Popcorn Ceilings of the Midwest

The paisley comforter feels like silk and sandpaper. I pull at a loose stitch, listening to the TV in the room next door play an infomercial about bed linens. If you buy the periwinkle queen-size sheet set in the next nineteen minutes, you will also receive a free knife set, including the wooden storage block! I remember my grandmother loved periwinkle. Loved all forms of soft and baby blues. Her eyes were like that, too. Maybe everything she saw was the color of her eyes. 

I picture someone receiving the sheets, pricking their finger with the edge of one of the knives, then slashing the sheets into periwinkle streamers. What a party that would be. 

Nothing in this hotel room—motel room—is periwinkle. Instead, it is maroon and navy and mustard. And not in a retro-kitsch way. Someone smoked in here, maybe a decade ago, but those kinds of things you can’t purge. 

The ceiling is that bumpy popcorn. Like curdled yogurt, like cottage cheese. No ceiling should resemble cottage cheese and I can’t tear my eyes from it and I’ve been lying here since Mike left a few hours ago. 

It’s not like that. It’s not some torrid affair and Mike is not married. I’m not, either. I’m traveling through on a road trip. I’m calling it a road trip, but it’s actually a funeral procession with a John Denver dirge: a long parade to my dad’s funeral. Thank god they’re not doing it the Jewish way, like we would have if it had been my mom, burying the dead as soon as possible, seven days with covered mirrors and casseroles. No, my dad wasn’t Jewish. The aunts—his sisters—wanted a wake. They’re Catholic in a hail-Mary-but-donate-to-Planned-Parenthood kind of way. I don’t even know what a wake is, really, but it’ll take me a week to get there in my Civic, dragging my heels to avoid facing what I don’t want to. 

I’m already halfway there. 

I called up Mike from my college days, because I was driving through Madison. Hey, it’s Lyds was all I had to say and he was all, Hell yes, I can come over. So he did. We had sex in a motel between a cornfield and a neon-signed bar, drank a few Leinies, and it was surprisingly like sophomore year, though it’s been sixteen years. Back then it was cement-block walls. Back then it was hangovers and breakfast burritos. Back then it was him with a guitar in the dorm hallway surrounded by hordes of admiring peers, but he looked at me when he sang. Now it’s popcorn ceilings and a bit of burning and a soupçon of regret. I trace a road through the tiny canyons on the ceiling. Imagine myself driving the map of it. 

On the road playlist: the aforementioned John Denver, Kenny Rogers, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke. Over and over and over. I envision my dad sitting on docks and driving country roads, stalks of corn swaying in giant quilts over the countryside. 

This is the father they will commemorate in the eulogy. It’s the way they always talk about the dead: lies and half-truths. As if people are worried their ghosts will return in revenge. I wonder what his mother would say to remember her son, my grandma who loved periwinkle, the woman who saw pretty blues everywhere she went. 

In life, my father wasn’t so peaceful, and I can’t decide if his music choices reflected something he wanted to be or something he was grateful he wasn’t. He was a mean old fuck and I hated him. So why am I crying? 

There’s a fly, maybe a moth, maybe a spider, crawling over the tallest of the white ceiling stalagmites. Do flies have families? I wipe the tears from my face. 

It had been Parents Weekend at school—when teens and young twenty-somethings imagine a world knocking back red cups with their parents only to discover nothing has changed and they are the same and so are their parents, so they go out for giant bowls of expensive creamy pasta instead, show them the engineering hall, the lake, maybe revel in the lush cleanliness and cable in their parents’ hotel rooms. But my folks weren’t going to come. Hotels are damn expensive, my father said. Waste of my money. 

But then a knock on my dorm room door on Sunday morning, and in open-buttoned jeans and a T-shirt, I opened it, bleary eyed, and there’s my dad, with my mom almost hidden behind him, biting her nails and studying the dry erase board on my door. He stood on tiptoe to look beyond me and waltzed in saying, “Well, who is this?” 

It was Mike. 

“Did she suck you off, young man?” he asked. Mike didn’t move. I buttoned my jeans and pushed my father out of the room. “Did you like it?” he hollered from the hallway. 

“Get the fuck out of here,” I said, because I was nineteen and I could say those things to him. Finally. 

“Lydia!” my mother admonished. But did she not hear the part where her husband said those things? To his daughter? 

I slammed the door behind them and sank down and sobbed. Mike rubbed my feet, and we ordered soggy diner breakfasts to be delivered and watched Return to Oz with the blinds closed. 

They had apparently driven the six and a half hours back to Toledo that afternoon, stopping once for gas. My mother told me this like it was a trial. Like I was to blame for her full bladder and her aching back. 

Anyway, years later and I am on the journey back to Ohio, trucking east on 90 through Wisconsin at fifty-five miles an hour, being passed by semis and Harleys and minivans. I shove Culver’s fried cheese curds into my mouth and curse anyone who approaches my rear bumper. 

Too close—everyone’s getting too close. I see the “Welcome to Illinois” sign and take the next exit. I decide to take mostly side roads, two-lane state highways, dragging out the trip, needing time to process my father’s quick descent into death from pancreatic cancer. He’d been diagnosed four months before. 

He was an asshole. 

I didn’t love him. 

I was an asshole. 

I did? 

Maybe I think that once I get there, stand in the hallway of the Finley Funeral Home, I’ll know. Under undoubtedly yellow light and certainly on brown, diamond-patterned carpet, I’ll know if I loved him or not and if I am sad or not, and then maybe I will know what to do with that. Maybe by slowing down this trip, I can keep that uncertainty alive. Schrödinger’s sadness, I guess. 

But once I know the answer, I’ll be able to respond appropriately when people say they’re so sorry for my loss, or that his memory will be a blessing, or whatever. 

Outside of Schaumberg, I call Mike again. Ask him to drive the few hours to meet me at another, different, but identical, motel. The ceilings are popcorned, and dull lines swirl with caked-in dirt on gray, packed carpet. 

He comes and we order in pizza. After, crammed into the bathroom, we discuss the high-quality travel-sized toiletries this motel has provided. We snap on shower caps, and I put the incongruously provided shoeshine glove on my hand and we bat at each other until my stomach aches from laughter. We open the little bottles and smell them but don’t use them. Honeysuckle and mint. 

Later, bullets of rain assault the window and roof in one of those great Midwest thunderstorms. The lights flicker but don’t go out. I turn on the TV and find Return to Oz, which feels like a sign. It’s the part where Dorothy meets Tik-Tok, a round, copper, mechanical Royal Army of Oz guy. She winds him up and he says: 

I called for help until my voice ran down. 

Then I paced back and forth until my action ran down. 

Then I stood and thought until my thought ran down. 

Am I doing this? 

Mike and I watch until the end, and it switches over to infomercials—a tabletop rotisserie, freshwater-pearl jewelry, the periwinkle sheet set again. In Schaumberg, we don’t have sex; we don’t even kiss. Instead, we sleep beside each other on our backs, his arms crossed over his chest, and we stay there all night. I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and stare at the popcorn ceiling in the light of the bright digital alarm clock. I keep my arms at my sides the whole time, though. It’s like we’re a couple of corpses. 

It’s unclear why Mike and I didn’t become an item. After that morning with my dad, he became distant. He kissed more girls. I kissed more girls. I hung around when he sang droopy ballads in the dorm hallway but always left before he finished. Through the years, as this roommate and that rec soccer teammate got married, and this classmate and that fellow school-newspaper co-editor had kids, I still thought about Mike and the way the cold cement walls felt on my bare back and how warm my feet felt in his tender hands. 

In the morning, I wake up first. The thunderstorm has passed. I lie there for hours and watch as the sun sneaks into the lean spaces around the curtains, and the entire motel room looks like a study in photography, angles of light, chiaroscuro. A piece of art: Midwest Melancholy, it would be called. I realize the service for my father is tomorrow. I have to get to Toledo by nighttime if I’m going to make it in the morning. I can’t drag my heels anymore. I can’t study the ceilings for the answers, although I suppose the lesson is that you can still be protected by things that are ugly and sharp. 

I’ve gotten used to it: the comforting rattle of a vending machine, the predictable rooms, the spring smells of the small toiletries. Mike. I won’t be able to just call him from Ohio and ask him to pop on over: it’s too far. 

Checkout is at eleven. Mike’s still sleeping. 

My plan is to slip on my clothes, peck Mike on the cheek, and wave a nonchalant hand. Maybe I’ll say something like, Thanks Mike. Good seeing you. You can take the little shampoos and shower gels if you want. I mull this over as I quietly pack my things, then pull open the curtains that match the bedding. I’m momentarily blinded by the hazy sun, but then I start to see what’s in front of me. Curls of heat issue from trees. A cart parked right in front of the window is filled with brand-new travel-sized toiletries and perfectly folded towels. 

I shake Mike and he snorts awake. I laugh. He laughs too. I want to say I’m sorry. Sorry about my dad and the girls I kissed. 

He says, “Looks like a storm again.” 

I say, “Yeah,” and study the clouds. And then I turn back to him and say, “Come with me.” 

JENNIFER FLISS

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, No Tokens, and elsewhere, including the Best Short Fiction anthologies. She is the author of The Predatory Animal Ball and the forthcoming As If You Had a Say. She can be found via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.