Falling Over Sideways

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  I had a private lesson with the strictest teacher at the dance school, Miss Laura, that night. I asked her whether she thought it would be possible for me to get moved up into the higher classes with my friends. She said, “Honestly?”

  I gulped. This was not a woman who was known for holding back. I couldn’t imagine what her unfiltered, honest opinion would be like. But I really, really wanted to move up, so I said, “Honestly.”

  “Well. Your turns are slow. You need a bigger plié before your leaps. Your arms are like spaghetti, and you aren’t graceful.”

  “And what’s the bad news?”

  If her eyebrows hadn’t already been completely plucked out and redrawn in pencil, Miss Laura would have raised them and sneered at me. She’s not a big humor fan. All righty, then, I thought. All I have to do is change … everything. You know, get good. Stop sucking. Turn into Alanna. No big. I stepped over to the barre and said, “Just kidding. Can we please get started?”

  On Friday, I found myself one-on-one with my father for the first time since his stroke. Gram had gone to New York for a couple of days to take care of some things, but was back again. Mom and Gram had gone out to a Chinese takeout place to pick up dinner, and Matthew was off playing in a soccer game. I had begged my mother not to leave me there alone because I was sort of afraid of my dad. I mean, the last time I’d been alone with him, he’d almost died. I told my mom this, and asked, “What am I supposed to do if he has another massive crisis?”

  She said, “Just grab this remote control right here and push the big red call button. Now, have a nice conversation with your father. He loves you. Your voice is good for him.”

  Then she walked out. Like I wasn’t already scarred for life enough.

  I didn’t know where to look, how to act, or what to say. Dad kept looking at me as if he wanted to tell me something important, so I got up from the chair I’d been sitting in and sat on the edge of his bed. But then he didn’t say anything, so I decided that maybe I should just tell him about my week. Mom, Matthew, and everyone else in the family had been talking to him as though he could still understand, even though there wasn’t any way to know. People had tried asking him all sorts of yes-or-no questions and getting him to nod or shake his head; sometimes the answers made sense, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes he just stared into space while completely ignoring the speaker.

  I couldn’t stand the silence, so I launched into a whole big speech—about Ryder and my audition and my dance issues. I told him how much I missed talking with him and how much I needed his advice. I even told him how sorry I was that we’d argued the night before the stroke.

  Then I felt stupid, because if he didn’t understand any of this, it was all completely pointless. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance I might as well have been directing my monologue at the huge bundle of Clifford the Big Red Dog balloons Dad’s publisher had sent over on Wednesday.

  I couldn’t take not knowing, so I squeezed Dad’s hand and asked, “Dad, do you know what I’m saying? Do you know who I am?”

  He stared at me for the longest, scariest time, and then said, “Piggy? Piggy! Piggy!”

  I threw my arms around him and burst into tears. He did understand. He did know me. When I was little, I used to hide under my blankets when I didn’t want to get up in the morning. My father would sit on the edge of my bed and say, “Where’s my daughter? Where’s Claire? I think she’s gone! But there’s some kind of lumpy thing under her covers! Let me just … poke … at … it … a bit and see what I can figure out.”

  Then he would poke and tickle me through the covers, “finding” my face, knees, feet, elbows, et cetera, but mistaking them for various animal parts. Sometimes, he would declare that I was a snake or an elephant or a deadly jungle cat. But most often, he would grab one of my elbows and pretend he thought it was a pig’s snout. Then he would shout “PIGGY!” as he whipped the blankets off.

  We called that game Playing Piggy.

  When my mother and Gram came back with the food, I was trying to teach Dad to say my actual name. I would go into a whole, lengthy explanation, like, “Yes, Piggy is a game we used to play. But that’s not my real name. My real name is Claire. Can you say ‘Claire’?”

  Then he would get all animated, lean forward, and yell, “Piggy!”

  Mom and Gram thought this was great. Mom said that the doctors had told her Dad might not have the right names for things, but when he started naming things at all, it would be an important step.

  So I worked on getting Dad to name the other people in the room. When it was my mom’s turn, he didn’t even come close to saying Nicole, but he did point to her and say, “Bug.” She got all teary-eyed and told me that when they had first started dating, his mushy nickname for her was Herbie Love Bug. She had called him Pork Chop.

  Which didn’t sound that romantic, but whatever.

  Next, I tried to get him to call his mother Mom. He kept looking away and bunching up a handful of bedcovers in his left fist, like this was a really frustrating assignment, but then he finally whipped his head around, made eye contact with Gram, and said, “Hat! Hat!” in a soft, little-kid voice.

  Gram teared up, too, and said, “That was his first word. He used to crawl around the house all the time holding this little blue hat his aunt Iris had made him, and he would say it just like that—‘Hat! Hat!’ ”

  Dad smiled and said it again. His hand released its grip on his blankets, and he lay back and closed his eyes.

  In probably less than a minute, he was snoring. Mom told us the doctors had said remembering would be exhausting work for him, and that we were supposed to let him sleep as much as he needed to.

  We sat and ate our Chinese food in total silence. I kept remembering what it had been like, hiding under my blankets and waiting for Dad to “find” me. Even when I was, like, seven years old, a small part of me had sort of half believed he hadn’t known it was me under there. Mom and Gram looked far away, too. I guess Mom was having dinner with her Pork Chop, and Gram was picturing her little boy crawling around with a blue hat.

  I don’t know how long we all would have sat there, but after fifteen minutes or so, Matthew burst into the room with Mom’s parents right behind. “We won!” he shouted. “I scored my first varsity goal. Aw, Mom, it was beautiful. I was way out past the eighteen. There were two guys on me, but I juked and got the shot off—lefty! The keeper dove for it, but it bent around him and went in. Back upper ninety for the win! Oops, is Dad asleep?”

  Our father sat up, looked right at my brother, and said, “Matthew!”

  So typical.

  My favorite of my dad’s books is called Out of the Cradle. The title comes from a poem by his favorite poet, Walt Whitman. Anyway, the last line of the novel goes, “And that’s how we live: wandering endlessly, concentrically outward, seeking in others a kindling spark of the love which has long lain dormant, dark, unstoked in our own deepest souls.”

  On the morning of his discharge from the hospital, I kept thinking of that sentence over and over, wondering whether he would ever write anything like that again. Write it? I was wondering whether he’d ever even be able to understand anything like that again. A parade of professionals came into the room and went over the discharge instructions with Mom—which was an endless recital of “He can eat this; he can’t eat that; he might be able to eat this other thing, but only on Fridays when the moon is three-quarters full” and “He’s walking great—well, not great in the sense of being able to walk more than fifteen feet without a cane, or being able to handle stairs, or having good balance, but, hey, he’s walking and that’s great!” and “You have to give him this medicine twice a day with food, this medicine three times a day without food, but with plenty of liquid, and this medicine four times a day with food, liquid, a spoonful of sugar, and the blessings of three monks from a cave in the Himalayas.” Mom looked so overwhelmed I thought she might just pass out.

  Who could possibly keep all this stuff
straight?

  And then my father came home. Gram waited at the house to help on that end, while Mom, Matthew, and I all escorted him out of the hospital and into our minivan. The whole way, I felt tremendously panicked. I was like, Help! Don’t send him home with us! We don’t know what we’re doing! Here he has doctors, nurses, nutritionists, physical therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, breathing therapists—I’m pretty sure his therapists have therapists. At home he’ll have a bunch of total amateurs. I can’t even keep a goldfish alive. Matthew once bought a hamster and didn’t notice for three days that it had escaped. Three freaking days! Do you know how far our father could get in three days?

  Possibly all the way to the front door.

  Anyway, it took a big male nurse-dude and Matthew to help Dad into the front seat of the minivan, and I was like, Do you people think we have a guy like that just randomly standing in our driveway, waiting to drag my father out of the car? What are we supposed to do, call 1-800-LIFT-POP?

  I hadn’t really thought it through, but our whole life was going to get flipped over and shaken around. I mean, the hospital was one thing, but once he got home, this was the rest of our lives.

  Matthew and Gram got Dad into our family room through the garage, because that was the only entrance that didn’t involve stairs. That was another thing: Our house was a minefield of staircases. First, you had the family room and a half bath on the garage level, with stairs down to the basement from there. You had to walk up five steps from the family room to reach the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and another seven to get to the bedrooms and the main bathroom.

  What were we supposed to do, crank Dad up and down using pulleys? Was he going to live on the family room couch? There wasn’t even a shower in the bathroom on that level.

  I also had two really selfish thoughts. First of all, what was I going to say when my friends came over and found my unshowered, dirty father lying on the pullout couch all day, drooling, barking nonsense words, and referring to me as Piggy? And second, the family room was where I did all my stretching and core exercises for dance, because I liked the carpeting there. Where was I supposed to work out if Dad was permanently camping on the sofa?

  “We’re home, honey!” Mom said in a fake-cheerful voice.

  “Waldron!” Dad replied.

  “What the heck is a Waldron?” Matthew asked.

  “It’s the street he grew up on in New York,” Gram said. It was so strange: Everything Dad said made a weird kind of sense, but only if you knew enough about his life to skip a step along with him. Was that just how things were going to be forever?

  “Spicy!” Dad said.

  “Our cat when he was a little boy,” Gram said.

  “Jesus Christ!” Mom said, and leaned her head against the wall. “How are we going to get through this?”

  My mom and Gram hadn’t ever been close—I mean, they were in-laws—but Gram put her hands on Mom’s shoulders and said, “You’ll do it the same way you’ve always done everything, Nicole: extremely well.”

  Holy cow. That was the nicest thing either of my grandmothers had ever said to her kid-in-law. It was a total moment, until I noticed something: Our whole house had been messed up. There were grippy railings leading around the edge of the family room to the bathroom, and then to the stairs. Somehow in the couple of days since I had last been home, the whole place had been worked over.

  I felt like the bears in Goldilocks: Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, and they’ve brought power tools!

  I ran upstairs, and there was a railing installed to connect the downstairs stair banister to the one that led to the bedrooms, and another that ran the whole length of the upstairs hallway, into the bathroom, and then into my parents’ bedroom. My bedroom was unchanged—which was kind of a relief, because for a moment, I had been afraid it might have been turned into some kind of therapy pool for Dad or something—but the bathrooms were both bizarrely altered. The downstairs one had a weird, tall thing strapped on top of the toilet to make the seat higher, and guardrails on either side. The upstairs one had a railing on the shower wall, plus a plastic-and-metal seat actually in the tub itself. I examined the seat and saw that it could fold up and out of the way for when the rest of us were using the shower, but still—our entire home was like a gigantic hospital room.

  I ran back down to the family room, where Matthew was already looking outraged. “Mom,” I said.

  “This is not the time, Claire. I just told your brother the same thing. Now go to your room and study or something until dinner.”

  “But—but—I don’t have anything to study. And it’s only two o’clock.”

  Mom rubbed her right temple with two fingers, which she only ever does when her head hurts. “Just find something to do with yourself. Or I will find something for you. Is that clear?”

  Matthew and I both got out of there so fast that if we had been in a cartoon, you would have seen colored blurs, and possibly trails of smoke, behind us.

  Mom made Dad’s favorite dinner, spaghetti and meatballs. Unfortunately, if you have ever seen a toddler try to eat spaghetti, you will realize she hadn’t really thought that one all the way through. It was a massacre. The doctors said Dad’s recovery of his swallowing reflex had been amazing, because apparently, after a stroke, lots of people can’t eat or drink much without either choking or inhaling the food into their lungs.

  But you can’t swallow the food if you can’t get it into your mouth, and Dad had been right-handed before the stroke. Now his right hand was kind of weak, curled, and spastic. He was trying to do everything with his left, but if you try to do something like get spaghetti onto a fork and to your mouth with your bad hand, you will be surprised by how challenging it is. And you haven’t had a stroke, which messes up things like balance and body awareness, too.

  What I am saying is that Dad was essentially trying to catapult the food at his face in the hope that some would go in. As a result, his face looked like a thirteenth-century French castle under attack. We all tried to ignore this for a while, but finally Mom said, “Here, can I help you with that?”

  He just stared straight ahead, as if he hadn’t heard, and chucked a meatball over his shoulder into the white lace curtains.

  Mom wiggled the sauce-covered fork out of his hand, speared a tiny piece of meatball from his plate, and brought it to his lips, but he didn’t do anything.

  “Bite, Dad,” I said, but he just stared at the wall.

  “Open?” Mom asked, but he still stared.

  Then Mom asked Matthew to help her turn Dad’s chair, and they got Dad positioned so that he was facing her on an angle. Next, she took a bit of food onto her own fork and put that down on her plate while easing Dad’s fork back into his hand.

  I found myself holding my breath as she slowly brought her fork up. Dad slowly lifted his, too. She opened her mouth, and after a few seconds’ delay, Dad opened his. She brought her fork to her lips, and Dad did the same, but his fork was off course. Matthew jumped up and guided Dad’s arm a bit until everything was lined up.

  I could barely stand to watch.

  Mom put her food into her mouth, closed, and chewed.

  Dad’s fork went in. He closed his mouth, a bit crookedly, and chewed. Only a little bit of sauce dribbled out.

  When she swallowed, Dad swallowed. When she opened her mouth and smiled, so did he.

  Then Dad tried to take another forkful of spaghetti, but he couldn’t seem to find his plate with the fork. He just kept stabbing the table instead. Matthew tried to guide his arm, but Dad shrugged him off with a glare. After five or six stabs, Dad dropped his fork, shoved a hand into his spaghetti, grabbed a hunk, and shoved it into his mouth.

  Mostly.

  “Oh, honey!” Mom said.

  “Meat! Me eat!” said the great author.

  When Matthew was in the eighth grade, he was president of the jazz band. He was the only kid in his entire year to have straight A’s through all three
years of middle school. He was the star shortstop of his travel baseball team, and captain of his travel soccer team. When he walked through the halls of the school, lesser students waved palm fronds to cool his skin and dropped aromatic petals in front of his feet.

  Okay, that last part isn’t true. As far as I know.

  But you can see why I might have felt insecure about my place in the world, especially when my semi-vegetative father started calling me Piggy but still remembered Matthew’s name every time. Plus, I was now fifth chair in band and had been demoted to Baby’s First Dance Class.

  I decided I needed to do something fun, different, and flashy to cheer myself up. Obviously, my two-hundred-dollar boots hadn’t exactly blown anybody away, so fashion wasn’t going to do the trick for me. But right after Dad came home, my history teacher, Mr. Evans, assigned us a project on any aspect of American history up through the Revolutionary War. Now, you have to understand, Mr. Evans had a sick sense of humor. So I figured I could go a little crazy with my presentation.

  I decided to go with a “Miserable Deaths of the Explorers” theme. This stuff was awesome material. Henry Hudson was marooned with his son and a few faithful companions to freeze and die in a rowboat in an icy bay—picture the end of Titanic, but without the sexy parts. Captain James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death by angry Hawaiians. Giovanni da Verrazano went ashore on a tropical island in a small boat with a few men, and was then killed and eaten by cannibals in the Caribbean while the rest of his crew watched helplessly from their ship. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo jumped down from his ship onto some rocks to help his crew when they were attacked by natives, but broke either an arm or a leg when he landed. The limb got infected, and he died several days later. Ferdinand Magellan was hacked to death by Pacific Islanders with spears and blades. But my all-time favorite was probably Juan Ponce de León, who got shot in the leg with a poisoned arrow in Florida.