The only thing that tortures my dad more than worrying about the people he loves is causing the people he loves to worry about him. My heart hurts, knowing that my father is living his worst nightmare in these last days—hours? minutes?—of his life.
On the sixth floor, a nurse points me to his room. I speed-walk down the hall, come to a stop in my dad’s doorway. He’s asleep in his hospital bed. He’s alive.
Relief washes over me. But is this gray-faced, slack-jawed, disappearing man really my dad? Plastic bags hang off the sides of his bed. There’s an oxygen tube in his nose. Monitors beep. I can feel him going. It will be better for him, worse for us, when he’s gone.
My brother stands at the window, talking on his phone. My stepmother sits in an orange plastic chair next to my father’s bed, staring red-eyed into space.
My dad’s eyes flutter open, widen, and then narrow in on me. “Things must be worse than I thought,” he says. “I see they brought in the big guns.”
I choke back tears. My father doesn’t know whether it’s day or night or what country he lives in or which of his wives he’s married to, but his sense of humor survives. All my life, he’s been transfusing it to me. I won’t always have my father, but I’ll always have that.
I go to his bedside and hug him. “Hello, sweetheart,” he says into my ear.
“Hey, Pops,” I say into his. He pats my back nervously. I cling to him. How many more times will I hear him call me sweetheart, I wonder. We had so few hugs, our first sixty years. How many more do we get?
“How are you?” I ask.
“Too soon to tell. Ask me in ten years.”
I shake my head at him, kiss Lina’s cheek, hug my brother, and return to my father’s bedside. “Really, Dad.”
He meets my eyes. “The question is, how are you?”
For the past ten years, my dad has been on a mission, trying to make up for the previous fifty. He was a classic crappy 1950s middle-class father, Old Spice–scented, away on business trips a lot of the time, pretty much absent even when he was home. Like so many of his ilk, he was the reigning king of the castle, his lone minion my mom. He never knew the names of my friends or my schoolteachers. When he was in some Neiman Marcus somewhere, buying me a pair of fancy pajamas, he had to call my mother long-distance to ask for my size. But I adored my father and I absorbed his humor and his hungers, and somehow, despite his distance, despite his insistence that I mirror him instead of manning up and mirroring me, I knew that he adored me.
Until my adolescence broke up our mutual admiration society, my dad was my playmate and my role model. We stole weekend hours together, eating corned beef and coleslaw sandwiches at the Gaiety Deli, betting the long shots at Aqueduct, acting out the plays he wrote, recording them on the Sony reel-to-reel we drove downtown together to buy.
My father was a Madison Avenue ad man, Don Draper without the booze or the cigarettes or the style. His longing to be a real writer went underground in him and resurfaced in me. He asked me repeatedly what I wanted to be when I grew up. Unlike so many fathers of his time, he wouldn’t take wife for an answer. The son of Holocaust-era Jews, my father fed me a steady stream of terrible, fear-driven advice. It was almost worth it for the one good bit he shared: “No matter how bad it is, a sense of humor will make it better.”
My dad is asleep again. My brother taps me on the shoulder, beckons me out of the room.
“His doctor says it’s time for hospice,” my brother says.
“What does that mean?” I stall. I know exactly what hospice means. Patricia was in hospice care for a month, from the day she left the hospital until the day she died at home. She adored Lenny, her night-shift hospice nurse, because he read Kafka to her. One night, when Patricia was sleeping, Lenny told me that he’d never known anyone to live as long as Patricia was living on just a few ice chips a day. “Ice chips and Kafka,” I added. “And Kafka,” Lenny agreed.
“Maybe we can talk Lina into getting a full-time nurse,” I tell my brother. “Or find a really good nursing home—”
“Mer,” he says.
My stepmother, my brother, and I have been having this conversation off and on for the past year. As my father’s symptoms have cascaded, his care has become impossible for my stepmother to handle, even with the help of a visiting nurse. Luckily and confusingly, my dad is still very much alive inside his failing body. In fact, his illness has made him humbler, more emotional, more lovable, and more loving, which makes knowing that we’ll soon lose him extra hard.
I know there are countless daughters and sons and wives and husbands dealing with precisely this heartache. I know there’s only one way out of life. Still, I can’t let go of my conviction that there’s some solution we could find (to mortality?) if only we were creative and persistent enough.
“Lina’s against it,” my brother says. “We have to convince her. If she brings him home again, this is just going to keep happening.”
“You don’t know that.” Even to myself, I sound like a petulant child.
Lina takes my father home. My brother goes back to work. I fly back to L.A.
Three weeks later, I get a call from Lina, telling me to come quick—again. I race to the airport again, race to my father’s hospital bed, and find my dad weak and disoriented but alive—again. I know this is the normal course of events. I know this is how it happens. I don’t care. I don’t want it to be happening, period. Checking in for my third flight back to L.A. in the past two months, I inquire about Southwest’s bereavement fare. They don’t offer one.
—
MY THERAPY SESSIONS with Olivia offer companionship and comfort and relief. But with my dad’s clock ticking down and my system on 24/7 alert, I need a bit more ballast.
During the hard years with my wife, a Berkeley friend invited me to an Al-Anon meeting. “It’ll help you keep the focus off what she’s feeling and thinking and doing,” she said, “and keep the focus on what you can do for yourself.” I figured it couldn’t hurt to stop analyzing every breath my wife took and start paying attention to breathing better myself. And it was free.
Much to my surprise, Al-Anon helped. A lot. So I started going to meetings every week. As weirdly ritualistic as the meetings were, as seemingly obvious as the program’s guidelines for living were, hearing the sagas of other control freaks loosened my death grip on fate and opened a tiny keyhole inside me where faith began to grow.
“The God thing” that bugged my atheistic Berkeley brethren was actually a plus for me. I liked standing in a circle, holding hands with a roomful of strangers, saying the Serenity Prayer, invoking God’s name. I liked the cleverness of the Al-Anon slogans, as good as any I’d heard (or written) during my marketing years.
“You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”
“FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real.”
“Don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides.”
“Progress, not perfection.”
“Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
Reciting the Serenity Prayer—“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—I’d close my eyes and try to imagine what on earth this strange sensation, serenity, might feel like.
On the Los Angeles Al-Anon website I find dozens of meetings, including one on Sunday mornings at an LGBTQ center a fifteen-minute walk from my house. The notion of praying for redemption on Sunday mornings with a bunch of gay people appeals to me, and so do the hilarious shares of the stand-up comics and sitcom writers in the room. My search for serenity is unlikely to be quick or easy. But at least I’ve found a welcoming place to look.
—
ON MY FIRST DAY BACK at Bellissima after my latest emergency trip to San Francisco, my coworkers welcome me with great kindness. They tell me they
’re sorry my dad is sick. They ask how he’s doing. They ask how I’m doing.
I’ve been at Bellissima for eight months now, and until I ran out of the office crying on two separate occasions three weeks apart, no one besides Charlotte had asked me a single question about myself.
I know it’s unfair to compare my coworkers’ level of interest in me to my interest in them (and everyone else on earth). I’m blessed and cursed with a journalist’s nosy nose; I come from a long line of buttinskis. But I’ve given my coworkers so much to wonder about. Why was a sixty-year-old woman available to move to L.A. on a moment’s notice? Why did she arrive wearing a wedding ring, which was soon replaced by a hugely bandaged finger, and then by a stitched scar? Is she gay, straight, bi? Single, married, dating, divorced? Did she find a place to live in this wildly expensive city? Does she have friends or family here?
For a while I attributed my colleagues’ lack of interest to the kind of polite restraint that’s practiced by alien species (humans who are not New York Jews). Then I thought they were being respectful, waiting for me to initiate exchanges more personal than those revolving around their Paleo diets and makeup tips. But each attempt at clue-dropping left me standing in the empty lunchroom with a frozen smile on my face.
It took me a while, but I got it. My personal life is of no interest to my coworkers because my age makes me irrelevant to them. Just as my hippie comrades and I vowed never to trust anyone over thirty when we were their age, they have no reason to want me following them around. Their Facebook shenanigans—their club-hopping and Urban Outfitters shopping expeditions; their Tinder swiping and holiday pilgrimages to their parents’ houses—will never include me. My divorce and my bulk-pickup-day-decorating and my sidelined writing career will never include, nor be a subject of conversation with, them.
The fact that I’m “young at heart,” “young-looking for my age”? Irrelevant. My eagerness to plug into “youth culture” by learning my coworkers’ tastes in music, clothes, diets, boyfriends? Irrelevant. Possibly also annoying.
On the other hand, the feminist complaint about the invisibility of older women—something I couldn’t imagine ever applying to me? Highly relevant. Invisible, c’est moi. For thirty-two hours a week on the job, and 24/7 everywhere else.
The insult has its benefits. I don’t have to make up stories about what I did over the weekend or whom I did it with. I don’t have to change pronouns to ward off homophobia or change details to protect the innocent. On weekday mornings when I wake up crying, I can spackle my face with makeup and slap on a smile, knowing that no Bella will ask the kind of questions or give me the kind of sympathetic glance that might crack my façade.
Better late than never, I’m developing a social skill I’ve never wanted before: the ability to keep my feelings to myself. After a lifetime of believing that anything less than full disclosure equals withholding and discretion equals deceit, I’m seeing the upside of the boundaries I scorned. My work life gives me a break from my broken personal life. My competent work persona gives me a break from my broken self. Spending my workdays “acting as if” isn’t just faking it. Mimicking a person who’s capable of functioning is actually making me functional.
Huh.
—
FOR ONE HOUR each workweek, Workout Wednesday levels the playing field. If I can manage to keep up with the other Bellas, our shared sweaty suffering transcends the generation gap.
And so I try. Hard. I jog around the city block with the others when I’d so prefer to walk. I do twenty-five push-ups when I’m ready to quit at five. I do the goddamn burpees and the dead bugs and the rock climbers. I squat, I crunch, I lunge. I never miss a private training session with Joanne and I take classes at Silverado four nights a week and I see my body changing and I decide that I’m going to win the next Fat Contest at work, two months from now.
I join my young colleagues on the Paleo diet. In violation of my father’s training and my entire Jewish lineage, I abandon the theory of preventative eating (in case the Cossacks come) and start eating for fuel, not pleasure. One hard-boiled egg and one slice of Canadian bacon for breakfast. A tiny mound of undressed chicken-kale salad for lunch. A huge mound of steamed vegetables for dinner. Two French fries instead of two pounds of French fries at happy hour with Charlotte. One bite of cake at the Capricorn birthday party at work. One cocktail, not four, at Donna and Nichole’s.
I like dieting. I like the rules, the restrictions, the structure. I like not having to think about what to eat. I like the bright line between “good” behavior and “bad.” The craving for alcohol’s edge-blurring never fades, but the cravings for fat and sugar recede. I decide to eat half as much and have a martini when I want one, which is every night. Thus I create my own sustainable diet.
On Weigh-In Wednesday Joanne sets up shop in the office bathroom and summons each Bella, one by one.
“I think I have a shot at winning, don’t you?” I ask when my turn comes.
Joanne shrugs in her Joanne way. “Depends how everyone else does. Get on the scale.”
I start unlacing my running shoes. “I weighed you with shoes on last time,” she says. “No cheating. Keep them on.”
My heart soars at the sight of the digits between my feet. “I lost eleven pounds!” I crow.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Joanne says. “This is about fat loss, not just weight.”
“What panties?” I say.
“Funny,” Joanne says. “Drop them so I can measure you.”
The first two times Joanne measured me, she shocked unshockable me. It just felt wrong, standing naked in a bathroom at work with the company trainer wrapping a tape measure around my breasts and upper thighs—wrong enough that I’d insisted on keeping my underwear on while Joanne measured me. Now it barely fazes me to drop my Lulus to my ankles—until I see Joanne’s mouth drop in horror.
“What’s that mess?” she yelps, pointing a tiny finger at my pubes.
I regard the offensive situation. “I guess I haven’t gotten waxed for a while.”
“Waxed? Who gets waxed anymore? You need to get that shit lasered off if you’re ever going to get any action in this town.”
“All of it?”
“Jesus, girl. No one has pubic hair anymore.”
Still shaking her head, Joanne continues taking my measurements, pinching my upper arm with a metal caliper, clamping the cold metal onto my thigh, my belly, my butt. She enters each number into her phone.
“Get dressed,” she says, running a bacterial wipe over her calipers.
“How’d I do?” I wheedle.
“You did good,” she says. “Now go tell Heather I’m ready for her.”
—
I ABSTAIN FROM FOOD for the rest of the day, just in case someone demands a recount. Finally the announcement appears in my inbox. “Oh my God,” I whisper to myself, because it would be bad form to scream. “I won!”
Yes, I had an unfair advantage—the contest rewards a change in body fat, not the lowest percentage of body fat. Unlike my coworkers, I actually had fat to lose. But still: I’m the oldest Bellissima employee by twenty years. Not to mention a contender for Most Likely to Comfort Herself with Emotional Eating. And I promised myself I’d win. And I won, dammit. I won.
TEN
After working at Bellissima for a year I’ve saved some money, but I haven’t saved my marriage. So now I’m going to spend most of what I’ve saved getting divorced.
Wishful thinking is all that’s left of my hope. It’s been years since my wife and I shared tender words. Years since I took a breath without pain. I’m desperate for resolution. I want to live one day and then another without this strangled throat, this aching chest. Taking a step has to land me someplace better. I hire a gay family-law attorney. On the phone with him the first time, I can barely spit out the word divorce.
Filing for div
orce so soon after finally winning the right to be married—and only four years after my wife and I tied the legal knot—I feel that I’m betraying more than my vows. I’m betraying my own beliefs about social change and marriage. In many cities over many years, I marched for marriage equality. I argued with the Prop H8ers and I argued with the gay people who said that marriage would co-opt us, diminish us, turn our imaginative, quirky queer culture into a caricature of miserable, boring, heterosexual married life.
“You’re not filing for the first gay divorce, and yours won’t be the last,” my lawyer says.
I write him a big check. He e-mails me a big pile of documents. I print them out after work. The folder I put the pages in is nearly an inch thick. I go home and put the folder on the dining table, right next to the vase where I keep cheerful sprays of magenta bougainvillea, clipped from the bush outside my door.
I approach and avoid the folder for a day, a week, a month. In Al-Anon they say, “Don’t quit before the miracle.” I’m waiting for the miracle. I’m waiting to wake up happily married and tell my wife about my horrible dream.
My lawyer leaves me a message about the paperwork. I don’t call him back or fill it out. He calls a second time.
The miracle isn’t coming. I’m not going to wake up from this bad dream. So I go home to my crappy apartment with nothing of mine in it and my name alone on the lease, and I force myself to open the folder and pull out the first page.
There it is, for the last time ever: my wife’s name on an official document right next to mine.
—
IN 1996, when my wife and I fell in love, getting legally married wasn’t something two women could do. We didn’t let that get in our way.
We bought wedding rings five months after our first night together. We weren’t quite ready to do the deed, but buying the rings staved off our shared sense of urgency. I didn’t know then what I’d learn later in Al-Anon: “If it feels urgent, it probably isn’t important. If it’s important, it probably doesn’t feel urgent.” I didn’t know then that twenty years later I’d be combing through this happy memory and every happy memory asking myself, Is this where we went wrong? Or was it there?
The New Old Me Page 10
