Award Winner, Part One, September 1998
The bags under Harvey Stapleton’s eyes were growing. The semester was settling in, late September. On his bicycle rides home from campus, after leading his graduate writing seminar, focused on the modern short stories of Lorrie Moore, George Saunders and Charles Baxter, Harvey noticed the late-afternoon slants of sunlight pouring in through the oaks and maples of campus. As the early autumn days shortened, Harvey sensed a heaviness to the weight underneath his eyes.
After a purposely short scalding shower which left his skin bright pink, Harvey gazed into the mirror. In the reflection, the skin underneath his eyes puffed out as if they’d been inflated. Harvey shuddered, but maintained eye contact with the man looking back at him. His was no longer the face of a young man, maybe not even the face of a middle-aged man. Late middle-aged? If he’d been alive in any other century, Harvey was sure he’d be dead by now.
Harvey considered his thick eyebrows. Honey-brown and thick like a badger’s fur. On the top of his head, his coarse hair was recently trimmed short on the sides, a bit helmet-like on the top. Harvey kept his sideburns long but neat, shaving on Sunday nights and Thursday mornings. By Sunday afternoon and again by Wednesday night, his thick stubble came close to looking beard-like. Harvey’s nose hair had grown long and spiky. His dad’s nose hair had done the same. He wondered how many Stapleton men had such unruly nose hair. He reached in the sink drawer for the trimmer, pressed the button to trim, but it wasn’t charged.
Today, Sept. 22nd, 1998 was Harvey’s 48th birthday. It seemed early to notice so many changes to his face. Harvey’s last general check-up had come a couple of years ago. He didn’t do the annual. Never had. More like tri-annual. At the time, there were no red flags except slightly high cholesterol, but he knew that ran in the family. He didn’t smoke or do any real damage through drug use; it’d been nearly two decades since he’d smoked weed and tried mushrooms on a couple of hikes with his then-girlfriend Mo.
For the last several years he’d been on a low-dose of prescription meds for depression and anxiety, which helped him sleep and occasionally lowered the frequency of his negative thought-spirals. The mild depression was always there, but rarely the paralyzing, can’t-get-out-of-bed variety. More like the get-out-of-bed-slowly-and-trudge-through variety. Harvey finally decided he may as well try the pills. It worked for one of his teaching friends, Pascal. It didn’t work so well for his aunt, who ended up committing suicide. Harvey knew no pill was a cure-all. That his habits around sleep and food and exercise were probably more important, but he also knew that his mind wasn’t always his friend. That sometimes it took him down dark paths. Maybe a regular serotonin boost would function like a set of lanterns lighting the sides of those dark paths. And it had. So far.
The medication also helped Harvey avoid one of his go-to anxiety dreams. From his bed, Harvey would find himself in seventh grade again, with a big backpack and a dry mouth. In the vision, he found himself frantically searching for his math class in an endless hallway. The room numbers kept swirling, impossible to read. Most of the students were already in class. The second bell blasted the hallway. Harvey rushed around but couldn’t figure out where he needed to go. The hall monitor everyone feared was walking toward him, snarling and shaking her finger. Harvey woke from this recurring scene in a panic, then looked at the alarm clock and tried to return to sleep. Though the dream had been with him for decades, it evaporated after he’d started taking the pills. Unfortunately, so had some of Harvey’s vigilant attention to details. It was a worthwhile trade-off, as long as he reminded himself of the important details, Harvey and the psychiatrist agreed.
Harvey was a pacifist. He hadn’t seen much physical fighting in his young life. There were minor disputes with his younger sister Hope, a moody child who had a talent for watercolors, field hockey and tattling on Harvey. Those disputes sometimes ended with Hope’s shrill scream and Harvey shouting “Hopeless!”
There were squabbles between his parents, starting with his dad grumbling about something or his mom worrying about money. Typically ending with his mom Penelope extending her arms wide and asking the universe “What am I going to do with you, Edward Stapleton?” Followed by Edward Stapleton retreating to the back door, grabbing his pipe and wool hat. As Harvey sat at his desk and dutifully finished his homework, he’d hear the grunts and the sound of wood splitting. The accumulation of winter firewood. As he got older, Harvey would sometimes help carry and stack the logs. Afterward, Edward sat on the back porch smoking his pipe while Harvey asked his dad trivia questions from an old Farmer’s Almanac.
Most of the time, his parents were placid and pleasant. Their energy was generally focused on the ongoing battles with the bark of the maple trees that surrounded their home in northern Vermont, about an hour south of the Canadian border. The Stapleton brothers were three. Edward the eldest, Paul in the middle and the youngest brother Freddy. Together, they tapped and collected maple syrup on their adjoining properties. They sold the syrup to a manufacturer that bottled and distributed it to neighboring markets and local restaurants. Penelope, who had a knack for numbers, took care of the books. It was a small operation and took up most of their time. Harvey’s father and uncles bought the land in the late-1940s, after the war, moving north from Worcester. All three men had survived tours in France, though Paul was left with a limp. Freddy had seen the worst of it, narrowly surviving an encounter with a German tank. Edward, who had a basic understanding of medicine, was stationed with a medical battalion, away from the front lines.
Harvey had helped his dad and uncles since he was 12. As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Harvey spent most evenings reading mystery paperbacks on his bed, occasionally plopping himself down next to Hope and Patricia in front of the family’s black and white television, to watch Andy Griffith, Gilligan’s Island, or on Sundays, 60 Minutes. On summer nights, he often went out to drive-thru movies with his girlfriend Linda, sometimes returning home to listen to the crackly radio signal from Burlington which carried the Red Sox games. Harvey caught the Sox fever in ‘67, when the team finally started winning. The Impossible Dream. He’d always loved that moniker. The Boston Impossible Dream Sox. Still, the Vietnam War raged on, polluting Harvey’s thoughts about the future.