Alltreecare, the best tree-trimming business in the area, was on the way to clean up the mess. They came out of St. Louis, run by a guy named Felix McLoughlin, but they were all over the southeast after a hurricane ripped through. I was going to pay to get the stuff hauled away, and I was thankful that the tree trunk had fallen away from the house, cutting a path across our yards and into the canal.
Felix came up behind me with a chain saw, and with hardly a nod, he got to work cutting up some fallen branches. “Mighty busy since Earl,” he said, bending over with an arm-wresting pull on the starter. He had long, tangled hair and ropey arms as strong as Popeye’s, and Irish songs fueled his energy, which was considerable.
Billy lounged on the broken fence, discussing the aspect of my property on top of his property when Tick hollered from the patio. I couldn’t hear him with the chain saw in my ear, and I was distracted with Billy’s breath in my face, so I went over to where my son fidgeted with his hands in his back pockets. He showed no interest in coming closer, and I couldn’t say I blamed him.
“Goin’ to Erin’s,” he said. My heart stopped when he said it, because he was going to her house, and that was all.
“Wait, I have a chicken and some potato salad I want to take over there. Will you wait a minute? I’ll drive you.”
Tick looked over at Billy, who appeared to be telling Felix what to do. Felix waved his left hand at him like he was swatting a mosquito.
“Looks like you’re busy. I gotta go, Mom. Can’t wait.”
I started to go after him, when the decibel went up on Billy’s directions. I turned around to deal with the cleanup, annoyed at Billy and Felix and Earl, and that Tick wouldn’t wait one minute to go with me to deliver the food. He just wasn’t going to go along with almost anything I suggested. I had to get over it, but I had to keep trying to communicate with my son. It just wasn’t at the top of my agenda that afternoon.
Tick had his hand on the door when he stopped and yelled back at me. “You better check Gamps, Mom. He’s being funny again.”
Oh, God. I’d forgotten about Dad.
He was due to get up from his nap, and my daughter was just back from the community center where she was making posters for the Fun Fair. I was getting far behind in my afternoon of rounds. I looked over at Felix, who had a great deal of chopping and clearing ahead, which I quickly estimated would run into the hundreds of dollars to finish. At least he’d gotten rid of Billy, who was ambling over the torn hibiscus bushes and broken fence, probably to grab another beer. Felix had not turned off the chain saw for a beat, which effectively ended the one-way conversation with Billy. I’d have to remember that one and buy a chain saw.
I spun toward the house, sprinting across the patio and into the porch. Dad cruised past me on his walker with Little Sunshine right behind him. This couldn’t be good. My daughter was teasing her grandfather lately, and most of the time Dad took it. In fact, most of the time, he acted like he liked it. He made little quips that set my girl off. Her wild bursts of laughter must have entertained him, because he kept egging her on. The two of them were like children. She had a small, stuffed pink pig they tossed back and forth between them. Little Sunshine had now taken to braiding his hair—I forbade the scissors—so that Dad ended up with little springs all over his head, sometimes with bows, as they watched MTV together. Dad loved Madonna, and that “Irish bald one.” He seemed to lose seventy years when he goofed off with his granddaughter, when he and my girl called their own special club to order. I was not a member of that club. I cheerfully stepped aside. This was a club in which age was less a factor than the antics of its members.
I stood on the porch and watched them for a minute, wondering what to do next, whether to intervene or just yell, “Stop!” The two of them were speeding around like two planets in orbit. I was fixed on the circular pattern they were making, round and round past me and through the kitchen, out the far door and back around past me again.
“Hi,” I said. But they ignored me.
Dad had his hat on and his khaki jacket, which he wore no matter the weather or the occasion, and he leaned on his wheeled walker and scooted by, back through the kitchen. My daughter caught up with him and held on to him, pushing and cheering, dangerously so.
“Dad, when did you get up?”
“I don’t know,” he shouted over his shoulder.
“What are you two doing?”
“Playing,” said Little Sunshine.
“Where’s my martini?” Dad said. It was obvious they were not only different planets, they were on different orbits altogether. They’d passed through the kitchen and they were coming back around, and now I could see his face, and it wasn’t good. He was plainly tired, but he didn’t stop. He was in pursuit, and he wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Stop!”
They both came to a halt and looked at me, startled. I guess I yelled, but I was alarmed to see Dad cutting this manic path, and my daughter racing behind him. Little Sunshine peeled off and ran to her bedroom, obviously bored with the play. She’d stirred up enough for one afternoon.
“How was it at the center? Did you get the posters finished?” I yelled after her. It seemed I was doing a lot of yelling lately.
Dad was gone again, scooting back through the kitchen, due to make the turn past the breakfast table, cutting close to the piano and coming up to face me where I still stood in the doorway to the porch.
“Dad! Stop! Go on over to the rocker.”
Nothing. He kept going, now hunched over the walker and gripping the sidebars with white knuckles. He didn’t seem to hear me at all. He was on automatic.
I tried again. “Dad, please, stop. The rocker. Go.”
“Where?” He glanced at me as he wheeled past. He didn’t even slow down.
“Where what? Where’s your rocker?” I tried to “cue” him, in the language of the therapists. But it didn’t make any impression.
“Yes, I know it’s here. I’m going. Go, go, go.” But he didn’t go to the rocker. He kept going toward the kitchen.
My patience was gone. I’d make him remember where his rocker was, and I’d will him to calm down.
“Dad, come on. Stop now, and go sit down.” I came closer to him, hands on my hips.
“Hi, my little sweetie,” he said, as if he’d just realized I was standing there. He had some eighty pounds on me, and I couldn’t force him into the rocker, nor was that a very good idea. My face grew hot with annoyance and frustration. I didn’t feel like little sweetie; I felt like the Daughter from Hell.
“Go sit down. Now.” He stopped then and looked at me. His face crumpled like paper, and he started to shake with dry sobs.
“Oh, Dad.” My hands rested on the front of his walker and I looked into his blue eyes, trying to find him in there. My daughter had given him a wintergreen Life Saver, his favorite. His breath smelled like the leafy-green jelly candies he bought for us when we were kids, and now he stared at me like he was lost.
“Dad, go sit in your rocker and I’ll get you some ice water.”
He loved ice water and breaking up ice cubes with his remarkable chompers, which was not a good thing, but it was better than downing Absolut. He preferred the ice with vodka and some “fresh squoze” orange juice. This was his Sunday brunch treat, and every day, he asked me if it was Sunday, because sometimes the week had more than one Sunday in it.
“I don’t want any water. I want a martini.”
“Dad, it isn’t time yet. Tom Brokaw isn’t on until 6:30.” Tom lifted Dad’s social barometer, and the news show never failed to get Dad out of bed from a nap or ground him to the schedule.
“Oh, all right. Then give me a cigarette.” He wasn’t going to get a cigarette, so this was the time I had to distract him. It was then I saw the large wet stain on his pants leg. He’d have to be changed, and Marilyn was gone for the day. I hated this part. But he had to be dry.
“Dad, first we have to go change. And then we’re going to think about what day it is. I
think it’s Sunday.” I gave him a little poke in the arm, and he chuckled.
He didn’t say a word, but let me steer him toward his bathroom where we did this little dance. He stood with his back to me and dropped his trousers and the diaper he wore, and then I guided him into a fresh one. I shut out the humiliation with brisk movements and odd bits of encouragement.
“Grab the other side, Dad. That’s it. Now let me tape you up.” I peeled away the covering on the tape and wrapped him in the clean white diaper, one leg at a time, then got him into dry pants. He must have hated it, but he didn’t say anything, which gave me the luxury of skipping around this bit of caretaking with little notice.
We both found the rocker together out on the patio in the sun, and I pretended it was Sunday. I gave him a screwdriver, mostly orange juice with a cap full of vodka floating on top. I settled for ice water and a breather. Felix and Billy were gone. The afternoon was waning, and for the moment, peace reigned.
34
EAT YOUR CHEEZ-ITS
I looked over at Dad, tentatively taking a sip of his “juice.” I was trying to take care of him, make him comfortable and happy, while my girl was dancing around to her own tune and Tick was moving away into his own world. The kids were both getting older; they were supposed to grow up. I hoped that did not mean Tick had to grow away from me. But something else was happening. He didn’t seem to be as happy and he’d become more secretive, especially with Erin’s death. We’d always talked openly together when he was younger, and now we’d nearly stopped. I hardly noticed it until it was upon me, and that was not good.
We all took a step back with Erin’s death. I was grateful that Tick stuck closer to home through that second winter of The Adventure, forging an even tighter bond with Dad. The two of them watched old World War II documentaries on PBS, and I caught Tick passing a Marlboro to Dad, secretively, like two old war buddies in a ditch. All right. I turned away. I had so much to nag about, I decided it best to pick my battles, those that I had a small chance of winning.
I don’t know how the argument started, but it got full blown before I knew it. It began with the beer bottles I found in the garbage can, and the yelling that ensued. I shouted, and he slammed things. Back-and-forth we went with accusations, criticism, and responsibility, and the consequences of drinking. I was right, and he was wrong, and we were going nowhere.
“I hate you! I hate Dad! I’m sick of listening to both of you. I’m getting out of here, and I never want to see either of you again!”
I stared at him—not really angry, not hurt, just bewildered and surprised. He hardly saw his dad, maybe once every month or so, although they did talk on the phone. A new feeling with ragged edges—like a huge tear in our universe—made me stop. I didn’t answer him. What Tick said really didn’t surprise me all that much, because I’d felt the outburst building for some time. The beer bottles had just brought all of it to a head.
Tick settled down on the side of his bed and looked up at me. He changed the subject, of course, because if we went on in that vein it clearly was a dead end.
“Be reasonable, Mom,” he said. “Think how Dad feels, not having us around.” He blamed his parents—me especially—for further wrenching the family apart. Of course, I didn’t call this failure. I called it something else. It was The Adventure.
I didn’t know what to say to him. So I said nothing. I stood there while he got up and took several loping steps back and forth across the kitchen, grabbing things, a glass, a can of Mountain Dew, a box of Cheez-its, all nestled in the fold of a long arm. A few ice cubes went sliding and clinking across the kitchen floor like spent bullets. Well, at least he was eating, I thought. All functions had not stopped.
In another second, he was out of the kitchen and slamming the door to his room, retreating, getting away from me. But I was not going to leave him, and the words he said stuck in my heart. I thought I was doing good, but if he felt that way, I had failed him somehow. Tick’s world had been broken because his parents couldn’t get along. How could I think the divorce would not matter so much to the kids, that it would just go away with time and that it was just between his father and me? It didn’t go away, not only when it happened, but for years later, in ways I never thought would happen. Like a death the divorce was done, but it was always there with all of its consequences and considerations and what-ifs. I thought it was over, but it would never be over for the children; they were still living through it in ways different than how their parents coped, the old people who wanted to bury the bad and get on with the new. The Adventure.
In the midst of it, hanging over Tick, was Erin’s death, and the bitterness and loss and reaction that came of it. Tick had a thing about the “marred fascism” of parenthood—a tidbit I overheard from my perch at the kitchen sink one afternoon. He was growing up and he wanted to call some of the shots; he didn’t want choices taken away from him, and, of course, I didn’t want that either. It was a point we could agree on.
I had to start somewhere and I would start now. Go slowly. Breathe. Deeply. And listen. I knew what I should do. I needed to make my emotions and mouth follow directions from my head. Put one foot in front of the other and start. Go to door. Knock. Talk.
“Tick, can I come in?”
“What.”
“Tick?”
“COME IN.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, and I could tell he’d been crying, but he kept his head down, hunching his broad shoulders. He looked all angles there, with his elbows crooked on his knees and his hands and feet too large. The Cheez-its and Mountain Dew were left untouched on the floor. How could someone so big look so vulnerable? How did he get so big so fast? Where was I when that happened? What have I been doing all this time?
I hesitated in the doorway. “Well?” he said. “Tick …”
“WHAT.”
“Please.”
“Whatever.”
This was the way most of our conversations went. One-word sentences that reminded me with an ache of the last words I had with his Dad, one word at a time for fear we’d inflict worse than we’d already done.
I plopped down on a bar stool he used for practicing the guitar, and I looked at him. I was always rushing ahead. Now I would not do that anymore. My kids were teaching me how to act in this crazy circle I found myself running in, from parent to children to me.
“Are we going to have this conversation one word at a time?” I said, hardly speaking above a whisper.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, I guess. At least we’re being careful, and we might not say too much at once, too much stuff that’s bad that we can’t take back.”
He looked up at me then, and I saw a frustration I’d never seen before, or maybe, I didn’t want to see it before. I think it was often there, but I had never seen it so clearly, the tension that hovered around his beautiful, green-hazel eyes. His pupils were dark and ferocious, his eyebrows like fractures. And now I looked, and I finally saw that look for what it was.
“It’s awful. I know it is.”
“You don’t know,” he said. His jaw angled sharply, and he set his teeth.
“You think you’re the only person who’s been sixteen? I was sixteen. Your father was sixteen. Millions of people have been, and are, sixteen! You’re not alone, for God’s sake.” My voice was rising, and the more I tried to push it down, it boiled up. “You’re not the only one!”
“Tell me about it.”
And I did, starting with high school. Tick hated high school, and I did, too, because Dad made me go to the new Catholic school in North Hammond, instead of letting me go to the new public high school in town where all my buddies from eighth grade were going. Tick and I both understood that same feeling of disconnect at the time of our lives when every minute of every young day was the very end of the world.
Somehow the conversation landed on that morning I found his dad’s car in the alley at four in the morning, that searing, ripping feeli
ng of when I found him at that woman’s house. I had screamed and railed, and Tick had heard all of it, including my rage following the call from Mrs. Minkiewicz—about another tryst. That morning in the kitchen should have been a wake up call for me, but it wasn’t. I let things spiral away, until Tick and I found ourselves at the edge of a discussion that was a long time coming. Tick, so young, had already gone through searing, ripping feelings of his own.
“What I said—it’s you, it’s Dad. It’s Erin. I can’t stand it.”
“You’re talking around it. What exactly is it?”
“All of it. It’s just too … too confusing. It’s just all of it.”
“What? Like we’re all just bouncing off walls, making a bunch of noise?”
“Something like that. I guess I feel like things are broken,” he said.
And then I knew what he meant.
“Mom, we’re not together. We’re just a bunch of parts and we’re not a family. Is this a family?”
“Yes, Tick, this is our family. And family can get weird sometimes.”
Tick grinned then, and he laughed like a man. Yet, I saw the face of my young son when he was four years old and he danced on the piano bench, singing, all the words to “Memory” from Cats.
“I feel weird a lot,” he said. “Really out of place and time.”
“What do you mean?” Of course, I’d dragged him out of childhood to Florida. Who wouldn’t be confused? He was always serious, putting Legos and toy ships together, playing the guitar and listening to music. He did all of these things with such concentration and intent, while the rest of the world went by.
“I mean, I’ve never felt young.”
“Is that good, Tick? Or bad?”
“It’s good,” he said. “I look at the Gampers, and I see myself sometimes.”
“And?”
“That’s good, Ma. That’s real good.”
35
THE LONG DRIVE
The yellow Mustang wouldn’t move out of the way. We were behind it in the ambulance, with the siren blaring, and it still wouldn’t move. It stayed in front of us, weaving side-to-side, until I thought I’d scream.
The Last Cadillac Page 24
