Midnight Mutterings | Bear

|||MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

Note: The ‘yesterday’ in the first line was muttered nearly four decades ago in Seattle where Tomas was my sometimes next door neighbor. jb

Yesterday, I was talking to Tomas about spring gardens and writing to deadline when he told me about his bear. Tomas does not remember when or how he got Bear, but it seemed as if they had been together forever. They were inseparable, eating their meals and napping together, taking walks with Tomas’ mother, and, of course, sleeping together at night, sharing secrets in the dark.

They talked all the time when no adults were around, making Elaborate Plans about where they would go and what they would do as soon as Tomas was old enough to go out alone, with only Bear. Tomas told Bear he could not wait to learn to read and that he would read to Bear every day as soon as he could. He wasn’t sure Bear would be able to read for himself, with his one glass eye and Tomas could not remember when there had been two. Always, he was considerate about Bear, being careful not to hurt his feelings about his vision or his appearance.

Although Tomas was raised bilingual, for some reason Bear spoke only Spanish even though he could understand Tomas’ English. Bear had a faded red tongue and his Spanish was lovely, like poetry.

Tomas is a gorgeous man, dark and ridiculously handsome, who arranges his life as meticulously as a curator. A Stanford professor, he commutes to Seattle to spend as much time with his partner as possible. Yet he never seems busy or stressed and always has time for a chat with me. It is easy to imagine him as a boy, already fashionably dressed, always with Bear, whose fur must have been worn ragged from love.

One day, Tomas told me, when he was almost four years old, Bear said something that made him cold with rage. It was the first time such a thing had happened. In his fury, Tomas got the forbidden scissors from his mother’s sewing basket and clipped off Bear’s red felt tongue.

His mother tried to sew the tongue back into place, but it turned out wrinkled and awful.

After that, Bear never spoke again.