The Normals

by David Gilbert

  "Produces insulin," Billy explains.

  "Still a stupid organ," Lannigan says.

  The words continue from Do's mouth. "During the trip back from the funeral my father told me how much he hated his father, he told me how my grandfather was a primo jerk. And however you feel about me multiply that by a million and you've got him, he said. So I asked him if he was feeling even a little sad and he told me, no, his grave had been dug long ago, and it just needed the dirt to be kicked in. Then he got quiet, spooky quiet, like he was going to scream and scare you, which he did sometimes, thinking this was hilarious. Instead he started telling me about the only time he ever saw his father cry, years ago, when he was a boy. My grandfather took him deer hunting, and I guess they hiked in and camped so they could get an early start on the day, and I guess this put my grandfather in mind of his own father, my great-grandfather, one hard turd, my father remembered my grandfather telling him, viscious, mean, drunk on sacramental wine meaning self-righteous, my father told me. He told me how my great-grandfather was kind of infamous north of here, near Vermont, where he was the enforcer for the largest apple grower in the state. He'd convince the competition to sell their orchards by killing their dogs and brutalizing their migrant workers and setting suspicious fires. Not a nice guy. Eventually he ended up hanging from a tree. The police said suicide even though his hands were tied behind his back. Or legend goes. My father never believed this. The Ramis have that impulse, he told me on that trip home, and he mentioned a half dozen Rami uncles and cousins and how they killed themselves with a rope. Fail-safe method, he said. If it doesn't break your neck, it'll close your throat. Two deaths in one, he said, because we were mean enough to say screw you to the first, and then my father got quiet, like the story was finished, and that made sense. We're not a family who talks about family, especially dead family. I thought that he was done, that he had talked himself out, but ten minutes later he picked up again."

  "Too bad," Lannigan says.

  "About how they were camping, he and his father, the night before they hunted. My grandfather began telling him about his own father, about the time he was roughly his age, my father's age, maybe ten years old, when his father showed him how to fix something, I can't remember what it was, or my father couldn't remember what it was, some toy or something. My grandfather took this toy to his father and his father showed him how to fix the toy. Something along those lines. And after he fixed the toy, his father, my grandfather, he said thanks and began playing with the toy right there, a car I think, if cars existed back then. Maybe a cart, a toy cart, something with wheels. And seeing my grandfather play made my great-grandfather cry for no good reason. Just cry. That's what my grandfather told my father. He wondered what was so sad? A son playing with his toy? How could that make you cry? And as he was remembering this, my grandfather started crying, trying to figure out what could've been so goddamn sad about a boy playing with a toy. And that's when my father started crying. Right there in the car with me after the funeral. He teared up remembering his father crying. That's the only time I ever saw him cry." Do stops. He looks as if he's woken up from being hypnotized and perhaps has acted foolish.

  "Too many fathers," Lannigan critiques. "And I would've liked some tears at the end. That would've been a nice touch, you crying."

  Billy looks up toward the ceiling and its punch holes of acoustic tile that beg for a scream. He won't add anything to this conversation. No. He won't tell Do and Lannigan about his own father, a man who seems on the constant verge of tears. He won't tell them about the last time he himself cried in front of his father, when Dad and Mom were gardening in that small backyard they treated like a farm, no lawn, just seasons of soil into vegetables into soil again. Abe and Doris were preparing against a late spring frost, a large tarpaulin being spread over the dirt, the two of them on either side of the plot, unrolling the blue plastic like an artificial pool. Billy was fourteen. He watched them from the narrow strip of grass that bordered the garden, a sketchpad and pencil in hand. His assignment for art class was to draw a tree—that's all, a tree—and there was a tree in the backyard, in the corner, a maple, an oak, an elm, Billy had no idea. But he won't tell Do and Lannigan how the day was beautiful, cool and sunny, a day where runners would run a couple of miles beyond their normal distance. The idea of frost seemed ridiculous, but the local weatherman was convinced, so here were Abe and Doris, and Billy, too. The trunk of the tree was easy to draw, though he spent too much time on the bark's fingerprint, particularly the whorl of a knothole, until finally the trunk looked right, and the pencil could sketch upward. Abe and Doris began pegging down the corners of the tarp while Billy tackled boughs, limbs, branches, twigs, leaves, a tangle of perspective, branches crossing branches, like fingers intertwined. He won't tell Do and Lannigan how difficult it was to get right, to get really right, so that the space came alive. He took out his eraser, erased a whole section, leaving behind bits of rubber dust, while Abe and Doris finished securing the tarp and moved on to the tomatoes. Billy tried again, but once again the drawing frustrated him. His tree was flat. There was no bend, no attenuation, no sense of dimension. He erased again, determined to eliminate any trace of a line. The paper became worn, and he thought about a fresh sheet but his trunk was so good, so perfect, he was determined to save it. Abe and Doris covered the tomatoes in burlap, carefully bagging each vine that grew along a green stake. Billy lightly penciled in a limb, but already the curve was wrong and looked nothing like the real thing. He erased again. Abe and Doris, side by side, moved down the row of tomatoes, never talking, their hands simpatico, their shoulders bumping without apology. His perfectly drawn trunk survived the eraser, a stump haunted by a ghost. Billy floated his pencil over the paper and glanced up at the tree then down at the lineaments of failure while Abe and Doris took on the last plant, tying the burlap around the base. He won't tell them about disappointment and defeat and failure and how Billy felt so lonely that he started crying, how he shook his head, feeling foolish for crying over a ridiculous tree, for crying at all. He had no preconceptions about being an artist and could've cared less about the assignment, yet here he was, crying. His palms covered his face. His head lowered down into the safe house of elbows on knees. His parents progressed toward the smaller shade garden, near the back fence and that untamable tree. He won't tell them how he was bawling now like a silly child, how Abe picked away fresh weeds and Doris joined him, how their gloves dug together into the dirt, how neither one seemed to notice their son for they had things to do, how Billy waited for a hand to fall on his shoulder, how they eased up the unwanted shoots until the roots gave way, how a little pile had grown by the time Billy gave up and retreated inside.

  There's no way he will tell his roommates any of this. Instead, Billy watches Do glance up at the clock and back down to his Bible and the corresponding verse in Luke. Billy imagines fathers falling in a forever descent, Rami men extending backward from Do, Rami unbegetting Rami, back to the old country (wherever that might be), back to the old old country, to Palestine, to Eden, back to the beginning where Adam tells Cain and Abel about the only time he ever saw his father cry.

  20

  THE STORY of fathers mixed with the institutional quality of this place, the wear and tear of boredom, the daily pills, the sickly clean smell, the bland food, the long bright hallways, the open doors repeating the same dazed scenes inside, the nurses far removed from saving lives, the overall weirdness of time in the clocks, almost like breathing—at best unconscious, at worst conscious—tugs Billy toward a phone that rang three years ago.

  "Billy Schine, please, this is Abe Schine, his father."

  Of course Billy recognized the voice. There's that nervous cadence, that lag between brain and tongue as if every word is poorly chosen and needs further clarification. His father is the king of redundancy. Abe has always been the preferred title, father and all its cozy derivations dropped years ago, not from some liberal notion of parenthood but simply becau
se those terms never really applied. Once, when Billy was five, he tossed a "sleep tight, Daddy" at Abe, and Abe flinched and said, "Just call me Abe from now on. No more 'Daddy,' just 'Abe.' In Hebrew, you're halfway there, so stick with 'Abe.' Okay? Good night."

  So Billy said, "Hey Abe," to the phone.

  "Billy?"

  "Yes, Abe." Patience was already frayed.

  "I need your hand, help. A favor. You think you could come home?"

  "I'm kind of busy."

  "Just for the day. Thursday. Three days from today. Not even a full day, just late morning and afternoon. You can be home by the eleven o'clock news."

  "I don't know," Billy said in a deep breath of no fucking way. "It's kind of crazy around here. I'm totally swamped, tax time and all." He said this as if his temp work was wrapped up with April 15, but at the time his job involved copyediting a teen clothing catalog which, with its spunky portmanteaus and youthful brand of syntax, was impossible to correct. How do you tackle words like coolicious and awsum and jway} Where do you begin when you find a sentence like this: So pretty boy, right, u know who I'm sayin, yeah, absotootely, he's goin wow when he spies u to the 9s in this floral pant suit number with matching visor and kicks ($49.95), go girl camo we call it, cause once he shwees you, bang! he's already dead. All Billy could do was red pencil in {sic} with a question mark, {sic}? {sic}? {sic}? It was like his mantra, {sic} by every purposeful mistake, {sic} becoming the rule of his own {sic} life. It could've been tattooed on his forehead.

  "We need you." Abe said.

  "Well—"

  "It's your mother. She's ill, not well, quite bad actually. She's sick," he said. Immediately cancer came to mind. Or a stroke. Or a heart attack. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation swirled in the aftermath, as well as hospital stays and months of recovery and perhaps, in the end, hospice care followed by dying words, a funeral, flowers on a grave. Billy was ready. He was prepared. He had been expecting this phone call from either his mother or father with news of the other's declining health. He had rehearsed his reaction, had scripted his speech before their last breath, had staged his changed relationship with the lone survivor. All the years of coldness might thaw in the eleventh hour. Maybe a bit sentimental, but feelings needed prompting and who gave better cues than the Grim Reaper. Under time's scythe they might end their chilly truce and finally make peace. Not that they were ever at war. War involved battles and there were never any battles in that household. But there were tensions. It often seemed like the domestic version of mutual assured destruction: whoever launched the first shout could very well destroy the world.

  Billy asked, "What's wrong?" He was unsatisfied with his tone (too curt) so he added, "Is she okay?" which sounded better, warmer, more genuine, which, upon recognizing the improvement, made him feel shallow, leading him to mutter, "I hope."

  "She has Alzheimer's," Abe said.

  "Alzheimer's?"

  "Alzheimer's," Abe repeated with a vague hint of his first tongue. Billy was stunned. Within the inventory of parental decline, he had never considered Alzheimer's. It loomed so much larger than his mother, like one of Sameer's celebrities was posing by her side. That's my mom with Alzheimer's. The actual awful effects—the slow attack on memory and function, the backslide into geriatric pediatrics—sounded like a metaphor gone gangrene.

  "I can't believe it," Billy said.

  "I know," Abe agreed. "Terrible."

  "I'm in shock."

  "Yes, terrible."

  "I can only imagine."

  "Well—"

  "My God, I am"—weighted pause—"so sorry. For you. And her, of course. But you, my God, so hard. Not fair."

  "Just tragic, you know."

  "Well—"

  "I know."

  They could've been inventing a new language, beautifully inarticulate.

  "So you'll come home?" Abe tried again.

  Billy—"Absolutely"—answered without hesitation. "I'll come home right away," he said. "I'll even stay for a while. I will. I want to. To be there. I do. Really. We'll face this thing, together, as a family, which is important, I think. The three of us. We'll be a team. I want to spend as much time with her, with you, as possible before she gets"—Billy was shocked by the natural quality of his words—"worse. No, I'll come home. Definitely. Maybe I'll move back, and help, and everything, until whenever." The sentiment, the decency of his reaction, moved him within the vicinity of tears.

  "Uh-huh" crawled through the line.

  "I'll try getting a flight tomorrow."

  "No rush," Abe said. "We just need you Thursday, April twenty-second, twelve noon."

  "But I can come tomorrow. No problem. Work is barely work."

  "But Thursday is when we need you."

  "What's the big deal about Thursday?"

  "She goes into a nursing home, assisted living, and we—"

  "A nursing home?"

  "Assisted living."

  "Already?"

  "Yes."

  "That seems soon."

  "I tried for as long as I could," Abe said defensively. "I really did try hard. When she became more"—he skipped trying to find the right word—"I took leave from work and stayed with her, but she's now beyond my care. She needs around-the-clock professional assistance and I have no choice. I can barely—"

  "Wait, how long has this been going on?" Billy asked, stomach roiled.

  "She's soiling herself, not eating."

  "Abe, how long has this been going on?"

  "The soiling and not eating? About three months."

  "No, Abe, when was she diagnosed?"

  "Diagnosed?"

  "Yes."

  "About four years ago," he said matter-of-factly. "But I suspected long before. She was becoming different and of course forgetful. Scattered. In a way it was a relief because I thought she might be leaving me for somebody else. I thought she was having a lover, a torrid affair that was making her crazy. I thought that. I thought she was leaving me for a while."

  "Four years ago?" Billy repeated.

  "Yes, four years. I even followed her I was so convinced she was loving someone else. I was so crazy I followed her and caught her in the park by herself eating dirt. Eating dirt. Who eats dirt but the insane? She was eating dirt like a sick animal. So I ran over and she saw me and I was a nobody to her. I took her home. The next day she remembered nothing. Makes me think about all the days I didn't follow her."

  "Eating dirt?"

  "Or worse."

  "And that was four years ago?" Billy asked.

  "The dirt, then the doctor, the diagnosis, yes, four years ago. Roughly."

  "So you've known for four years?"

  "Officially, yes."

  "And you didn't call me?"

  "We didn't want to bother you."

  Billy sagged, emptied his lungs until they were deflated, allowing sadness brief lodging in his chest, outrage as well, the space measuring four years, Billy holding his breath and waiting for the burning to begin, the burning that might anneal hope for the simple promise of the next breath when his heart would push away his parents and temper lament for the sake of air.

  "Billy?"

  "I'm glad you're telling me now," he said without bitterness or irony.

  "We thought you should know."

  "So Thursday."

  "Yes, and if you could rent a car."

  True New Yorkers, his parents never learned to drive. They relied on buses.

  "I don't know, Abe," Billy said. "I'll try, but I don't know."

  "We need you now," Abe told him coldly, as if activating some familial sleeper cell.

  "I'll let you know if I can make it, but if I can't, I'll try to visit soon. I will. But Thursday I'm not sure about." The pain in his voice might as well have stemmed from his appendix, vestigial and serving no useful function. But why should he help them? Let them be abandoned, denied. Let them finish their life the way they lived it, on their own, in exile, without anyone else crowding the picture except for that
out-of-focus boy who occasionally lingered in the back. Four years without a word until they needed him for an errand. Four years of ignorance in New York, in exile from exile, as his mother dwindled, as his father no doubt clung to the last of the warmth, his alone. What did Philip Larkin say in that poem, something about parents and how they fuck you up? But Philip Larkin is nowhere to be found within the parents of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. There is Charles Dickens. "You don't object to an aged parent, I hope," he wrote in Great Expectations. No, Billy thinks, there's no objection, except that aging should be a shared thing, a slow progression, communal in nature between parent and child, often the circumstance that bears most fruit, seeing Mom and Dad inch toward death, toward the end time when they will pass into memory. And what if parents object to a young child for no apparent reason. What if every step brings a headache, if every hour of need robs them of time together, family like a zero-sum game, mother and father pitted against wife and husband, and what if, exhausted, the latter throws in the cards and lets the child play in the corner by himself, lets the child fend with only the nuts and bolts of care, like some genetic boarder who earns his keep with quiet compliance. No, Billy doesn't begrudge them growing old. But he is jealous of death's last unimpeachable word.

  Billy thinks Oscar Wilde has a point: "Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." As does Francis Bacon: "The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears." But Billy gives Horace the final say: "What do the ravages of time not injure? Our parents are worse than our grandparents and they have produced us, more worthless still, who will soon give rise to yet a more vicious generation." Billy translated the words himself.

  21

  ON WEDNESDAY, the fifth day, Billy has to escape his room. Since after lunch, Lannigan has been standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shaving. The decent beginning of a beard, certainly more than Billy could muster in double the time, is shaved in increments. After each particular pass of the blade, Lannigan peeks into the room and asks, "How's this look?" He goes from Viking to heavy metal rock star to Amish to hipster to swinger to Hitler to nothing. Water is splashed on his face as if he's advertising the cooling effects of aloe vera, then he snoots his upper lip for stray nose hairs. Yep, a few. Out come the tiny scissors and—snip snip—all gone. Then he trims the thin side-curls from around his ears and cleans up his eyebrows. He stares at himself for a good three minutes before he grabs a bit of forelock and—"What the hell"—cuts. Cuts again. After every few cuts he again asks, "How's this look?" without needing an opinion, only a confirmation of his own patented wackiness. Do barely acknowledges Lannigan. He reads his Bible and checks the clock for Luke time. He's a hermit without a cave, only a bed, hoarding the stink underneath like shame is his nourishment. Words no longer appear on his mouth. For the last few days he's been silent. But there's something in his eyes. If they were a movie they might be saying "Please kill me now!" but since they are far from a movie, they submit to another minute of misery, another appearance by Lannigan with the latest fistful—"How about this?"—of hair.