a schoolteacher with apparently quite the gift for children; she is Midwestern with a rather pleasant phone voice and a warm laugh; she seems, according to my father, to be just the support system J needs in a time like this. He calls him “J.” I can’t remember him ever calling him “J” before.
    My heart quickens and toes curl,