Super America

by Anne Panning

  Inside, my father waited for us in the kitchen. I wondered what it must’ve been like to be him—trapped in a body that was now half of what it once was, unable to walk or run or spontaneously do anything. The guilt factor must have been high, too. No one had ever said anything, but I predicted that one day he and my mother would have it out.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart,” my mother said. She laid the roses in my father’s lap. Their musty hothouse scent filled the kitchen when he drew back the paper wrap. She kissed the top of his head, I noted, not his lips.

  “Thanks.” He smiled and handed them back to her to put in a vase. “I didn’t get you anything,” he said. “You know ...”

  My mother shrugged and laughed. “Don’t be silly,” she said, opening up the cardboard containers full of chicken. It was all I could do not to pounce on the food and stuff everything into my mouth. “The fact that you’re with us at all is enough for me.” But she was all business and didn’t even look up. “Nick, could you set the table?”

  I rushed plates and silverware onto the dining room table, even though I thought the beauty of takeout was supposed to be that you didn’t have to do dishes. But this was a special romantic day, I reminded myself, even though I didn’t have a girlfriend; seeing Harry and Rebecca constantly together never failed to remind me of that. Earlier I’d heard them laughing in the living room, then chasing each other up the stairs to Harry’s room. Ostensibly they went up there to play a new video game on his television, but I had to wonder. What amazed me even more was that my mother let them get away with it.

  Finally we sat down to eat, and I loaded my plate with an extra plump chicken breast, a dollop of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a small soupy puddle of coleslaw just to be polite. I started eating before they’d even served themselves.

  “So did Harry and Nick tell you about the legs?” my father asked. He helped himself to a drumstick and wing, then handed my mother the box.

  “The legs?” Her eyes looked glassy and tired. The day care center had been having a lot of turnover lately, and she’d been putting in long days and sometimes nights.

  “I’m going to walk again,” he said. He hadn’t touched his food yet—another new trait since the accident was his seeming lack of appetite. I rarely saw him eat. “I’m going to get legs.”

  “You are?” My mother was peeling all the good crunchy breading off her chicken breast. She was one of those people who read labels on food religiously, refraining if the fat content, especially the saturated fat, was too high. Her chicken, without its coating, reminded me too clearly of an actual bird now, and I looked away. “So where did this idea come from all of the sudden?” She ate politely with a fork and knife. “I mean, do you think you’re ready for something like that?”

  My father put down his food. “Do I think I’m ready?” He gestured to himself in the chair. “How much more ready could I be?” I thought he winked at me then, but I couldn’t be sure. At any rate, he hadn’t seemed to have lost his enthusiasm, even though my mother, for some reason, was doing much to dampen it.

  “I just mean,” she said, chewing. She patted a napkin to her lips and cocked her head to the side, considering. “Didn’t the doctors say that might not work for everyone? I mean, that you’d have to wait and see?”

  My father pushed himself back from the table and crossed his arms. If he couldn’t stalk away at least he could do that. “So what are you really saying, Ginny? Would you prefer I stay in this wheelchair for the rest of my life? Is that what you want?”

  “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up,” she said. She fluffed her potatoes with her fork like a little kid trying to pretend she’d eaten them.

  “Why not?” my father said. The way he draped one arm around the back of his wheelchair provided a glimmer, for just a second, of his old confidence, his almost cocky self-assurance. It was part of what had made him such a good lawyer. Why couldn’t he still practice law? I thought. Even from his wheelchair? “What’s wrong with someone getting their hopes up?”

  She looked at him, her chin pointed down. “You know why.”

  My father turned away, staring out the window. I wished there had been a way for me to leave gracefully, but I was stuck in the middle of them with my mouth full. “In your world,” my father said finally, “nothing works out, does it? Nobody wins. You’ve always been an incredible pessimist.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  I got up and cleared away the discarded boxes stained with grease spots and littered with bones. Let them clear the air, I thought. Let them finally do it. Neither one of them stopped or acknowledged me as I ducked out of the room and took the stairs by twos only to hear Harry and Rebecca laughing in his bedroom. The contrast with what was going on downstairs was acute—and welcome. The door was open a crack, and I knocked with a knuckle. “Guys?” I said. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” Harry said. They both lay sprawled on bean bag chairs in front of the television. His room had been newly painted navy blue, but my mother had insisted he at least keep the trim white. It looked nautical and sporty instead of the brooding den he’d likely imagined. He’d bought a couple of Indian bedspreads from the head shop in town and had one hanging on a wall and the other billowing from the four corners of the ceiling. They gave off a scent of smoky incense and dark, earthy hemp. “What’s up?” Harry sat up, revealing matted messy hair. He’d inherited my mother’s kinky curls, which he wore, in my opinion, a little too long to look good.

  “Not much,” I said. We all looked at the door when we heard loud voices erupt downstairs.

  “They going at it?” Harry said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  Rebecca leaned back against the bed and crossed her arms over her knees. She wore two long ponytails like a child. “I didn’t think they ever fought,” she said. “They just seem so ... I don’t know. Under control.” She pulled at the fraying white hem of her jeans. “Unlike my parents, who are, like, totally whacked.”

  “Dad wants legs,” Harry said. “He thinks he can walk with fake legs.”

  “Well, couldn’t he?” Rebecca asked. She balled up a bunch of threads from her jeans and pitched them in the garbage can across the room.

  “In theory,” Harry said. “I mean, I guess, right?”

  I shrugged. I’d never really let myself consider the possibility after the accident. “Maybe with crutches or arm braces or something.” I sat on the edge of the bed and couldn’t help feeling I was interrupting something. I stood up. “So I thought I’d take a picture of you guys,” I said. “You know, for Valentine’s Day and everything.”

  “That’s sweet,” Rebecca said. She took off her little wire rimmed glasses and folded them up in her hands. Her eyes were perfectly round, like giant bright blue marbles. Something about her reminded me of a frog.

  “You want to do that?” Harry asked. “Picture of us?”

  “Sure, why not?” I went to get the camera in my bedroom, which sometimes felt like a shrine to all my father’s caregivers, with their pictures on the walls like some sort of museum. I looked again at the one of Julie with the grocery receipt in her mouth and felt a pull in my chest. She still worked for my father, but it was often the late shift and I wouldn’t see her unless I had to run downstairs for something. Even then, we hardly spoke.

  Back in Harry’s room, I walked in on them kissing. They’d clearly heard me but must not have cared. “So, okay,” I said.

  “Like this,” Harry said, muffled. They kept their arms around each other. They turned their faces towards me, but kept kissing. “It’s the perfect Valentine’s shot. Come on.”

  I fiddled with the light meter, then, just when I was about to take it, Harry placed a hand on Rebecca’s breast. All of us froze, but I took the picture anyway. Neither of them laughed, although I wished they would’ve. “Harry’s so uncouth,” Rebecca finally said, and slid his hand back into his lap. “You’ll have to
forgive him.”

  Harry shrugged it off. Ever since the dui it seemed he cared less and less about what people thought; in fact, getting the dui seemed to give him even more license to shock and disrupt. Shortly after the incident my mother had timidly suggested he get therapy, which was not a big hit with Harry. “I’m not the one who’s fucked up around here,” he’d said. “God!” I remembered that Saturday morning; I’d been sitting at the piano playing Bach. Harry kept spinning the basketball on his finger, then letting it drop to the floor where it bounced, upsetting everything in the house. At one point it crashed into the glass hutch where my mother kept all her mother’s valuable dishes. When my mother told him to knock it off, he left for the entire day and didn’t return until midnight.

  I went back to my room after Harry had so deliberately embarrassed me and lay on my bed. My room was dark, save for the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling I’d put there on my eleventh birthday. Amazingly, they still kept their glow. I closed my eyes and gave myself permission to masturbate for just a little while. I liked to think of Julie the most, but images of what Rebecca must’ve looked like naked crept in as well: her pale, veiny skin, her small round breasts under tight T-shirts, her collarbone jutting up out of her clothes. The climax never really felt like a cleansing, though, but more like the way a hard, sweaty climb left you breathless and exhausted. Afterwards, I thought about my parents. They didn’t even sleep in the same room now, even though the downstairs den had been renovated and enlarged to accommodate their big king-sized bed whose tall mahogany spires had always read medieval to me. My mother stayed upstairs in their old bedroom; sometimes I caught her watching television and folding laundry up there, even though she’d said she was so tired she could absolutely not stay awake another minute. I guessed I couldn’t blame her.

  The thaw that year was incredible. Although the meteorologists had forecast a very wet spring, given the record-breaking volume of snow we received that winter, no one had predicted how torrential the month of April would be. I’d taken to carrying my umbrella with me no matter what. The ground felt spongy underfoot, and the old slate sidewalks—uneven and pocked with age—became red-tinged lakes that stained my shoes and socks a pale orange. Our basement had flooded, and then flooded again; the old sump pump could be heard underneath the floorboards desperately trying to keep up, but nothing could stanch the continuous flow of water that came from both above and below. Religious pundits began appearing on television to declare the floods biblical in proportion and prophetic in scope. Perhaps, they claimed, the new millennium had indeed served as a warning to us after all. I was unsure what, exactly, they were suggesting, but I knew I had never prayed, had never believed in God, and could think of nothing particularly sinful about my behavior save for my private masturbatory sessions that had increased in frequency as the months wore on.

  One cold, rainy Friday evening found us all at home with no plans, no good television to watch, and nothing good to eat. I knew this meant our usual pizza order to Mamma Mia’s: two thin-crust sausage-and-mushrooms with extra cheese and a liter of cola. By now this had become our standard backup meal after the constant flow of casseroles, soups, and baked pastas had tapered off. We’d had a good laugh when we realized the sympathy period after a misfortune ran almost exactly six months, especially if the misfortune was particularly debilitating and “life altering” as my father’s had been. I actually found it a relief not to sit through another foil pan of baked ziti, the noodles so melded together by cheese they looked like brain matter, the sauce so sweet it could not be cut with any amount of parmesan cheese or hot sauce.

  Having long abandoned formal meals at the dining room table, we all sat around the living room watching The Weather Channel, even though we all knew the forecast by then: rain, rain, rain. My father’s wheelchair sat in its usual position, which was adjacent to the couch and perpendicular to the leather club chair that he used to occupy almost exclusively. Harry lounged in it now with his feet dangling over the edge. My mother had bought it for my father for their tenth wedding anniversary, and it was his pride and joy, with its supple oxblood leather, its matching ottoman, its traditional nailhead trim. Recently he’d begun testing himself in terms of lifting and moving himself onto furniture, but most often he seemed to prefer his wheelchair, which was starting to take on a slouchy, lived-in quality. He now had a swing-armed tray attached to the side that he could use for eating, writing, or holding his shortwave radio; when he didn’t need it, it folded down out of sight. There was also a little tote bag snapped to one side, with pockets full of papers, pens, magazines, and the portable telephone.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said apropos of nothing. Nothing was ever just a simple conversation with my father anymore but a series of bulletins, updates, and challenges. We’d all been watching yet not watching the television, eating merely to sustain ourselves, what my mother called “maintenance eating,” a term she used, I thought, to assuage her guilt over not preparing home-cooked meals. For a while she’d tried, but then she was simply too tired by week’s end to put in the effort. Julie, my father’s aide, still helped out in that regard, but she only came in the late evenings to help bathe him and get him ready for bed. Sometimes she left us containers of chocolate chip cookies she’d made while we were all asleep, which helped explain what I could’ve sworn were my vanilla-scented dreams.

  “Yes?” my mother said, not unkindly. It seemed she’d become immune to his pronouncements by that point and could no longer be shocked.

  “I’m thinking of moving out,” he said. A huge triangle of pizza was draped over his paper plate. He hadn’t touched it. “Try things on my own for a while.”

  Harry changed position in the leather chair, causing it to squeak loudly like an animal. He shot me a look of disdain, as if it were me who was abandoning ship.

  My mother, who had been supporting my father—however unenthusiastically—through his initial inquiries and examinations for prostheses, did something then that I knew I would never forget: she screamed. It wasn’t a quiet or ladylike scream, or even a tired, anguished little scream, but a full-on, from-the-throat scream. Then she cried, “No! No! No!” And again, “No!” before running out of the room with her hands on top of her head. In my mind I remembered thinking: such is the beginning of a nervous breakdown. For a second I contemplated calling an ambulance, but Harry ran after her and I thought it best to wait a while, let the dust settle, see how serious both of them really were. This left me alone to deal with my father.

  “The legs ...” he said, but didn’t finish. “It would take too much out of her.”

  I got up and turned off the television. Later in my life when I would remember these moments, I didn’t want them cheapened by a flashing television in my memory. “What do you mean?” I sat down in the club chair and put my feet up on the ottoman, something I rarely felt entitled to.

  “It’s an uphill battle,” he said, then laughed a little. I didn’t know if he was acknowledging the understatement, or referring to their marriage. “But then it always has been with your mother and me.”

  The rain lashed against the windows with little ticking sounds as shadows of headlights moved across the walls, growing and then lurching as they got closer. I grabbed Nomad and rubbed behind her ears until she purred appreciatively and slumped down in my lap for more. Until last year, I’d thought they’d had a pretty happy marriage. I remembered one particular vacation we’d taken quite vividly, even though I’d only been about eight years old. We’d driven all the way to New Orleans, stopping only once at a chain motel just outside Nashville, then driving the next day straight through until we reached the French Quarter. My parents were both younger and thinner then, more apt to try new things and experiences without analysis or debate. They’d brought along a small fruit crate of their favorite tapes, and each got to take a turn at selecting as they drove. “Except driver trumps all,” I remembered my father saying with a sly smile since he was most oft
en the one behind the wheel. Harry and I sat straight up in the back seat of the old bmw station wagon, eying the men dressed like women with fear and intrigue. Clowns juggled, artists painted caricatures, and everywhere musicians played the Dixieland jazz my father so loved and admired.

  Our European-style hotel (read: small, quirky) spilled right out onto Bourbon Street, and the very first time we ventured outside a woman lifted her shirt and showed us her tattooed bare breasts and laughed in a way I remembered sounding like a mean cackle. Harry and I walked in front of our parents, who held hands and kept making sure we wouldn’t get snatched. They both seemed so happy during that trip, popping into any shop as they walked, buying freely, holding sequined masks up to each other’s faces and laughing. Harry and I were each so festooned with Mardi Gras beads around our necks that I could still remember the hot weight of them in that tropical August humidity. We ate muffulettas, big, round, flat sandwiches stuffed with greasy meats and cheeses and cut into triangles like pizza. We threw coins into the cups of street performers, one of whom terrified me to the point of tears. A man, spray-painted in silver, stood on a podium and pretended to robotically disassemble all his limbs. My mother later claimed she’d had to shield me from him every time we went by his corner.

  At night, Harry and I slept in a bed just inches from our parents’. When I opened my eyes, I found them seemingly locked together face to face, lying on their sides as if they were stuck that way. The city lights that leaked through the curtains allowed me to see their faces—pale, waxen, quietly charged. In the distance was the music, so lively and gay, reminding me we were far away from home.

  My father now moved his wheelchair closer to me, and I felt myself pulling back instinctively. “You would understand, right?” he asked. “If I had to leave for a while? We’d still see each other, of course.”

  Somehow everyone assumed I was older than my age and could take just about anything they dished out. “Is this about Rose?” I countered. A few times she’d come over to visit, but always when my mother was at work. “Or is that all over with?”