The Zenith

Donna had never attended a funeral until the day she sat on the red velvet cushions inside the Blissful Gardens Memorial Chapel to pay final respects to her maternal grandmother, Beatrice Covington from Augusta, Maine in the spring of 1987. Donna had moved away from Maine for warmer climates and better opportunities years earlier. Most of her memories of the recently departed were sketchy snippets from early childhood with the more vivid memories proceeding from return trips during the glorious Maine summers, when Beatrice was a shell of her former self, having succumbed to the ravages of dementia. Truth be told, Donna didn’t care much for her grandmother even when she was in full possession of her faculties, much less so in the years leading up to her death. Her favorite had always been Beatrice’s long suffering second husband, Winfrey, who she affectionately called Gramps. Despite the fact that Winfrey wasn’t a blood relative, it was Gramps who Donna loved, he of the jolly red face, sparkling eyes and powerful hugs. It was Gramps who always remembered to bring her candy and little presents whenever he went into town. It was Gramps who always followed around after one of his wife’s intemperate outbursts to reassure her that everything was alright and that he still loved her to the moon and back. So, Donna sat in bored, tearless silence as the Preacher painted an overly generous portrait of the deceased. 

After the graveside service, the family gathered at her Uncle John’s house in Lewiston for the covered dish supper. The Covington house was in no condition to receive guests. Ever since Gramps had passed away, seven years ago, Beatrice had given herself over fully to every hoarding instinct that Gramps had kept in check. The small three bedroom rancher had become a warehouse of minutia which reeked of moth balls and mildew. Uncle John’s place was neat and tidy, smelled like leather and had room enough for the thirty people standing, leaning and sitting in the three main rooms eating raspberry pie and sipping hot coffee. Donna watched her mother standing in a corner with her brother looking overwhelmed at the job that awaited her, the job of cleaning and clearing out her mother’s disaster of a house. She knew that her baby brother was going to be no help. The job would fall to her and she would get it done while her brother spent the next six months talking about helping her. Guilt began to rise in Donna’s heart. Her mother would need her help, but even now as she drank her coffee, she was formulating plausible excuses for withholding it...I can’t take time off from work, Mom...the boys need me back home...If I lived closer I would be glad to help, but Virginia is 800 miles away...If I spent more than fifteen minutes in that pig sty with my asthma, I’d end up in an iron lung. Her mother would nod her head claiming to understand, but it would hurt her feelings, and send Donna home to Virginia with a fresh source of guilt—her steadfast and constant companion.

It would take six months to clear out her grandmother’s house. As bad as the upstairs had been, the basement had turned out to be a disgusting but profitable adventure. Aside from the twenty five years worth of neatly stacked, unread newspapers and unopened junk mail, a treasure trove of unopened Christmas presents revealed themselves from underneath the molded newsprint...three microwave ovens, four CD players, two DVD players, packages of underwear, socks and shirts, and most surprisingly—piles of cash stacked in obscure places. Here, a wad of twenty dollar bills pressed into the inside cover of a paperback book. There, $6,000 buried at the bottom of a can of sixteen penny nails. These finds slowed the process down to a crawl. Now, literally nothing could be discarded without a thorough inspection lest they throw a valuable baby out with the bath water.

She found it in the tray of Winfrey’s old work bench which had been covered with issues of The Sun Journal, Lewiston’s ancient newspaper. The entire bench had been hidden by issues from 1975-1978, and was only discovered three months in to the project. When she pulled back the tray there was only one thing inside, a faded yellow envelope held shut with a metal clasp with the words, For Your Eyes Only scribbled across the front. Although no one could be sure exactly whose eyes it was intended for, Donna’s mother felt she had earned the right. Inside was a hand written list of Winfrey’s personal belongings and instructions of who they were to be given to. Why this hadn’t been opened by Beatrice when Winfrey passed was unclear. Maybe she had opened it, didn’t approve of his choices, and hidden it in his desk drawer. It was the sort of thing she would have done, Donna’s mother thought as she read. Most of these old things had disappeared, probably thrown out by Beatrice in an unbalance rage. Only one remained, Winfrey’s prized television, the Zenith H2340P 25” beauty that sat proudly in the only clean room in the Covington house—Winfrey’s small den. His instructions were clear, This goes to my sweet Donna.

The day it was delivered Donna’s three boys stood, mouths ajar, staring at the giant burnt brown box with the dark screen in the middle and marveled at the boxy remote control with the cool name emblazoned in gold letters...Flashmatic. Donna tried to explain why televisions from back in the day had to be so large. She spoke of tubes, horizontal hold buttons and gangly metal antennas that had to be attached to the roof before a discernible picture could be seen. When Donna’s husband got home from work he took one look and asked, “Wonder what we can get for this thing on EBay?” Donna shot him down with an emphatic “NO” but had to admit that it was huge and they really didn’t have room for the thing in the house. It would wind up being “temporarily” stored in the utility room jammed into a corner beside the washing machine until they found a better place. Donna made it clear that the Zenith was here to stay.

Donna and her husband seldom argued, and when they did it was usually over something inconsequential. This particular day it was the culmination of a month of frustrations great and small. He had gotten laid off by the bank after the buyout, and had been on one job interview after another, always returning home discouraged and increasingly ill-tempered. Donna had tried to be patient, understanding and supportive. It wasn’t hard because it was exactly how she felt. She loved him and held him in high regard as both a husband and father. But patience had its limits, and after an argument over some little thing had blown up into a screaming match, he had stormed out slamming the door behind him. Donna retreated into the utility room, shut the door behind her and wept. In the middle of her crying jag the television turned on with a popping sound, a tiny dot of light in the center of the gray screen suddenly spreading a fuzzy snow out to the edges of the wood frame. Startled, Donna looked around for the remote and found it on the top of the console. She rose to her feet and walked closer to the set, picked up the remote and pressed the off button and the snowy screen leapt wildly then contracted back into the tiny dot in the center, then disappeared. Donna stared at the screen, temporarily distracted from her tears, and pressed the on button. Nothing. It was only then when she looked behind the set and saw the power chord, unplugged, coiled and lifeless on the floor.

It’s not that she wasn’t curious or troubled by what she had seen, it’s more like life overtook her. So after a couple days she had forgotten about the incident. When you live in a house with three boys and an unemployed husband, not much time is available for deep contemplation about the scientific conundrum of fifty year old televisions cutting on by themselves. There’s laundry to be done, for one thing, and for another, it hadn’t happened again. Perhaps it never happened the first time, memory being so famously unreliable during times of high emotion. Three weeks after the incident, Donna’s husband found a job, a very good job with better pay and benefits. There was a raucous celebratory dinner and a movie night with the boys. She couldn’t remember a time when they had been happier. Now whenever she walked into the utility room, she would run her hands over the polished wood of Gramps’ old television with nothing but sweet thoughts of what a dear man he had been in her life so many years ago.

The trouble with life though was the relentless succession of hardship that it visited upon the just and unjust alike. While Donna’s husband was away in Detroit for training Donna began having debilitating headaches. They would begin with dizziness, then progress throughout the day, which would end with a pillow over her head trying to block out the light. It was during her first such headache when the television once again sprang to life when she entered the utility room with a basket of laundry. This time it was plugged in but the remote wouldn’t shut it off. Donna had to reach for the on/off knob and push it in, Click. The screen went black. Each day, the headaches got progressively worse, and each day, every time she walked past the set it would turn on. By the time Donna’s husband returned, she was so sick she could hardly get out of bed. Doctor’s were visited, tests run and anti-migraine medications prescribed. Donna gradually improved, but it was weeks before she was well enough to take command of running her household. Her husband was valiant in response, taking over the cleaning, laundry and cooking. At no time during his many trips to the utility room did the Zenith come to life. Once again, the matter went unexamined, unremarked upon, but lived on in a corner of Donna’s consciousness between love and fear.

Months passed. Life was good. The boys were growing, her husband loving his new job, Donna content and energized. The set was quiet. Donna would stand and stare at it after loading and unloading the washing machine, wondering. One day, her curiosity prompted a Google search. What could possibly have prompted an unplugged television from the 1960’s to turn on without access to a power source? Theories abounded. The only one that seemed possible to Donna’s non-scientific mind was the suggestion that perhaps the ancient remote had picked up a signal from a baby monitor from one of the neighbors. Do you live near high voltage power lines, someone in a chat room asked. Another loopier theory posited that only an external power source more powerful than mere electricity could be responsible. What might such a power be? Clearly, the extraterrestrial kind, came the answer. Donna turned off her laptop.

She poured herself a cup of coffee, pulled up a chair in front of the Zenith and thought about Gramps. When he passed away it had been ten months since she had seen him. He had died of lung cancer, first detected just seventeen weeks earlier, already having done irreparable and fatal damage. When twenty two year old Donna walked past his open casket at the funeral home, she had been shocked by what she saw. His plump, jolly face was hollow and drawn tight around his mouth, his rugged, meaty hands shriveled down to the bone. She had burst into tears at the sight. It had grieved her that she had not been there to wait on him when he was sick, her grief made worse by Beatrice’s callous declaration that during the last painful hours of his life he had “many times asked where his sweet Donna was.”

Donna sat quietly, running her hand over the wood of the Zenith, remembering the times when she would see him watching something from his recliner, run across the small room, jump up on his lap and be enveloped in his warm embrace. She remembered the smell of him the most, the intense combination of molasses and pipe tobacco. On anyone else she would have recoiled, but it was the smell of her Gramps and to her it smelled like kindness.

Then, the bright resonance of a clarifying thought came to her. The only times the Zenith had ever come on was when Donna was scared, afraid or sick, and even then, only when she entered the utility room in such a state. The hundreds of times she had come and gone from the room unburdened with such care, the set had been quiet. Donna stood up and placed both hands on the set and wondered, could it be? Donna was a practical woman, a child of Maine, raised to shun the fanciful notions that now swam freely inside her head. Life was about the here and now, ghosts stories and all who told them were for unserious dreamers or crazy old men. Yet, as Donna looked down at the Zenith she heard her voice asking softly, Gramps? Is it you, Gramps? It’s me. Donna. I’m here.

She lowered herself down to her knees, touched the screen with her fingertips, and felt a static shock and heard the soft crackling sound as she brushed the screen with her hand. Gramps, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you when you were sick. I so wished we could have said a proper good-bye. Donna felt the tears begin to well up, felt the longing of loss even after so many years. Such was the divine attachment that little girls forge with their grandfathers. 

The tiny, starlike beam of light sprang forth from beneath Donna’s hand and soon spread itself out until the entire screen was a snowy white. She quickly withdrew her hands from the screen. Gramps! It’s me, Donna. I’m here. I love you so much. But Gramps...it’s ok. I’m ok now. I’m married now. You would love him. He’s a wonderful man. I have three boys who you would have adored. My life is everything I hoped it would be.

Then she pulled a tissue out of the box on the shelf above the dryer, wiped the tears from her face and placed one hand on the set. Gramps, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. God has taken very good care of me. You can go now. It’s time for you to go back home, back where you belong.

Donna heard the sharp metallic click. The screen went dark and never came on again.