Untitled Essay, Untitled Painting, by Stephanie Provenzale-Furino

Untitled, by Delbert. L. Thomas (American) 1974. Photo of painting taken by Carissa McNeill Alilovic, 2024.

Untitled Essay, Untitled Painting
 
author's note: "The part in italics is the 'untitled essay' I'm writing within the essay... as if we are breaking the 4th wall. I wanted to show the thought process and work that a writer goes through while writing something. The parts in regular font are the present time as me the writer researching and thinking about the untitled essay in italics. Whenever I go back into italics, that is me writing the 'untitled essay' again. The writing style is inspired by Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where we see the playwright's thought process as the main story."

My dad had made the cut in the first round of his bowling tournament. The bowling alley was near Ravenna, Ohio, about a 45-minute drive from Cleveland. My mom’s father, my Grandpa Thomas, lived in Ravenna, and she wanted to visit him before the second round of the tournament started. I know this because they’ve both confirmed it.
          
I can imagine my parents bickering on the way there, my mom pleading for him to just slowdown in their…
           
What was their car again? I text my dad, “What was the cool blue car you had before I was born?”
            
I can just hear them.
 
“Steve! Slow down!” my mother said as she pushed her foot into the car floor, stomping on invisible brakes.
           
“Vic – Come on! You can’t expect me to drive slow in this thing!” He revved the engine and gave her a goofy scrunchy-up pout, his Mario mustache making him that much cuter.
           
She laughed and looked out the window, the trees one green blur.
           
No speed could have gotten them there soon enough though.
           
The speedometer reached 95mph, and my mom…
           
My dad texts me, “1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme!! It had a 35 rocket with a 4 barrel engine!! It was the fastest car I ever had!! I once went 115mph on a Sunday going to a bowling tournament!!”
           
Oh geez. Okay.
            
The speedometer reached 115mph, and my mom yelled, “Steve! Slow down!” just like they did my entire childhood.
           
They arrived at my grandpa’s mobile home, laughing, my mom punching my dad’s arm playfully, telling him to “not drive like a speed devil ever again.”
           
My mom knocked on the door.
           
“Dad?”
           
They were on a covered patio. I know because I’ve seen pictures. The mobile home was very fragile, shifting under your feet as you walked from the front to the back. You could hear everything in that echo chamber. So, Grandpa Thomas should have heard my mother calling him.
           
“Dad!” I can hear her voice going up, concern now peppering it.
           
She turned to my dad and said, “Maybe he’s asleep? I think I can see him on the couch.”
           
She knocked again. No movement.
           
She knocked again. Just voices coming from the TV.
           
Perhaps now she wished that they had come before the first round of the bowling tournament.
           
Panic zapped her like an exposed wire. “Steve, we need to call 911.”
           
But how did they call? This was 1988. There weren’t cell phones. I ask my dad in another text, “Do you remember how you guys called the police when you got to the mobile home? You wouldn’t have had cell phones.”
           
My parents stand at the door, immobile, stuck, waiting for direction.
           
He texts me back, “My god that’s right! I really don’t remember.”
           
“Maybe went to a neighbour?”
            
My mom told my dad to run over to the neighbour…
           
“I don’t recall doing that!!” my dad says. I have my mom bring my dad back over.
           
“Hmm bizarre. Because the cops or firefighters are the ones that broke down the door, right?” I ask my dad.
           
“It was the paramedics!! Ask your mom. I guess we got a neighbour??” My dad’s extra punctuation marks sound just like his exaggerated voice he always speaks in.
           
It occurs to me that maybe my mom had a key to the mobile home, but she forgot it. Maybe she never had one? I text her, asking for her side of the story. I continue.
            
“Steve, we need to call 911!” She must have forgotten her key…
           
“I never had a key. Went to the neighbour,” my mom responds. Okay, no key. Neighbour. Paramedics.
            
“Steve, run over to the neighbour and call an ambulance!” my mother’s voice shook, her tongue tripping over the word ambulance, the syllables too much. She stood there looking at the outline of her father on the couch, unable to reach him, unable to help.
           
My dad ran back over from the neighbour’s, something he doesn’t remember doing. Probably adrenaline, probably his brain erasing this traumatic event. Death had never really knocked on his door before.
 
They waited. I envision the moments waiting to hear those sirens of help. Those long agonizing minutes.
           
Did they stand there in stunned silence? Did my mom pound on the door, her fist taking out every transgression her father had ever done to her? Like throwing her First Communion cake against a wall in pure alcoholic rage in front of all of the guests? Like bending his clarinet over his knee in a terrifying fit of anger? Like letting her leave home at 16 without so much as a phone call for over a year? Did she scream, spittle coming off her lips as she cursed her father for causing such panic now when really she needed someone to rescue her all those years ago?
 
I don’t know, because I don’t ask.
           
I have a picture of my Grandpa Thomas lying on that very couch. It’s either Christmas or his birthday because my mom has stuck two green gift bows to his brown knit sweater. He looks happy and sober.
           
The couch is a late 70s plaid of orange, brown, and beige. I wonder who picked it out?
           
“Probably my mother. She wasn’t a very good judge of things,” my mom tells me on the phone once we decide to just call each other – my essay could wait.  “She probably sat in it at the store and liked it but changed her mind when she got home.”
           
“What happened to the couch?”
           
“Oh, we had to throw it away. We didn’t know how long he had been there. He had wet himself. It smelled terrible. Ugh, it was awful.”  
           
I have inherited some of my grandfather’s things throughout the years – his perpetual motion clock that GM gave him when he retired, his travel Olympia typewriter, his wedding ring, and most of his acrylic paintings. My mom has given them to me because she says they are too painful to look at. They remind her of blue and green bruises, of sleepless nights. They remind her of the sweet man he became once he was sober. One of the paintings, signed D L Thomas, July 1974, hangs on a wall in my living room. Untitled, it depicts a storm on the ocean, waves crashing into each other, a mist obscuring dark sky.
           
My grandfather suffered an aneurysm long before my parents got into their car. The paramedics took him away because he wasn’t dead. Not yet. He was still in the mist.
           
“Something I don’t think I’ve ever told you was after we took him to the hospital,” my mom says on the phone. “Your dad had gone back to the bowling tournament since he was doing so well. So, I was alone with my dad in his room. He still hadn’t woken up or said anything.”
           
I can’t imagine standing next to my father after finding him like that.
           
“So, I’m standing there, and I’m pissed. I’m pissed that he didn’t call. I’m thinking about what’s to come. Because, I know. I know he’s not coming home. Now, I’m going to have to get the door fixed that the paramedics broke. I’m going to have to get rid of that couch that now has piss on it. I’m going to have to get rid of everything in the mobile home. But then my dad opens his eyes.”
           
I haven’t heard this before.
           
“He opens his eyes, looks right at me. I say, ‘Dad! Why didn’t you call?’ but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and I have this angry look on my face. I’m upset about everything that’s happened, and here I am standing there with this bitchy face. Steph, I can’t tell you how much this bothers me.”
           
I swallow.
           
“Then he closes his eyes, and he never opens them again. He never says anything, and I’m the last thing he saw, with my bitchy face.”
           
“Oh, Mom, he knows now why you looked like that.”
           
“I know. And he knew I wasn’t a bitchy person, but I still can’t get over that.”
           
Then I think about how my Grandpa Thomas traumatized my mother’s childhood with his alcoholism and abuse, and yet she’s still upset that she somehow let him down in his final moments. He let one final blow hit her heart.
           
“I don’t even think you dad knows about that,” she says. Very typical of their relationship.
 
I look back at the photo I have of my grandpa, the man I never knew, wondering. 
 
Wondering what an aneurysm feels like, wondering what he was watching on TV, wondering if he felt remorse for letting his daughter down one last time.
            
My mom stayed by his side until he let out his final breath. Sitting on the second bed in the room, she had been fiddling with a medical glove whenever he sat up, grimacing. He grunted in pain then fell back on his hospital pillow. The air seeped out of his mouth as my mom looked at her motionless father. She sobbed and dabbed her eyes with the medical glove, a fill-in for a tissue, just like he had been a fill-in for a father all those years.
           
After I hang up with my mom, I look at his ocean painting one more time. My mom once said that there had been a ship on the waves, but that he ‘sunk’ it because he wasn’t pleased with the results. Instead, the brushstrokes crosshatch, bringing your eyes toward the swell of water where souls have been lost to sea. Greens and blues texture the waves, just like a healing bruise. I hope he found peace beyond the mist, but more importantly, I hope my mother does too.
 
Stephanie Provenzale-Furino

Stephanie Provenzale-Furino is a librarian in Northeast Ohio. She holds an MFA from Ashland University, where she finished her book-length memoir. When she isn't reading or writing, she's busy jamming out on guitar. You can view her other work at stephanieprovenzalefurino.com.