Susie, Do I Write You a Letter?
Susie, do I write you a letter, the way you did to Tom after he died?
You asked me if I minded if you wrote him a letter and sent it to my address. Our dead friend. The letter arrived and I put it somewhere. Now it seems urgent to locate it. But the program for his memorial is in a stack of unfiled papers I have. I run across it when I’m looking for something else. A photo of him beside his bike.
Susie, will your sisters put together photos of you? a verbal remembrance? I met your brother once. I shook his hand, joked that any brother of yours was a brother of mine. He looked at me with cold curiosity. He looked like an empty version of you, a you that didn’t know me.
All those weeks my daughter was at Mass General, you and Tom and I passed our writing between us. You kept me sane while I was alone, 3000 miles from home. I never would have believed that five years later, you’d both be gone.
You attended Tom’s funeral but saw nothing of him in it. Stayed on the periphery that sunny day in Golden Gate Park. You couldn’t connect the Buddhist chanting with the Tom you knew. Who’d write about his drinking days in Chicago. Work trips to Sacramento. Growing up poor in Oakland. Like you, he never wrote about the present.
I read about a remote island in Japan. So many people have aged and died there that they established a new tradition. They make life-size dolls representing the dead. Prop them around town. Sitting over a coffee. Reading on a bench.
You and I wrote together for 20 years. You wrote only about your family, its chain of heartbreaks. Always in the past, as children, then teens, in Skylonda.
When we are face to face, I’ll want to blurt it all out. Seize my connection to you. Tell them all I know.
I’ll want to take your favorite sister’s face in my hands and tell her she was the only person in the world that you wanted, in the end.
After Tom died, his widow told you about an emotional affair he had. A younger woman, a nurse like her. You didn’t want to hear that about him. It didn’t fit with what you wanted to know. You never called her again.
Will they tell me things that don’t fit? That I cannot use?
At your memorial, in your tiny house, I’ll want to say everything. More likely, I’ll be silent. I’ll take notes in the bathroom. I’ll want to search faces. Listen to your sisters’ side of things. Tell them how much they all meant to you. Susie, you look so much alike. Husks. Representations of people.
I’ll imagine a life-size doll of you beside me, nursing a doll tumbler of wine, a dog doll in your lap. Our friend Tom will be at my other side, pad and pencil in hand, smiling in his cycling togs.
Siren
Someone is singing. I follow the sound around the corner, into the hall where the empty offices are. Layoffs.
My boss, a woman so alluring she terrifies me, is singing “Sister Golden Hair Surprise” into her phone. A song from my college years. Not hers. A time of endless, grassy afternoons. Cat Stevens. Spice tea. Scholarship’s demands, mere backdrop to sex and its intrigues. My boss attended the same State school as I, only a decade and a half later.
Maybe she’s singing to her baby. Maybe even to her mother.
I back away, but she’s seen me. Holds up a finger, finishes. (Well I tried to fake it, I don’t mind sayin’, I just can’t make it) and then slips her phone into her dress pocket.
We are standing close enough I can see the wetness of her eyelashes. I work out regularly. My pecs show a nice separation, even under my medium-weight sweater. My teeth are straight and white. My fun-loving wife has termed my lovemaking “attentive” and “unhurried.”
“Thought I heard something,” I say.
“I was singing to my ex-husband. It’s his birthday.” Her hair is damp. No makeup. She recently started parting her blonde hair down the middle, making her nose even more prominent. That sultry Sally Kellerman Afghan Hound look.
I swear I can feel heat emanating from her hair, her breath. I want so badly to kiss her right here in the darkened hall. I should be at my desk, preparing the board report. “Sister Golden Hair Surprise;” is that what this schmuck I’ve never heard of until right now calls her?
Work awaits under greenish bars of light. It is unclear who should move away first.
That scent, it’s dizzying. Sandalwood. You never smell that anymore.
Image by Kate Macate on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Susie, Do I Write You a Letter? and Siren - November 19, 2025