2
THE CASE OF THE SIMMERING SIBS
“What?” Jack said.
“You’re going where?!” said Julia. “DAD?”
Lucy stood at the dining room table with her arms folded across her chest. One painted nail tapped an elbow, but she didn’t say a word. Her mouth was screwed into a remark that seemed stuck and wouldn’t come out.
“I said—I’m going to Florida with Nancy and the kids.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” said Jack. “No way in hell that’s going to happen.” He threw his coat on the dining room chair. I rolled my eyes. A new Burberry.
Jack stomped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I could see him across the counter that divided off the dining room. His face broke into angry lines as he bent forward and pushed cans and bottles noisily around the shelves. He pulled out a Bud, popped it open, and took a swig, nearly draining the can.
“Great,” I called after him. “That’s real helpful, Jack.”
He turned around and glowered at me, then slammed the fridge door. He finished the beer and kept looking at me like I’d kicked him. I stood up, hands planted on the table. Like a feral cat, I felt like springing at him. But that wouldn’t take the look off his face. At this point, nothing I could do would change that. So, I yelled. “What the hell did I do to you? This was not my idea, you know.”
He looked stunned. They all did. Even Dad, whose eyes got round, then crinkled at the corners. He reached for my hand. No one said a word, for once.
Dad’s announcement had totally shocked me, too. Like my siblings, I needed time to sort this out. Clearly, we were all absorbing the news in different ways. My insides clenched. No one asked me how I felt about the prospect of taking Dad to Florida, which was a good thing, given that I probably couldn’t have come up with a sane comment.
Jack turned away, and I sank back into my vodka tonic. Julia and Lucy leaned over Dad, hovering like parentheses. What did Dad’s care mean to them? Of course they cared about Dad. They just weren’t there with him as much I was. Julia was in Minneapolis, although she used her invisible umbrella as Nurse Poppins frequently. Lucy was busy chasing juicy, young men all over Chicago. Dad ignored my sisters while Julia plucked at his collar and Lucy kneaded his shoulder. He stole a peek at me. I smiled back at him.
The girls kept at it, ignoring me, all the while I felt Jack’s cold stare. Dad removed himself from the situation by concentrating on the ceiling. My father usually had a good sense of timing, but this? You have to pick the moment, he’d say. He had certainly done that.
I decided to let my siblings flap awhile until they ran down, even though that probably wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, I said, “You’re poking him.”
“We’re not poking,” said Lucy. “Right, Dad?” My sister had big teeth that gave her an uncharacteristic savagery when she was excited. I had the feeling she was mad at me, too; that Dad’s announcement was my wrongdoing. I pressed my hands to my face. I felt defensive—which was not good. I knew myself too well. It would only make me drink more. It would only make me angrier.
Jack walked across the dining room with another beer. “Crap. Florida.” He sat down at the table and slammed the Bud on the table, causing a plop of foam to shoot from the can and make a puddle.
“Are you going to clean that up?” I said, somewhat peevishly.
“You clean it up,” he said. “You’re the one making a mess.”
I set my teeth on edge and tried to control my irritation. Our little family conference was clearly off to an unproductive start, but I suddenly felt this burst to make some headway, despite my anger smothering anything productive that might grow out of this.
“Jack, you know how much he likes Florida. You shouldn’t be so surprised,” I said, feeling very surprised myself. “Maybe he should go.”
Jack looked right through me. How did it happen that he had such a short memory? Or, did he just remember what he wanted to remember? He loved Florida, too. They all loved Florida. I know they did, because I was there with them when they did.
Then, suddenly, Julia exploded. “You can’t do this!” Her neck glowed with red splotches, a sure sign she was upset. That hadn’t changed in the forty-odd years she’d been my little sister.
“Me?” I tried to be level, but outrage kept bubbling up. Modulate, I told myself. Breathe deeply and try not to leave the room, never to return. We all had certain buried feelings, and now, unfortunately, they were unburied, like zombies shooting out of their graves. We hardly looked like the loving group we’d been when we grew up together, when our parents encouraged us to “love one another.” But with the death of our mother, half of that very influential glue was gone.
“He’s not going to Florida with you,” Jack said.
Julia was nodding like a bobblehead.
“It’s settled,” he added, as his eyes darted from face to face.
For the moment, quiet was the only thing that settled in the room. We all sipped our drinks, inebriation being part of solving our problems.
Jack was used to giving orders, and, he was used to getting his way. And, as always, he was consistent. If things didn’t run smoothly for him, the result was instant crankiness. He didn’t like to quibble over the annoying inconveniences of life. Instead, his focus was on the tennis game ahead.
“No, Jack, nothing is settled,” I said, finally, choking on the air that hung in the room. “I didn’t say that Dad is not going with me. He just told me not ten minutes ago that he wants to go to Florida with me. I have to think about it. I guess we should all think about it, don’t you? Or do you ever think, Jack?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He abruptly turned away, the chair skidding across the tile, and his head was in the refrigerator again.
I glanced at Lucy. She’d been fairly silent, but now she moved closer to Dad and shook his arm gently. He paid little attention. He tapped his cane up and down and occasionally reached for me. I wanted to hold onto him, and at the same time, I wanted to get out of there.
We often argued, but this was something new. I was unprepared for their “over” reactions, but I realized that it didn’t matter. This family did little preparation of any sort. We just fell into the next drama and let it take over. Lucy’s face contorted into an expression I hadn’t seen since high school when she played Myrtle opposite Harvey, the invisible rabbit.
“Dad, we just lost our mom,” she said. “Now we’re going to lose our dad?”
He patted Lucy’s hand and sipped his “special” martini. It was mostly ice, water, and lemon, upon which I floated a quarter ounce of vodka. Today I’d added an extra capful to make it just a bit stronger than usual.
“Lucy, you are not losing me. I’m not about to be put into the ground. Not yet anyway.”
“But if you go to Florida, when will we ever see you?”
Dad kept patting Lucy. He worked his way up her arm to her head while she still peered into his face. “You come and visit me sometime in Florida. That would be nice.”
I wondered about that. With all of our jobs and kids, the year had been a struggle to keep up with our parents. Florida might be a dream, not just for me and my kids, but for everyone. Jack loved tennis, particularly the courts in Mexico and Hawaii. There were plenty in Florida, dozens in Sarasota County where he had reciprocity with the country clubs. The idea of taking Dad with me started to make some sense. Maybe the attraction would nudge Jack into visiting his father; Poppins could employ her umbrella; and Lucy could bring along one of her beach-boy toys.
But Jack was having none of it. “Dad, why do you want to leave your family and friends and move hundreds of miles away to Florida? Your roots are in the Midwest. You were born here, and your business and family are here. Dad, your wife died and is buried here!”
Scowling, I checked Dad for tears, but instead he appeared to be annoyed.
“My Patsy! Don’t bring her into this,” Dad said. “She’s in a much better place than Florida
.”
Jack clenched his jaw. “Dad, you just can’t go to Florida.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Dad picked up his glass and then clapped it on the table. “Florida’s full of people who have come to their senses. They left the cold and the snow up here, didn’t they?”
“Well, why not?” I chimed in, as much as for Dad as for myself that Florida was a glorious place to be. “It would be a lot easier on him down there. And, you know he’s always loved the cottage and the sunshine.”
“Will you stop?” Jack’s face turned the color of his wine-red Brooks Brothers tie.
Julia suddenly re-appeared from a trip to the liquor cabinet where she’d collected herself and calmed down. “Come on. If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” She was holding a Waterford old-fashioned glass, full of ice and vodka, which took me eerily back to Mom and her penchant for liquor as medicine. The awful year washed over me for an instant. We were all our mother’s daughters. I took another sip, but it did nothing to calm me down. All it did was turn up my volume.
“Really. Enough!” I yelled. “And Jack, you stop already!”
“Well!” said Julia. “We really should try to be more pleasant.”
Jack stepped back, and Lucy was still leaning over Dad. She looked oblivious; Dad perplexed.
“Julia, you sound like Sister Mary Fides,” I said. “And we are not getting anything settled here.”
Jack pounded away. “I’m just saying. Dad, you can’t just get up and leave after spending your whole life here. You even have the key to the city.”
“Oh spare me,” I muttered.
Jack walked around next to Dad and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Another thing, Jack,” I said. “If he did stay here, who is going to come over here and take care of him? Are you going to cook, watch television with him, drive him to the doctors? You’re never in your own house, so I can’t expect you’d be over here taking care of Dad.”
“We can get a nice Polish lady to come and clean.” He took his hand off Dad’s shoulder.
I’d reached my limit. The pipsqueak. I changed your diapers!
“Polish lady? Are you serious, Jack? Getting a maid while you’re in Maui? You don’t have any idea. What’s a nice Polish lady have that I haven’t got?”
“She’s here, and you’ll be in Florida.”
“One other thing, while we’re on the subject of tennis …” I said.
“No, you’re on the subject of tennis,” he said.
“Well, I guess I am. How would you like to sit here and stare at this gloom all winter?” I pointed vaguely beyond the dining room through the sunroom to the patio and the nine-hole golf course and tennis courts beyond. In so doing, I spilled the rest of my drink. “He can’t get out much anymore. He can hardly walk. He wants to sit in the sun and listen to the seagulls.”
Confusion vanished from Dad’s face, and the sun came out again. He smiled; I smiled. He looked at me. We were both thinking about the same thing: the cottage, the beach at Anna Maria, the sound of the waves and birds, the warmth of that great, old burning ball rising and setting over the Gulf of Mexico.
So, I went for it. My siblings had backed me into a corner, forcing my conviction. Why not? The whole year had been crazy, so why not keep it up? It probably couldn’t get any crazier.
“Look,” I said, “this is beginning to make some sense, I think. I can take care of Dad. I’m, sort of, between jobs.” What I meant was that I was between my elderly father and my kids, between my sporadic journalism career with its ups and downs through the years and all those moves during the marriage—and God-knows-what else. I was stuck in a sandwich of sorts, but I could do this. I could give it a go with the Lord Almighty’s help.
My siblings turned away from me. Together, like they’d timed it.
Julia plopped herself down next to Dad. “What about Minneapolis?” she said, leaning on his arm. Her voice changed to a light singsong that declared Minneapolis to be a splendiferous destination. She pulled her chair closer to Dad, edging Lucy out, who gave up and went off to the kitchen.
“I’m not going to Minneapolis,” said Dad. “That’s that.” Julia looked like she’d been slapped.
“I just meant, Dad, we have lovely retirement facilities for ambulatory clients there.”
“Julia. Do you mean a nursing home? A place for old people who can still walk around? I’m not going to a nursing home in Minneapolis.” He toned his voice down a notch, took her hand, and smiled at her. “I really want to go to Florida. With my Nancy.”
And there it was. The Rub. He preferred to go to Florida with me, his eldest, his bridge partner, the “matriarch of the family,” as he called me. The accident of my birth order had everything to do with Dad and me being close, and nothing to do with the worth of my siblings as caretakers. But who was thinking about that? The whole thing was one big, old accident.
Dad and I were always close—closer than my mother and I were. I adored my father, and I was definitely Daddy’s girl. My mother may have resented it, but maybe she was just tired. There were four of us by the time I was six. Growing up, I had a never-ending assortment of chores that were meted out … to control? To punish me? Who knows. I just had a lot of them, especially dusting and vacuuming, which I saw no purpose in doing, since the mess my family made instantly replaced my daily cleaning efforts. None of my siblings was exactly domestic—Julia left the bathroom uninhabitable, and on a regular basis, Jack nearly burned down the house making a pyre out of the garbage cans. Lucy had an uncanny talent for disappearing at the sight of a dust rag or dirty dishes, which were mostly left to me. I hated it. At the end of the school day (after a cherry coke and fries, and a couple of Kent’s on the bus with my friends), I just wanted to be left alone. I ran home to watch American Bandstand. My mother found me there at four o’clock in front of the black-and-white television with Arlene and Ken, and Justine and Bob, my feet propped up on the woodwork, drinking a Diet-Rite (as punishment for the fries). I could tell Mom was fresh from her nap because her eyes were puffy. Why didn’t she do the dusting?
“Here,” she said, handing over the Pledge and a list of other chores. It irritated me, and we never settled the slight tug of war between us, which—in part—had to do with Dad. It was like we were at a department-store sale, waltzing carefully around a rack of clothes we both wanted to buy.
He deferred to me; she did not. I was the child, not my father’s confidant, and so she discouraged my involvement in decision making. To be fair, my fiercely independent parents didn’t involve any of us much—and that was part of the problem. We could never sit down and work things out together because we had no practice in it.
But, from the beginning, I was my father’s daughter. I became a pleaser. I began to take on responsibilities. I babysat from age nine for a quarter an hour; I was often a cleaner, helper, driver, cook. Through the years, Dad and I sort of grew on each other. He depended on me and told me early on “to set an example.” I usually did. Except for a few minor detours when I was in high school and threw a party in my parents’ absence, during which about a hundred of my hooligan friends showed up and drank all the booze, wrecked the furniture, and took the car on a joy ride—after which, the police came.
I recovered from sophomore year, got straight A’s (“See, I told you you could do it,” Dad said), earned some scholarships and a double major, and then went on to a successful, albeit short, career as an assistant editor for a decorating magazine in New York. The career ended abruptly when I fell for a West Point cadet, and he for me. We got married right after his graduation and flew off to Germany, Georgia, and Alabama, during which time he anesthetized himself at the Officer’s Club with his newfound buddies returning from Vietnam. He had not served in the war because of his low class standing—711 out of 749 cadets. He was lucky, but he didn’t think so. He tried to forget his lost opportunity by drowning himself in bourbon.
His los
s, oddly enough, was an opportunity. We ended up at Fort Benning, Georgia, where I got a job as a feature writer at the Columbus Enquirer, and he was happily jumping out of helicopters. While he didn’t come home, I stayed up all night with Tolstoy, Godden, Hemingway, Roth, Dreiser, Bellow, McCarthy, Buck, Steinbeck, Updike, Caldwell, Hardy, and London. They were my friends, and I wallowed in my friends, not wanting to leave the comfort of my pillows and covers pulled up to my chin, turning the pages into an eternity of writing. I had a reading slump through high school and college, but now I was thirsty and couldn’t put the books down.
My career sputtered with all of our moving around, but then, along with the reading, I started writing more. I would not let it die. I kept notes and wrote away the hours, in notebooks and steno pads and scraps of paper galore. Nothing could stop the flow of words I put into journals, and into my head from the books I read. I was always writing from the time I was in high school, when I had a column in the newspaper called “Nau’s Notions,” which mostly touched on prom fashions, or the activities of the football and basketball players. In college, I was a page editor and columnist. I wrote deep, thoughtful editorials about the existential experience—which, to me, was Waiting for Godot meets my exceptionally handsome philosophy professor, Mr. Walter Toby.
My father was anything but existential, believing in platonic ideals of love and courage floating out there somewhere in the clouds. He even believed in Richard Nixon because he was a “president,” and, he believed in any Catholic priest or nun, and, of course, the pope, because of “the office” they held. We argued politics often. Except for that, I was my father’s daughter. I drew on his strength of conviction and his loudness, and I loved his humor and magnanimity over and above his politics and religion.
But in those early years, we argued about everything. He didn’t know what to do with me, so he yelled a lot. We yelled a lot together. When I hit puberty like a bomb, we had screaming fights.
“No drive-ins, no beach parties, no tattooed men,” he growled.
It ended when I stomped to my room and slammed the door, only to break a succession of mirrors clipped flimsily to the back of the door. I can still remember that slight wobble and rattle before the mirror came crashing down in an exclamation of teenage rage. After I broke the third one, Lucy looked up from her bed where she was sprawled, reading Seventeen.
The Last Cadillac Page 2
