Pittsburgh
What if we lived in Pittsburgh? What if we packed a U-Haul with Etch-a-Sketches,
Legos, budding seedlings, the piano, left the prairie grass teetering
in the mirrors, clickered across kettle moraines, deciduous biome, tollways,
skyway, siloed Ohio, settled into Pittsburgh—oh how we could dispense
with holiday cards: sending, receiving, Scotch-taping them to the fridge
assiduously with pursed lips, how the kids would finally know aunts and uncles,
grandthings. No way out but through, my father would say. The way through’s
the hatch opening a few feet up in the air, a minor Jetstream, a loopway, a kiss
on the breeze, and somebody less memorable told me Pittsburgh’s got hills,
and I’m sure there are waterfalls toppling out of rockface, and maybe they’re slathered
in honey, and maybe we could gaze into them and see our souls or at least our pants
turned inside out, and maybe we’d have a porch, the views that porches
are sold with, maybe the cousins would twist from their photo-globe tinsel
and red-knit sweater grins, becoming real people, and maybe when we zipped
to Cleveland to Jersey to Brooklyn to Boston for long weekends
they’d rocket off their sofas, mount themselves against the skylines, eyes
aglimmer as highrise windows lit on the night commute, we’d catch them
more than once a year at Christmas in Indiana at great-uncle Leonard’s,
where last year my daughter, nodding off in the unheated mudroom, glanced
upward, ran eyes along the plaster-crack ceiling, blurted Leonard is old,
Leonard’s house is full of old things, Leonard will die soon.
Have you ever driven from Minnesota to Indiana in bluest winter?
We did it once, twins five weeks old, each hour unleashing ourselves
into McDonald’s, cradling them through the ice-soaked parking-lot air,
one of us swiped poop away on a restroom changing table, the other
queued for shareable fries, one inch of bitter espresso. Have you ever leaned
close into a cashier, whispered for their tallest cup of hot water to warm
formula bottles, or at least make them uncold, unhostile, uninhospitable
for newborn bellies? There’s no such thing in the world as warm or welcoming or correct,
our only chance is hedged bets, harm reduction. All we could count on
between Minnesota and Pittsburgh would be McDonald’s. We would.
My wife’s milk never came in. They’d plucked the bodies from her midsection,
disappeared her into catacombs of tubes, propped fluid bags, for five days living
between venous and intravenous, I knew her as a digital line
updating updating on a screen, codes in a farflung language not graspable.
Postpartum ward: pressed the infants to her motionless chest
like hot water bladders people in old times bedded down with to survive
December, January, the North, the loss of life. Fourteen days massaged
edema from her calves. Where does it end up? Who knows? Yet
it helps somehow, and the infants slept like inert paper clips in plastic boxes,
and I loved her more than ever. If you’ve been there you know. If you’ve been to Indiana
in December, you know the sun rises at ten, good God. The raw. The grey,
the million finite deaths. What is it Mom says? You can solve any problem
sitting side by side on a long drive. I’ve been hunting a grandfather
for 35 years—mine dead, mine dead—and have replaced them with
Leonard, this great-uncle by marriage, this mudroom of rare stones, piss jars,
pop rivet guns, expired gas bills. Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh
of love, of scorn, of tulips in the tree boulevards, of traffic violence.
Pittsburgh of discredited factories they’ve made museums of. I spent my boyhood
inside an AM radio. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to pry it open, swap out the batteries,
throw its tinny buzz off a viaduct. Thinking fatherhood would change me.
When we drive into Pittsburgh, I’ll fling it into the Monongahela, or the Alleghany
or the Ohio, there would be so many choices in Pittsburgh, there’d be all the answers to all the questions, stuffed in the pockets of those hills. Rocks and birds and corner
taverns, you wouldn’t know what do with yourself, you wouldn’t be able to stop
changing your life. Where do the batteries in our bodies come from?
Why is the sound of my station always fizzy? My hands stuck on the steering wheel,
and there she is swiveling her neck to stare at me, sighing,
“Don’t fool yourself, honey, it’s too late to change our lives.”
CHRISTOPHER R. VAUGHAN'S poems address masculinity, mental health, and silence, and have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Cincinnati Review, Able Muse, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Off the Coast, and Del Sol Review. He was a winner of the 2020 Princemere Poetry Prize and has received support from the Community of Writers, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference.