The pregnant woman was whisked away in a wheelchair with her husband scampering behind. “When your mother was in labor,” Dad said, “she wanted a hot pastrami sandwich and a kosher dill in the worst way. But the midwife said she could only have ice chips. Every time I left the room, your mom was sure I was sneaking off to eat. But I swear, I-didn’t have a single bite the whole time!”
He laughed. “Eventually I got her a KitKat from the vending machine and slipped it to her behind the midwife’s back. Your mom was beyond hunger by then, though. All she-could do was squeeze it to a pulp, wrapper and all. But I was forgiven.” Dad smiled at me. “I think that was the last time I was in a hospital, till now.”
I’d never heard that story, or anything like it, before. “Was that my birth or Liz’s?”
“Yours,” he said.
I’d never pictured Dad at my birth—not that I’d thought about my birth much. But if I had, I would have imagined him pacing in the waiting room on his cell phone. Or handing out cigars to his friends and clients—in California. I’d forgotten that he didn’t leave till I was three. I wished I remembered more from back then.
By the time Dad’s name was called, his knee was huge and the skin was so tight it looked like it would split. They took X-rays, then we waited around again. But I didn’t mind. Throughout the whole ordeal, it was just Dad and me, talking. I figured his talkativeness was the result of shock, but I liked it.
At one point he said, “Stuff like this makes you appreciate what you’ve got, Big Guy. I’m a lucky man, you know. I love my work. I love my car. I love going out for a run in the morning…I’ve got two legs. I’ve got you.”
When the doctor came in, she talked mostly to me. It reminded me exactly of how my doctor back home sometimes ignored me and talked to my mom as if I weren’t there. When Dr. Wong did that to me, I hated it, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.
“We’re going to give him a temporary cast, and you’ll need to keep him off that leg for two weeks,” this doctor told me. “And I mean off! Then come back and we’ll change this for a walking cast.” She turned to my father and talked louder. “Have you been on crutches before, Mr. Gordon?”
“Not for many, many years,” Dad said.
“Well, the orderly will be in to give you a refresher course.” She wrote out some prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and pain pills and explained to me how often Dad should take each one.
Next came the orderly. He wrapped my dad’s leg in a cast, then showed him how to use crutches. “You get up to go to the toilet only,” the guy said, shaking his finger at Dad. “Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Dad said, like a kid who’d gotten in trouble.
I pushed Dad in a wheelchair to the hospital pharmacy and filled his prescriptions. Then we took a cab home. This cabby, though, was a creep. When I asked him to help me get Dad up the stairs, he said, “Sorry, I’ve got a bad back,” and zoomed away.
I leaned my dad against the wall with his crutches and left him grumbling about the elevator that had been broken for months. I raced upstairs, hoping Beau was home. How would I haul Dad up all those stairs myself? What if I dropped him?
I hammered on Beau’s door, and thank goodness he was there. I told him about my dad’s accident, and I swear, his eyes pinked up and his face got blotchy, like when I told him about Ditz!
By the time we got Dad upstairs and into a chair, with his cast propped up on the coffee table, Dad looked beat. But he grabbed the phone, saying he had to get his car back, had to cancel appointments for tomorrow, had a million things to do.
Beau and I slipped out of the room. “Major drag,” Beau said.
“Actually, we had a great time for a while there,” I told him, hearing how stupid that sounded.
Beau asked if I wanted to go feed the hungry video games more quarters, but I said I had to keep an eye on my dad. And it’s a good thing I did, because soon he needed help getting to the bathroom. The crutches were clumsy down the narrow hall. They clunked against the wall and Dad looked like he was going to tip right over. It was funny, and not.
I finally got him back in his chair, and then he said he was hungry.
“Well, we’ve got eggs and we’ve got eggs,” I said.
Dad smiled. “I think I’ll have eggs.”
Beau and I banged around in the kitchen, hunting for a bowl and a frying pan. Then Beau pretended he was the host in a cooking show.
“First vee must break zee egg,” he said. But when he tapped it against the counter, the egg crunched to a zillion bits, oozing egg slop up his arm.
He came after me with his slimed hand, so I had to sound the battle cry, “Kill Kitchen Creature!” and fire slices of bread at him. Someone knocked over the orange juice and the floor was instantly slippery—and great for sliding.
“Hey! I’m trying to make a call here!” Dad yelled from the living room. Beau and I tried to quiet down—but we-couldn’t.
Eventually, we brought Dad his food. “Ta-da!” I said. Dad looked at it and tried to hide his wince.
Beau and I flicked through the channels, making fun of the people on TV while Dad talked on the phone and ate-every sticky glop of egg and every burnt crumb of toast.
When he hung up, Dad said, “Stuff like this makes you realize how alone you are. What would I have done if you-hadn’t been here, Big Guy? You too, Beau.”
“This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been here,” I said. But I knew what he meant.
After a while he fell asleep in his chair. Beau and I tiptoed out to the grocery store.
“Need more eggs,” Beau said.
Later, I had to help Dad get undressed and into bed. Now that was weird.
After he was settled, I called home. “Mom? I think I’ve got to stay longer. Dad wrecked his knee. Tore some ligaments.”
“What?” she said. “How?”
“I was teaching him to Rollerblade.”
“Rollerblade?” She laughed. “There’s no fool like an old fool. What’s that forty-eight-year-old geezer think he’s doing on Rollerblades?”
“Mom, he has to stay off his leg completely. I gotta stay.”
“Well, you still have a couple of days left,” Mom said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“He’s supposed to stay off it for two weeks, not two days.”
Mom sighed. “Isn’t there someone else who could help him?” she asked.
“No,” I said, and heard how lonely and sad that one word was.
chapter thirteen
Dad and I spent the fifth day of my visit playing cards and talking about stuff. He even told me a little about his dad, my grandfather I never met. “I hardly knew him,” Dad said. “He wasn’t mean, exactly, he just couldn’t be bothered with me. He was always tired when he came home from work—wanted to be left alone to smoke his pipe and read the paper.” Dad shuffled the cards, saying, “My father was old-fashioned. He thought talking to kids was women’s work.”
I cut the deck and thought, Women’s work? And suddenly I just knew that Dad thought that telling me Ditz had been killed was women’s work, best left to Mom and even Cora to handle. But somehow that realization made me feel worse for him than for myself.
Dad dealt the cards and said, “I couldn’t have friends over when my father was home. My mother was always telling me to be quiet and leave him in peace.” I tried to picture Dad as a kid in that kind of gloomy house. “They were older parents,” he said. “And, you know, I didn’t have brothers or sisters or anything.”
I studied my cards, afraid that if I looked right at him, he’d clam up. “I guess I thought my father would become interested in me when I got older,” Dad said, taking my jack with his ace. “But that didn’t happen. He up and died right before my fifteenth birthday.”
Fifteen? I thought. That wasn’t all that much older than me.
Dad took a nap after the card game. He said the pain pills made him dopey. I tried to watch TV, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dad and his dad.<
br />
I was relieved when Beau came over with a tub of vegetarian lasagna from his mother. The three of us devoured it for lunch. I guess Mrs. Lubeck was that helping kind of woman who likes to take care of men. She must be, I thought, with a husband and four sons! Then I wondered if I was a helping kind of guy. The idea creeped me out. But I liked taking care of my dad.
“Your father’s a big boy,” Mom said on the phone later. “And he has exactly the life he created for himself. I’ve thought about it, and I want you home as planned, John.”
“I can’t leave him! He needs me.”
“I need you,” Mom said. “Liz and I need you.”
What did they need me for? I wondered.
“What am I supposed to tell Theo and Brad?”
“Mom! It’s just another week,” I groaned.
“And we have to figure out what to do with Ditz’s ashes. And Liz is crying all the time about Jet.”
“Liz is crying?” I asked. That was hard to imagine. “She-really broke up with him?”
“She made a bonfire of all his photos and love notes in a pan on the stove. It sent up such a cloud of fumes, we had to stay out of the house all afternoon!”
I smiled. Building a fire sounded more like Liz than crying did. I’d hate to picture my sister all weepy like Cora.
“Plus, John, a new plane ticket home would get expensive,” Mom was saying.
“I’ll pitch in, out of my savings,” I said. “Dad can’t even walk to the bathroom himself, Mom. I don’t think you get it. He needs me!”
“And what about all the times you needed him, Johnny? Where was he then?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew she was just missing me. And maybe she was afraid that she’d lose me—that I might choose to make Dadland my home.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “Do what you think is best, son.”
I went into Dad’s room. He was watching TV. I admit, I was plenty tired of the constant racket.
“Can I turn this off a second?” I asked.
Dad looked surprised, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “You bet,” he said.
“Dad,” I began, “I can stay on longer if you want. I’d be glad to…you know, stay on another week or so to help you out.”
“That’s a mighty nice offer, Big Guy,” Dad said. “But it won’t be necessary. Really. What kind of summer vacation’s that? Hanging around here, watching your old man nod off in his chair?”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“You’re a good kid,” Dad said. “A really excellent kid. But son, I’ll be just fine.”
“Well, then maybe you should call Cora,” I said. “Maybe you two could make up.”
“I thought you hated her,” he said.
“I don’t hate her,” I insisted. “Her eyebrows are weird, and I don’t see why she needs four cats, but other than that, she’s a nice enough lady. And anyway, she’s not my girlfriend.”
Dad raised his eyebrows.
“You didn’t break up with her because of me, did you?” I asked.
“Nah,” Dad said with a shrug. “It was just that she sent up a big warning flag at the beach. Disaster! Beware!” Dad chuckled. “So, I bewared. Or I beed-ware, whatever.”
I thought Dad’s pain pills were making him loopy. “Huh?” I said.
“At the beach!” he continued. “We were having a perfectly lovely time. Beautiful day. Sunshine and so on. Then suddenly, Cora said my bathing suit was too ugly to give to the poor. That may not sound like much to you, son, but trust me on this one: Them’s fighting words! And as if she-hadn’t gone way too far already, do you know what she said next?”
I shook my head.
“She said to throw it away and she’d buy me a more fashionable one!”
He stared wide-eyed at me, I guess waiting for my gasp of horror. Then he added, “She was probably thinking of one of those minuscule, muscle-man, G-string Speedo things in unspeakable Day-glo colors!” Dad shuddered.
I laughed.
“You know, son,” he said, shaking a warning finger, “take it from your old man. It starts with a swimsuit, but the next thing you know, it’s lacy curtains in the kitchen!”
“Actually,” I said, “you could use something in your kitchen window. Anyone walking by can see you making eggs in your underwear.”
Dad squinted at me, scratching his chin where a beard had already started growing.
I squinted back.
Then he sighed as if defeated. “I suppose I could give my old friend Cora a call,” he said. “See if she’d like to stop by tomorrow. Maybe bring her niece to say good-bye to you. What the heck.”
“What the heck,” I agreed.
Dad smiled. “In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll phone her right now. Let her yell at me awhile.” He thumped his cast. “I won’t be needing a swimsuit in the near future anyway.”
I left him alone and put my trunks on, then went outside and knocked on Beau’s door. “How about a night swim?” I asked him.
“Cool!” he said, and ducked back in to change.
The pool was lit from underneath, making our bodies look rubbery in the blue-green water. We splashed around, raced. Then we lolled on the steps at the shallow end.
“My dad says I should leave as planned, day after tomorrow,” I said.
“You gonna?” Beau asked.
“I guess so. I mean, I can’t exactly stay if he doesn’t want me to. And my mom wants me home.”
“What do you want?” Beau asked.
“Me?” I said stupidly.
“No, not you. I was asking that palm tree,” he joked.
But his question rang in my ears. What did I want to do? I hadn’t the foggiest idea, so I changed the subject. “Is your brother always like that?” I asked.
“Claude?”
“No.”
“Marcel?”
I shook my head. “Eric.”
“Ah! The ugly one,” Beau said. “No, he’s not always like that. Sometimes he’s worse.”
I waited for Beau to continue but he didn’t. So I said, “How can you stand it?”
He shrugged. “My dad says my uncle Jorge was always pounding on him as a kid. It’s a brother thing.”
“But you’re nice to your other brothers.”
“I,” Beau said, poking himself in the chest, “am an infinitely superior human being to both my brother Eric and my uncle Jorge.”
“Infinitely,” I agreed. “Are your dad and your uncle friends now?” I asked.
Beau laughed. “We only hear from Uncle Jorge when he needs money.”
When I went upstairs, Dad had the TV back on. “All is forgiven,” he said, nodding toward the phone. “The womenfolk are bringing lunch tomorrow.”
I didn’t know what to think about that. Was there any truth to the swimsuit story? I shrugged to myself. Another mystery. One among many. Like: Would Cora still be around next summer, Muzak, gum chewing, and all? What if Dad married her? Would they keep her cats? Where would that leave me? In a hotel?
I looked at Dad, propped up on his pillows, and told myself I’d worry about all that later. Or, as Jet says, “I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.”
We had pizza delivered and ate it on Dad’s bed. There was an old movie on and I didn’t mind watching it. The bad guy reminded me of Eric, so when the movie was over, I told Dad about Eric always beating up on Beau.
Dad rubbed his stubbly chin. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I never noticed.” How could he not have noticed? I wondered briefly. But I suppose that just because Beau was paying close attention to my dad, it didn’t necessarily mean Dad was paying attention back. Then, without even meaning to, I told him about Alex.
“Edgar White,” Dad replied. “I guess everyone’s got one.”
“Huh?”
“A bully. Mine was Edgar White. I’ll never forget that name. I spent years hoping I’d run into him again so I could punch his lights out.”
I wa
ited for him to go on.
“I vowed I’d never be picked on again. Started lifting weights and slugging away at the punching bag, pretending it was his face.” Dad smiled. “Edgar White’s what made me start working out, so I guess something good came of it. Until then I was this skinny.” He held up his finger. “Edgar White was big and beefy. Mean as sin. Had three goons who did whatever he said.” Dad shook his head. “They got me on the way home from school once. Four against one.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Fought for my life.”
“Alex never actually touched me,” I said. “Just took my books, called me Worm. But it was for a whole school year.”
Dad shook his head again. “Hard being a kid,” he said. “I forget that.” He took the last, cold piece of pizza and chewed awhile. Then he said, “I thought bullies were a thing of the past, that kids were smarter now, more civilized and sophisticated than in my day. I see how much more articulate and thoughtful you are than I was as a boy, and I hoped life was different for your generation. Better.”
“I wish,” I said.
Dad nodded. “Well, maybe it’ll be better for your son,” he said. “Or your grandson.”
My son? The idea made me laugh. But then I imagined myself as an old guy with a busted knee and my nerdy kid telling me he’s getting picked on by bullies. I guess I’d tell him about Alex. Maybe mention Edgar White too.
“Dad,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
“Fire away.”
“Remember that guy Chris who called? When I forgot to give you his message?”
Dad nodded.
“How come he didn’t know you had a son?”
Dad shrugged and looked like he was going to joke about it, but then he stopped himself and said, “I’m sorry, John. Everyone’ll know I have a son from now on.”
chapter fourteen
The next day Cora and Iris brought fried chicken, potato salad, garlic rolls, watermelon, and cherry pie. I ate like a pig. I was in no shape for swimming, but Iris insisted. She practically dragged me out the door, whispering that we should leave the two lovebirds alone.
When we got outside, she said, “Thanks for breaking your father’s leg.”
Stranger in Dadland Page 8
