He leaned away again. The space between us slackened and subsided.
“That doesn’t look anything like them, though,” I said. “None of these things look at all like what they’re supposed to.”
“They do,” he said, sounding personally offended. He burrowed his long, bony toes into the dirt. “They do. You just have to let your eyes go a little fuzzy.”
“When I let my eyes go fuzzy, I can’t see any stars at all.”
He laughed. “Just try,” he said, and I did, but the stars had already drifted away from where they’d been only minutes before, and the sky had already filled the grooves his fingertips had carved into it.
FIVE
I’m in the bedroom, up early and getting dressed to go to the farmers’ market. They’ve got a big one now, off the highway on the edge of town, has every vegetable and fruit you could ever think of wanting, bins of them spilling over. You’ve got to go early, though. After noon, you may as well stay home, unless you’re in the mood for split tomatoes and ears of corn with brown rings where bugs have eaten their way around the cob. We usually go out there a couple times a week, though Frank would have you believe that garden of his was the only thing saving us from imminent starvation. I drop him off at one end and start myself down at the other, and we rendezvous at the car, parked way out in the lot, far away from the others. We end up with lots of duplicates, but at least he lets us take the same car now. We used to have to drive separate, and not stray from our own designated territory of vendor stalls.
I’m belting my britches when he looms up in the doorway. His face is red, and the wisps of hair atop his scalp are smeared flat with sweat. I’ve kept more of my hair than he has. It may be white, but at least it’s still there.
“Ready to go?” I say. I sit on the edge of the bed to put on my shoes. They could use a polishing; the toes are scuffed to matte.
Sunlight falls through the bay window and across the placid shining sea of wood floor. He wanted to put carpet down, didn’t want to set his bare feet on a cold floor first thing in the morning, but I refused to let him cover up the hardwood.
“Don’t just stand there looking like a criminal,” I say. “Go start up the car. Get the air going.”
He still doesn’t speak, just watches me, his jaw clamped shut tight so it won’t chew the air and ruin the effect of his glaring. I tie my shoelaces.
“You cut down all my plants,” he says. His voice is low and hoarse.
“I did no such thing.”
“I’ve been growing those plants since March.”
“It was probably some vandals,” I say.
“It wasn’t no vandals.”
“And you think it was me? You think I’d do something like that?”
“You’ve got squash cuts all over your arm.”
“These aren’t squash cuts.”
“Then what are they?”
“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of every single surface that abrades my skin.”
“I’ve picked enough squash in my life to know what their scratches look like.”
“There are all kinds of animals running wild out there,” I say. “I heard coyotes—”
“Every single plant was cut off right at the bottom of the stem.” He crosses his arms. “Nice and neat.”
I haul myself up by the bedpost. “We don’t need those plants anyway,” I say. “That’s what we’ve got the farmers’ market for. Are you coming or not?”
His face turns hard and brittle. “No,” he says. “I might exert myself.”
“Well, at least you’re sounding sensible for a change.”
I squeeze through the sliver of space he doesn’t occupy in the doorway and head down the hall. He turns and watches me go, aghast.
“Five months of work,” he yells after me. “How’d you like it if I went and sliced open all your deer?”
“I sure wouldn’t act like such a big baby about it, I know that much,” I call over my shoulder. I step into the sunlight. Day’s barely started, and already it’s so hot the handle of the car door burns my fingers.
I don’t see what he’s so broken up about. It was just some plants.
While I’m out, I buy him everything he needs: big plastic cups with spouted lids that won’t shake water down his shirt when he tips them to his lips or break when he drops them, thick plastic plates and bowls and forks and spoons big enough for him to get his fingers around without too much trouble, an extra-large remote control with extra-large buttons he’ll be able to hit one at a time, even a cane, a fancy one with a gold wolf’s head for the handle, looks real Victorian and distinguished. And when I come home, a veritable cornucopia threatening to spill forth from the trunk, he’s in the bathroom at the end of the hall, with the door open and light pooling across the floor in slick, wet puddles, and the fan roaring, and him down on all fours, scrubbing the bathtub. He wears thick pads around his knees. In the hallway, outside the bathroom door, there’s a vacuum I’ve never before seen. Comes up to my waist, gray plastic with purple handles and all sorts of hoses and gadgets and brushes and extension arms snapped and tucked into its sides, and in the middle of it all a clear, cylindrical chamber packed tight with dust and hair and layers of sediment compressed halfway to rock.
I stand in the doorway, and he pretends I’m not here. He’s got an old toothbrush, and he’s furiously scouring the scum that outlines the petals of the raised flowers on the rubber mat in the tub. They give you traction, keep you from slipping, but they do gather grime.
“This tub is filthy,” he says, looking pointedly at me. “It’s an embarrassment.” He says this like it’s supposed to be some sort of accusation, some kind of impugnment of my own personal cleanliness.
“Of course it’s dirty,” I say. “You weren’t around to scrub it.”
He scoffs, but he knows good and well that cleaning the house is his job. Always has been. He cleans the house, takes out the trash, keeps up the yard, and does the laundry. I cook and do the dishes and take care of our finances. That’s how we do it. That’s how we’ve done it for near to sixty years.
“I won’t live in a filthy house,” he says.
“It looks plenty clean to me. Come on and get up. You ought to rest.”
He laughs, as if to say he’ll be the judge of what’s clean and what’s not, since my grasp on the matter is so obviously and woefully impaired, and keeps scrubbing.
“You’re not supposed to do anything strenuous,” I say.
“I believe I’ve got enough strength left in me to wield a toothbrush.”
“Fine.” It’s probably doing him some little bit of good to feel useful, at least. I don’t think he’ll give himself another stroke just from cleaning the tub. “Where’d you get that vacuum?”
“The neighbors.”
“The neighbors gave you their vacuum?”
“They left it out on the curb with the trash. It ain’t even trash day. It’s Saturday.” He says that last part like we all, myself included, ought to be ashamed for not paying adequate attention to the municipal waste schedule. Until five years ago, they wouldn’t even come out here; he had to haul all our trash out to the dump himself, pile the bags up in the back of his truck so high I thought they’d all fly off before he could get them there.
“That lady,” he says, with profound loathing of our neighbor, an unwed mother whose name he pretends not to know—he never has liked her, ever since she cut down all the trees on her property, right up to the line with ours, thinned out the woods so bad that some afternoons we can hear her bastard children screaming while they beat each other with switches in the yard, and all, as she explained in the letter she illegally deposited in our mailbox after Frank yelled at her from the car that she’d better not pry up so much as a single root that crossed into his yard or she’d be hearing from his lawyer, to let a little light in around here—“that lady came out and told me it didn’t work.”
He gapes at her idiocy as if it were floating, brazen
and arrogant, right here in front of him. “I said I’d be the judge of that.”
“She caught you going through her trash?”
“It was right out there beside the can. I just walked up and took it. Didn’t have to dig through nothing.”
“She didn’t mind?”
“She wished me ‘the best of luck,’” he says, imitating the condescending sweetness in her voice.
“I wish she hadn’t seen you scavenging. It looks bad. Low-class.”
“Nobody takes care of anything,” he grumbles. “Look at it. It’s a perfectly good vacuum.”
“It’s probably full of spiders,” I say, looking in the chamber for spider eggs. You can see the different cleanings and different rooms, the passage of time, in the differentiation of its strata: a thick buffer of pure dust after they let the house go for too long, a pale, thin line of sawdust, a wavy band of white hair.
“Ain’t room for spiders in there,” he says. “They’ve crammed it too full.”
“I wish you hadn’t brought it in the house. I don’t want little baby spiders swarming all over everything.”
“I just told you there’s not any spiders.” He intensifies the force with which he saws the toothbrush against the edge of a rubber petal. The brush’s bristles flatten and fan.
“I got us some peaches,” I say. “A whole bushel of them. Real nice ones from Candor.” The best produce all comes from Candor. It’s something in the soil. “Thought I’d make us a cobbler.”
He makes some noncommittal grumbling noise to avoid sounding pleased. He loves a good peach cobbler. I carry the bushel of them into the kitchen, a couple pecks at a time. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten quite so many. I don’t know how we’re going to eat them all. But it’s the height of the season; they don’t get any better than this. You’ve got to enjoy them while you have the chance.
When I go back to check on him, he’s still scrubbing away. The overhead light gleams bright on the porcelain.
“Don’t you think it’s clean yet?” I say.
“I’m almost finished,” he says.
“It’s spotless.”
“I said I’m almost finished.”
“It’s pure as the driven snow. I can’t look straight at it or it would blind me.”
Something’s wrong with his scrubbing. He’s doing it too slow, almost absentmindedly, and his free hand holds the lip of the tub so it juts his elbow into an awkward angle behind him.
“You can’t get up, can you?” I say.
“I can get up whenever I very well please.”
So I sit myself down on the commode and watch him clean for another ten minutes, pushing the bristles of the toothbrush into every cranny and bloom, until I start to hear a pulsing undulation inside the previously uniform roar of the fan, and finally he wedges the toothbrush into the drain—bristle side up, so it can dry out before he throws it back into his plastic cleaning caddy—and tries to stand, but his legs are too stiff, won’t bend far enough underneath him, and his arms are too weak. They tremble, wobble, and give out, and he sags against the lip of the tub. Sweat drips down the back of his head and into the fold of skin where it meets his neck.
“They never should have let you come home this soon,” I say. “I knew it. I knew they were just tired of dealing with you. I told them you weren’t ready. Too weak. I told them you were too weak.”
“Stop crowding me. I just need some room.”
“What you need is some help. Do you want some help?”
“I want you to stop crowding me.”
I stand behind him with my hands in his armpits. He tries to shrug me off, but he doesn’t try very hard, and then I strain to lift him while he strains to push himself up, and we succeed in moving him about three inches before he sinks against the tub again.
“I’m calling the ambulance,” I say.
“Don’t call the ambulance. They don’t need to come all the way out here just to help me get up. We’ll rest a few minutes and try again. Bring me something to eat. We need to get my strength up.”
“How long have you been stuck down there?”
“Since you left.”
“I’m calling the ambulance.”
“They won’t come. This ain’t an emergency.”
“It’s my taxes paying them, so I’ll decide for myself what’s an emergency.”
“Don’t,” he says. “It’s bad enough you called them out here last time.”
“You’d rather I’d left you there?”
“I’d rather you go get me some food like I asked you to.”
I go to the kitchen and slice him a peach. It splits right open, its cloying smell curling thick out of the cut. The meat pulls easy from the wrinkled pit. I set the slices on one of our new plates, a bright green one, pour him some iced tea into a cup, and snap on the lid.
I sit on the edge of the tub, stab a slice with my fork, and hold it out to Frank.
“What’s that?” he says, glaring at the thick tines.
“This,” I say, “is a fork. And this here is a plate. And this”—I swirl his tea around—“is what we call a cup.”
“You want me to eat with those?”
“I thought you wanted food. Didn’t you just make a big to-do about how you wanted some food?”
He doesn’t answer.
“They’re easier to hold,” I say.
“They might be, if I were ever going to hold them. Which I ain’t,” he adds, as if I didn’t catch his implication. I don’t know why I thought this would go any other way. I sure can’t believe I expected him to be grateful.
“You won’t have to worry about spilling things, or—”
“These are for children,” he says.
“No, they’re not. The ones for children had princesses and castles and dump trucks all over them.”
“I don’t need those. I don’t need any of this.”
He stares into the tub. I pop a chunk of peach into my mouth and chew it loud, really let the juices squish around.
“What?” he snaps, real sudden and grumpy, as if I’ve said something provocative.
“I didn’t say a word. I’m just eating my peach.”
“I worked on that garden all spring.” The look on his face is so sick, so broken-hearted, I nearly apologize. Instead I eat another slice. “The watermelons were just now getting good and ripe.”
“Are we back to that again?”
“Back to it? We ain’t ever left it.”
“Your watermelons are never very good anyway.”
“And how about my tomatoes? And my squash and peas and—”
“I had no choice,” I say. “You left me no choice.”
“No choice?”
“You backed me into a corner.”
“What corner?”
“The doctor says—”
“I’m tired of having to hear every five minutes about what the damn doctor says. It ain’t gonna kill me to work outside for half an hour.”
“It might,” I say. “It very well might.”
“Well, I don’t plan to turn myself into a shut-in invalid just because I had one little stroke.”
“One little stroke?”
“That’s all it was.”
“And what about your heart?”
“That’s a bunch of nonsense and you know it. ‘Cardiomyopathy’? That’s nothing. Nobody ever had ‘cardiomyopathy’ when I was a boy. They’ve made up that entire diagnosis just to sell more medicine, I’d bet you money. It’s a racket. The only thing I’m suffering from is getting a little older. Stiff joints, that’s all this is.”
“I saw the pictures,” I say. “I saw your heart strung up in your rib cage like an old sock, limp and stuffed so full it was about to rip. So if living with me is so terrible that you can’t bear it one more month, you just keep on doing what you’re doing. Wear it right out. It won’t take much. I just never realized I was so awful to be around that you’d rather—”
“You know that’s not what
I mean.”
“That’s what it comes down to. You can either stay here and enjoy a few more years with me, or you can work yourself into the grave like some fool who didn’t know any better, when I know you do. Leave me here to try and go on without you, all alone. All by myself. I don’t believe I’d last very long.”
He hangs his head, eyes squeezed shut.
I have to admit, I’m a little impressed by how smoothly I’ve managed to turn all this around.
“If I can’t clean,” he says, “and I can’t work in the garden, then what can I do?”
“Watch the birds. Read all those books you’ve got piled up. Collect something.”
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t move, just stares into the tub, at the splash of light diffused across the basin, as if trying to divine the future in the shape of its glare.
“We could start playing cards,” I say. “We could join a bridge club.”
He gives me a look that asks if I’ve lost my mind or if I’ve always been this stupid.
“We tell the hospital we’re brothers. I don’t see why we couldn’t tell a bridge club the same thing.”
“Men don’t play bridge,” he says.
“You want to play poker instead? Fine. I’d beat you at that, too.”
After a minute, he says, “All right. I have a plan.”
His plan is that he stretches out one long arm, grabs on to the sink, drags himself over to it, and, with me heaving him up from behind in a bear hug, manages to get one foot under him, kneeling, and then hauls himself to his feet, pulling on the sink so hard the caulk splits and tears away from the wall. Nearly rips the plumbing out with it.
He leans against the doorjamb and waits for his legs to solidify. From the stricken look on his face, you’d think I’d violated him.
He limps to the den, snatches up the remote, and mashes the keypad with his big fingers. He does manage to turn it on, at least, then takes us to two channels full of static and one with a bunch of sweaty, half-naked young people cavorting to what’s supposed to pass as music these days. He holds the remote close to his face and squints at it while a young woman with her hair dyed in black and blond stripes like a raccoon’s tail gyrates herself against the corner post of a boxing ring. I grab some scissors from the drawer in the hallway and cut the new remote out of its package. They seal these things so tight it’s like they never want you to use it, nearly slice my thumb open on the plastic before I manage to get it out. I hold it up like it’s a prize on one of his game shows. The thing’s so wide I can barely grip it in one hand, and the numbers are each big as my thumbnail.
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