“No, he didn’t,” Mom says. “He mostly listened to us.”
“He’s probably not light then,” Dad continues. “Or he would have mentioned it. Maybe he’s in-between.”
If only Hemingway had had someone to background his short-term memory. Would things have turned out differently for the American novel?
AN AMBIGUOUS STATEMENT
Dad stands at the living room window with his back to me. It’s 5:20 p.m. on March 16.
“The days are getting longer,” he says.
I’m rereading an old Newsweek in the easy chair. “Dad, is that longer-good, as in more natural light/more time to enjoy activities, or longer-bad, as in you can’t wait for the day to end?”
Dad looks at me, then turns back to the window.
“The days are getting longer,” he repeats.
The house is quieter now after school. Linda and Jodie have disappeared from the afternoons and are now meeting at Jodie’s house. They left behind clumps of brown paper wadded with ink, and some burnt ceramic scat that may have been beads that stuck to the oven when I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t have to clean up because Mom said I should take it easy for a while.
But beyond that, there is a sense of peace in the house, though I can’t put my finger on it exactly. Dad’s right—the days are getting longer. Could that have been what went wrong with Dad, that the days were getting too short? Might the light box really have worked, if we hadn’t been so quick to discontinue it?
But thinking this way doesn’t do any good. We had another follow-up visit with Dr. Fritz, and he said that although, again, he wished we had come back in sooner, we shouldn’t be kicking ourselves, because to a certain extent we were just doing the best we could with the tools and resources we had at the time. But it seemed to take a lot of effort for him to say this, and while he said it he looked at our file and not at us, not staring at us at all, as if he didn’t like us anymore, and this made us feel worse.
TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 116
For Saturday lunch the day after his sixth treatment, Dad ate a ham sandwich, a hard-boiled egg, a quarter of a melon, and a piece of chocolate cake. Mom and I eyed one another and kept bringing out more food.
SOLILOQUY
Reading in bed that night, I find this section in Walter Merig’s The Progression of Major Depressive Disorders.
It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that the greatest rates of morbidity occur when the patient appears to be getting better. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon can be traced to two developments: first, that the patient may have wished to self-terminate much earlier and did not have the physical strength, powers of resolution, and planning resources to do so, resources which are now, with some improvement, more easily at his command; and second, that the recovering patient, now viewing the illness from “the other side of the hurdle” as it were (Femmigant, 1998), regards the recently concluded illness with his improved perceptive powers as a torturous ordeal, the recurrence of which must be avoided at all costs.
I sit up and reread this a few more times, allowing its meaning to unwind in my tired brain. We were happy to see Dad getting better. We high-fived each other over him finishing a ham sandwich. But now he’s in more danger than he’s been in the past four months? Still…
I get out of bed and pace across my room. What do we do now? Do we try to keep him at this level? Do we try to prevent him from getting any better? Do we hope that he stays just sick enough that he never sees the big picture? That he concentrates on surviving day to day and never looks back to realize how terrible it was?
It’s a philosophical problem, isn’t it? If the risk of suicide is greater as you recover, would it be better to stay at least a little sick—let’s say an easily controlled low-grade melancholy—and live longer but not as well? Or would it be worth it to end it all on the up cycle, savoring the taste of hot French toast with maple syrup? The brightness of a tube of aquamarine? The feel of salt spray? I imagine Dad as a ski jumper. He sees the mountain slide away beneath his feet, then fade into the distance. He decides never to come back down.
When did I pick up Dad’s habit of pacing? I have to calm down and get back in bed. I have to stop being theoretical. I have to remember that I’m not a philosopher or a psychologist, I’m a son. This is Dad I’m talking about, not some experiment, not some patient in a book. Of course he has to keep getting better.
And even though I’ll say, “Whoa! What’s your hurry?” when in the next few days he talks about getting out his paints or stopping by the office to say hello, I can’t get in the way of his recovery.
ANATHEMA
Except that Dad hates the treatments.
Hates the way the other patients look, wan and stick-like in their bathrobes. Hates the wheelchair he rides from the treatment room to the car. And especially, hates the moment when he lies down, waiting to be knocked out so his mind can be taken out of his control and…not wiped clean, but smudged around the edges, the way your sweater sleeve smudges words off a chalkboard.
INTROSPECTION
Every once in a while I come across Mom standing in the kitchen and twisting her necklace. She might be steeping a teabag or sorting through the mail. She doesn’t show much on the surface, but I can tell by the way her eyes aren’t seeing what she’s looking at that she’s pitching a silent, internal horror fit over the fact that we almost lost Dad. I wonder exactly what she tells herself at those times. I could break into her thoughts at one of those moments, engage her in conversation, but to be perfectly honest, I would rather not know.
SWEETS
The cute girl in our bakery hands me the price list. Mom has given me “carte blanche” to buy whatever we need for the celebration of Dad’s eighth and last treatment—whatever looks good, she says. A fancy cake two or three times as much as we can eat, maybe some cookies or Italian pastries on the side. Linda has already bought the party decorations and hidden them in her room. Uncle Marty and Jodie have been invited.
Cannoli are always good, and chocolate-chip cannoli are even better, although both get soggy if you don’t eat them the same day. I crouch in front of the case to get a better look at the cakes waiting for other customers, and I see, along with my own reflection, a boy’s birthday cake with sky blue frosting and Star Wars figures—Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker facing off with their lightsabers. Too theatrical to be appetizing. I like the golf-themed cake better. It’s covered with green-tinted shredded coconut that resembles grass and dotted with mini-marshmallows for golf balls. Beside it is a dignified white-frosted cake that says “Best of Luck Stan” in a circle around a small plastic adding machine, possibly for someone who is an accountant.
Needless to say, there’s no precedent for our specific occasion. I look at the price list again. Color photos of sample decoration styles, with a variety of messages, are ranged along the top. Are we a “Good Luck”? A “Congratulations”? A “You Did It”? “Happy Last Treatment” would be too specific, and “It’s Over” is too vague.
While I’m making up my mind, the loud and distorted electronic doorbell over the bakery door rings: bwingbwong! A woman enters the store and speaks to the girl and her father, the baker. It’s June. Not the month of June, but June from Dad’s office. The scent of her perfume mingles with the bread-and-sugar air in the bakery. I curl into a cannonball position in front of the case, hoping she won’t recognize me.
“Billy!” She stoops toward me and I straighten up.
“Hello, Mrs. Melman.”
“How’s your dad doing?”
“A little better, actually.”
“Fantastic. Will he be coming back to work soon? We have a temp working at his desk. A nice kid, but he seems to have accidentally deleted half the files on Bill’s computer. Maybe he thinks that will make us keep him on longer. But tell Bill that as soon as he gives the word, we’ll clear things out and give the temp his marching orders.”
“Well, I don’t know how soon it will be. You better wait to hear
from him. See…”
“Yes?”
“See, we’ve sort of had a routine.”
June searches my face. “You had a routine. Routines can be good.”
“Yes.”
People on the outside don’t realize how tricky a situation like this can be. You don’t want to rush things. You don’t want to upset the delicate balance that causes a sick person to get better. It’s not like you just decide that someone will improve and they do. Mom was right when she called her “easy-breezy June.”
June pays for the Stan cake and gives the girl a two-dollar tip, even though there’s no tip cup. She turns back to wave to me on the way out the door and catches the baker studying her rear view. She smiles and waves to him, too.
I pick out both a golden raspberry-filled cake with buttercream frosting for twelve and a Boston cream pie. The bakery can stack the two cakes in a corrugated crate for me to carry home. I watch the girl’s father move my raspberry cake to a work counter. Then he adorns it to my specs: “Congrats Dad” plus balloons and ribbons drawn in every frosting color they have, exuberating around his name and cascading into heaps on the cardboard plate.
SHRINKING
The night before Dad’s eighth treatment, I walk him around at midnight while Mom takes a rest. Dad really hates the treatments.
“I can’t get back on that table,” he says.
“You have to. It’s all planned. They’re expecting us.”
“Why don’t you call them, early in the morning, and let them know we’re not coming.”
“We can’t, Dad. You have to go. Just one more. Then never again. Then you can relax. I promise.”
I’m as tall as Dad, and my arm feels good where it rests along his bony shoulders. My outside hand holds his wrist so I can suppress any rubbing compulsion. We look like a couple about to begin a square-dance maneuver.
I feel alert and happy tonight. Although it seems strange, I’m realizing that these have been good times. I’ve felt occupied and useful, and I’ve never spent so many hours with my father. But now our togetherness may have peaked—he’s been talking about going back to work again.
No one can deny that Bill Junior has been there when needed, like Mom’s uncle Jack, who fell into the tight squeeze in Normandy in World War II by standing under a blanket filled with air.
Will life be cutting me down to size now? I feel my regular life, boring, disappointing, and mediocre, tugging me back with a hundred strings. It wants to turn me into a two-inch-high toy parachute man who will sit in a drawer until someone takes him out again. Folded, rubber-banded, put aside, waiting.
SYNONYMS
Saturday morning we sit outside Dr. Stone’s office at Coolidge Hospital, waiting for Dad’s last treatment. Mom and Uncle Marty know the place well, but Linda and I have never been here before. Our family, including Dad, are the only people in street clothes. The rest are bathrobed inpatients. Dad keeps to himself, while Mom and Marty exchange a few words with the patients around them. The cast of characters changes a bit every time, Mom explains. Two patients that she used to talk to regularly, Mike and Irene, have finished before Dad and gone from the hospital. She wishes she could find out how they’re doing.
This time, when the assistant calls Dad’s name, Dad makes a brief announcement to the other patients. “I won’t be seeing you again after today. So, good luck to you all.” He waves over his shoulder to them and to us as the double door to the treatment room swings closed behind him.
Twenty minutes later we are waiting for him to wake up when Dr. Stone calls Mom and Uncle Marty into his personal office.
“Should we stay out here and wait for Dad?” Linda asks.
“Let’s all go meet Dr. Stone,” Mom says. “It’s a special occasion.”
Dr. Stone is a thin man in a polo shirt with a bandage on the side of his forehead. This gives me the creeps, as if he’s been operating on himself. The office is clean and bare, with just a dinged metal desk, a few chairs, and filing cabinets. There’s no decoration except for two Harvard Medical School diplomas and a photo of him running the Boston Marathon, stringy and determined in a pair of very small shorts.
“It’s gone very well,” he says. “You should be pleased.” We are.
“And you’re seeing improvements at home?” We think so.
“He’s put five pounds back on,” Mom says. “And he got out his camera and started playing around with it.”
“Very good,” Stone says. He opens the schedule book he shares with his assistant. “I think another two to four treatments are all that will be needed to really lock it in.”
Mom and Linda both fold their arms tightly over their chests and recross their legs. Each has a leg swinging. Marty blinks as if he didn’t hear right.
“I may be mistaken,” Mom begins, “but I seem to recall hearing from you that this course of treatment would require eight visits total.” She strokes the earpiece of her reading glasses slowly through her hair.
“Eight was a very good estimate,” Stone says. “We’ve often had very good results with eight. The remaining two or three are just a bit of insurance, to make sure the improvements really jell.”
“You’re telling me,” Marty says, “that my brother’s brain has to jell?”
“Well, not his brain really, but the changes in his brain. If we want them to become permanent. We want them to coalesce, to firm up, to be cohesive. To really take hold, to lock in.”
He keeps going, looking for a word we will accept. I would hear more about his reasons, but I am gone.
CORRIDORS
Water sears my eyes. I run blindly through corridors, left and right, right again, taking enough turns that I hope never to find my way back. The hallway is a moving watercolor of white, pink, and chrome.
“Paging Dr. Billy!”
I turn around to find Linda cupping her hands over her mouth and pinching her nose. She drops her hands. “Big brother,” she says in her normal voice.
“Incompetent. Just—incompetent. I promised him he wouldn’t have to come back here again.”
“Well. Was that even your promise to make?”
We walk together until we come to an open door.
“Those idiots have no idea what they’re doing. How many times did I try to tell Mom that this was a bad idea?”
Linda leans against the doorway. “Be quiet, Billy. God is here.”
Inside the hospital chapel, the organist is playing the hymn that goes to the tune “Finlandia.” We know this song from Dad’s music collection—“Be still, my soul: The Lord is on thy side”—but the organist keeps stopping at a bad time to practice this phrase or that. We sit down and Linda bows her head, but I keep my head up and look around, at the dark paneling, and at the one narrow stained-glass window that a crowded city will allow.
While I may have called to God in moments of desperation, I still don’t believe in Him. See, I have this deal with God: I don’t believe in Him, and He doesn’t believe in me. In fact, we view each other the way you might view fictional characters. We hear good things about each other, but we would never expect to see proof of each other’s existence, either in a random meeting on the street or as a name on a tombstone.
Mom believes that there’s a happy afterlife for everyone, even those who may not seem to deserve it, like murderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. Linda believes that anything you do will be forgiven, if you ask the people around you or ask God. Now that we bought the cake and the decorations and the gifts, I wonder who will be the one to tell Dad that his treatments aren’t finished.
We return slowly through the zigzag of corridors. The halls are clear and distinct now, alive with workday sounds. We get to the waiting room, where Mom sits with Marty and the other patients. Marty goes to the swinging door that separates this room from the treatment room. He stands there until Dad comes in smiling, about to raise his arms in triumph.
“You sit, Adele,” Uncle Marty says. “I’ll tell him.”
; “Tell me what?” Dad asks.
Marty turns Dad’s wheelchair toward the hall.
“Let’s go for a walk, bro,” he says.
DECELEBRATION
Linda keeps the decorations in her room that night. But we cut up the raspberry cake. And in spite of the lack of reasons to celebrate, the cake tastes good. Really good.
A READER’S QUESTION
Q: Does Dr. Mieux, the psychiatrist with a taste for fine furniture, ever reappear in this story?
A: No, he does not.
MARTY
Marty says he had a rough time telling Dad, as he puts it, “about the more treatments.” When he talks to me in the driveway after the cake, Marty looks like he’s falling through the ice again, into the cold place where no one but Dad wants him. “He was disappointed, but he kept telling me not to feel bad,” Marty says. “He was worried more about me.”
Throughout Dad’s sickness Marty has seemed convinced that Dad was always thinking about him. His money problems, his business schemes, his trauma over the divorce from Aunt Stephanie…I got the idea that Marty was kidding himself, feeling all this sympathy from Dad that couldn’t possibly have been there. That he was filling Dad with intelligence and other good qualities, like a little kid confiding in his teddy bear.
But along with the quiet and calmness that seeps into the house, something else seems to be happening for real. It’s like Dad was a snow globe that had no top on it, and all the stuff that was inside had somehow disappeared. Now it’s as if the top has been put on and something is falling to the bottom, settling and collecting, flake by flake. Some recognizable stuff that can only be called the Spirit of Dad.
The Opposite of Music Page 15
