The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  He paused, considering whether this was true. “I don’t want you to get married for my sake,” he said.

  “For whose sake, then?”

  “Your mother worried about you too, you know.”

  “And marriage solved all her problems? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He felt the needle inside her words.

  She stood up abruptly, almost aggressively. “You know I don’t need your help,” she said. “You do know that, don’t you?” She reached one hand above her, and touching the plaster, appeared to brace herself between the floor and the slant of the low ceiling. “Since when did you become such an expert in everyone else’s happiness anyway?”

  “Not everyone’s. Just yours.”

  “And what makes you think you’re right?”

  “Because I’m your father.”

  “Somehow that gives you privileged insight into the matters of my psyche?”

  “Most of the time, no. But in certain circumstances, yes.”

  “What if I don’t want the life you want for me?” she said. She was looking at him with the strangest mixture of heartbreak and anger. “What if this is the way I am? What if I can’t become the person you’d like me to be?”

  When she said this, his whole body felt at once strangely hollow and heavy, as if something had been blown out of it years ago but the pain was coming to him only now. He wanted to shout something through that hollowness, but what he wanted to shout was not a sentence or a thought or anything he could grasp with his mind. It was a feeling he’d had his whole life, deeper than a thought, which was that there was nothing she could do to make him not love her—that no matter how many times she transformed herself, his love would transform itself to match her. This was what it was to be a parent—it was to give up control over your own love. To love where sometimes you didn’t even like. It was something that could barely be expressed within yourself, and even then it made absolutely no sense.

  Her face suddenly softened and seemed to arrange itself around this new softness. Her arm came down. “What is it?” she said.

  “You can be yourself,” he said, “and still have other possibilities inside. A surprise or two. Maybe even a reversal.”

  Dary’s eyes widened and fixed upon him intently. “What’s yours, then?”

  For a moment he thought of Adele, his unexpected feelings for her. The strain of the past two weeks without her, the anxiety of still having heard nothing from her, was only beginning to show him the strength of those feelings. Just thinking about her now he felt somehow guilty and, what was it—childish? Yes, maybe childish, because whatever it was between them, he still wanted to keep it to himself. “I stopped going to church before you were born,” he offered.

  “And?”

  “I voted for Eisenhower the first time around. Believe me, that was a mistake.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” She attempted and failed to suppress a laugh. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m trying to take you seriously, but it’s hard. It’s hard to take advice from a guy who counts Eisenhower as the major betrayal of his life.”

  “My feelings on plenty of other subjects have changed,” he said.

  She glanced at him, sidelong. “Have you ever reversed yourself about a woman?”

  “I’ve only been devoted to one woman, you know that.”

  “Mom?”

  “Who else!”

  “I don’t know—that’s why I’m asking. But it goes to show you—some people don’t have reversals. Maybe I’m like that.”

  “Oh, but plenty of people do. Have erotic—I mean, romantic—reversals.”

  She laughed a nervous laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say erotic,” she said. “It’s like we’re talking about the birds and the bees thirty years too late.”

  19.

  HE CALLED ADELE several times, hanging up just before the answering machine picked up, operating under his old teenager’s belief that a person could call as many times as he wanted as long as he didn’t leave behind evidence of the attempts. But when, after two more days, these phantom calls didn’t bring about the desired result, he finally left a message:

  Hello? Hello, Adele? This is…ah, well, I don’t have to tell you. I’m at home right now—I’ve got the whole house to myself. Dary left behind a pair of boots she wants me to send her, so it’s just me and a pair of boots here. Are you coming over? Well, I’m calling to tell you there’s been a change to my, ah, calendar. Today’s still fine, Wednesday’s still fine, but if you’re planning to come on Friday, we should talk about Friday. Right now I have a doctor’s appointment. But I could change it. So, yeah, I’ll be waiting to hear from you. About Friday, okay? Wow, this is a long message. I—hello? Oh. I thought you might have—but okay, I hope you’re…BEEEEEEEP.

  The machine cut him off.

  The doctor’s appointment was a purely pharmacological mission. He had run out of the sleeping pills, and his anxiety was keeping him awake at night. Though half the time he found the sleeping pills worthless, he had also come to realize that not having a supply of them caused a greater kind of suffering, because it was better to be awake in his room at night with lousy pills than it was to be awake with nothing left to try.

  On the day of the appointment, Dr. Fornier performed a routine examination. He shined a bright beam into Gene’s eyes, causing Gene to wonder if the doctor could detect lack of sleep in the physical tissue of his eyeballs. Gene assumed not, because when Dr. Fornier finished, he simply moved on to poking an instrument into Gene’s ears, which reassured Gene that his body was normal. But when the doctor was walking the cold drum of the stethoscope across his back, something in Dr. Fornier’s expression made Gene’s stomach grip itself.

  “Something wrong?” Gene said.

  “Maybe not,” said Dr. Fornier.

  Dr. Fornier ordered an EKG, and an hour and a half later he declared the result presented nothing worrisome. Yet somehow the “nothing worrisome” was an indicator for further inquiry, and Dr. Fornier ordered more tests “just to cover our bases.”

  The hospital was connected to the medical offices by an underground tunnel that was several degrees too warm and smelled of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Gene took an elevator to Cardiology on the third floor, where several others were waiting to see a doctor. There was an ancient-looking man, hunchbacked and stiff, attended by a younger, tired woman. A little boy with a dissident clump of hair poking up at the back of his head roamed around with a yo-yo he wildly and abruptly shot out into the room. His mother put down the magazine she was reading and asked him to be careful, and it was something she had evidently said so many times before that neither of them appeared to expect her words to change anything.

  Also waiting was a rotund man with a pink face offset by a patchy gray beard. His belly, incongruously big for his frame, seemed swapped from a larger man’s figure. He was seized by a coughing fit and the book in his lap fell to the floor. When the spasm ended, he looked around the room and, addressing no one in particular, said, “Pardon me, it isn’t anything contagious.”

  Gene found a seat that wasn’t directly next to him, but the man leaned over the empty seat between them anyway. “What do they have you in for?” he said. “Angina?”

  Gene pretended not to be aware the man was addressing him. But the man was determined to get Gene’s attention and repeated his question.

  “Oh,” Gene said finally. “They’re just running a few tests.”

  “That’s how it always starts.” The man went back to his book, but hardly a minute passed before he leaned over again and said, “Children? Have any?”

  Gene peered toward the door where nurses appeared and called patients’ names. “Just one,” Gene said. “A daughter.”

  The man nodded wordlessly and returned to his book again. Somehow he had arranged it in his lap so that every time he turned a page it made a loud, flapping noise. He appeared to dwell on some
thing he’d just read, then leaned over a third time: “Does she know you’re here?”

  Gene said something about not wanting to worry her unnecessarily.

  “That’s good,” the man said. “Keep that going for as long as you can. They give us no choice, we have to protect ourselves.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gene said.

  “You’ll see,” the man said. “One day you’ll go in for some straightforward test, and before you know it your relatives will be whispering behind your back about whether you have an up-to-date will. If you don’t run six miles before breakfast and later the same day eat a steak—because maybe when you were twenty-five a good day involved running six miles and eating a steak—someone will ask you if you’re feeling all right. And God forbid you forget the name of the vice president’s wife, or cough over the soup. You’ll be dead already, as far as everyone else is concerned.”

  Just then a nurse emerged from the interior and called a name. The ancient-looking man shuffled across the room with his walker, and the younger woman followed behind him, carrying his papers.

  “And there you have it,” the man said. “We’ll be lucky if we get to choose between a catheter and a bedpan.”

  As it turned out, Gene didn’t rate highly enough to see a cardiologist. In the examination room a nurse fitted him with a small, portable heart monitor, then attached several soft foam discs to his chest. The discs—electrodes—connected to thin cords that in turn connected to a monitor, a computer about the size and weight of a small transistor radio that hung around his neck on a black nylon strap. The way the nurse explained it, it was an EKG meant to measure over time an unpredictable heart rhythm. Gene wasn’t supposed to alter the course of his day because of it. If he exercised, he should continue to be active; if he was used to walking places to get around, he should maintain his routine; if he climbed onto ladders to clean the gutters of his house—here the nurse gave him a sharp look to make it clear what she thought of someone his age getting on a ladder. On the face of the monitor was a red button that he was to press at specific times—when he took medication, when he lay down to sleep—and also when he noticed, if he noticed, a sudden increase in his heart rate.

  There was something disturbingly alien about the electrodes, which resembled large nipples, and the laminated wires, which were like veins extruded from his body and reattached on the outside. But it was the computer that disturbed him most of all, because it would learn things about him he couldn’t be sure in advance he was willing to know.

  As he buttoned his shirt over the monitor, he thought about how frightened Maida had been in the ambulance when the paramedics had put on the oxygen mask. Her look to him seemed to say that the mask was going to kill her. This wasn’t true, of course, but it was also true that he never saw her alive again without the mask. In a way, that was when she had died—the moment when her face disappeared behind the mask. After that there were more interventions and other machines, and though he knew these also didn’t kill her, they helped usher her into a liminal, personless state in which her body no longer seemed like it belonged to her anymore. That day in the ambulance he saw that the fear of death could kill you in more than one way: you could die from the fear of what was actually happening to your body, or you could begin to die the moment you observed other people considering your death likely. He’d seen in Maida’s face that she was afraid to have him witness her in her condition. And it was as if by recognizing this look on her face—the one that said the mask would kill her—he had somehow validated her fear, so that the moment they both had the same thought it became inescapable.

  There was no question in his mind as to whether he would or wouldn’t tell Adele about his heart. If he acknowledged the possibility that his body had begun its terminal decline, she might find herself unconsciously less attracted to him. He intended to keep the monitor hidden beneath his shirt so she would never see him as his future decaying self.

  Adele finally turned up on Monday. It had been three weeks since he’d seen her, and she had gained a little weight over the break. Her face was fuller and her hips had a buttery heaviness, a new plumpness that suited her. She was wearing over her jeans a long clingy sweater that went nearly to her knees, and he almost cried out in dismay when she took it off—he wanted to be the one to draw it over her head and cast it to the floor.

  She offered no explanation for her absence. Her expression—officially attentive, yet personally uninterested—told him to surrender his banal, parochial desire to restart their relations by making her account for their time apart. In a way it was the first demand she had ever made of him and he was jarred by it. Why wouldn’t she tell him where she’d been? If something significant had happened, wouldn’t she want them to share it? And if it wasn’t significant, why go to the trouble of keeping it from him? She didn’t mention his phone message, perhaps because now that they were together, it no longer seemed relevant. But it was odd that she didn’t volunteer any information about the birth of her grandchild, an event he knew had to have taken place in the interval since they’d spoken.

  “How’s the baby?” he finally said.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Your son’s baby,” he said. “A boy or a girl?”

  She briefly hesitated, then told him it was a girl. “But they haven’t decided on a name,” she added, heading off his next question.

  She made a big fuss over the vacuum cleaner, an old, temperamental metallic-green upright, and indicated her irritation with him for not having replaced the bag, accusing him of shortening the life of the machine. She had never scolded him before and he didn’t know what to make of it. Possibly it was a sign they were further along in the relationship than he’d thought.

  She began dragging around the armchairs in the living room, tugging them from their customary places where their feet had left flattened spots in the rug. When he tried to help, she said, “Don’t do that, you’ll just hurt yourself.”

  Her words sent a chill through him. He wondered if she had somehow intuited the wires under his clothes. Or if he was already unconsciously sabotaging himself, playing the role of an ailing man without being aware of it. He decided the thing to do was to turn her comment into a joke. He pretended to fall over the side of one of the chairs and landed in what he hoped was a charming, splayed heap with his arms open and his legs wide. He imagined the gesture was sufficiently forlorn and silly that she would come over to check on him and he would snap her up.

  “I think I’m stuck like this,” he said.

  She glanced over. “You’ll find a way.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, doubtfully. “I might need a tug too.”

  When she passed near him he trapped her between his legs, and she allowed herself to be held for a moment.

  “Did you have a good visit with your daughter?” she said.

  “I missed you like crazy. I was one glum bachelor.”

  She patted his knee—time to release her. “You seem to have recovered just fine.”

  She lifted his leg as though it was a log that had fallen into her path, a gesture he found confusing when he considered that the last time he had seen her, they had shared a bed. But he brushed the feeling aside because to feel anything but gladness at her presence now seemed like admitting that something irreparable had happened between them, when it hadn’t. He told himself they had been apart for too long, that was it. He watched her vacuum the rug, bending over to adjust the settings on the front of the machine whenever it made a strange sound, and contented himself with admiring her generous backside.

  As she was finishing, he got up and went upstairs. In the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror, he took off his shirt and began detaching the wires from their electrodes. When this was done, he stripped the electrodes from his chest. The adhesive left gray gummy circles on his skin, and he used a cotton ball doused in rubbing alcohol to get rid of them. He rolled everything—including the used cotton
balls—into a towel and wedged the towel behind the pipe beneath the sink. He would cancel his appointment with the cardiologist and mail the monitor back to Dr. Fornier with a note of apology.

  In the bedroom, he changed his clothes, swapping the heavy sweater he had chosen to hide the monitor for a shirt he considered more dapper. Half the closet remained filled with Maida’s clothing; the rest was in her dresser. He still wasn’t ready to give it to charity. It pained him to think of her special things, her fine shoes or the nightie he’d splurged on, getting picked off a rack by a stranger at the Salvation Army.

  Adele was still tinkering with the vacuum when he found her downstairs and asked her to come with him.

  “All right,” she said, “but I’m bringing this with me.”

  When they were in the bedroom together he suggested she have a look at the dresser. It was just an ordinary five-drawer maple highboy with brass pulls. The stainless-steel shears that Dary had used to cut his corduroys for the beach were still sitting on top, next to a spool of navy thread.

  “You’ve got some mending for me to do?” she said.

  “Open the top drawer.”

  She did and peered inside. “What is it?”

  “It’s for you.”

  She pulled out the bundle of pale fabric and let its silky length fall to the floor. “A nightgown, is that it?”

  He asked her to try it on.

  “But I’m working,” she said.

  “I’m asking.”

  Her compliance reminded him of a sullen child’s. She stripped off her shirt and tossed it to the ground, leaving on her sturdy bra with its wide straps, then marched herself out of her jeans, stomping on the crotch to get them off over her ankles. She was wearing baggy underwear. The elastic at the top rose above her navel, and around the contours of her thighs, it hung sad and puffed out. She pulled the nightgown over her head and then gripped at the sides and waist in an attempt to make it sit more evenly on her.