by Anne Panning
It was painful to watch my mother sit down and sign her name to these contracts, however. After spending the early “lean” years of their marriage living in a small ranch house on the outskirts of town, my mother had finally achieved an address she could be proud of. The street we lived on was populated mostly with professors and high school teachers, retirees and Volvo-driving young couples who had fled Rochester when their children reached school age. Houses rarely went on the market on our coveted tree-canopied street, and I knew it caused my mother no end of agony to agree to let groups of men tear out the bull’s eye molding around the doorframes, remove the original wainscoting in the bathrooms, take off the heavy wooden doors with glass knobs, and finally install a permanent two-tier wheelchair ramp onto the front porch, her pride and joy—graced with gingerbread detailing and ornate spindle work and painted in four rich but complimentary shades of green, a “painted lady” I had actually heard passersby envy and exclaim over.
On Christmas Day, the mood around the house was surprisingly cheerful. My mother had made a solid effort at normalcy by putting a turkey in to roast early in the morning, playing the old Bing Crosby and Elvis Christmas carols of our childhood, and gathering us all around the tree at an ungodly early hour to open gifts. Harry was not very amenable to this and sat there gruffly in his flannel pajamas, hair coned and twisted as if he’d been caught up in a storm, lips and eyes puffy from exhaustion. He’d been out the night before with Rebecca, which had caused my mother nothing short of agony. “On Christmas Eve?” she’d said plaintively, quietly, while our father took one of his customary late afternoon naps. “Don’t you understand that we’re all in this together?” She’d been rolling out cookie dough with me sitting obediently by her side. I had the Christmas tree, the Santa with his toy sack, and the star ready to go.
“Well don’t you understand that I can hardly stand being in this house anymore it’s so depressing?” Harry nabbed a pinch of dough between his fingers and popped it in his mouth. He’d pulled on his ski jacket and kissed my mother on the cheek before she had a chance to argue or scold. He grabbed his car keys off the counter, gave me the peace sign, and closed the door behind him, leaving a gust of cold air in his wake. My mother and I had both shivered.
As gifts were opened the next morning, it became obvious that Harry and I were being inundated with things to make up for the new sorrow of our household. We both received expensive new hockey sticks, matching (unfortunately) Irish wool sweaters, numerous new cassettes for our favorite computer games (which weren’t cheap), and a television set for each of us to put in our bedrooms. The magnitude of these gifts worried me more than it pleased me. I knew my mother had orchestrated it all, since my father had not left the house since he’d returned home in November, save for a couple thwarted attempts to go downtown despite the treacherously snowy sidewalks. All the gift tags read “Love Mom & Dad,” but they were all penned in my mother’s expertly mastered Palmer’s cursive that I knew I could identify out of thousands of writing samples if I had to.
My father received mostly clothes and music. Harry and I had gone in together on a Walkman that was supposed to attach around your waist for jogging but that we’d clandestinely discovered also worked perfectly around his wheelchair. It was unfortunately called a Jogman, scripted in flashy black letters across its bright yellow shell, but we figured it was the perfect gift for him regardless.
My mother gave my father an odd tool that looked like a giant silver duck bill but was actually called a Grab-It, used for reaching and grabbing things that were out of reach for someone in a wheelchair. Somehow my mother’s giving him such a utilitarian, disability-focused tool tipped me off to how their relationship had shifted. I realized I hadn’t seen them kiss or display any kind of affection since the accident. It had all become physical touch with a purpose: lifting my father with the help of the moving board (which Harry called a Ouija board because of its similar shape and composition); adjusting his clothing (they’d tried to alter his pants, but mostly they were just rolled up and pinned at the legs); bringing him medication and water; and generally helping him groom and tidy himself.
“Sorry I don’t have anything for you,” our father said as we were balling up the bright gift wrap and stuffing it into a garbage bag my mother held open. “But you can see how it is ...” He gestured to his legs and shrugged. He looked down at the floor. I thought he was going to cry, and then I thought I might cry, until Harry broke in.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Hardly expected of you, Dad.”
Our father nodded but didn’t look up. I could feel my mother monitoring the situation, trying to gauge when or if we might need her mediation, but we were a fairly quiet, reserved group of males and not prone to deep or lengthy conversations. In fact, one of the things I’d always enjoyed about my father was the quiet understanding that seemed to carry us through the good and bad times. My mother had always been the talker, the busy, fluttering voice to help us all avoid the unspoken. Thankfully she didn’t butt in but left us all with our private thoughts.
We ate at the small wooden table in the kitchen—feta, tomato, and onion omelets. I hated to admit it, but even the way my father ate seemed different now, like a handicapped person. I couldn’t say what it was exactly, but something made me look away, out the window, where I directed everyone’s attention to the chickadees snacking at the bird feeder in the patio. Beyond the garage, you could see the pool cover crusted over with snow like frosting on a cake; the sun reflected off the white stretch of yard in a fierce sparkle. It was hard for me to even remember anymore the evening my mother and I had sat out there so peacefully drinking iced tea, talking, cooling off, before the phone call that had changed everything.
Later that afternoon when the light was starting to fade, I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I figured it must’ve been another one of my father’s aides who was here to help him bathe, go to the toilet, stimulate his limbs for blood flow. I glanced out the window and saw a vehicle I didn’t recognize, though—a little foreign station wagon with a ski rack, sporty but sensible. Normally the aides drove older, rustier cars that had seen better days; in fact, one aide, Belinda, drove such a loud car that it often woke me up when she arrived early in the mornings. I got out my camera, readied myself in the front entryway, and after I let her in, asked if I could take her picture. “What?” she asked, uncoiling her scarf. She seemed flustered and surprised in a way the others hadn’t; I sensed fear or entrapment. I noticed she was really quite beautiful, also unlike all the other aides who seemed to have a worn, underpaid look about them that suggested fatigue and early aging.
“I’m Nick,” I said. “His youngest son.” I held out my hand to her, and she shook it. “Let me take those for you.”
Everything about her was bright and athletic, including her colorful jacket, hat, and gloves. “Rose Vancheri,” she said. “Thank you.” When she smiled and shook my hand, I instantly warmed to her. Her eyes, a squinty green, honestly sparkled. She was much taller than my mother, and something about her quick movements—running her fingers through her long hair, brushing snow off her pant legs, stomping her feet in a little two-step march—suggested youth and vigor, though I doubted she was really any younger than my mother.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, and pointed to the camera.
“I guess,” she said, and stood holding the poinsettia she’d brought in her arms. She seemed more comfortable having something to hold onto. “You’re quite the shutterbug.”
“I take photos of everyone who comes to help my father,” I said. She moved aside while I adjusted the light meter. “I mean, just so you don’t feel self-conscious or anything.”
“Well, I don’t know how much help I can be,” she said. She pulled a rubber band from around her wrist and twisted her hair into a loose ponytail, and that’s when I got my shot. “But I’d sure like to see him and say hello.” She stood on tiptoes for some reason and peeked into the living room; I took a shot o
f that, too. Harry and my father were watching a football game. The lighting was dim. It was already dark outside. I didn’t know where my mother was or what she was doing.
“In here,” I heard my father say. I realized he’d probably been listening the whole time. “The Jets are getting their asses kicked.”
Clearly Rose was not an aide who had come to help my father. I could see it in the way she squeezed his hand and relaxed around him. “Peter,” she said, “how are you?” She knelt by his wheelchair and presented him with the poinsettia.
“Okay,” he said. This was his standard answer. I’d come to realize there was no way he would ever lie and say “good” after the accident; he was that kind of honest. “Just put it over there.” He pointed to what I’d always thought of as my mother’s plant table in front of the bay window. It was loaded with jade plants, African violets, wandering Jews, and one cursory spider plant that I’d given her for mother’s day when I was a child and that was still amazingly alive.
It was funny what people brought to someone who had lost their legs in a terrible accident: backgammon, books, lasagna (we’d probably received upwards of ten lasagnas since the accident; what used to be a favorite of ours Harry and I could no longer stomach), long distance calling cards, notebooks and pens, bottles of wine, flowers, fruit baskets, crossword puzzles, National Enquirers, disposable cameras, even a two-gallon bucket of caramel corn, which Harry and I downed in a single afternoon. We actually kept a space in the pantry for visitor gifts and had an ongoing contest about which was the weirdest or most inappropriate—a set of juggling balls had most recently been holding first place.
Harry and I eyed each other as my father and Rose talked. They seemed to ignore us completely, and as I listened, pretending instead that I was engrossed in the game, I gleaned that they were coworkers or at least that she was affiliated with my father’s law firm in some way. They referred to cases and subpoenas and appeals and hearings and laughed intermittently at things that didn’t seem to me remotely funny. Rose sat in the rocking chair that I had always considered my mother’s chair. Her foot bobbed up and down easily as she listened and talked. Instead of the many stiff, awkward visits I’d been witness to, this one seemed to draw my father out of his misery and into his old self again. This woman, clearly, was a friend, and a good one from the look of it.
I heard my mother thumping up the basement steps and felt a stab of guilt that I should’ve been helping her with the laundry. She brought the basket of whites into the living room, as she often did, to fold them in front of the television. “Might as well make it a little more fun,” she’d say, then sit on her knees, folding our underwear and T-shirts, glancing up at Dan Rather between grabs into the basket.
Finally, she saw Rose. “Rose!” she said. “How are you? It’s been a while.”
They exchanged pleasantries, but I could see something was off. My mother seemed wary, even though she appeared to know Rose, to have some vague familiarity with her. She pushed aside the laundry, too personal for public viewing, and rushed off to pour glasses of wine. When she came back, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes darted around the room as if she were looking for something.
“So how’s the new job?” my mother asked. She sat beside me on the couch, elbows leaning forward on her knees, overenthusing her interest. Then, as if she’d just realized Harry and I were in the room, she turned to explain. “Rose used to work part-time at your father’s office but quit for something more full-time.” She hadn’t said if Rose was a lawyer or a receptionist or a legal aide, and I couldn’t guess. Something about her didn’t seem lawyerly. She looked like a ski instructor or a tennis player. My mother swung back to Rose. “So how’s it working out for you?”
My father watched their conversation like a tennis match, his eyes flipping back and forth. He held a hand up over his mouth, a ponderous lawyerly look.
The conversation took a turn then that failed to interest me. I let my gaze fall back to the television screen where players were tackling each other under a spitting snow. One coach paced back and forth nervously like an expectant father as his opponents inched toward the ten-yard line. In the stands, fans with green-painted faces shouted “Number One” at the camera in a way that suggested violence. Harry was rapt; occasionally he shouted admonitions or encouragement, depending on the play. He was barefoot and sat picking at his big toe absentmindedly. He acted as if he had no idea anyone else was even in the room.
After Rose finally left, I carefully watched how my parents reacted. My mother, who’d been so polite, hustled into the kitchen to fix dinner. “I can’t believe she stayed so long,” she said to no one in particular. “I mean, on Christmas Day?” My father sat fingering a single red leaf on the poinsettia. He wasn’t used to drinking anymore and had been warned against it because of his pain medications. I could clearly see its effects on him. The next time I looked he was sitting in his wheelchair, head slumped down to his chest, passed out, and looking—I hated to even think it—like an old man. Even his hands looked ineffective as they lay in his lap, limp-wristed and useless.
We continued to have almost constant snowfall that holiday season. In fact, the winter had already been documented as the third snowiest winter on record since 1918, and it was only December. On New Year’s Eve, when we were once again so socked with snow you couldn’t really go anywhere, Harry announced to my mother, whose back was to him washing dishes, that he would not be home until the next morning. She spun around. “Excuse me?” she said, dishtowel flung over her shoulder like a toga. “And since when do you get to decide things like this, Mr. Harold Foster?”
He gestured impatiently at her mock formality. I was leaning against the kitchen counter picking at a pineapple upside-down cake someone had sent over. It was glazed with rum and encrusted with a brown-sugar glaze. I had to admit a sick part of me enjoyed watching Harry duke it out with my parents. He was braver than me when it came to such things, and part of me rooted for him, part of me rooted for my parents. I also had to admit he could be a total ass.
“I just thought I’d, you know, let you know.” Harry joined me by the cake pan where we both gouged out chunks of the cake with our fingers and tucked them in our mouths. I knew this drove my mother crazy. “But you know, hey, whatever,” Harry said. “I guess some people just don’t appreciate courtesy.”
My mother stopped washing a dish but didn’t turn around. I wanted to say: Don’t do this to her, Harry, not now. But it was almost as if he was trying to make her upset, knowing full well he was stirring up a fight.
“Well, where are you going, if I might ask?” My mother continued her dish washing. Although we had a dishwasher, she insisted that most of her things were too fragile for it. “Rebecca’s?”
“Probably.” Harry reached into the refrigerator for the milk. Just when I thought he was going to swig from the carton, he did the right thing and reached for a glass.
“Probably?” my mother asked. She stood wiping a cracked floral platter that had belonged to my grandmother. “What kind of an answer is that?”
Harry shrugged, drank down the glass of milk, then belched.
My mother handed me the platter to put away in the cabinet above the stove. For me it was an easy reach. “Well, why don’t you ever bring her over here?” my mother said. They both seemed determined to beat the other at something; to me it was only a matter of endurance. “Harry?”
Again, Harry shrugged. This time she turned to face him, hands on her hips. I noticed, despite the cold outside, a thin film of sweat coated her face and her turtleneck was damp. “Is it because your father is in a wheelchair and you’re ashamed for her to see that?” She stood there, all five feet of her, in front of Harry’s towering frame, waiting.
“No! God!” Harry said. It seemed he had lost the showdown for he instantly retreated to the front entryway and pulled on his coat and boots. We heard the door slam—a sound muffled by all the snow outside. His Honda was buried, like both our parents
’ cars, and I assumed he would walk the half mile across town.
I’d thought my father had been down for a nap, but he wheeled in through the yet-to-be-adapted narrow doorway. “Can’t you cut him some slack?” he said. The special black gloves he wore to wheel himself around had already frayed and pilled.
This was more direct parenting than my father had ever done, even before the accident. It seemed our whole lives were now divided in two: preaccident, a happy if not slightly dysfunctional time when none of us really knew how good we’d had it and were happy enough to operate in denial; and postaccident, an unreal and exhausting time that made me feel as if I were walking around like an actor in a play, unsure of my lines, unsure of my blocking, unsure of what might happen next. Postaccident, my father surprised me more and more often.
“I’m not sure you’re one to be talking about slack,” my mother said. It was a jab, certainly, but what stunned me was that this was the first time, postaccident, that she’d said anything to him other than words of support and encouragement. They were fighting just like the old times, and it was actually a relief to me. I longed to slink away into the living room or up to my bedroom, but my father was blocking the doorway. I had no choice but to stand there gorging myself on the upside-down cake.
“Here we go,” my father said. “You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?” He glared up at her from his sitting position, which felt unnaturally inferior. “You’ve been waiting for just the right time so you could say to me, ‘Peter, this is all your fault.’ If only I hadn’t bought the bike. If only I’d paid more attention. If only I—”
