by Rita Rudner
My father had never married again after the death of my stepmother and had lived alone for the last twenty-five years. Even the sanest person allowed to live alone for a quarter of a century will develop a few idiosyncrasies, and my dad was never one to be called sane.
The first clue as to how strange he had become were the boxes that arrived for us to unpack a few weeks before his arrival.
“Martin,” I inquired of my husband as I scrutinized the contents of the package, “why is my father mailing cans of pineapple juice?”
“I don’t know,” Martin replied, staring into his opened box. “I’ve got baked beans in here.”
Box after box was stuffed with canned juices and beans. Dirty shirts and socks were intermittently wedged between them to keep them secure.
“Look at the date on this V-8 juice,” I exclaimed. “January sixth, 1992. He’s drinking ten-year-old tomato juice.”
My husband looked at the date on the can he was holding. “That goes nicely with a twelve-year-old can of baked beans.”
Not every box was filled with canned goods. One package contained rusty tools and ten boxes of freezer wrap. Another contained thirty tubes of toothpaste intermingled with forty tubes of antifungal cream. My dad was a hoardaholic.
My father loved the apartment we had rented for him. It was a perfect situation. We lived in the building next door, so we could be there if he needed us, and we could also pretend we were away.
I became his professional grocery shopper, which was how I discovered how much he was drinking. His first shopping list included four gallons of Zinfandel, three bottles of scotch, ten boxes of Kleenex, a dozen bottles of rubbing alcohol, and a request for more antifungal cream.
“What about food?” I asked.
“I packed that in the boxes.”
I broke the news to him that although I had been tempted to sell his canned goods on eBay under the heading “antique food,” his carefully packed groceries were now living happily with their friends in the garbage dump.
Attempting to change a diet that obviously had consisted of rusty juices and rotten beans for at least a decade was quite a challenge. I included TV dinners, fruits, and vegetables in his first grocery delivery and introduced him to the microwave.
The first time he attempted to use the microwave, instead of entering nine minutes he mistakenly entered ninety. The explosion broke the seal of the microwave and a brown gooey mixture ran down the front of the cabinetry. That Salisbury steak TV dinner left a stain that will still be there long after all of us are gone.
His drinking represented another issue. His reasoning made sense. He was eighty-two. He didn’t drive, he didn’t work, he didn’t have to be anywhere at any given time, and he liked to sleep. What was wrong with drinking scotch in the morning? It was positively healthy! He used it to down his vitamin pills. A glass of wine with his lunch didn’t sound all that unreasonable until you factored in that lunch occurred at ten o’clock and the wineglass was a ten-ounce tumbler.
Still, the relocation had been a success. Dad took daily walks during the couple of hours in the afternoon when he was sober, and our then-one-and-a-half-year-old daughter loved to visit him in the next building. She even got him to play a game she invented, called Hats. She noticed some baseball caps on his coffee table and with baby sign language demanded we put them on our heads and rotate them when she yelled “hat.”
I noticed my father limping slightly on one of his walks, and when I asked him about it he complained that something was “sticking in his foot.” Back up at his apartment I found myself in shock when I saw what was going on at the base of his body. This man who carefully applied antifungal cream to his toes every single day had not cut his toenails in years. My father had Howard Hughes’s feet.
“What’s going on? Why don’t you cut your toenails?” I asked.
“Can’t see down there.”
“How are you applying the antifungal cream?”
“Badly, but I have to do it. You get athlete’s foot, it’s with you for life.”
“You’ve lived alone for almost thirty years. Who are you going to get athlete’s foot from? Mice?”
“You never know. Some of these germs are airborne.”
I decided not to argue with a man who even in his youth had made very little sense. Not only was I his personal grocery shopper, but now I was also his pedicurist.
All was going relatively smoothly until my father’s diet caught up with him. One morning during our daily phone call I asked him, “How’re you doing?” and he replied that his stomach wasn’t “so hot.”
I rushed over to find him leaning back on the couch, his face a shade of statue gray.
“Just wait a couple hours. I’ll be OK,” he mumbled.
I hadn’t listened to him when I was a teenager and I didn’t listen to him then. I called an ambulance.
Acute diverticulitis was the least of his problems. Once his condition was stabilized, an X-ray revealed an aneurysm in his aorta that was poised to burst. The doctors recommended an operation that, although it would be difficult to recover from, had a very high success rate. It was up to my father whether or not he wanted to go through the invasive procedure and the rigorous physical therapy that would be required post-op.
He chose the operation. It was as they had promised: successful and debilitating. My father was never one to exert himself, and the rehabilitation therapist had quite a time convincing him that getting out of bed tomorrow was not optional.
When he was discharged I was told what foods should be given to him and that his drinking had to stop. He was given a strict exercise regime that he immediately ignored. Without the foods he liked or the drink he craved, and unable to motivate himself even to get out of his pajamas, he sank speedily into a deep depression that ultimately won.
My father’s life-threatening aneurysm was gone, but he was never happy again. I tried everything. Even my daughter could no longer bring a smile to his face. He died one night in his sleep and no one could figure out why. He’d been to the doctor and been checked out a few days before, and had been prescribed an increased dose of antidepressants. The doctor wrote “heart attack” on his death certificate because he didn’t know what else to write. I think my father died because he wanted to. Ironic, when you consider the pain and expense he suffered when he was informed he possessed a life-threatening condition.
It had been my father’s decision to undergo the operation. I didn’t try to sway him one way or the other. I didn’t want the guilt fairy visiting me for the rest of my life and scolding me for persuading him to make the wrong decision.
I do know the right decision had been for me to move him to Las Vegas in his old age and look after him the best I could. I knew every inch of my father by the time he died: the good, the bad, and the toenails.
It did leave me thinking about the way I’ll handle my old age. If there’s a choice of having a few weeks of fun rather than six months of hell, I’ll be having the martini.
’Twas the Night After Christmas
’Twas the night after Christmas and back in the kitchen
The family was sittin’ and drinkin’ and bitchin’.
My husband in his robe and me in my shift
Discuss and debate whom and what to regift.
Old Aunt Sophie gave me money; is she lazy or wary?
Why did Grandma give me shoes that would fit a canary?
It’s not only them. I am also pathetic:
I gave Grandpa chocolate and he’s diabetic.
My daughter still asks why she can’t ride her bike
(It came unassembled, so she may have to hike).
With instructions in Japanese, Spanish, and Mayan,
It might never work, but we won’t stop tryin’.
Martin hates his new jacket and he wants to burn it.
I soon calm him down and agree to return it.
But I’ve cleared up the box in my quest to be neat
And it see
ms accidentally I’ve tossed the receipt.
My overcooked turkey’s caused us all indigestion.
We retire to bed with our sanity in question.
One thing we agree on before we all say good night:
We’re glad Christmas is over as we turn off the light.
If Not Now, When?
YOU KNOW YOU’RE GETTING OLD WHEN YOU begin looking for places to live when you retire. Martin and I began looking for places to retire when we were on our honeymoon. Although we were only in our thirties, it seemed like a good idea to plan for the future. We had our post-wedding vacation at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point, California. We were so low on funds we had booked a room overlooking the pool rather than the ocean, but upon hearing that it was our honeymoon, the management took pity on us and upgraded our room to a suite on the ocean.
Martin and I enjoyed just-married morning coffee on our beachfront balcony and luxuriated in the ocean breeze. We watched the dolphins playing in the waves and the boats sailing by on the horizon.
“This is where I want to retire,” Martin said.
“Me too,” I replied. “Let’s save our money and try to buy this balcony.”
As luck would have it, a community was being developed directly next door to the hotel. The lots had been outlined with little yellow flags and the development’s representative was happy to show us the different options that were available. He also shared with us the prices of each oblong of dirt. Martin and I tried not to laugh as he explained the fantastic value that was to be had for merely hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For now the dolphins could afford to live in Dana Point, but we would have to wait. We put our retirement fantasy on hold and set out to earn some money.
Five years later, we returned to the Ritz-Carlton for a weekend and tried again. This time we sauntered down the road and located an unsuspecting real estate agent named Beverly whom we would subsequently drive crazy over the next twelve years.
“You don’t want to see the properties next to the Ritz-Carlton,” Beverly informed us. “They’ve tripled in value in the past five years.”
Martin and I remained silent and nauseated. Beverly showed us a few properties that we could almost afford. They were pleasant and a stone’s throw away from the beach if you could throw a stone ten miles. It just didn’t make sense to us to buy a beach house that was so far away from the beach. We thanked Beverly and assured her that we wouldn’t be bothering her again.
A few years later, Martin and I bought a vacation house in Palm Desert on a golf course. People don’t go into retirement and then decide to play golf; golf takes so long to play you have to go into retirement to play it. We went into semi-retirement in our forties and only played nine holes. It was a modest yet idyllic house. It looked out on a lake and a mountain that were so perfect it was as if someone came out each day and polished them. It was lovely, but we still harbored a secret desire to have a house on the ocean. And Beverly, bless her masochistic heart, was still sending us brochures for beach-frontish property.
When Martin and I moved to Las Vegas, the house in Palm Desert stopped making sense. In the summer when it was 110 degrees in Vegas, it was 120 degrees in Palm Desert.
“Rita,” Martin said one day, “it occurs to me that we have two houses in places that are hotter than the sun.”
We had officially come out of semi-retirement anyway, and with a steady job in Las Vegas and a baby on the way, smacking a tiny white ball into a hole for five hours at a time was no longer a priority.
Beverly had some new properties to show us. The first was the inside-out house. The bedroom was on the first floor and the living room was upstairs. It had a beautiful view from the living room and the bedroom looked at a wall.
The second house was so far up a mountain I thought we might be eaten by bears. The third was perfect. Recently renovated and Tuscan in feel, it overlooked the ocean and boasted a backyard with a fire pit and barbecue.
Dan, the real estate agent representing the seller of the house that Beverly had found for us, was adamant that Martin and I should buy it.
“If not now, when?” he said.
“Maybe when we can afford it,” I replied.
“When you can afford it, it will be out of your price range,” he stated wisely.
We had learned from our first mistake when we didn’t buy the land next to the Ritz-Carlton. Oceanfront property tends to go up in value. We agreed to meet Dan later with an offer. Over drinks at a swanky hotel, Dan began going over some minor details associated with the property.
“The thing about this house that I really like,” he said, smiling, “is that in 2020, you’ll be able to buy the land at only sixty percent of its value.”
“Could you please repeat that?” asked Martin.
“The land is owned by a trust and comes up for sale in 2020,” Dan repeated.
“So this property is already out of our price range, and if we buy it, we don’t own the land,” Martin stated.
“Exactly!”
“So, where don’t I sign?” I said, handing the paperwork back to Dan.
We returned to Las Vegas, resolving never to try to buy property in Dana Point again.
Beverly waited a few years until we calmed down and then gave us a call.
“I think I’ve found something for you. It’s not on the market yet. It’s a renovation and you could get it before they decide on materials. You could get it exactly the way you want.”
We couldn’t resist. We met Beverly at her office and reminisced about all that had occurred since we first entered her life. I had become a mother, she had become a grandmother. She had remarried, and Martin and I were now celebrating our fourteenth anniversary. We followed her to the house where we could help choose the materials.
The house required a complete renovation. It would take years for the planning permission and requisite architectural approval, and my gray hair was already becoming dye-resistant. The beach was within walking distance and an easy journey if you were a mountain goat. We felt bad for Beverly, but it was a no.
Beverly had another house up her sleeve. It was in the area we’d first seen sixteen years before. It was within walking distance of a beach and it was something we could afford. It was a starter house with an ocean peek.
“See the ocean through that vacant lot? There is very little chance anyone would ever build on that lot and block your view,” Beverly promised.
Martin and I shook our heads.
“I’ve got one more,” she said.
“Beverly, you have to stop now. I can’t torture you any longer.”
“Rita, at this point it’s not even a job anymore. I’m on a mission. I will not rest until I find you and Martin a house.”
We followed Beverly into a beautiful neighborhood and pulled up in front of an understated contemporary house that was exactly what Martin and I were looking for.
“This house fell out of escrow yesterday,” Beverly explained. “I think it’s meant to be.”
Martin and I wandered into the living room. The sliding glass doors opened up into the walls and the breeze wafted through the living room. It had everything we were looking for. It was big enough but not too big, and easy walking distance to the beach.
Martin and I looked at each other and said, “If not now, when?”
We made an offer on the house that afternoon, and it was accepted. We went out with Beverly and bought her a well-deserved drink.
It had taken seventeen years, but Martin and I had finally bought our dream house. It’s the house we always wanted and never thought we could find. There is only one problem…we don’t own the land.
* * *
I really wanted a child. I didn’t want to be old and sick and not have someone to drain financially.
* * *
It’s My Daughter’s Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To
TYPICAL VEGAS PARTIES USUALLY FEATURE NAMES like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and always occur at
the hippest hangouts in town. Don’t think Martin and I haven’t checked out these nightclubs, because we have…but only during the day. Being the proud parents of a toddler and a dog on diuretics leaves us roughly six hours of interrupted sleep a night, so clubbing with the beautiful people is quite simply a nonstarter. That’s not to say we’re not party people. We are.
When Martin and I adopted our baby girl everybody warned me about no sleep, tantrums, and potty training; nobody warned me about birthday parties. It seems that each child my daughter knows has at least three birthday parties a year. We have been to bouncing parties, ice-skating parties, Build-a-Bear parties, dress-up parties, cookie-making parties, and horseback-riding parties, and that was just last week. This is the story of my daughter’s party and why after it was over I needed a drink.
Celebrating birthdays one through three had been a breeze. At these ages children’s frames of reference are rather narrow; they don’t have many friends and haven’t really experienced a full-blown celebration. We got off easily. We bought a cake and hats and invited some strangers, and Molly was totally satisfied. At four everything changes.
“Mommy, Krystal had pony rides at her birthday party. What am I going to have?”
“Well, honey, we have a dog on diuretics. I’m pretty sure he’s available,” I replied.
That answer didn’t fly. Four was going to be a very different experience compared to one, two, and three.
The planning of a child’s birthday party becomes significantly more difficult when you live in an apartment. Ponies are out of the question, as are pigs, donkeys, and any other animal that has a relationship with hay. While our child’s bedroom is fair game for stickers, Play-Doh, and grape juice, our mohair living room sofa is not up to having a gaggle of four-year-olds partying on its pampered cushions.
