by Ann Packer
“Penny,” Rebecca said.
“I know.”
“Well,” Ryan said. “So anyway—”
James set his fork down with a clank. “You want to know why I’m here, don’t you? You think there has to be a reason, like I’m in trouble, I’m broke again. God forbid I just wanted to come home. And no, Rebecca, I’m not projecting.”
I’d felt Jen watching me since James’s comment about my misery, and now I looked at her, wondering if I’d receive censure or forgiveness. Instead, she gave me one of her loveliest and most encouraging smiles, and my lachrymal glands lurched into action.
Ryan was speaking, but I hadn’t heard a word. “. . . take some time,” he was saying, “and create some space . . .” and I was off again, because Jen’s sympathetic look had gotten me thinking that James might have helped me, saying what he’d said—that I might, if I were very careful, find a way to use it to my advantage.
Immediately, I felt the kind of shame I associated with my father, with whom—or with whose image—I had created a tightly constructed system of self-esteem manipulation, a habit pointed out to me and elaborated by Rebecca, bless her analytical heart. It was as if I had a flow chart in my head that began with any action I performed, any comment I uttered, any thought I had, and from which there extended two arrows, one toward my father’s approval and the other pointing definitively in the opposite direction. From each of these, of course, there was only one way to go: toward peace in the first instance and self-loathing in the second. On occasion I would stop to consider—would he truly have objected to this idea, that choice?—but for the most part life, my life, divided neatly into the good and the bad. And this was bad. He would have argued vigorously that milking one person’s offensive comment for emotional credit from another person was a shabby show, as he liked to say.
Ah, but I could get so much from Jen if I played it right: patience, succor, forgiveness, relief from chores—the husbandly things having to do with fence posts and torn screens and constantly running toilets that a handyman could knock off in minutes but that the men of my social class felt they needed to do themselves, however awkwardly, and if they could do it, why couldn’t I? I was the grandson of a hardware store owner, for God’s sake! This was my hang-up, not Jen’s—she would have been delighted if I’d hired someone to fix the little things I diligently postponed week after week.
“More eggs, anyone?” Rebecca said.
After brunch James invited himself over. He claimed he wanted to play with the boys, but I suspected his true motive was to make sure he’d get the opportunity to add insult to injury. At the car he took the shotgun seat without so much as a glance at Jen—a move that pleased me, perversely enough, since it gave me further reason to be angry at him—and as I drove he jiggled one leg at warp speed while holding the rest of his body in an attitude of exaggerated relaxation.
The boys had earned an hour of DVDs, and James dug through our overstocked library until he found an old Smurf disc he had sent them for Christmas a couple of years earlier. He settled on the couch and began a disquisition that was surely not intended for his nephews, ages eight and five. “This whole show,” he said, “is an argument in favor of socialism. The Smurfs are basically a workers’ collective.”
I had decided, doubtless with my father’s imagined eye fastened tight on me, that rather than try to get sympathy from Jen I should face one of the annoying fix-it jobs I’d been postponing, the longest-standing of which involved the latch on the gate to our side yard, which hadn’t worked properly for months.
My untrained eye had diagnosed the latch problem as secondary to the gate coming loose from its hinges, so my first task was to make a study of the gate/stucco exterior wall/hinge complex to determine whether fixing the hinge would require that I drill into the stucco, a business that was beyond the scope of my interest. As fate would have it, the gate was just outside the master bedroom, and before I could get to work, Jen appeared on the other side of the window, cranked it open a few inches, and asked me if I was okay.
I’m sure there are loaded questions in every marriage, and “Are you okay?” was one of the big ones in ours. “Are you okay?” meaning Are you mad at me? “Are you okay?” meaning Why are you mad at me? “Are you okay?” meaning I thought you were going to fix the gate . . . take the boys . . . come to bed . . . And “Are you okay?” meaning I love you, I’m worried, please talk to me.
“What do you mean?” I said, stalling.
“Well, at brunch,” she said. “James.”
I gave the gate a swing before I answered, its long, shrill creak making me think the whole problem might be solved with a simple squirt of WD-40, though I knew even as I thought this that it was ridiculous. Turning back to Jen, I countered with a question of my own: “Am I okay about what James said, or am I okay given that he said it?”
She shook her head sadly. “Oh, babe.”
I walked a few paces, then turned back. James and the boys had the TV turned up so high that I could almost figure out what bit of Beethoven was playing as background to the little blues, as the Smurfs were known in our family. “You know what gets me?” I said to Jen. “They have no idea . . .” I let the sentence trail off and took a step back. I could see Jen’s silhouette on the other side of the screen, but the angled window was catching a lot of sun and it was almost possible to pretend she wasn’t there. This was an October day, clear blue, and I was leaning against a fence I owned, looking at a house I owned, contemplating a gate I owned, and the world seemed a dismal and unforgiving place.
“What?” Jen said. She stepped closer to the screen, and now I could see her square shoulders and her smooth, straight hair. “Who is ‘they’?”
“Rebecca,” I said. “And Ryan and James.”
“Your family,” she said.
“Right.”
• • •
In residency we used to say the last hour of call was as long as all the previous hours combined, and we compared notes on the physical sensations of exhaustion: the heavy limbs, the watery eyes, the sour taste in your mouth no matter how much you brushed your teeth, the faint hum emanating from your own head. Worst for me was the crawling skin, what a friend of mine called “the furs” because to him it was as if you were beginning to sprout hair. I felt it just below my eyes and on my forearms: a sensation not unlike what toast might feel, if toast were sentient, when it was spread with butter.
That evening I forced myself to read three chapters of a Hardy Boys adventure to the boys. It was dark by the time I’d finished, and the boys were close to sleep: Sammy, the older, in his bed, since we were in his room, while Luke lay on Sammy’s floor in his beloved junior sleeping bag and made his body as floppy as possible so I would give up on trying to move him and leave him there for the night.
What followed was like that last hour of call, with its abrupt onset of deferred suffering. I stood in the kitchen boiling water for tea and remembered my final patient Friday afternoon, a twenty-eight-year-old man complaining of fatigue and occasional fever. On exam, he had swollen lymph nodes in his neck (but no sore throat), and his abdomen was normal. I assumed a virus, and after the usual rote and unhelpful recommendations (time, rest), we spent a few minutes talking about his work, which had always fascinated me: he assisted the pastry chef at a trendy restaurant in San Francisco. He told me that in the next year or so we’d be seeing a revival of verticality in desserts and described a mousse/cake concoction topped by a six-inch shard of hazelnut brittle, upright and thin as a knife blade.
Now, as I pictured him on the exam table, I noticed in memory what I’d failed to see in the moment: that as he talked, he was running his fingernails up and down his forearms, scratching. I was stricken. Fatigue, fever, swollen lymph nodes, itchy skin: had I thought of lymphoma, much less sent him for labs? I had not. I felt so terrible I had to sit down. What earthly good was I to anyone if I could not pay attention to wh
at was right in front of me? What else had I missed on Friday, or last week, or last month?
Then I remembered something else, not worse but more embarrassing. As I sat in my office late Friday afternoon, getting ready to leave for the weekend, I phoned the restaurant where this patient worked on the off chance that they might have a free table for Saturday night. And when I learned they were fully booked, I very nearly called my patient to see if he could help.
Asking a favor of a patient. Thinking about asking a favor of a patient. My father, that holy ghost, intruded yet again. Though he never would have said so to them, he was troubled by the stories his colleagues in adult medicine told him about receiving gifts from patients—bottles of Scotch, theater tickets, seats at sporting events. These were offerings, he thought, to the part of the doctor who was, in the patient’s estimation, God, and they expressed the patient’s belief not just in the doctor’s omnipotence but also in the notion that this was a capricious and demanding god whose favors would not be bestowed equally. If the gifts were not bribes, they were at the very least plaintive cries for attention, and by accepting them the doctors entered into, participated in, essentially encouraged the patients’ beliefs. As a pediatrician, my father was given finger paintings and clay pencil holders and could not tell their creators that it would be wrong for him to accept them, but he always studied the parents to make sure they weren’t too invested in the giving of the gift, since if there was any apotheosizing going on he wanted to head it off at the first opportunity. In this way he was ahead of his time, trying to throw off the mantle of the all-powerful wizard while most physicians enjoyed the warmth and grandeur of the garment.
My father never would have considered asking a favor of his patients’ parents. He never would have missed an obvious sign like urgent scratching. He never would have allowed himself a slump of several months’ duration during which he failed his patients, his wife, his children.
Our kitchen faced southwest, allowing, in daylight, a view of some of the trees on my family’s land; Jen and I had bought a house not far from the one where I’d grown up. Now, in the dark, I could make out nothing of my childhood home, but I peered through the window anyway. I wished I could see not the old place itself but my life in it—the life of the younger Robert, possessed of a little of the competence of the oldest child and a lot of the grandiosity. How satisfying it had been for me that my father had made me the general contractor of table setting, responsible for getting the subs to do the work but not having to touch utensils or place mats myself. This was a neat trick on his part, since getting kids to set the table is a far greater chore than setting it. (Jen and I had learned this conclusively thanks to a brief experiment we conducted in transferring various responsibilities onto our kids’ shoulders by allowing “natural consequences” to develop when said responsibilities were shirked. A woman in Jen’s moms’ group swore by this method, but at our house the kids won easily, pushing aside their dirty breakfast dishes to sit at the unset table and go at their dinners with their bare hands because all the utensils were still encrusted with food and lying on the previous day’s unwashed plates. “You have to give it some time,” Jen’s friend said, but we caved after a few days.)
I’d brought home straight A’s, and though my father refused to praise us for good report cards, saying instead that what mattered to him was that we worked hard, I believed that in the deeper regions of his mind, my academic accomplishments burned like the eternal flame of the Olympics torch.
Then there was the power I enjoyed in the matter of my siblings’ self-esteem. I was a pretty nice older brother, but I always knew this was a choice, an act of generosity I could reverse at any time, and with my brothers especially I refined a narrow-eyed tilt of the head that offered a reminder of my gifts in the area of sly undermining should I in any way be provoked.
Rebecca presented a more complicated challenge, since she was as unflappable as our father and, I knew, quite a bit smarter than I. My best ammunition with her was indifference, which I never actually felt but simulated fairly well until she was in high school with me and began making friends with some of my friends, at which point I had to feign unthreatened friendliness lest someone get a whiff of the true terror I felt that she would surpass me.
After brunch that morning, Rebecca had pulled me aside and said meaningfully, and no doubt apropos of James’s comment about my misery, that I could talk to her anytime, which until this moment in my kitchen I had managed to find for the most part sweet rather than enraging. Now, with the world outside my window narrowed to a house where I once was happy—or if not happy at least somewhat unaware of my true, wretched character—I felt the full humiliation of the morning reach deeper into my being. James’s word struck me as both accurate and inadequate. Reading to the boys earlier, I had deliberately made my voice into a monotone at the moment when Frank and Joe first saw the peregrine falcon they would use to aid their investigation. I was hoping the kids might be only half listening and that we could therefore avoid a three- or four-minute discussion of whether or not it was really possible to train a bird to intercept a message and instead finish the nightly session as soon as possible.
And now I remembered something Jen had said about some other failure of a father: that it wasn’t the kids she worried about, it was the man himself, that he’d be hit by regret for all he’d missed. Which brought me again to my father. On the day he held his first grandchild—Sammy, born during a rainstorm that flooded the hospital parking lot and broke branches off trees—he claimed he had only one piece of advice for us, the novice and nervous parents: “Enjoy him.”
Had I? Had I enjoyed my children?
If I hadn’t, then the question of which of my parents I more resembled—settled and obvious for my entire life—was all at once open and terrifying. Penny may have enjoyed motherhood when she was very new to it; she may even have enjoyed me and Rebecca when there were just the two of us, and Ryan because of his nature. But generally? As a retrospective assessment? Nuh-uh, as my kids liked to say.
This onslaught of self-torment took approximately two minutes. I turned the water off, grabbed my car keys, and told Jen that I was going out.
“Where?” she said. “Why? You look terrible.”
“Only because I am.”
“Robert, please.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. She was sitting cross-legged on our bed, surrounded by pieces of paper printed with the words “A Night to Remember, December 2, 2006” in maybe a dozen different fonts. A lawyer by training, Jen was “home with the kids,” a detour I had feared would make her bored and resentful, but she was at least as busy now as she had been while she was working, and her current project organizing a fund-raiser for the boys’ school required as much time and energy as preparing for a complicated litigation.
She straightened her legs and reached for her feet, her forefingers grazing the teardrop spaces between her big toes and the toes next to them. In better times I might have found this erotic, but we were in a lull, or rather I was—with “lull” being a euphemism for the most pitiful kind of sexual problem—and in any case I had something else on my mind.
She sighed. “Where are you going?”
“The old place. I won’t be long.”
The actual property was half a mile away as the crow flies, but the route meandered down one long hill and up another, in the process winding past oak trees and toyon shrubs and hulking modernist mansions. The night was clear and chilly, and as I rounded one curve I saw a deer vanishing into the woods, all spindly hind legs and arcing motion, maybe two seconds ahead of what would have been a grisly car crash.
There was a fork just past the mailbox, with Ryan’s small cottage down to the left and the main house up to the right. I rolled down the window and listened. Cars on the freeway, so far away they sounded like the inside of a seashell. We’d spread my father’s ashes on a night like this,
the four of us passing the urn, scooping, tossing. “Should we say something?” Ryan said, and Rebecca said, “If we want to,” and then we didn’t. James had arrived from South America too late to say goodbye, and he bore this burden in uncharacteristic silence.
The house was now occupied by a Silicon Valley CEO who’d coveted the place so much that he’d agreed to rent in the hope that, despite what my siblings and I said, we might someday sell it to him. Putting up with Ryan on the property was part of the agreement, and so far they’d coexisted peacefully.
I should have driven down to Ryan’s place, but instead I headed up the driveway. It was a little before nine and all the lights were on. I got out of the car and closed the door softly. I had no subterfuge in mind but no desire to be discovered, either. The CEO had two daughters, and through an open window came the sound of one of them practicing the flute.
The front door was flanked by narrow floor-to-ceiling windows. When the doorbell rang, we kids plastered our faces to the glass of the left-hand window—always the left, never the right—and as I climbed the steps I had a powerful wish to summon those four figures.
I sat in front of the door and drew my knees to my chest. If my patient had lymphoma, I would be lost. A three-day delay on a CBC would mean nothing for his prognosis, but my carelessness would haunt my practice and turn me into a nervous, sweating mess. This—the image of myself in an exam room, trembling in fear of my own fallibility—made me bow my head, and when I looked up again one of the daughters was standing in front of me.
“Excuse me,” I said, hurrying to my feet, though since I was on the downslope to fifty this was no longer something I could accomplish with any speed. “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
She was twelve or thirteen, blond, and terribly thin, though prepubescent enough that I didn’t immediately worry for her health. I recalled her mother’s absurdly long, slender legs and figured it was genetic.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “But I need my envelope.” She pointed at the door, and I saw that I’d been leaning against a manila envelope with “Susanna” written on it.
