by Delia Ephron
“Oh yes, it’s quite wonderful. It’s not really a library, it’s a museum. There are fountains and a reflecting pond. And they have the place he was born right on the premises in case people get bored and want to take a little walk. I have the name of a woman there.”
I write it down, get off with Madge, then phone Kim and ask her to set up an appointment for me with the woman at the library and to send the RSVP list to Madge immediately. I come banging down the stairs. “I’m going,” I call out. But I can’t leave without complaining. I detour into the breakfast room. “You know this party for four hundred fifty ear, nose, and throat doctors? Well, Madge Turner is changing the location to the Nixon Library.”
After a long beat, Joe looks up from his paper. “Who goes to that place? Probably the most white-bread group in the country.”
“I suppose you think it would be interesting to talk to them.”
He laughs. “‘What Nixon means to me.’ I bet you’ll have a great time.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll see you later.”
At five o’clock, I visit my father. I call Joe and tell him he does not have to come too. “I should hope not,” he says.
There’s one thing I like about doing something the second time, even when it’s unpleasant: I like knowing the ropes. The elevator is to the left, past the admissions office. Seventh floor, I don’t have to check the listing. After I ring the doorbell, I have to state my name in the intercom, my business (visiting my father), and the door will be unlocked from the inside. I will store this knowledge. It will comfort me. Maybe I can pass it on to someone. Maybe my friend Adrienne will have to commit her mother.
Also, the sights and sounds that I closed out the first time, that even scared me, become curiosities. Then familiar, even familial. I like this process.
The first thing I see is a woman sitting in a wheelchair facing the phone booth. She has the receiver in her hand. She has pulled it as far out of the booth as it will reach so she can talk. And she is screaming, “Come and get me.”
Her hair is white, there isn’t much of it, and it’s pulled back by a child’s barrette. She is little and her chin is pointed. I wonder who is on the other end of the phone. I wonder whose number she doesn’t forget.
I go past her to the cage. “I’m looking for my father, Lou Mozell.”
“Just in time,” says the nurse.
“For what?”
She leans forward so her mouth is almost against the grate, and whispers. “They get difficult now. We call it sun-downing.”
I nod in understanding. She points to the left. “His room is the third. Doris will show you.”
Doris, who has frizzy hair the color of straw and two very fat cheeks that scarcely leave room for her mouth, which runs like a straight road between them, comes out of the cage. I follow her down the hall. “So he’s being difficult?”
“He wants to leave.”
“Well, that’s understandable.” I state this loyally, in a tone that says, For God’s sake, what would you expect? Then I hear him.
“Goddamnit, you bitches, get in here.” He is shouting loud enough to be heard over the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
He sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, stranded—a passenger in a car that broke down on its way to nowhere. His pants aren’t fastened at the top, and there’s a rope around his waist holding them up. “Could you buy him some suspenders?” Doris asks.
“What’s wrong with his belt?”
“It doesn’t seem to work on all his pants.” She bends until her face is level with his. “Your daughter’s here.”
“I’m not blind,” says my father.
I sit down on the bed. “So how are you?”
“I’m hungry.” His face wrinkles up tight, as if someone took a screwdriver, put it in the center, and twisted it.
“I think you’re having dinner soon.”
“Order room service.”
I say as patiently as possible, “Dad, this isn’t a hotel.”
There is a pause. “Well, what is it?”
“It’s a hospital. They’re going to fix your medications.”
He thinks about this for a bit. “They don’t take Georgia’s magazine here,” he says petulantly.
“I’m not surprised.”
“What kind of a hotel doesn’t get Georgia?”
“Hotels don’t subscribe to Georgia. Anyway, this is a hospital and hospitals never subscribe to Georgia.” I am very bad at being patient.
“You put me here because of Jesse, didn’t you?”
“No. Listen, do you want some company? Do you want to go sit with the other—” I am about to say inmates, I realize, so I stop the sentence there.
“Sure, kiddo, let’s go for a walk.”
My father stands up and pitches forward, crashing onto the floor. It’s sort of beautiful—he’s straight all the way, as if he’s tracing the quadrant of a circle. The sound when he hits is a gigantic squish, air being punched out of a cushion.
“Help, help!” I shout. Is this it? Is he dead?
I am flat against the wall staring down when Doris runs in. My father lies there like a permanent fixture.
“Jocko!” Doris’s voice is so commanding she could be summoning troops. “Fortunately your father’s fat,” she says to me. “They fall better if they’re fat.”
I nod as though I agree or understand or know something. Then Jocko appears. He is as big as a Bekins van. His head is shaved except for some hair on top that sprouts like a plant. The sight of him probably has sent many old people who are mentally on the edge right over.
He wraps his arms around and under my dad, and pulls him up stomach first. “We really need a crane for these situations,” Doris confides as Jocko pushes my father onto his knees. Then he lifts him from behind and puts him back in his chair. My father is conscious but silent. He looks quite puzzled.
“He fell over,” I tell Dr. Kelly. We are in an empty patient room a day later, having our official end-of-first-week consultation. Dr. Kelly is wearing high-top sneakers with her medical whites. “Why can’t he stand up anymore?”
“It’s part of his dementia.” She opens his file and spreads the pages on the bed. “All your father’s tests are normal. His EEG, his EKG, blood work. We did a CAT scan this morning.” She mentions a few more workups. I lose track, and I know I should take notes, because Georgia is going to quiz me later.
“Look, my father’s been nuts before. He’s been mixed up about who he is and where he is. If you adjust his lithium and whatever else he’s on, he’ll come right back.”
She shakes her head.
“Is there someone else I can talk to?” I say this bravely. It makes me nervous to confront any doctor, even this soda-pop version. I don’t say, “I want to speak to someone over you—the doctor in charge,” but I try to imagine I am Georgia, who inspires fear. Who can make salesgirls scurry in all directions.
Dr. Kelly stiffens. “I know your father’s case.”
“Fine.” I cave in that quickly. And now her voice is sterner. Meaner. I owe this to you, Georgia. “Look,” I say, smiling, trying to win her back. “My sister’s concerned that we know everything, that’s all, that no stone is left unturned.”
“Your father has the dwindles.”
“The dwindles?”
She nods.
“You mean he’s dwindling?”
“Exactly.” She acts proud of me—I have caught on to an extremely difficult concept.
“Are you sure it isn’t Alzheimer’s?”
“Well, we can’t be sure of that until after he’s dead and we do an autopsy, but this severe dementia and loss of motor skills came on fairly rapidly. I think”—she says “I think” as if she were drawing on years of experience—“it’s just the dwindles.”
“How long do you live with the dwindles?” It sounds as if I’m asking, How long will he live? But maybe I am really asking, How long will I have to live with his dwindles?
>
“A year or two.”
“Why does he keep bringing up my son? He says I put him here because of Jesse.”
“Could he be referring to something in the past, some event?”
I don’t have to think about this. “Yes.”
“He’s perseverating.”
Perseverating? I insult her and she pays me back by using an SAT word. Who knows what this means? I don’t bother to ask. She shuffles the pages together and slides them back in the file.
“Oh, Dr. Kelly?”
“Yes?”
“The other day, I couldn’t remember why I went upstairs. Is that normal?”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-four.”
“Yes.”
I go to my father’s room. He’s leaning over trying to reach his shoe, which is untied. He doesn’t have the dexterity to tie his shoe even if he could reach it, and he can’t walk anymore, so it doesn’t matter whether his shoes are tied. He is no longer able to trip on his laces.
I stand in the doorway, watching coolly, like a plant manager assessing some employee’s capability. You’re not going to live two more years. Not one more year. I don’t believe it. He looks up.
“Dad, come on, let’s do something. Let’s go find company.”
I push him out the door and down the hall. The last time I pushed someone along like this it was Jesse in a stroller.
A man walks toward us in a lively way, on the balls of his feet. He has a healthy head of white hair and a trim body. He resembles an aging, weathered camp counselor, someone who might lead us all in jumping jacks. “I bet you don’t recognize me,” he says to my father.
“Sure I do.” My father puts out his hand.
The bouncy man grasps it. “Great to see you again. I’ve been traveling.”
“Me too,” says my father.
“The Orient, Baghdad, Taiwan. But you know, I was thinking”—the man turns his head to one side, then the other, like a bird on a branch deciding which way to fly—“it’s great to see you.”
“Me too.” My father is smiling and so is the man, as their conversation goes ’round and ’round, a horse on a racetrack with no finish line.
“Would you like to get by?” I pull the wheelchair to the side.
“I’m going in there.” The man points to the dining room door. “Would you open it?”
I try. It’s locked, so I knock. Doris peeks out. “Excuse me,” I say.
She opens it further, spots the bouncy man behind me, and slams it closed. “Wait here,” I say to my dad, as if he could go somewhere.
I run to the cage. “That man”—I point—“wants to go into the dining room, but Doris slammed the door in his face.”
The nurse leans close to the grate and whispers. “He gets into everything.”
“Oh,” I say, as if it makes perfect sense. Who would want that? “Well, we’ll see you later,” I tell the bouncy man, who may have lost his mind but who does not have the dwindles. His family will expire from exasperation long before he dies.
“I have no idea who he was,” says my father. Was. That’s the correct tense. He was someone else once. My dad was too, I guess. I’m not sure.
I wheel him into the TV room. Old people sit and stare at a television, which is showing a weather report of conditions at nearby beaches.
“I hope you aren’t jealous of your sister,” he says suddenly, very loudly.
“Of course I’m not,” I reply, noticing that several old people have turned to look. People who are otherwise not interested in anything. I smile at them to show that this conversation is harmless.
“She’s a big success.” He booms it.
I don’t answer. Maybe this train of thought will go away.
“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie.” He’s chanting and happy. He’s ten and on the jungle gym, hanging upside down and swinging. “She’s Georgia, the magazine,” he chants. “We named her and then they named a magazine after her. Who ever thought when we gave her that name it would end up a magazine? Wasn’t that brilliant? I’d like some applause.”
Several demented people clap.
“This is her sister.” He has swung to the top of the jungle gym and is shouting to the entire playground. I smile, nodding at everyone. My father turns his head toward me sharply. “What’s your name?”
“He’s always been like that,” says Joe, who is packing.
“True.”
“But now he’s senile. If you could see his brain, I’m sure it would look like Swiss cheese.” He smiles, pleased at the notion of my father’s brain with gigantic holes in it. “Of course, it’s the holes that make Swiss cheese interesting. Although Swiss cheese can never really be interesting. Like your father.”
Joe does three half-hour shows a week for National Public Radio. What that means to me, married to him, is that at any moment some idea takes hold, like this mini-essay on Swiss cheese, and then he’s no longer talking to me but experimenting with an idea that, in some form or another, may end up on the air. His show, USA from Here, features oddballs. Joe spins their lives into tales.
He loves it. He was spinning tales before he was on the radio. He grew up in New Hampshire, in a small town, a place where it was safe to be curious. His parents still live there contentedly, in an 1846 white clapboard house with vines of roses encircling the windows and a weathervane standing at the peak of its shingled roof. Joe could always tell which way the wind was blowing.
With the confidence of the truly secure, Joe does not pay tremendous attention to how or what he packs—except for his tape recorder, which is always carefully snapped into its leather case and stashed in the small zippered pouch on his hanging bag. Clothes are selected almost at random: the first shirt his hand touches in the drawer, the pair of pants nearest the closet door. Our bathroom is full of duplicates and triplicates of things Joe forgot and had to buy on the road.
“My father’s interesting,” I protest.
“You’re praising your father? He’s not dead yet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, when Nixon died, they turned him into a hero. Revisionist history. But your father’s not dead.”
“He’s dying.”
“He’s not dying and he’s not interesting.” Joe talks to me as if he were correcting my wrong answer to a test question. “Mainly he’s trouble.”
“You pack like a complete slob.” I say this with a smile that I tack on after I hear myself speak. It doesn’t fool Joe.
“What is this about?”
“You always get there and don’t have what you need, that’s all.”
“So I buy it. Or don’t.”
“Right. Forget it.” I go look in the mirror. Is this new haircut weird, or is it my imagination? My hair is short around my ears, then takes a two-inch drop in the back. It looks like upstairs, downstairs. “If my father is senile, why does he know how to upset me? Do people always get senile in character?”
“Ask Jesse. That sounds like something he’d have an opinion on.” Joe zips his bag, folds it in two, and starts buckling the sides.
“Why? Because you don’t want to talk to me?”
He stops buckling and stands up straight. He pushes his glasses back on his nose. It’s a remarkably aggressive gesture for being so simple. Casual, affable Joe is deceptive this way. He uses his index finger and pushes the glasses back firmly, and it is now immensely clear that he’s looking at me piercingly, and not just with two eyes but with four. “That is not what I mean, Eve. The reason you should ask Jesse is, he has an opinion on everything. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your sense of humor?”
“That is so unfair.” I am dimly aware that I sound exactly like Jesse at some age. Some earlier age that I miss right now. The phone rings. I hope this is Dr. Omar Kunundar, car accident victim. “Hello?”
“Well, so …” says Georgia.
“I hate my hair. And this is my third new hairstyle in six months.”
> “You don’t hate your hair. You hate your face.”
“I do?”
“Yes. But you cannot do anything about your forty-some-year-old face, so you change your hair, thinking that will make your face look young, the way it used to.”
“Oh God, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” says Georgia, closing the subject. “What’s the verdict from the doctors?”
I ask Joe to hang up the bedroom phone after I take the call in another room, my study, where I have clocked thousands of hours of phone calls with Georgia, leaning back in my swivel chair, as I do now—lean back and get comfortable before I tell her. “He has the dwindles.” I wait for the gasp of amazement. I get it.
“What? That’s the diagnosis?”
“I swear to God.”
“That’s not a diagnosis. It has only two syllables. Did you speak to the head guy? Oh, good grief, hold on. Can you believe I’m still at the office? I have to check this caption.”
When she comes back on the line, I skip over the head-guy question, hoping she won’t notice. “They say his brain is going and it’s not coming back. They’re going to try to adjust his medications so he doesn’t shout and get abusive, but they can’t guarantee it.” I get no response. It’s possible Georgia is doing work again and has forgotten I’m on the phone. “Hello, are you there?”
“I was just thinking. This is really sad.”
“I know. Oh, wait a minute. Jesse,” I call, “is that you?” He opens the door and lounges against the jamb. “Your dad’s leaving soon. Don’t forget to say good-bye.”
“Duh,” says Jesse.
“You know, Jesse, it’s really not necessary for you to talk to me like that.”
“Sor-ry.” Two syllables, not a diagnosis, and definitely not an apology.
“Are you doing something tonight?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. Ifer’s grounded. She called her mom a PMS ho.”
“Well, no wonder she’s grounded.”
“Her mom is a PMS ho, it’s the truth.”
“Well, fine, I’m on long-distance with your aunt Georgia, I’ll be off in a minute.”
