Eileen Frankel Tomarchio
1. THE DISPATCHWindow Water Baby Moving: A Film by Stan Brakhage
Only months before my father will forget my name, he tells me a story about his time in the Marines, just after high school, before he met my mother. One I’ve never heard before, from when he was stationed in California. No—Hawaii. Private first class. Or was it lance corporal? As he describes his jobs at the base, I see the strain of remembering in his pinched eyes and halting voice. Mainframe computer upkeep, working the mess at the hospital, delivering meals to the officers’ wives in the maternity ward. He didn’t mind the KP duty, he says. The moms liked him. New, expectant. He read to them from joke books, put syrup smiles and butter-pat-eyes on their pancakes, shaped their napkins into pillbox hats. He remembers one of the wives especially, named Ruth, or Judy, ten years his senior. He has some trouble conjuring her, describing her to me, but he says there’s something she did that he’s never forgotten. A peculiar request—or perhaps it was more an order.
She wanted him to watch her deliver her baby.
My father stops here, shy suddenly, his face blooming purple-red. I imagine the memory-shock of such an invitation, such a command. I don’t have to ask if he accepted, obeyed. Or how humbled he must have felt, how afraid. I imagine possible reasons for why this Ruth or Judy would want him there as witness. If she was in love with my father. If she was a rebel pulling rank, a free-thinker, lonely. I picture her in beatnik bangs. Formidable. It comes back to me then, a film I saw in college. An experimental short, the filmmaker’s wife giving birth in a loft bathtub. Her uncomplicated labor in jagged cuts, her head lolling back from pain so unposed and intimate that watching felt like a violation, the scratchy film stock, the incongruous soundtrack of funhouse electronica, the camera unblinking as the baby’s head crowns, eraser-pink. Images that scared me back then, or moved me to tears, I can’t recall. The bloody wet, the gloved fingers, the opening like a cataract-gauzed eye. The filmmaker’s rolled-sleeved arm plunged underwater, propping the pale body. His off-screen wonder a given. A stark thing.
I want to ask my dad how he was even allowed inside the delivery room—this, a time of expectant fathers told to wait in hospital stork rooms or corner bars or back at home—but I’m afraid he’ll think I don’t believe his account. He gets defensive too easily. His tears spring so readily. I want to ask him if he blinked as he watched. If he couldn’t move or moved about too much. I want to ask him if he watched my mother deliver me. If by then, watching a delivery felt like old hat, all his wonder sapped by Ruth or Judy. But I’m afraid to ask because I’m more afraid to see those seconds of blankness, no recognition, my own un-birth. So I let him have his Ruth or Judy, true or not, real or dream, figure and scene distilled from the erasure of so much else.
When he clears his throat, shifts in his chair, I can tell his blunted reminiscence is not just done but gone. I wonder if it’ll come back again, this time Ruth or Judy going by still another name. That’s a wild story, Dad, I say. Too late, I know. He stares hard at my face and I think I remember something I’d forgotten. The filmmaker’s face, caught by his wife who’s turned the camera on him. Terror, for only a second or two. I have to look away. As if the camera’s eye is on me. As if I’m being born to my father again—but not again, the first time. Not a thing of wonder but of terror. Clinging to life.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYBooks for inspo
Sprouted nuts
Toothpicks for fidget-rolling
Hemp seed oil lip balm
Miraculously thriving jade plant
Framed pic of husband and daughter
Bluetooth speaker queued with Nils Frahm, Julia Kent, Terence Blanchard, Zoë Keating, Jonny Greenwood…
3. BIOGRAPHYEileen Frankel Tomarchio works as a librarian in a small NJ town. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Chestnut Review, The Forge, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from NYU Film. She tweets @eileentomarchio.