long and behold

by Catherine Dean

He brushed the peach against his suit jacket before taking a bite. A peach is not an apple. It was just one thought of many that occurred to his mother, Linda, from her vantage point in the reserved pew. As he dried his face against his sleeve, Ginny strode onto the dais. John Henry held out the pulpy remnants which his wife removed with the aid of an open freezer bag. It was not a neat, reassuring gesture. Instead, it reminded Linda of a fish struggling to breathe. As she watched her daughter-in-law stride away, giving serious magician’s assistant energy, she determined that a eulogy should never be in need of props. Linda set her spine into the hardwood pew, shivering at the thought of the unavoidable Prufrock quote.

“To everything there is a season, Ecclesiastes 3:1,” John Henry began the eulogy for his father.

Linda exhaled with the relief of an anesthetized patient extricating her fingernails from the recalcitrant plastic arm of a dental chair.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock always sticks in her head, “Women they come and go…” She thought, “Exceedingly more apropos,” is “‘to your scattered bodies go.’” Such poems were made for parody as was anything from the pen of Coleridge or Longfellow and of course E.A. Poe. John Donne, not so much. To her mind, he continues to be significantly more interesting than T.S. Eliot.

She would have preferred a quote from Lady Lazarus herself describing the marathon tick of love as measured by gold watch beats rather than coffee spoons. Donne seems to her relatively unproblematic by the side of Eliot and Plath. Linda has never scuttled onto the shores of the Berck-Plage, which she mistakenly read for years as Berck-plague before self-correcting. “Did I actually say that out loud?” she responded to daughter Letty, digging her nails into her shoulder, whisper-shouting, “Control yourself.” Impulse control is the first thing to go with age. Still, her eldest son had prufrocked it hard. That really should be a thing, she managed not to say.

Linda scooched along the pew, making space for Malcolm. She acknowledged him with the slightest head-tilt. If he found the gesture grating in light of his extended absence, he never let on. She literally had won the return-of-the-estranged-relative pool after all. For sure, Corin would be proud that he showed, although he absolutely would have bet against his younger son. It would have been all about bragging rights and not financial remuneration. Cor might however have put a little side bet on Malcolm turning up in the very same shirt he had worn 17 years before. 17 years seems an unremarkable number, for the most significant act of their lives.

Since then, she has asked herself many times if withholding is actually an act – or the absence of one. It required resolve and will. In the end, she let him go. Even at peak intransigency, she loved him. Besides, he never did anything he didn’t want to. It was always that way. In someone, not her own child, that kind of stubbornness might have been a sign of integrity. Malcolm like she, is a truthteller, born of a truthteller of a truthteller of a truthteller. What truthtellers cannot accept is that for them to achieve that beautiful kind of unyieldingness, others have to throw down. And not in the good sense. Reaching that conclusion had cost her. It had removed her from their uniquely heirloom heritage as truthtellers.

Some mistook her sobs of laughter for tears. “Oh man, I vision-boarded it,” she thought, scanning the yellow calligraphied letters WWJD on Malcolm’s message tee. He always wore his political views. It was his favourite message tee. She was a little surprised it had not attained pyjama-wear status by now. The message was pithy, but also not. One word, and not. Acronyming it – the kids do love verbing a verb these days, she told herself. Squished together the letters might go: wuh-wuh-jü-dè. or weh weh zhè dhə. But I ask you where is the question mark? If I were to get my diacriticals out, I would mark the statement (rhetorical question) incomplete. A little tight, but it still fit. They don’t cut t-shirts like that any more, thank God. That made it an easy decision to junk his collection of plain t-shirts emboldened with surrealistic adjectival swearing. She hung onto the one with Fuckwit splashed across it. Compared to the others, she thought it the LBD equivalent, simple and classic. She never went out in public in it. Only in her mind was she ever that brave. Instead, she gardened in it, wiping traces of sweat and soil and deadheads into it.

Fuckwit is her favourite swear, sort of. In the early hours of the morning, when she can’t sleep, she pictures herself wrapped in a warm blanket of fame answering the only good question on Inside the Actors’ Studio, “What is your favourite curse word?” The conditioned crowdpleasers, that they are, celebrities will always lie in response. The word fuckwit for her is really a lesser swear. It is not even her default. Characterized by its initial hard ‘c’, it is the one that makes English people sound hilarious and North Americans, deranged. In the early hours of the morning when her feet are intolerably cold and she is too exhausted to reach across the bedside table for a tissue to get a little respite from her maddeningly allergic nose, she thinks that her made-for-television answer would have to be fuckwit. She can’t help but admire the fullthroated English snobbery of the statement. Still, she thinks that Italian swearing with its fluid polysyllabic, multi-hyphenate scansion has the capacity to trounce all the others in its unquenchable authority for describing copulation with a piece of fruit or some oedipal variation thereof. In her imagination, James Lipton is not the questioner.

Instead, she subs in Brian Linehan, her favourite, a critic among critics. She glimpsed him once from the corner of her bus seat as he moved through dirty Toronto March slush. It gave her a frisson of joy. She waved silently at that unmistakeable face. And when he asked the James Lipton question, that he would never have really asked seeing that he was not a formulaic type of guy, she would have answered, fuckwit and she would have delivered. Because being a celebrity is really about talking, about assuaging communal loneliness. Her close friend put it so well with his inadvertently profound malapropism, long and behold. To see yourself in someone famous, the whole People magazine aesthetic, is everything.

It wasn’t about any shirt Malcolm ever wore, or anything he himself said that closed the door. It was simply another instance of his girlfriend Emily, her rank stupidity on full display. Still, she, as his mother should have been the last one, to point that out. Volubility is one of the few rungs on the genomic ladder she and Malcolm share. Emily was poised to take the LSATs and her reading choices had been accordingly attenuated. So, Linda understood why Emily had never gotten through Ulysses. She herself had been known to take a failing running leap or two on beloved classics. As she’d said often enough, it’s not the ending, it’s the journey. She looked up at John Henry, so sure of himself at the podium. Watching him fall back on funereal clichés in a church that was a copy of a copy of a copy. The thought seemed more Dickian than Dickensian.

“I just don’t know what to think of it yet, really. Half the book is Latin after all,” Emily intoned in an intentionally deep whisper.

“No, it’s not. I mean I’ve read it twice,” Linda spoke slowly, “The text is not demarcated into one English and one Latin section.”

They looked at each other, recognizing the misunderstanding. It was the kind of thing Linda would normally have met with laughter or a self-deprecatory remark. Instead, it provoked a deep sense of annoyance in her. “That’s stupid,” she said looking straight at Emily. I’ll grant you, Joyce is periphrastic and maybe elliptical in his Latin usage, but there is no half of a text, in Latin,”

“Speaking of stupid,” Malcolm added.

He was not wrong. It was. She noted that he only had her to thank for his own facility with sarcasm. Is such a thing something you can call an honestly-acquired skill? His annoyance at her blushing face was all too apparent.

“He should talk,” Linda thought, feeling him tense up. And what about all the times she’d stayed up late with him discussing everything from Samson Agonistes to Plantar’s warts. She never had not made a showing at his events, dropping him off with no advanced warning to visit his friends. Linda was the only adult they had ever trusted to keep their secrets.

 “I’ve been a pretty damned good mother.”

 “Don’t go there.”

 “Really.”

“Let’s just say that if Plato’s Republic contained a perfect form for a bad mother, you might be it. You might just be the unbroken mould from which all others are created. A classic filiophage, like in Medea, like in The Brood.At least Medea knew how to create a beautiful table.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the insult came too easily. It was one they could never give up.

“Don’t call me stupid or my beloved, stupid, for that matter.”

“Could you find it in yourself perhaps not to accuse me of filicide?” she asked him. “Also, could you find a more tortured and well-worn analogy? Also, beloved? What the hey?” They were not really questions she wanted him to answer.     

“Speaking of torture, this is what you do with your children, with your constant complaints, arguments and sad rants. Sometimes I don’t think that you are even actually human.”

“Et tu Brute.”

“Oh my God, here we go with Latin quote 101; I feel a migraine coming on.”

“Well, I would know Latin. After all, I spoke it every day.”

“The famed Latin Mass,” he interrupted. “At 8 a.m. every school day in that little humble parish of days gone by. Yee oldee churchy soon to be replaced by yee oldee video stores and the like.”

“Blitheness is the eighth deadly sin,” she said. “It was a lovely little church that the father built.”

“Let’s see. I know. To honour the stucco red-roofed buildings in Mexico. Beautiful, until it crumbled and fell down a hill.”

“That was the other one, the middle school, not the church or the school next to it.”

“Excuse me, the lovely little red-roofed church that mercifully held onto its architectural integrity. And all of you little kindergarteners in that mystically beautiful church would chant.”

“Gradeschoolers.”

“Gradeschoolers, my bad.”

“Dominus vobiscum et cum spirit tutuo.”

“Skip to university and your poetry teacher calls on you to read a long Latin passage from The Wasteland.”

“Maybe it was that, maybe something by Auden, I don’t remember.”

“Well, that’s a first.”

“No, there’s lots I don’t remember.”

“Tell me about it,” he said flatly.

“You know, you’ve done well by me.”

“I might say the same for you. After all, it’s your life that I keep remembering for you.”

“I remember it.”

“And I’ll be around remembering the details of your life long after you’re dead, whether I like it or not. And what happened when you volunteered to read the long Latin excerpts from one of the great British poets, do tell?”

“English.”

“English. Because, political, right?”

“Right.”

“And you know how I know that? Because you had competing Irish protestant friends who fought at your graduation dinner. And Aidan told you, that was his name, wasn’t it?”

“Close enough,” she was losing interest.

“Well,” Aidan went on, “two things: one, that asking where an Irish person comes from is actually just bullying them into declaring their religion and two, that designating a country British, supports its ongoing imperialist projects. From that day on, you parsed out: English, Scottish, Welsh. All part of your origins story. Your long, tumultuous, jeremiad and we have not even entered the thicket of the bildüngsroman portion of the story yet.”

“More accurately an entwicklungsroman.”

“Mother, I have no notes. No words. I actually have no words.”

“Well, I had words and my reading of the words of that English poet was beautiful.”

“Sonorous.”

“A good word, I won’t argue with sonorous even though you were not even a mote in god’s eye when it took place.”

“Larry Niven might have something to say about that.”

“Hang on, you’ll make me forget where I am in the story.”

“No chance of that.”

“And then that guy proceeded to read the Latin part all over again in its entirety. You know, I spoke Latin long after that guy, in church every day. I spoke that. Out loud. For real. Viva voce “v” with a “v” sound, “c” with a “ch” sound. Because I myself actually loved those words and I raised my voice together with all the other little kids. It was a lived-in experience.”

“Is there any other kind? Also, to be fair, you forgot how to speak it. You know, mother, you’d be hard-pressed to rattle it off like some kind of party-piece. And let’s see if I remember the gist of it. That mean little coke-bottle-glassed Van-Dyck-bearded asshole replaced your beautiful spoken word church Latin with all the lovely chs and v not w sounds. All those hard guttural “g” and glottal stops, it must have been murder for you.”

“It was ugly and it was disrespectful and he spoke it in an ugly manner in an ugly way of an ugly person and told us all it was no longer a spoken language. But it was a spoken language. I spoke it. So even with all that anglicized Latin which may or may not be correct, those of us speaking it in church were the last ones to do so. He was listening to me impart something beautiful and real and true that was not even from the distant past but from my own true lived life.”

“Again, the lived life. Is there any other kind?

“Actually, there is. Have you never read Aristotle?”

“I’m going to pretend I did not hear that. Because you are asserting that instead of remembering my first steps, my friends’ names, me splashing around in a wading pool, you choose to hang onto the memory of someone trying to prove you wrong.”

“One can hold many things in one’s own mind, multitudes even.”

“And you, having learned this lesson about being shamed, manage to be both shameless and shaming.”

“Are you really going to make me eat shit over this, Malcolm?

That was the last thing she said to him. A stupid question, statement, rhetorical question, she really didn’t know what it was any more. As a swear, it was mid. She was not sure if she was looking for an answer or just a reassurance. A lot to put on someone you love, even a big kid, as she still thought of him, as she will always think of him. The whole discussion had taken place in under eight minutes. She would have much preferred being able to recall an unkind shove or a drink splashed into someone’s face. Neither of them really noticed Emily shut the door when she left, without a slam. That was 17 years ago.

*****

Linda sits near the back of the laundromat soothing herself with the sounds of the dryer. She sorts through the hot staticky clothes trying to determine whether or not they belong to her.

“There it is, the infamous Fuckwit baby-tee, handed down from my baby to me, put it altogether they smell, mmm pommelo and degraded notes of mmm, hydrangea.” Despite its provenance, the piece of clothing has long ceased having any physical connection with Malcolm.

She pulls Corin’s printed eulogy from her pocket. It begins with a story she knows by heart. Linda is walking down a Loblaws grocery aisle in Ottawa searching out a box of Breeze. Since she was a kid, she has coveted the powdered detergent featuring a free towel. “It was the fluffy white towel of my dreams,” she tells an audience she has no memory of addressing. “You need to understand that when Grandma Louise made up her mind, she was immoveable.”       

She fleshes out her own love of a bargain, being a university student after all, so a known frugalista. She has actually textualized the word frugalista. But, she tells the audience, when it comes to laundry detergent, she is determined to live high off the hog. “Shout out to Hogsback.”     

She has no memory of reading the slightly twee line out loud. Viva voce, wee waa wokay if you are Auden, or maybe Eliot. The smoothed-out crumpled script is still readable. She finds her place again on the page, at the point of the story where the stockboy replies, “They haven’t carried it for a couple of years. Not enough demand,” he tells her, “Too expensive.”

She goes on to spell out how sorry she felt for herself on hearing that. Her eyes alight on a box of Omo detergent, a European brand. It sounds luxurious to her ears, but she’s only a student and what does she know about detergent? Of course, it is literally out of reach.

This part, she knows by heart. I see a guy strolling down the laundry aisle. He has kind eyes and long brown hair and glasses. He is not particularly tall, but as you know, I am pretty short. Long story short, his name is Corin Michaels and yes, he snagged the Omo detergent and delivered it straight into my waiting arms. You all know, that every time I tell this story, I am inundated with laundry puns. Bonus though, every single time I get around to washing the clothes, I think of Corin and how we met. I am always reminded of how he is bright, sunny and yes, he even smells good. The longlastability factor. I never did find the detergent with the towel I so craved, but I walked out with something much better.”

Just before she would bring the family story to a close Malcolm would interrupt, declaring, “And,” pausing for effect, “big finish.” He always liked to remind her that all the stories she tells are really only ever about her.

Their relationship is a serial back and forth. Love is still on the time clock.

“You know how I said I named you for Malcolm McLaren of punk rock fame?”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“I named you for –”

“Malcolm Muggeridge the Catholic writer on all things Catholic that you came to despise.”

“Not my fault.”

“So, you remind me.”

The next move seems simple right now. She opens the intimidating dryer door and begins to funnel the clothes into an abandoned basket. She waves at John Henry coming towards her bearing a small opaque orange plastic bag of peaches. He hands them to her, and proceeds to stuff the laundry into a green garbage bag.

“Malcolm sends his love,” he says, picking up a stray sock.

Photo of Catherine Dean

BIO: Catherine Dean lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. Her short story "Kitchen Table Prose" appeared in "Wildscape. Literary Journal" May, 2025. "Dishwasher Gig" was featured in the December issue of "shoegaze literary" magazine. She is a member of an online writing group known as WWW.