Read Online Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone - Free Book Online Page A

becoming you, John. Losing me. Losing us. Losing the very reason I went looking in the first place. The way you lost yourself in a China you believed could be converted into Georgia. Why did you leave me? Was it that you could no longer understand English? Had you only the taste for the cheapest red rice?
    You don’t know about television. Imagine one of your radios but this one sends pictures along with the words. After my bath, if the night is warm, I go down to the appliance store and watch the televisions in the window. No one in Chinatown can afford one yet. So, people come out and they watch with me. The men wear straw hats and bob up and down to see over shoulders. The women sit on the curb or lean against the few cars and listen to the man who translates the words which come from the small speaker tucked up under the awning with the sparrows’ nests. There are twenty sets on tiers all tuned to the same picture. You can watch people making sure that all the pictures are doing the same thing at the same time. You can see their heads jerk from screen to screen. I go there to watch them watch. During the day, the screens are turned off, and no one stops on the sidewalk. The televisions are watching us. “Take one home,” the appliance man tells me as I pass his door. “It will keep you company.” He says I will never be lonely. “Come back tonight. They will all be turned on tonight.”
    Then I go back to the American Legion and search for you. In my file is a new commendation from Chennault. I answer mail. Write letters. Make notes in the margins of radio traffic logs.
    I do not know how many letters this makes to you. For a while after the Arbor Day I spent in Georgia, I would send them to your sister there. She would write back as you. She had practiced your hand from the letters she had from you during the war, tracing them as she grew up the way other children trace animals or flowers out of encyclopedias. We both went a long way toward believing. She cut short her hair and nails, carved our initials, yours and mine, into one of the trees. She had her picture taken by the tree while she wore your old work clothes. But the closer she got to you, the more I missed the things that she was not. Maybe I am cursed with too much memory. Maybe I write these letters as a way of forgetting. I watch the nicotine stains on my fingernails grow out as the nail grows out, and I think to myself that by the time the yellow splotches reach the tip, I will be over this. They do and I am not and I smoke more and my nails are stained. Perhaps I will clip them and send them off with this letter.
    Of course, there are other men. Mr. Lee, who brings me the fried bananas and the fortune cookies without fortunes he buys half-priced at the bakery thrift shop. There’s him. He clips articles for me from the National Geographic . He takes me to movies at the Circle Theatre. There is the floorwalker at L. S. Ayres, who began by suspecting me as I wandered around the mezzanine near the stamp corner. But I was innocent, and he led me to the perfume counter where he spotted my arms with samples. What could they say to me? “He is dead and gone.” They are too polite for that. To them, I am a story they could tell their grandchildren. “I knew a woman once.”
    Recently, I met another man.
    At my table at the Legion, I found a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I thought someone had forgotten them from the day before, and I tried to turn them in to the woman at the desk. She said no, they were for me. “A Mr. Welch left them for you himself.” Welch’s was the brand name on the box.
    That night as I watched television, he appeared in the jinriksha, bedecked with flowers. “Audrey, my dear, come for a ride with me.”
    The men watching television looked to see him too, a tall man in a linen suit and Panama. “I am Robert Welch,” he said. “It was I who left the bonbons for you.” The women in the gutter clucked. “Come here,” he