Time to Go

by Stephen Dixon

  “God be with you,” the beggar said on the street today when Don gave him a dollar. “And if he doesn’t get with you, get mean with him. That’s what I do. Yell at him, scream, say ‘God, what’s with you today, man, huh, huh?’ It works.”

  When he was a boy and there was lightning out as there is tonight and he was asleep, he’d wake up in a panic and crawl under the bed with his covers and clamp the pillow over his head and in the morning wake up and wonder for a minute how he got there.

  He remembers when his sister came home from the hospital when she was born. The buzzer from the building’s vestibule rang. His babysitter rang back whoever it was and Don opened the door. His parents and brothers were walking up the stairs, his father holding his sister. “Here she is,” his father said, “a present for you. Now you’re no longer the youngest,” and he put Rita into Dan’s arms.

  After they were called out for the last time, he didn’t know what to think. Either I did well, very well, or I’m fooling myself and I just did adequately and maybe even poorly, because the audience goes wild on premiere night and especially for a young dancer who replaces the not-so-popular soloist at only a few hours’ notice.

  The cats whined and rubbed up against his ankles and he fed them for what he thought would be the last time. About ten minutes later, while they were licking each other’s faces, his wife called from the corner phone booth and he put the cats into their traveling case and carried them and their kitty litter box and what was left in the kitty litter bag downstairs.

  He met a woman in a theater lobby. They talked during the two intermissions and after the, ballet she suggested he come home with her for lots of “wine, wooing and womance.” They took a cab to her apartment and after they had some wine he tried to kiss her and she held him at arm’s length and said “Not now, not tomorrow, not ever if you mind it with a guy who’s better at part of it than any woman can be and who’s going in for an operation next month to complete the job.” “Goodnight,” Don said, and the man started to cry.

  He goes over to the dinner table, looks at the elaborate salad he prepared and main and side dishes he cooked for three hours tonight, and goes into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and a juice glass and shuts the door and turns on the TV.

  “Oh, you’re having another girl, aren’t you?” the nurse said to them at the obstetrician’s office. “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that, since you didn’t want to know the sex of your baby, did you?”

  His mother called and said “What’s this I hear you’re going out with a black girl?” “I don’t know how you could’ve heard it so fast,” he said, “as I’ve only known her for a week.” “Someone saw you two walking in the street and said she was short and not even pretty.” “Look, I don’t want to get cross with you, but what I do and who I go out with is my own business,” and she said “Not if it touches on the lives of your father, brothers and sister and even your only grandparent who can’t see, hear and can barely think.”

  His father never went to a doctor till he was seventy-seven and three months after that died at home in his sleep. The City doctor who did the post-mortem later said “He died of old age; otherwise, he was in perfect health. I’m not joking. After what you said about him, I don’t understand how someone could be that age and stay so healthy yet drink the way he did and never exercise or eat the right foods for all his life.” “Let’s not go into it any further,” Don said, and the doctor said “What’re you so worried and upset about? It means you carry some great genes.”

  His sister dropped by. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said. He said “As long as you’re here I suppose you should be the first to know. This is Lucy. I met her last Friday, proposed to her this morning, and we’re getting married, if we can get the blood tests and license and all in that time, Saturday of next week.” “I’m glad to meet you, Lucy, and to know I’ll have such a beautiful sister-in-law, but what,” she said to Don, “happened to my best friend and your fiancée Susan who you were in love with so much till last week?”

  His wife called and said “If you have a moment I’d like to speak to you.” “I have to rush to an important union meeting, I’ll call back.” “You don’t know where I am,” she said. “You’re not at your mother’s?” and she said no. “Nor at one of the women’s departments in Bloomingdale’s?” and she said “Don’t be such an ass.” “Or at either of your two lovers?” and she said “One I haven’t seen for a month and the other’s on a business trip.” “Oh, I’ll find you,” and he hung up.

  His wife brought him flowers in bed on one of his birthdays. He said “The hell with those, I want you,” and lunged for her. She jumped out of his reach; he fell out of bed and landed on top of the flowers. She said “I’m leaving you,” and he asked why. “The way you treat me and the way you treat flowers.” He said” Ah, you both like to be treated rough, don’t tell me, and besides, on my birthday I can get what I want and act any way I please. It’s an unwritten law or maybe even in the Talmud,” and he kicked the flowers under the bed. She packed but didn’t leave.

  His daughter lost her first tooth. He said “Go to sleep, put it under your pillow.” She said “First I have to put it under my pillow, then I go to sleep.” “Oh, you’ve done this before?” “How could I—this is my first lost tooth? I know all about it though. I put it under my pillow, make a wish to the good fairy and go to sleep and you or mommy put money under my pillow and take the tooth away.” “No. We take the tooth away while you’re asleep, inspect it, see what it’s worth as a tooth, if anything, and then put money under your pillow according to the tooth’s value. This one—I don’t know. It looks a little rotted. In the long run, eating all those sweets doesn’t pay.” She said “I don’t eat so many. I want my tooth’s money.” “Oh sweetie,” he said, hugging her and wiping away her tears. “I’m sorry. For your first tooth we’ll try to make an exception.”

  His mother liked to say he was born in a taxi. Actually, his head appeared out of her vagina just as the cab was pulling up at the hospital. The driver and Dan’s father carried her inside and she delivered unassisted in the elevator going up to the delivery room. “Yours, except for the fact that I thought they might drop me carrying me to the lobby, was the easiest birth of all my kids.”

  His second oldest brother died in an air crash. One hundred and seven people, including the crew, died in the plane with him. One person survived. He floated down about three thousand feet inside the tail section and escaped with minor injuries. Don had wanted to phone him and ask what he remembered last about his brother, since they were both actors going to Los Angeles to work in the same film and had sat a few rows from one another, but he never did. He wrote him once about it, care of the film company, but never got a reply.

  “Help,” his nextdoor neighbor yelled through the walls, “I’m being attacked by two black panthers.” It was the third time this week she was attacked by a wild animal; the last one was a lion. He rang her doorbell and asked if there was anything wrong and she said “Go away, I’m okay,” and resumed yelling about panthers and, calling for help. He spoke to two other neighbors about it and they said he should call the landlord. He did, saying his neighbor was going crazy or drinking too much and having hallucinations or maybe it was drugs—but she definitely needed help, though not from what she said. His landlord said “If I could get her out I would. She’s only paying one-thirty for an apartment I could get four-fifty for easy, but in this city the tenants have all the rights. You look after her—you seem to do that well for the whole building and block. But as long as she pays the rent, which her lawyer always does for her on the first of the month, there’s nothing I can do. Be the one to get her out for me though and I’ll give you a month’s rent gratis and a complete paint job even before your lease is up.”

  His oldest brother seemed to set the standard for the rest of the children. He was very political and social conscious, the rest of them became that way. He listened to classical music, th
ey all listened to nothing but classical music. He married out of his religion, so did the others who got married. He became a sculptor, the rest of them ended up in various creative and artistic fields, though his parents had wanted them all to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, university professors. His father once said to Irv when the whole family got together for a Thanksgiving Day dinner “I blame you alone for ruining your brothers and sister. They’ll all wind up making peanuts and being Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guys to the detriment of themselves and their pocketbooks, just like you.”

  His daughter knocked on their bedroom door, said “Mommy, I can’t sleep.” “Tell her she has to sleep in her own room tonight,” he said. His wife said “Maybe she’s not feeling well—let’s find out first. All right, Carole, come in.” She came in, crawled in bed with them on his wife’s side. “Can I sleep between you and dad?” “No,” he said. One of his great pleasures in life was holding his wife while he slept, the two of them on their sides, his genitals pressed into her buttocks and his hand holding her breast or thigh.

  During a biology practicum at college his professor came up behind him and said “What do you have in your hand?” “My pencil,” Don said. “Your left hand.” “Nothing.” “Then please open it?” “Why should I?” “Because I think you have something in that hand other than sweat and air.” The whole class watched them. “Go back to the practicum,” the teacher said. “How can they?” Don said. “Then open your hand so they can go back, as they’ve only ten minutes left to this part of the exam.” “Oh, the hell with it,” and he threw the crib notes into the air. They came down on top of the teacher and Don’s lab table. “Get out of this room!” “Save your breath,” Don said, “I’m already gone,”

  Their first cat jumped out of their apartment window five stories up and, after two days at the vet’s, had to be put to sleep. His wife and daughter and he made the decision in the vet’s office and that was the first time they all cried together. Only other time was when he slapped his wife in the face. She cried, then their daughter came into the room and cried, then he cried and said he was sorry to both of them. “Not to me—only to mommy,” their daughter said. “Okay, I’m only sorry to mommy, but also to you for slapping your mommy, though thank God I didn’t do it in front of you, and I swear it won’t happen again,” “It does and I’m leaving you for good,” his wife said and she and their daughter started to cry again and he just stared stupefyingly at his wife. She’d never said anything like that to him before.

  His sister got a rare form of cancer when she was nineteen and suffered horribly for a year before she died. The entire family stood around her bed in the hospital and watched her pass away, while the nurse and aide tried to get them out of the room. Every time they got two of them out of the room and came back to get the others, the two who’d left came back. Finally the doctor came in and said “All right, though it’s against hospital policy, let the young woman succumb in front of her family—we’re outnumbered and they seem decided,” His parents and brothers and he were advised to go for checkups and body scannings twice a year after that for the rest of their lives, since the disease she died of was supposed to be hereditary, even if no one on either side of the family for three generations back had had it. The first woman he asked to marry refused him because she said their children might get his family’s hereditary disease. “I’m sorry but with your luck it’s almost bound to hit you or one of our children, which I just don’t have the guts to take.”

  He couldn’t make himself verbally understood to any adults till he was four and a half. He talked an almost incomprehensible baby talk that only his brothers understood, and they translated it to his parents and other people for him. His pediatrician used to make fun of him when he was brought to his office. He’d say “Donny bonny, still can’t say a word but mmm mmm dadda momma poo-poo too?” He told his parents that mimicking their son would ultimately shame him into talking complete coherent sentences. Then on one visit, his mother said, Don spoke his first recognizable sentence to an adult. The doctor spoke baby talk to him again and Don said to him “Doctor Brandon, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  Only one teacher in his entire education ever showed any affection for him. It was in the fifth grade. She’d put him on her lap in front of the class whenever the students had been disruptive, and say “This is the nicest, quietest, gentlest and politest student in the class, and that goes as well for the girls. Why can’t you all be like him?” It embarrassed him but he enjoyed it and she gave him the highest grades he ever got at any school.

  His mother enrolled him at ballet school when he was nine to improve his physical coordination. He liked ballet but stopped taking it because his friends said it was only for sissies, and resumed classes when he was twelve and had moved to a different neighborhood. His ballet teacher then said it was too late for him to take it seriously, so suggested he shouldn’t take it at all. He quit and got interested again four years later when he was going out with a girl who was studying ballet. He got so good at it that he switched to a city high school that concentrated on the performing arts, and got a chorus job in a Washington ballet company when he was eighteen. He was considered a promising soloist with a New York company at the age of twenty-one when he broke an ankle crossing a street. He leaped out of the way of a bicycle going in the wrong direction and fell over the pedestrian next to him. His ankle never healed right and he had to stop dancing professionally. He tried choreography, wasn’t very good at it, went to college to eventually become a dentist, flunked most of his predent courses, switched to a degree in political science and became a social studies teacher in junior high school, which he does today. He got a master’s in education and has failed the assistant principal’s test twice. He still limps a little from the street accident and occasionally does a few positions, jetés or parts of dances he danced on the stage or choreographed, for his children or when he’s by himself. He never dances at social occasions, except for a slow simple fox trot, because most partners and observers expect too much from him on the floor.

  His wife said on their fifteenth wedding anniversary “The first five years were the pits, the second got a little better, the last five have been almost brilliant. I can’t explain it, can you?” “No,” he said. “Maybe we’re just slowing down” she said, “or getting used to one another, but those reasons sound like gross clichés. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ve really begun to like one another—oh this is going to sound trivial, the cliché of clichés, but it’s what I feel.” “Say it then,” he said, “because I’d also like to know why.” “It could be our having the children and because you are a good father and provider and you’ve mellowed a lot since I first knew you—maybe all those are it. You let me love you now when before you held back. Cliché? Trite? Even if they are, so what? But I never thought I’d stay with you after the first year and then every year after that for the next four. Then we had Carole and I thought what the heck, I have to stay with him till she’s at least in the first grade. Now she’s in the fifth grade and we have Celia and I’m very much in love with you and you seem to be with me and it’s great together most of the time, as a couple, individuals, and a family—am I talking like a schmuck or what?” “No, you’re right. I hate my work but I love you and the kids. And the sex is still good, isn’t it?” “Better than ever,” she said, “I forgot that. Let’s do it now, in fact. My anniversary present to you, or my morning one.” “Celia might get up and want to have breakfast.” “We’ll say we’re still asleep,” and she got up and locked their door.

  His mother’s condition got worse. His oldest brother called him from the hospital and said “You better get here right away.” He went into the principal’s office and said “I have to leave immediately—could you send someone to cover for me?” “I’ve no one,” the principal said. “Stay for another period. Then Diamant will be free and he can cover for you.” “I can’t stay another two minutes. My mother’s dying—that’s what that emergency call w
as about.” “You have to stay. I have no one to cover. We had ten regulars call in absent today and could only get four substitutes.” “You cover for me.” “Me? I don’t cover for teachers no matter what the emergency. I run this school. I have to look after ten things at once.” “Then the girl I appointed to take over my lesson while I’m in here will cover for me.” “I’ll have you fired,” the principal said. “You’re crazy,” Don said and went back to his room, said to the class: “Listen, you’re to be on your best behavior for the rest of the period. My mother’s dying and I have to see her in the hospital and the principal can’t get anyone to take over the class. Please don’t be rowdy or do anything to embarrass me or yourselves. Please, if I ever asked for anything, it’s to be better behaved than you ever were in my class, do you understand? Now finish the assignment and then do schoolwork, homework or sit quietly and read or just think. But damnit, be considerate and mature,” and he left the room. He wasn’t three steps past the door when he heard something smash against his blackboard and then a window break and the class cheer.

  When he was a boy his father insisted that all his children kiss him when he got home from work and kiss him when they went to sleep and kiss him first thing when they saw him in the morning. “I kissed my father every day of my life till the day he died and I expect the same treatment from my kids.”

  His sister one night scratched his face and pulled his hair and ripped the shirt off his back because she said each of the boys in the family got more things bought for them than the girl.

  He met his wife at a party on New Year’s Eve. She was sitting on a couch, looked sick. He sat down next to her and said “Excuse me, but you don’t look well, is there anything I can do?” She said “You can get me two aspirins if you don’t mind,” and he brought them back with a glass of water. She said “That was very nice of you. I didn’t ask for water—not because I forgot—I like to swallow my aspirins whole—but you thought of it for me. If it wouldn’t also be a bother, and because I trust you now and think you have a good pragmatic head for such things, could you walk me to the bathroom and hold my waist from behind while I throw up? I usually do it so violently that I throw my shoulders out of joint.”