Lewis pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment making a little growling sound in the back of his throat that he had made for as long as Jay could remember. Then he peeled off a five and handed it to a stunned Ramona.
“Dad!” Jay said.
Lewis chewed on his lip and looked up at his daughter with a flash of apology. “I am the spirit of indulgence,” he said.
“Mama, look, look,” Ramona sputtered. “What is it? Is it a million dollars?”
“No, sweetie,” Jay said. “It’s a five-dollar bill.”
“Five dollars?” Ramona said. She tugged at her shirt to cover up her little-girl belly. “That’s how much my lion cost! That means I can buy another one. Not another lion, but maybe a . . . a . . .”
“You can think about it,” Jay said. “Why don’t you go put it in your bank.”
“Thank you,” Ramona whispered to Lewis in a tone of reverential awe.
“You’re welcome, honey,” Lewis said. He bent lower to put his face close to hers. “Look, that’s a lot of money. Maybe I gave you too much. I know you’re really good at saving, so you think about a toy you really want and save up your allowance to get it. OK?”
Ramona looked up at her grandfather, puzzled by his seriousness but aware that something very advantageous had just transpired. Jay had been ready to argue with Lewis over the way he’d shattered the humble frugality of her allowance scheme, but she knew she wouldn’t. Lewis and Ramona had just made each other very happy, and there was no good reason for Jay to ruin it.
“Have you had coffee yet?” she asked her father instead.
“Yes, I have,” Lewis replied. “But it’s so damned cold out there that I’ll have another cup, if you’re making. Anything to warm me up.”
They went into the kitchen together. While she was grinding beans and unfolding the filter, she saw that her father looked pale and delicate.
“What is it?” she asked him.
Lewis leaned back against the counter. “Me?” he said, surprised. “Oh, well, nothing. It’s colder than I thought it was going to be. Should have worn a warmer sweater. I was shivering in the car and couldn’t stop. I guess, you know, these pills I’m taking make me susceptible to chills.”
“You mean the antidepressant?” Jay asked, with the smallest measure of malice. Lewis talked about his SSRIs like they were aspirin. Jay was suspicious of any drug that purported to magically alter brain chemistry and make a person better adjusted. Yes, Lewis had been depressed and withdrawn for quite a while—since before Jay’s mother was diagnosed with cancer—but he was a moody man by nature and it might have been best for him to work out his problems on his own.
But didn’t the problem lie elsewhere? Something about the notion of Lewis absorbing a pill to help him cope was offensive—the idea that Lewis needed help made Jay feel panicky and anxious, and the reality of a doctor invading his brain with pharmaceuticals made her feel protective and helpless. Glancing at Lewis, Jay realized he was diminished in her eyes, and that was not a comfortable feeling.
“Yes,” Lewis said quietly. “The antidepressant.”
“I wonder why that is?” Jay rushed to deflect the glancing blow she’d just struck by making Lewis say the name of his helper. “You know, that it would give you a chill.”
“Maybe it’s just cold outside. Beats me,” Lewis said with a laugh.
“Grampa Lewis,” Ramona said from the doorway, startling Lewis and Jay, who hadn’t realized she was absorbing the arcane substance of their conversation. “I just saw a robin outside.”
“What’s that?” Lewis said, his forehead wrinkling. Ramona’s garbled syntax had made her proclamation a mess of W’s and elongated vowels. She would soon grow into her tongue, Jay hoped, but seeing her daughter struggle to be understood always opened a fresh wound.
“A robin,” Ramona slurred. “A robin.”
“Oh, a robin!” Lewis enthused. “You saw a robin! Jeez, kiddo, that little birdie had better gather up his things and head south. Doesn’t he know it’s about to get real cold?”
“I guess not,” Ramona said seriously. “I wish I could tell him. It was a boy, you know.”
“How can you tell?” Lewis asked.
“Because of his colors,” Ramona said. “The girls are less pretty.”
“Now why is it the opposite for people?” Lewis said. “Guys like me are all wrinkly and ugly, while you and your mother are as beautiful as you can be.”
“And Grandma,” Ramona added.
Lewis gave Ramona a look of surprise.
“And Grandma,” Lewis repeated.
Ramona looked up at Lewis with transparent inquisitiveness. The coffeemaker burped and farted.
“Hey, Ramona, would you make me a picture?” Lewis said gently. “I want to talk to your mama about something.”
Jay, reaching for coffee cups in the cupboard, stiffened. Lewis’s tone contained a warning. Lewis’s attention remained fixated on Ramona, who reacted with equanimity at this familiar shunting aside of her concerns in favor of adult matters.
“A picture of what?” she asked.
“A sky, and grass, and butterflies,” Lewis said.
“And a cat?” Ramona asked.
“And a cat,” Lewis agreed. Ramona strode down the hall with her usual intensity of purpose. Jay poured out the coffee and handed Lewis his cup.
“What is it?” she asked.
Lewis moved closer to the window, away from the hall and Ramona’s eavesdropping stratagems. He stared out at the drab stillness between the apartment buildings, the cold breeze stirring up trash that would soon be buried in snow until the thaw. When he spoke, it was in a throaty whisper of confidentiality.
“Stephen came to see me at work yesterday,” he said.
“At work?” Jay repeated, somewhat dumbly. Lewis had fallen into a manner she knew well—his saintly forbearance in the face of an offense, with Jay left to guess the precise nature of her role in the wrong that had been committed.
“He wanted to have a talk,” Lewis said. “A confidential talk, I suppose. But I’m not going to keep secrets for him.”
“Secrets?” Jay said. “What do you—”
“He said that there’s a problem between you and me,” Lewis said tightly. “Somehow I’m creating problems in your life.”
To hear Lewis tell it, Stephen had ambushed him with an absurd supposition and slur on Lewis’s character. Jay knew what Stephen had attempted—a clumsy stab at making things right. Probably that was how things were done in Stephen’s family: grievances were brought out into the light and promises were made to behave better in the future. But the flip side of Lewis’s certainty was a horrible vulnerability, which he had exhibited in flashes for as long as Jay could remember—he tantalized her with horrible glimpses into the abyss that awaited her if she forced Lewis to drop his mask of solidity. It wasn’t intentional on his part. But now she looked into her father’s eyes and saw the entreaty there: Agree with me, tell me I’m right. I can’t be what he said I am.
“Stephen thought he was helping,” Jay told him, her voice unfamiliar to her. “He means well. He must have thought it was necessary to get involved.”
And where was this voice coming from? It had evolved from the little girl’s voice she had addressed Lewis with long ago, when he was an overbearing specimen of superiority, such a powerful combination of need and demand. Jay wished Anna were there to help the way she always had—until those final years when Jay got pregnant and Anna receded to the murky sanctuary of her sunroom, painting the same pictures over and over again, engaged in a slow dissolve.
“Well, I don’t know,” Lewis said. He folded his arms and Jay saw the outlines of a cigarette pack in his shirt pocket.
“You’re carrying them around now?” she asked, pointing.
Lewis glanced down. “Well, I can’t very well smoke them all day if I don’t carry them on me,” he said.
“Very funny.”
“
Look, that was a joke.” Lewis put down his coffee cup. “I smoke maybe three a day. Don’t worry. Your domineering psychotic dad is going to be around for quite a while yet.”
Lewis laughed, but it was a hollow sound. Jay had made the coffee too strong, and it filled her mouth with a dry, acidic taste. She noticed that Lewis hadn’t finished his.
“Well, what did Stephen say to you?” she asked.
“He went on with his professor bullshit,” Lewis said. “Something about me making a story about your life and keeping you from making your own.”
“Dad, you can’t get away with playing dumb,” Jay said.
Lewis grinned. “Well, darling, he’s a big old professor and I’m just a shirt salesman. You can’t expect me to follow everything he says. I think it would have made him more happy if I’d have taken notes.”
Jay said nothing, not willing to take the bait and adopt a conspiratorial alliance with Lewis.
“Look, Dad—”
“Mama?”
“It doesn’t sound like you had the most constructive—”
“Mama?”
“Yes, Ramona?” Jay said.
“How is it my responsibility to—”
“Do you know where my spongy things are?”
“Just a second, Dad,” Jay said. She didn’t know how long Ramona had been there, or how much she had heard. She supposed it didn’t matter. Ramona was growing up with Jay as a mother, so she was going to see and hear all kinds of things. In another home, she would grow up seeing and hearing all sorts of different things. It was the essential compact between parent and child—the parent pretends certain realities don’t exist, and the child plays along. But both are human and understand the unspoken realities.
“What, sweetie?” Jay said.
“My spongy things.”
“If I’m ambushed at work and presented with a catalogue of my failings,” Lewis said, “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to react.”
“Just a second, Dad,” Jay said. “What spongy things, honey? You mean those dinosaurs we got at Target?”
“Yeah,” Ramona chirped, her voice the highest note plucked on a celestial harp.
“I actually know the answer to this one,” Jay said, kneeling slightly. She did a quick memory scan of the confines of their apartment, from the little carpeted entryway down the hall to the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, their twin bedrooms. “Your bath toys. The spongy dinosaurs are with your bath toys. You were playing with them the other night.”
Ramona cooed with appreciation over her mother’s command of their small universe. She hopped out of the room without a look back.
“God, she’s so happy,” Lewis said.
“I hope she stays that way,” Jay replied.
“You were just like her,” said Lewis.
And it was true—Lewis remembered when Jay was Ramona’s age, with Lewis in his late twenties, when they had just bought the house (what a bargain that was) and Jay would play for hours in the garden in her imaginary universe. Jay had been a precocious child, diligent and serious. Lewis had adored her more than anything from the very moment of her birth—a moment that had shocked Lewis with its intensity, when he was overcome with sheer emotion stronger than any he had felt before or since, a rent in reality with the enormity that he had fostered a life. And now, more than two decades later, she stood in a sweatshirt in her apartment on Emerson Ave. and helped her own daughter locate missing toys. If only he had a way out of this maze of self, if only he could unzip his skin and step out, embrace his daughter, make her feel the raw purity of his love for her. She had once been such a happy little girl. He had once loved his wife. It took all his powers of optimism to avoid succumbing to the apprehension that they were living in the ashes of those days. For a second he considered telling Jay about seeing Anna, but it didn’t seem right. He would share everything when the time came.
“Anyway, Stephen told me I was a negative force in your life, in so many words,” Lewis added. “I call you too much on the phone. I’m too judgmental.”
“Dad,” Jay said, seeing a flash of strong emotion flare up in her father’s features before he could suppress it.
“Look, maybe he has a point,” Lewis said. “Christ, I know I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.”
“Mama?”
“But to have an outsider just come along and tell me that I’m some sort of awful presence—”
“Mama?”
“Dad, I doubt that’s what Stephen was trying to—”
“You should have been there,” Lewis said. “I mean, this guy takes me out of work and lays into me—”
“Grampa?”
“Yes, sweet thing, what is it?”
“What’s different about a goat and a sheep?” Ramona held up a pair of plastic animals.
“Why do you ask?” Lewis said.
“I’m making animal lines in my room,” Ramona replied.
“Oh.” Lewis looked up at Jay.
“She asked you,” Jay said with a laugh, enjoying her father’s perplexity.
“You mean what are their differences?” Lewis asked. Ramona nodded. “Well, it’s easier to say what they have in common. They both have hooves, I suppose. And long heads with sort of pointed chins.”
“And wool,” Ramona said.
“No, not that.” Lewis knelt down to Ramona’s level. “Goats don’t have wool. They have hair.”
“Hair?”
“Yeah, sort of thick sparse stuff,” Lewis said, oblivious, Jay saw, to the fact that he was exceeding the limits of Ramona’s vocabulary. “And you can milk a goat. Some cheese is made of goat’s milk—it’s really good. I don’t know about milking a sheep. I’ve never heard of it done.”
Jay watched Ramona raptly absorb Lewis’s every utterance, a sight providing her with pleasing associations. She would have hated for her father to learn how little she remembered of him as a younger man, and how the vague impressions she carried were of him being tense and brittle, his voice raised in irritation.
“Thank you,” Ramona said, and was gone again.
“I’m going to have to go back to school and study zoology to pull off this grandfather trip,” Lewis said.
“More coffee?”
Lewis looked into his half-full cup. “Better not,” he said, absentmindedly massaging his breastbone.
“What, are you having palpitations or something?” Jay asked.
“Only the metaphysical kind,” Lewis replied.
Jay let it slide. Ever since her mother took ill, Lewis had the look of a man haunted by mortality—specifically, his own. Jay suspected it was part of the reason he started taking those pills, but there were areas of her father’s life upon which it wouldn’t be proper for her to comment.
“Anyway, this Stephen thing doesn’t sound like something to get upset about,” Jay said.
“Do I look upset?” Lewis asked, his massaging hand splayed open.
“Sort of.”
“I don’t know what to feel,” Lewis said. “I mean, what does Stephen expect me to do? Curl up in a ball and die so that everyone can have a better life without me?”
“Dad, don’t. Ramona might hear.”
“I’ve reserved comment on some matters surrounding Stephen.”
“Really.”
Jay leaned back against the sink. It would be preferable if Lewis didn’t call her up to five or six times a day. Couldn’t she summon the courage to tell her father that much?
“I suppose you know I have my reservations about him spending the night with Ramona around,” Lewis said.
In the tentative morning light of season’s change, Lewis’s broad, handsome features and tucked-in carriage looked like some artist’s conception of aging masculinity. At times such as these he was like a wall impervious to eroding waters.
“Dad,” Jay said delicately. “You know what I’m going to say.”
“Mind my own business.” Lewis tried to smile at her.
> “That’s part of it,” Jay said. “Here’s the rest: trust me. I know it’s delicate, having a boyfriend and a little girl at the same time. I’m managing to pull it off. You know, Dad, I have to balance my own interests with Ramona’s. I am conscious of that. What you don’t seem to acknowledge is that I love Stephen, and that he’s a good man. He’s good to me, and he’s good to Ramona. He stimulates me intellectually, and he makes me feel loved. I’m a woman now, Dad. I’m an adult. I’m dealing with aging and death and disappointment, the same as you.”
Lewis hid behind a mask of bland benevolence, nodding slightly as Jay spoke. Where was this coming from, this flow of hidden defiance? It felt good. Jay felt in control, capable of restraining the inchoate outbursts of adolescence in which she’d railed and railed against Lewis, once or twice, before dissolving in tears and apology.
“Look, Dad, I wish Stephen hadn’t done what he did,” she added. “Surprising you at work and critiquing you wasn’t the most political thing he could have done. But at least recognize that he was trying, in his clumsy way, to make things better. Because he loves me. And, presumably, because he wants there to be some line of connection between you two, mano a mano.”
“What about what he said,” Lewis asked. “Am I really that bad?”
“Much worse,” Jay said. “You are a fiend of monumental proportions.”
“I’m a baaaaad man!” Lewis bellowed, raising his fists in his age-old Ali impersonation.
“Just don’t hold anything against Stephen,” Jay said.
Lewis smiled a strange smile. “I have my own opinions about Stephen,” he said.
“Dad.”
“And they will go unsaid,” he said. “Because this is a beautiful cold bastard of a day in Minnesota, and I want to buy ice cream for my daughter and granddaughter.”
“Ice cream!” Ramona bleated from beneath them. She had been there for how long? How much had she heard? What would she make of it? Shit, Jay thought. She tried to control what her daughter knew about her, but as a censor she was a dismal failure.
Lewis walked out to the car while Jay got Ramona ready to face the chill of the day. The forecast had been for highs in the forties but the temperature hovered around freezing. Lewis zipped his coat up to his chin after sneaking out a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it against the breeze.
14 Degrees Below Zero Page 9
