OMPHALOSKEPSIS. : om·pha·lo·skep·sis. noun \ˌäm(p)-fə-lō-ˈskep-səs\. contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation
At twenty seven my father became lost in omphaloskepsis.
He hardly noticed when I, or my two younger brothers, were born. Of course doctors were called, but with no luck. Some blamed the absorbing slope of his aquiline nose. Others whispered of a psychotic break down while even more shook their heads at the dusty shambles our house had become with the stinging absence of a patriarch.
Whatever the prognosis, no remedy was found and my father continued to sit, his eyes cast down, resting like feathers on the pale ridges of his stomach. My mother wrung her hands and forbid us to speak of it to the neighbors or, god forbid, the rabbi.
She even, in a moment of desperation, hired a hypnotist to free my father from his contemplative shackles, but he arrived in such a layering of tangerine and blue robes, and with such a serpentine tongue of unknown consonants, that my mother shooed him from the house with a broom handle before he could even open his case of crystalline tools.
As we grew up it became a game, “who could get the closest to daddy.” We’d sneak up while my mother was busy in the kitchen, dipping her long apron strings in a vat of honey and drizzling it over the hot cakes, or dusting in the upstairs bath, and then we’d creep, on silent tip toe, closer and closer to my father and his dark, down turned eyes. Pressed against the wallpaper, we’d slide inch by inch until one of us could feel his shallow breathing or smell his cool tang. We’d slip so close we could almost follow his eyes in their downward spiral and then he’d blink, or we’d feel the slick softness of the cat as it brushed by and we’d run screaming into the backyard, our hearts doing frenzied summersaults till we lost ourselves in the tire swing or hopscotch on the hot cement.
My mother final gave up on the pretence of normalcy when I was in high school and would wrap her skeins of wool around his splayed fingers as she knit, or balance a coffee cup on his granited shoulder as she got ready for work in the morning.
When I was old enough to read Freud she whispered that she thought it was a mother thing. “It’s an abandonment issue,” she nodded as she ironed the table clothes, draping the stiff cotton across my father’s knees. “He feels disconnected from her, he always did and now,” she lifted up her own sweater, revealing a soft mother’s belly, dimpled and stretched, “he’s hung up on the one place that tied them together.”
Over the years my mother bathed my father with a washcloth, darned his socks, not holed from walking but from the flurry of moths that descended on our house each fall, sewed his shirts so the edges fell just below his nipples, and fed his spoonfuls of thick borsch each Sunday.
After a while, I forgot I ever had a father at all. Perhaps to give him some privacy, or merely to relieve us all from the burden of his hunched figure against the sideboard, my mother took to covering him with embroidered clothes and draperies. Each week she’d change out the apple green scalloped in purple, or the blue swirled velvet for a different pallet and shade, our house a fresh burst of new color each time I’d come home from college.
My mother noticed my father growing thinner and thinner, sinking into himself like a leaded paper weight the year I went abroad to get my post doctorate.
She didn’t want to worry me, or my brothers, who had scattered as soon as they’d saved some money and were old enough to shave.
One day my mother called me, as she often did, and spoke to me of the turning weather and the development of a new shopping mall down the street.
“I’m thinking of moving, it’s too nosy here. Plus the house is far too big for just me now.” I could here the sharp crunch of the pruning sheers as she trimmed the azaleas that bordered our sidewalk.
“But… what about dad?” The words came out cobwebbed and old, and although he wasn’t a taboo subject between the two of us, I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask about him in nearly a year.
“Oh, dear, I completely forgot to tell you! Last week he just up and… disappeared. I went to change the pink brocade, I was painting and wanted a simpler cream muslim, and he was just… gone. Not even a note or a button to be seen.”
There was a pregnant pause across the phone wires and for a moment I got lost in a memory from when I was five or six and had crawled over to see if I was brave enough to tap my father on the shoulder. It had been a hot august day, the kind that seems to slowly close on you as the sun climbs, like a stiff cardboard box folding in. It had been my turn to take the risk and I could feel my brother’s eyes watching me from around the corner. As I reached out to place my small palm on the large expanse of my father’s curving shoulders I thought I heard him whisper my name. It was so soft, nothing more than a drawn out exhale that I froze, the thrill and fear hot between my teeth. Was my father still there? Could he feel the heat of my skin so close and young next to his?
His hand twitched, the long pianist fingers flexing minutely within the alabaster stiffness of his bones and I jumped back, scrambling from the room on my hands and knees.
“Oh.” Was all I could reply as my mother told me the details of the funeral, next week at three at the cemetery a mile out of town. But was a funeral even appropriate?
Only one of my brothers could make it, so there were three of us graveside that afternoon, throwing handfuls of dirt into an empty hole.
“This doesn’t look six feet deep,” my brother scowled, scuffing his dress shoes along the edge of the fresh turned earth.
“It’s not. Only two or so feet, I told them not to bother, I mean, there’s no body…” My mother dabbed at her eyes but her mascara seemed fresh and perfectly even.
“Oh, well I guess that’s ok then.” My brother impatiently loosened his yellow tie and checked his watch for the fifth time, cleaning the speckled dirt from his black shoes with a handkerchief.
The irreverence was as thick as the low hanging clouds.
They both made excuses to leave, my brother to a meeting and my mother to her bridge club, but I stayed in the cemetery as it began to slowly rain, quietly lifting my black shirt to watch the pale skin beneath my breasts and above my hip, studying my own corkscrewed navel, hoping to catch a glint of the magic my father had found in his bones for just a hint/glint of what my father saw in his own marvelous flesh/ navel/ umbilicus.
Wonderful!
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