by Delia Ephron
“Look at this, my hands are shaking.” I rub them against the table, then back and forth against my neck.
“Eve, stop it, you look crazy.”
I put my hands in my lap. “Why did she leave him?”
“At first it was just sex,” says Maddy.
“With Tom Winston. What a thought.”
Maddy suddenly straightens up, no doubt remembering her public—she can’t be seen with her chin lolling on a coffee shop table. “I think he’s pretty hot. At least he sure gets worked up over eagles. He practically saved the American bald eagle single-handedly. But then remember when Mom drank heavily?”
“When she faked suicide?”
“Right. I bet during that time she wasn’t seeing him, and that’s when she realized she was in love.”
“Did Mom tell you that?” I have this vision of them—girlfriends flopped across a single bed, exchanging secrets while they clutch stuffed animals and giggle.
“Of course not. Mom—talk about something personal?”
“I thought she talked intimately to you.”
Maddy shook her head. “I’ve just thought a lot about it. Sometimes I do think about things, Eve.”
I let that pass. “What’s Tom like?”
“Oh, finally you want to know. Well, he can go on for hours about John Muir or how to estimate the age of a ponderosa pine, but basically he’s nice. Normal.”
“Maybe that’s what Mom couldn’t resist.” I thought of my father. How his emotional controls were never quite locked in place. Today … God, today …
“You should have told me Dad would be so weird,” Madeline says, her lips quivering. Uh-oh, the trembles—that’s what Georgia and I used to call it when Maddy was little and working her way up to a big cry. “Watch out, she’s got the trembles,” I would shout meanly, which would make her quiver more. “You shouldn’t have just taken me there,” she says.
“I didn’t know what he’d be like. Do you think I was expecting that? Besides, you haven’t exactly been here.”
“I was on vacation. My only vacation all year.”
“I only said you haven’t been here.”
“I know what you were saying.”
“May I take your order?”
We both look at the waitress blankly. “You ladies need more time?”
“Do you have buffalo steak?” Maddy asks.
“No.”
“Be serious, Madeline, this is Los Angeles.” I laugh so she will think I’m kidding around.
She ignores me. “What’s the soup?”
“Beef with barley.”
“Barley?” She considers, I assume, the Montana of it. “I’ll have that.”
“Scrambled eggs. No, that’s too risky,” I say.
Madeline yawns pointedly.
“It is, Maddy, you never know what they can do to scrambled eggs—put water in them, or milk, cook them to death. BLT on rye toast, and an iced tea.”
“I’ll have a Coke with lemon,” says Madeline. “He looks terrible too. He needs sun.”
“Maybe you could get him a day pass and take him to the beach.” I say this mildly, to cover my hostility.
“Maybe I will.”
There is silence. Neither of us can think of how to get out of where we are. Finally Maddy says, “I hope that never happens to my body.”
“What?”
“A pumped-up middle and everything else deflated. Everything except his big fat jowls. When did he get those jowls? If I ever look like that, shoot me.”
“I think he looks like Richard Nixon—the way Nixon did before he died. Except that Nixon had all his marbles. Imagine Dad discussing détente on the Today show. Nixon had slumpy little shoulders just like Dad. I always feel that if Dad had had an audience or a bunch of cameras recording his release from all those loony bins, he would have raised both hands in the V-for-victory sign. Also, Dad always ended up in a pit again, like Nixon, and had to dig himself out. Of course, Julie and Tricia loved their father, which is different from us.” I notice that Maddy has gone glassy-eyed, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. “I’m planning a party at the Nixon Library,” I explain, “and when I was there yesterday, they were showing his Today show interview, when he was eighty, over and over on videotape.”
“Why are you hosting that party? Where are your values?”
“It’s business. I’m throwing an event there for a slew of ear, nose, and throat doctors.”
“Things like that show up on you,” says Maddy. “Like Dorian Gray.” She smiles at someone she doesn’t know in the next booth: Yes, you recognize me from television, remember? “You know, Eve, there’s this great doctor in Santa Monica, Dr. Mao, and I swear, if Dad would drink his herbal tea, he’d be fine. This is like all those times he went cuckoo from being manic.”
“It isn’t.” I pick up my sandwich to eat but lose my appetite before I get it to my mouth.
“He should have been on tea all these years, instead of lithium.” Maddy is wolfing down her soup and slices of buttered bread as if she’s breaking a fast.
“I think the problem’s beyond tea.”
She admonishes me with her soup spoon. “Chinese medicine’s been around for a million years.”
“Everyone always says that. Just being around doesn’t mean anything. Dad’s been around for eighty years, and look at him. If you think herbal tea is the solution, you deal with it. Go talk to the doctors. Take over the whole thing, it’s fine with me. You weren’t here.”
“Take it easy. We’re just discussing this.”
We hit silence again. She can break it, not me, no way. I occupy myself by taking my sandwich apart and putting it back together. Maddy shoves the lemon down into her Coke and starts stabbing it with her straw. “So how are you?” she asks.
“Okay, considering I have to deal with this. Look, I would really appreciate it, when they release him, if you would take him back to the Home. Talk to Angie, make the arrangements, it’s your turn.”
Madeline nods.
“Thank you.”
The waitress stops at our table, staring down at my uneaten sandwich. “How is everything?”
“Fine, thank you.”
Maddy waits until she’s out of earshot. “So don’t you want to hear my surprise?”
“What?”
She flips her hair to the other side of her head and holds a pose. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Yup.” She delivers this like a cowboy on a Montana ranch.
“Who’s the father?”
“Eve, I’m not sixteen years old and you are not my mother. Aren’t you going to say congratulations?”
“Congratulations. That’s fantastic. When are you due?”
“January.”
“Did you tell the show?”
“Not yet. They won’t mind. They’ll write a pregnancy into my character.”
“Oh.”
Maddy takes the paper bag out of her purse and extracts the schnecken.
“So who’s the father?”
“How’s Jesse?” she flashes back with a wicked smile.
Why not? It’s safe territory. I go for it. I tell her about the Kasmian religion, about Ifer, about the car accident. “Joe’s away, so naturally I have to deal with it, and the doctor Jesse hit may be a semi-lunatic. I even had to speak to his mother.”
“I get the picture, Eve.”
“What?”
“You’re stressed and you want me to take Dad back to the Home.” Maddy uses a bored-out-of-her-wits monotone. “Fine, it’s my turn. I’ll do it.”
As soon as I get to my office, I call Georgia and inform her she’s going to be an aunt again.
“Madeline says they’ll write the pregnancy into her character.”
“Wait a minute. Refresh my memory. She’s a receptionist on this soap, right?”
“Correct. Her name is, I forget. Her name is something and she has an unrequited crush on her boss but mainly she say
s, ‘May I get you coffee?’”
“Oh my God, this is crazy,” says Georgia. “Did you suggest an abortion?”
“No, I did not. Juliana, that’s her name.”
“No wonder you didn’t remember it. It’s a soap name, it doesn’t exist in the real world. And she doesn’t know who the father is?”
“She knows. She wouldn’t tell me.”
These are the times we live for—these amazing family developments that no one but a sister can truly appreciate. In the contemplation of Maddy’s pregnancy, Georgia and I experience bliss: a moment of intense and perfect intimacy.
“You realize they’re going to fire her, don’t you?” says Georgia.
“They are?”
“Of course they are.”
“But why? If her character hardly has a story, why do they care if she’s pregnant or not?”
“You’ll see.”
“She thought Dad needed sun.”
“What?”
“She said he looked terrible and he needed sun. Isn’t there some joke about this? A man’s in the hospital with no brain, and the doctor says, ‘You look terrible, you need sun.’ She also said he should drink herbal tea. I told her to call the doctors. She can tell them herself. She could at least take care of something.”
This is what I do, rail to Georgia about Madeline for the thing I’m actually mad at Georgia about: abandoning me. There’s an instant when I panic that Georgia will notice. I never express my anger with her, Adrienne says, because she’s the closest thing I have to a mother. I’ve already lost one mother and I won’t risk losing another. Instead I take my anger out on Maddy, hoping/not hoping that Georgia will notice, and then am incredibly irritated when she doesn’t, when she just rattles on: “You know that thing you did where you looked in the mirror and you couldn’t believe your face? We’re doing a piece about that for the tenth-anniversary edition.”
“I reacted like that because I was so harassed and upset from putting Dad in the UCLA loony bin,” I say, now reminding her pointedly of my hardship.
“I doubt it. I’m calling the article ‘The New Adolescence.’”
“Huh?”
Georgia sighs. It’s a sigh that laments my dimness. “You know how you think you’ll never accept your body or your looks when you’re a teenager, and then you get to accept them?”
“Like, ‘I hate my legs.’”
“Right, but then you learn to like your legs if you’re you or learn to live with your legs if you’re your friend Adrienne. Well, it turns out this is only temporary. In the middle of your forties, you start to hate your legs or your face all over again, or spend hours contemplating your sad sagging behind because it’s aging.”
“I don’t contemplate my sad sagging behind.”
“I don’t mean you, specifically. I’m speaking of American women in general. You recall how Hillary Clinton kept changing her hair right after the election?”
“Not really.”
“Well, she did. ‘The New Adolescence’—it’s a great title. You know what else we’re doing? The D word.”
I have no idea what she is talking about. I assume it will become clear. Assume—Georgia taught me that.
After I hang up, I ask my assistant, “What do you think the D word is?”
“‘Divorce,’” says Kim. “You didn’t tell her about my divorce, did you?”
“Of course not.”
My office is a large, airy room Kim and I share ten minutes from my home. The building is very Los Angeles, which is to say that it looks like something out of New Orleans. Much of Los Angeles appears to have been transplanted from somewhere else. The native look is Spanish style, beige stucco with tile floors, but it is common to drive down a residential street past a white manor house with columns (shades of Atlanta), a Tudor house, even a clapboard colonial. People have put up whatever makes them happy, and so our office, which goes with nothing else on the block of plain brick medical buildings, looks as if it originated in the French Quarter. All the offices on the second floor open onto a circular balcony with fancy wrought-iron railings. Kim and I look down at a cobblestone courtyard with bougainvillea, geraniums in clay pots, and two cast-iron frogs with gaping mouths at the gate.
When I am on the phone, Kim hears everything I say, although she has good manners and pretends not to. During my call to Georgia, she proofread a speech I wrote—Madge Turner’s welcoming remarks for the party. She hands it to me and I hand her back the program, which I reviewed while I talked to Georgia. She runs down my list of calls. “Madge still wants to know about the name tags. The Citrus Singers have confirmed. They want to clog dance as well as sing.”
“Sure, why not.”
The phone rings. Kim answers, “No Surprises.” She holds out the phone. “It’s Dr. Kelly.”
“Hello, Dr. Kelly.”
“Hello, Eve.”
This is the height of pathetic: to call this person Doctor while she calls me Eve.
“How’s my father?”
“After you and your sister left today, he had a terrible screaming fit.”
“Oh? About what?”
“He was just angry. Using very bad words, you know.”
Very bad words? I don’t know and I don’t ask.
“We put him on the elephant tranquilizer.” She laughs.
“It’s for elephants?”
“No, I was making a joke. It should kick in soon, and he’ll be stabilized. We’re estimating his departure for a week from tomorrow.”
“My sister Madeline is going to pick him up. Please let her know the exact time.” I give Dr. Kelly the phone number.
“Eve?”
“Yes.”
“We have a group here, a support group for adult children of dwindling parents: ACDP. Perhaps you and your sister would like to attend?”
“I don’t think so, but thank you. And thank you so much for taking such good care of him.” Now I have made myself practically sick: I feel as though I’m always fawning over people who don’t deserve it. In fact, it’s knowing that they don’t deserve it that makes me fawn. I feel sorry for them.
“We aim to please,” says Dr. Kelly. “Bye.”
“Maybe the D word is ‘dwindling’?” I say to Kim.
“Maybe ‘depressed,’” says Kim. “Did you tell Georgia I’ve been depressed since my divorce?”
Late that night, I am naked in the bathroom, contemplating my behind in the full-length mirror. Why have I never noticed this sagging event? Woman faints from sight of own tushy. It’s a cartoon for Adrienne to draw: a naked woman passed out on her bath mat, eyes wide with horror. What vision has she seen? What caused her to get out of her bathtub and keel? Has Joe noticed this forty-four-year-old backside of mine?
“Mom!” Jesse yells. “Mom, you’ve got to get down here.”
“I’m busy,” I shout.
“Mo-om.”
I throw on a robe, a robe I now plan to wear while I bathe so I never again risk seeing my own behind. I stick my head over the banister. “What?”
Ifer is at the front door, droopy, a refugee. Dirty bare feet. Hair hanging in her face. She is pasty under the best of circumstances. Her hair technically is blond, but actually has an absence of color; her face too, more white than flesh-toned. Tonight, in her sorry state and lit by the harsh hanging fixture in our entryway, she has acquired a sickly greenish tinge. In her arms she clutches a cat, a mangy thing whose tail hangs out of the ratty towel it is wrapped in. Jesse has his arm around Ifer protectively.
I come down the stairs not too quickly. “Mom, can Ifer move in?”
Ifer sniffs a gigantic sniff.
“I swear her mom’s a bitch.” Jesse fixes his big brown eyes on me. My eyes. My father’s eyes. “Mom, you’ve got to let her, she’ll die if you don’t.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I walk into the living room. They trail in after.
“I swear, I’ll do anything,” Ifer says to me. “I’ll wash the dishes.
”
I sit on the couch, across the room, far from them. “I have my hands full right now with Jesse’s grandfather. I don’t see where—”
Jesse clasps his hands together, begging. “Please.”
“No.”
A moan escapes from Ifer. “Sit down, you’ll feel better,” Jesse tells her. She perches on the very edge of the chair like someone who doesn’t want to impose. “Listen, Mom, your dad’s on the way out.”
“How can you say something that callous? I can’t believe I’ve raised a son who would say that. You should consider what you say.”
“Me?” Jesse points to himself. “I don’t have a problem. But did you ever think there’s something wrong with your attitude? What is your attitude toward death?”
“My attitude?” I realize I’m trapped. I don’t have the energy to escape. Try as I might to have absolutely no meaningful conversations with Jesse, sometimes he gets me in a weak or ornery mood. “What I think about death is … when it’s over, it’s over.”
Jesse shakes his head in dismay. “That’s not very evolved, Mom.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” Ifer is up and eagerly on her way to my side. “Kasmians believe that everyone has at least two lives on this planet.” She speaks intensely, perhaps even spiritually.
“By then your soul has soaked up everything it has to learn and moves on to another planet,” says Jesse.
“Suppose you learn nothing being alive? Suppose being alive is like some course in high school that you flunk and have to take over?”
Jesse and Ifer are now standing over me, delivering the lecture of their dreams. “Maybe then you get three lives on each planet, I’m not sure,” says Jesse.
“But then you basically move around the universe,” Ifer adds. Jesse nods wildly in agreement.
So I think my father’s dying, but really he’s departing for Mars. Then why am I scared to die? I could be going to Jupiter or Venus. “As far as I’m concerned, my father is already on Mars. He’s given me nothing my whole life and I’m never going back to see him.”
“Cool.” Jesse smiles.
“That is so great, Mrs. Marks,” says Ifer. “Your mom is so great, Jesse. Mine is totally fake. Do they have any more room in that loony bin your grandpa’s in? Because my mom should be in there too.”
