by Delia Ephron
At the first sight of my father, I didn’t recognize him. I was expecting Dracula, or someone equally deadly. I had accumulated enough anger and fear over seven years to justify that vision, and instead saw an old man moving at his own slow speed, his only speed, and being bumped around by other passengers. He was shorter than before. The stewardess who shepherded him out had to lean down to talk to him.
He wore no sports jacket—nothing that would have given him a sense of presence or adulthood. His trousers were too long. They sat like hats on his Reeboks, and his shirt was so cardboard stiff, even after being on a shlumpy little guy for a five-hour flight, that it maintained a shape of its own. “Ever since Claire left, he buys only fabric made in a test tube,” I recalled Georgia saying. Although it didn’t look as if he’d bought these clothes at all. They looked donated.
He could still walk without falling forward, and he was alert. His eyes darted, searching for me, who else? But he seemed like someone who spent his days on a park bench feeding pigeons, not my crazy drinking dad who’d smashed his nose with a tennis racquet.
I waved, signaling I was here.
“Hey, Evie.” My dad smiled his familiar crooked smile, the one that meant to be a whole smile but got sidetracked by tears, which always lurked.
“Hi, Dad. This is Jesse. Do you believe how big he is?”
“Hey, Evie, it’s you,” he said again. His eyes overflowed.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his pants pocket. A white pressed handkerchief. It was as amazing as if he’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. It caused me to have an unaccountable wave of goodwill.
“Don’t cry, Dad, please. You always cry.” I patted him gingerly on the back, and for this minor act of kindness I felt I deserved a medal. One hour and fifty-eight minutes to go.
He wiped his eyes without unfolding the handkerchief, just patted that square against one eye and then the other. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” he asked plaintively, sliding the handkerchief into his pocket, astonishing me again. I’d seen him do it a million times—take that handkerchief out, wipe his eyes, and slide it back. It was like teeth: your whole face can age but your teeth remain the same. Georgia had once pointed this out to me—a person can have ancient, sagging, spotted skin, bags to his toes, creases as deep as the Grand Canyon, and retain a Colgate smile. Well, my dilapidated father kept a clean white handkerchief that he could still slip coolly into his pocket.
I pecked him on the cheek and nodded to Jesse. He did the same.
“How was the trip? Was the plane crowded? What movie did you see?” I was too nervous to wait for answers. “I think we want to go this way.”
“I’m going wherever you’re going. That’s all I know,” said my father.
“Well, I’m taking the escalator.”
My father balked at the top, staring down at the moving steps. I took his arm. One hour and fifty-three minutes to go, I thought.
All the way down, I babbled. “They’re all ready for you. A woman named Angie. Listen to this, she’s worked at the Home for twenty years. She said she’ll be checking in herself soon.” I laughed and then realized from Jesse’s look that what I had said wasn’t funny. My father didn’t pay attention, anyway. He was focused on the bottom of the escalator. He took his step off too soon, then almost tipped backward as the moving steps abruptly stopped.
“Whoa there,” said Jesse, catching my father’s arm with both hands and helping me pull him upright. Whoa there? I had never heard Jesse use words like that. It was language for old people. He’d spouted them spontaneously, the way people fall into “Cootchy-coo” when faced with a baby.
As we drove out of the airport and onto the San Diego Freeway, I asked my father, “What do you think of Jesse? Doesn’t he look handsome?”
“I’m not old,” said my father, ignoring the question.
“You’re not young. You’re seventy-seven.”
“I don’t belong in one of those places.”
“You might like it. You’ll have lots of company. Your life hasn’t been too full lately, has it? I mean, what do you do with yourself?”
“I eat grilled cheese sandwiches. And sometimes I screw the lady at the Chinese restaurant.”
“Dad, for God’s sake, Jesse’s in the backseat.”
“So what? I’m twelve,” Jesse piped up.
“Don’t take me there, Evie.”
“You have to go.”
“Why?” asked Jesse.
“Be quiet, Jesse. I think you’ll like it there.”
“Your sister’s a piece of work. Try saying no to Georgia. She could run the Israeli army.”
“You’re lucky that you have Georgia,” I said. “Georgia’s great.”
“Yeah.” His lips started their usual quiver and twitch. I pushed the button on the tape deck. Gypsy. No one can cry when Ethel Merman is blasting.
I saw my father’s mouth move. I turned the music down. “What is it?”
“Is Ella Fitzgerald alive?”
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded. I turned the tape back up. One hour and fifteen minutes to go.
When we walked into the Home, it was about five-thirty, which turned out to be dinnertime. The big open room behind the lobby was the dining room, and there were four gray heads at every table. My father stopped short, like some old raccoon who’s no dope: he knows danger when he sees it. He started retreating, backing into Jesse, who yelped.
“Hello, Mr. Mozell, I’m your aide. I’m Angie.” The perfect woman for the job, round and warm, a muffin, popped around the front desk and put her hand out. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”
“I’m not saying likewise.”
“That’s what he answered?” Joe said later, when Jesse and I got home and immediately crashed in his study.
“Don’t tell me you’re impressed.”
“No. But he’s still got his marbles.”
“His marbles are banging around in his head. It’s like they’re in a pinball machine. Every so often a marble hits one of those things that lights up, but usually they just careen randomly from one side of his head to the other.”
“Gosh, Mom.”
“Don’t criticize me.”
“Mom, you’re calling the man who gave you life a pinball machine.”
“You don’t understand.”
We sat there, Joe absentmindedly hitting buttons on his tape machine, making a kind of rhythmic music out of Stop and Rewind.
“So he’s in and he’s fine,” Joe said finally.
“I don’t know if he’s fine. We left him sitting in his room on this single bed. Just sitting there with his feet on the floor.”
“It was like a jail cell,” said Jesse.
“Hardly. Almost an entire wall was glass, and the wallpaper was—”
“Cheerful?” Joe supplied the word.
“Exactly. Flowers.”
Jesse stuck his finger down his throat.
“We unpacked his bullet and put it on top of his bureau where he could see it.”
Jesse clutched his stomach and gagged.
“That’s enough, Jesse. My father has his own bathroom, and his own telephone, unfortunately.”
“Creep city,” said Jesse.
“Well, do you want him living here?” I snapped.
“Here! He didn’t even say hello to me.” Jesse jumped up. “I’m going to Matt’s.”
“Who’s taking you?”
“His mom. I’ll wait outside. Want this open or closed?”
“Closed,” said Joe.
“Okay.” Jesse shut the door. We heard his chant down the hall.” ‘Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.’ ‘Here’s one.’ ‘I’m not dead.’”
“Truer words …” said Joe, as the phone rang.
I picked up. “Hello.”
“Hey, Evie,” said my father. “Hey, Evie, I’m back.”
The first time Jesse and I left him at the Jewish Home for the Aged, I was so grateful to be sprung that I promised to visit every w
eek. By the time we reached our car in the lot, I wondered how in the world I’d said that, and mentally adjusted the promise to once a month. I actually visited at about six-week intervals. Always I headed there with the same thought: In one hour and a half it will be over. I counted down, right through greeting him, eating lunch at the corner deli, where he flirted with the waitress, and taking him back to the Home. For the next four years, this was our routine.
“He winked at her with cole slaw hanging off his chin.” I reported the details to Georgia or Madeline. The waitresses started backing away as soon as we entered. I even saw one of them push another to take care of us, and she freaked: “No way.” My father didn’t notice. He told them over and over about Georgia, while they had smiles pinned on, and then about the bullet, about Ghosttown, about Maddy. “I’ve got one daughter who’s a big editor and another who’s a big actress.” Then he would point at me. “Don’t know what she does, but she’s a big hit too.”
“Congratulations,” the waitress would usually say to me.
“Thank you.” Thirty minutes to go.
Maddy said she wouldn’t be caught dead taking him anywhere. She would bring him a schnecken, a cup of coffee, and a recent videotape of her show. They would watch it together on the big TV in the lounge, my father waving over anyone who happened by. “It’s really fun for him, and I don’t have to talk,” Maddy explained.
Whenever I went to pick him up, there was a row of residents sitting at the entrance. Frances, who had a walker and oxygen pipes, was my favorite. I always wished I was visiting her because she asked me how I was. “How are you, dear?” She said it in the sweetest way. As I was answering, my father would growl, “Let’s get out of here.” He always ordered the same thing at the deli: a corned beef sandwich and a Coca-Cola. One day, when he was holding his glass in one hand and his sandwich in the other, I noticed that his hands were trembling, the Coke and sandwich shaking like maracas. I couldn’t help myself, I put my hands out to steady his. It was the first time I had touched him voluntarily since he’d come back into my life, and the first time since Jesse’s fifth birthday that I’d felt compassion. It was a gut reaction, that’s all. Nothing personal. Anyone would have had it if faced with an eighty-year-old man who was practically spasmodic. But the moment I touched him, I felt a frisson: in a blink, I will be on his side of the table. Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year.
I let go of him, let go with a spasm myself, as if I’d stuck my finger in a socket, and put my hands under the table, hidden, where they could hold on to each other.
Whenever I took my father out, I worried that I would smell him. I tried not to stand too close or take deep breaths. There got to be tufts of hair in his ears and more and more cuts on his chin until finally Angie took his razor away and began shaving him. His nose and ears grew larger, dwarfing the rest of his face. And his thinned hair seemed to get coarser. It stuck up around his head in points, until Angie began grooming him. Then, with his hair parted neatly and what remained of it smoothed down, he looked like the oldest person ever to attend Sunday school.
“He took out his teeth in the middle of lunch and then put them back in,” I told Georgia. “I didn’t know he had dentures.”
“There’s an article in this,” said Georgia.
“In dentures?”
“No, in surprises.”
“I hate surprises.”
“Obviously. Why else would you name your company No Surprises? You know, Stephen says that there is one thing, like an attitude or a quality, about every person that defines him. A person could have an entire analysis simply talking about that one particular thing. I’m going to have Stephen do his next column on this. Can he interview you? Because I think with you that one thing is surprises.”
“I don’t want to be in the magazine.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t.”
“All right. But you’d enjoy talking about yourself. Poor Dad. He does sound disgusting.”
“I hate to touch him.”
“Eve, all you have to do is have lunch with him. Some people bathe their aging parents.”
“I would rather die first.”
Sometime during his fourth year at the Home, shortly after he’d turned eighty-one, I noticed that my father began to slant when he walked, like a person blown forward by the wind. He trotted along, his feet trying to keep pace with the part that preceded him, but since they could never catch up, he trotted faster and faster. Would he pitch forward? He needed security. He needed people in front carrying a net, clowns perhaps. One day, walking the short distance from the front door of the Home to where my car was parked, he stopped, wobbled like a bowling pin deciding whether to go down, and asked plaintively if I would bring the car to him. “Sure,” I said. Forty-four minutes to go.
At the deli, there was a new waitress who didn’t know enough to dread the sight of us. She was standing by the counter intently marking a Sassy magazine with a pencil. As soon as we sat down, she slapped it closed, stuck the pencil behind her ear, and hurried over. “I was taking a test. ‘How assertive are you?’ Not very.” She giggled.
“Who are you?” asked my dad.
“Debbie.” She flicked her fingers against her name tag. “And I’m nineteen today. Want to wish me Happy Birthday?”
“Happy Birthday,” I said.
“Thanks.”
My father got this grouchy look: his lips rolled up as if someone had stuck little cotton pads under them, his shoulders hunched, and his eyes got squinty. If he had been taking the waitress’s assertiveness test, he would have scored off the charts. We both immediately switched our attention to him.
“Bet you don’t know who my best friend was,” he said.
“Who?” asked Debbie. “You mean someone I know?”
“John Wayne. I wrote three movies for him and he gave me his revolver. Took his six-shooter right out of his holster and handed it to me.”
“Who’s John Wayne?” she asked.
My father jerked his water glass, dousing her.
I jumped up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I scrambled around picking ice off the floor. “I think my father’s upset today.” Crazy, I wanted to add. A lunatic, but I couldn’t. I actually felt loyal.
Debbie stood there startled, the water dripping off her chin.
“I’m really sorry this happened.” I stuffed some napkins into her hand so she could dry herself off. I didn’t look around the restaurant; in fact everything faded out except my father, sitting dumbly as if this whole business had nothing to do with him. “Come on, Dad, we’re leaving.”
“Huh? Did we eat?” He took a slice of pickled cabbage out of a little bowl on the table, put it in his mouth, and crunched.
“No, we didn’t eat, get up.” I used my bossiest voice, grasped his arm and pulled. His body rose reluctantly. I could feel every pound like dead weight. “Out, we’re leaving.” I pointed him toward the door, and thank God, he trotted his crazy slanted way in that direction, clutching a remaining bit of pickled cabbage in his hand.
A week later, I got a call from Angie that something was wrong with him.
“Something more, you mean,” I joked.
Angie didn’t laugh. She said he’d punched the man who had the room next to his. No one knew why. His gait was so unsteady they’d put him in a wheelchair. “And he doesn’t know who I am,” she added. “He needs to be evaluated.”
I called my sisters. “They’re sending him to UCLA. To the geriatric/psychiatric ward. He’s, oh God, what’s that word when you don’t know who you are or where you are?”
“Disoriented,” said Georgia.
“Right, he’s disoriented. He’s going into the loony bin again.”
Ten
“Where are you?”
“Across the street from some restaurant called Patty’s Pie Place.”
“What happened to your car phone?”
“I left it at home on purpose.”
“On the day o
f the party?”
“Kim, tell me how I get to the Nixon Library from here. I took a wrong turn.”
“John Gerity’s having a fit. Leon says the microwave isn’t working, and he blew a fuse trying to plug in his grill.”
“Just tell me how to get there, Kim.”
A sign is posted at the entrance to the parking lot: “Private Party Tonight.” How did I miss it? How did I drive right by the Nixon Library and fail to notice it, as well as the gigantic geyser shooting out of the reflecting pond?
Although it is late afternoon and the party doesn’t start until seven-thirty, I am already dressed and coiffed, and carrying a tote with all sorts of touch-up equipment inside. I have even brought stain remover, not for furniture but for my clothes. Trying to cover every base. Who knows? Some plum sauce from Leon’s Great Wall of China dumplings might spill on me. I have to look my best for Madge, or in case someone else wants to hire me. That’s what I told myself when I packed a tote with every manner of beauty equipment, and tossed it into the trunk of my car with the smashed grill.
I walk across the lot fast, about as fast as I can go in high heels and still look vaguely dignified. Through the glass doors, I can see Kim. She is not sitting down, even though there is a chair right in front of her. She leans over it to reach the table, and is loading boutique shopping bags with the speed and hysteria I associate with people turned loose in supermarkets who have five minutes to grab as much as they can. She throws in some party favors, like cologne, a large yellow envelope containing vital information—the program for the evening, a floor plan of the Library, a brochure on the Pasadena Ear, Nose & Throat Institute, and so on—and finally a white rose with a little plastic water holder slipped onto its stem. She drops the bag into one of the large wicker baskets at her feet.
“Is everything under control?”
“Please fire me,” says Kim.
“I’ll fire you tomorrow.”
Kim blows upward in a futile attempt to get the hair out of her eyes, while her hands, on automatic pilot, continue to stuff. “Your skirt’s unzipped.”
“Oh my God.” I zip it, but—“It’s caught. It’s caught on my blouse.”
She comes around the table and starts tugging at the zipper. “Hold your stomach in, how’s your father?”
