by Lucia Berlin
The only time my father said he loved me was just before I came back to the States for college. We were on the beach in Tierra del Fuego. Antarctic cold. “We’ve tramped through this whole continent together … the same mountains, the same ocean, from top to bottom.” I was born in Alaska, but I don’t remember it. He kept thinking I should, in the nursing home, so finally I did pretend to know Gabe Carter, to remember Nome, the bear in the camp.
In the beginning he kept asking about my mother, where was she, when was she coming. Or he would think she was there, would talk to her, make me feed her a bite for every bite he took. I stalled him. She was packing, she was coming. When he was better we would all live together in a big house in Berkeley. He would nod, reassured, except for one day when he said, “You’re lying through your teeth.” And then went on talking about something else.
One day he just killed her off. When I arrived he was lying in bed, weeping, curled up like a baby. He told the story as if in shock, with irrelevant details, like someone who has witnessed a horrible accident. They were on a Mississippi steamboat; my mother was gambling belowdecks. Colored people were allowed on now and Florida (his nurse) had won every cent of their money. My mother had bet the whole thing, their life savings, in one last hand of five-card draw. One-eyed jacks wild. “I should have known,” he said, “when I saw that hussy laughing away with her gold teeth, counting all that money. She gave John here at least four thousand.”
“Dry up, you snob,” John said from the bed next to my father’s. He took a Hershey bar from the back of his Bible. He wasn’t allowed sweets, it was the one I’d brought my father the day before. My father’s reading glasses showed from under John’s pillow. I got them. John began to moan and cry: “My legs! My legs hurt!” He didn’t have any legs. He was a diabetic and they had been amputated above the knees.
On the steamboat my father had been in the bar with Bruce Sasse (a diamond driller from Bisbee). They had heard the shot and then a long time later the splash. “I didn’t have change for a tip but I didn’t want to leave a dollar.” “Cheap snob! Typical! Typical!” John said from his bed. My father and Bruce Sasse rushed around to the starboard side just as my mother was floating away. Blood in the wake of the boat.
He grieved for her only that one day, but for weeks he talked about her funeral. Thousands of people had been there. None of my sons had worn a suit, but I looked lovely and was gracious. Ed Titman came, the ambassador to Peru, Domingo the butler, even Charlie Bloom the old Swede from Mullan, Idaho. Charlie once told me he always put sugar on his oatmeal. What if you don’t have any? I asked, smart aleck. I puts it on yust the same.
The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me. After that he ordered me around like a secretary or a servant. One day I finally asked him where I was. I had run off. Bad blood, a Moynihan just like my mother and Uncle John. I had just taken off one afternoon, right outside the nursing home, up Ashby Avenue with a good-for-nothing greaser in a four-holed Buick. The man he described was, in fact, a dark sleazy type I find attractive.
He began hallucinating most of the time then. Wastebaskets turned into dogs that talked, leaf shadows on the walls became marching soldiers, the hefty nurses were now transvestite spies. He talked incessantly about Eddie and Little Joe; neither seemed to be anyone he might have known. Every night they had some wild free-wheeling adventure on an ammunition ship outside Nagasaki, in helicopters above Bolivia. My father would laugh, loose and easy as I had never known him.
It got so I would pray for him to be this way, but more and more he was becoming rational, “oriented as to time and place.” He talked about money. Money he had made, money he had lost, money he would make. He saw me then as a broker, maybe, would drone on and on about options and percentages, scrawling figures all over the Kleenex box. Margins and options, T-notes and stocks and bonds and mergers. He would bitterly denounce his daughter (me) for murdering his wife and locking him up, just to get his money. Florida was the only black nurse in the hospital who would work with him. He accused them all of stealing, called them pickaninnies or whores. He’d use the urinal to call the police. Florida and John had stolen all his money. John would ignore him, reading his Bible or just lying in his bed, writhing, screaming, “My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!”
“Hush John,” Florida said. “That’s only phantom pain.”
“Is it real?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “All pain is real.”
He talked to Florida about me. She laughed, winking at me, agreeing, “She’s rotten to the core.” He told us all the ways I had been a disappointment to him, from the spelling bee to my failed marriages.
“It’s getting to you,” Florida said. “You’ve stopped ironing his shirts—pretty soon you won’t come no more.”
But there was a new bond I felt. I had never seen him bitter or bigoted or money-conscious. This was the man whose idols had been Thoreau and Jefferson and Thomas Paine. I wasn’t disillusioned. The fear and awe I had felt toward him were beginning to disappear.
The other thing I liked was that I could touch him now. Hug him and bathe him, cut his toenails and hold his hand. I didn’t really listen to anything he said anymore. I’d hold him, listening to Florida and the other nurses singing and laughing, Days of Our Lives blaring from the dayroom. I’d feed him Jell-O and listen to John read from Deuteronomy. I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.
He ate in his room and wouldn’t associate with the other patients at all. I would, just for a break or to keep from crying. On the bulletin board was a big sign that said, Today is ———. The weather is ———. The next meal is ———. The next holiday is ———. For two months it was a rainy Tuesday before lunch and Easter, but after that the spaces were always blank.
A volunteer named Ada read the paper every morning. Turning and turning pages, avoiding crime and violence. Most days all she ended up with were bus crashes in Pakistan, Dennis the Menace, and the horoscope. Hurricanes in Galveston. (I also can’t understand how people have stayed in Galveston after all these years.) I came to enjoy the other patients. Most of them were even more senile than my father, but they were glad to see me, clawed at me with tiny fingers. They all recognized me, called me different names.
I kept going to visit him. Maybe out of guilt, as Florida said, but with hope too. I kept waiting for him to praise me, forgive me. Please know me, Daddy, say you love me. He never did, and I only go now to take shaving things or pajamas or candy. He can’t walk anymore. He gets violent, so they have him in a Posey day and night.
The last real time I was with him was on the picnic to Lake Merritt. Ten patients went. Ada, Florida, Sam, and I. Sam is the janitor. (Chimp, my father called him.) It took an hour to load them into the van, wheelchairs up a whining lift. It was very hot, the day after Memorial Day. Most of them had peed even before we got moving; windows steamed up. The old people laughed and were excited, but frightened too, flinching when buses passed us, sirens, motorcycles. My father looked nice in a seersucker suit, but then the front turned blue with Parkinson’s drool and dark blue all down one leg.
I had imagined that we would be under the trees, by the water, but Ada had us set up the wheelchairs in a semicircle facing the street, by the duck pond. I also imagined the winos would leave, but they just stayed on the benches in front of the old people. Some of the patients smelled cigarettes and asked for them. One of the winos gave John one, but Ada took it away and stomped it out. Exhaust fumes, and radios from the pimpmobiles and lowriders and motorcycles. The ground vibrated with joggers who bunched up when they got to us, running in place as they tried to get around. We were passing food, feeding the “feeders.” Potato salad and fried chicken. Pickled beets and Kool-Aid. Florida and I served plates to the four winos on the bench, and Ada got
furious. There was way too much food, though. Neapolitan ice cream melted onto bibs. Lula and Mae just mashed the bars, played with them in their laps. My father was very neat when he ate, had always been meticulous. I washed each of his fingers. He has beautiful hands. I don’t know why they pluck at their clothes and blankets. It’s called “floccillation.”
After lunch a big woman in a park ranger uniform brought out a baby raccoon and passed it around. It was soft and smelled sweet and everyone liked it, loved it, really, holding him and stroking him, but Lula squeezed him so hard he clawed at her face. “Rabid!” my father said. “My legs!” John cried. The man gave John another cigarette. Ada didn’t notice, was putting the food trays into the van. The ranger gave the raccoon to the winos. The little animal obviously knew them, curled around their necks, calm. Ada said we had twenty minutes to give people rides around the duck pond and the birdcages, up the hill for a view of the lake.
My father had always loved birds. I parked him in front of the ratty horned owls, talking to him about different birds we had seen. The porcupine with green hair. The pileated woodpecker against the white aspen. A frigate bird off Antofagasta. Roadrunners mating, majestic. My father just sat there, his eyes glazed. The owls slept or were stuffed. I wheeled the chair away. All the others were festive, hollered and waved to us. John was really having a good time. Florida had made friends with a jogger who loaned her his tape recorder. Lula held it and sang while they fed the ducks.
It was hard to push the chair up the hill. Hot and loud with the cars and radios and interminable thud thud of the runners. It was so smoggy we could barely see the other shore. Memorial Day litter and debris. Paper cups floated in the foamy brown lake serene as swans. At the top of the hill I put on his brakes and lit a cigarette. He was laughing, an ugly laugh.
“It’s awful, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“It sure is, Lu.”
He loosened his brakes and the chair started down the brick path. I hesitated, just stood there watching it, but then I threw away my cigarette and caught his chair just as it was picking up speed.
Tiger Bites
The train slowed down outside of El Paso. I didn’t wake my baby, Ben, but carried him out to the vestibule so I could look out. And smell it, the desert. Caliche, sage, sulphur from the smelter, wood fires from Mexican shacks by the Rio Grande. The Holy Land. When I first went there, to live with Mamie and Grandpa during the war, that’s when I first heard about Jesus and Mary and the Bible and sin, so Jerusalem got all mixed up with El Paso’s jagged mountains and deserts. Rushes by the river and huge crucifixes everywhere. Figs and pomegranates. Dark-shawled women with infants and poor gaunt men with sufferer’s, savior’s eyes. And the stars at night were big and bright like in the song, so insistently dazzling it made sense that wise men couldn’t help but follow any one of them and find their way.
My uncle Tyler had cooked up a family reunion for Christmas. For one thing he was hoping my folks and I would make up. I dreaded seeing my parents … they were furious because my husband, Joe, had left me. They had almost died when I got married at seventeen, so my divorce was the last straw. But I couldn’t wait to see my cousin Bella Lynn and my uncle John, who was coming from L.A.
And there was Bella Lynn! In the train depot parking lot. Standing up and waving from a powder-blue Cadillac convertible, wearing a fringed suede cowgirl outfit. She was probably the most beautiful woman in West Texas, she must have won a million beauty contests. Long pale blond hair and yellow-brown eyes. Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.
She tossed our bags and Ben’s little bed in the backseat. All of us Moynihans are strong, physically anyway. She kissed and hugged us both over and over. We got in and headed for the A & W across town. It was cold but the air was clean and dry, she kept the top down and the heater blasting, talked nonstop as she drove, one-handed since she waved at just about everybody we passed.
“First off I should tell you we’re short on yuletide joy out at our place. Uncle John gets here day after tomorrow, Christmas Eve, praise the Lord. Mary, your mama and my mama started drinking and fighting right off the bat. Mama went up on the garage roof and won’t come down. Your mother slit her wrists.”
“Oh, God.”
“Well you know, not bad or anything. She wrote a suicide note about how you had always ruined her life. Signed it Bloody Mary! She’s in Saint Joseph’s psych ward on a seventy-two-hour hold. At least your father isn’t coming, he’s furious about your D.I.V.O.R.C.E. My crazy grandma is there. Looney Tunes! And a passel of horrid relatives from Lubbock and Sweetwater. Daddy has them all put up at a motel and they drive over and eat all day and watch TV. They’re all born again so think you and me are just rotten to the core. Rex Kipp is here! He and Daddy are buying presents and stuff for poor people all day and hanging out in Daddy’s shop. So boy am I ever glad to see you…”
At the drive-in we ordered Papa burgers and fries and malts, like always. I told her Ben could have some of mine. He was just ten months old. But she ordered him a Papa burger and a banana split. Our whole family is extravagant. Well, no, my father isn’t like this at all. He is from New England, is thrifty and responsible. I turned out a Moynihan.
After Bella had filled me in on the reunion situation she told me about Cletis, her husband of only two months. Her folks had been as mad when she got married as mine had been with me. Cletis was a construction worker, rodeo rider, roughneck. Tears rolled down Bella’s lovely cheeks as she told me what happened.
“Lou, we were happy as clams. I swear nobody ever had such a sweet tender love. Why in heaven’s name are clams happy? We had a dear little trailer in the south valley, by the river. Our little blue heaven. I cleaned house and washed dishes! I cooked, made pineapple upside-down cake and macaroni, all kinds of things, and he was proud of me, and me of him. First bad thing that happened was Daddy forgave me for marrying him and he bought us a house. On Rim Road, you know, a mansion, columns on the porch, but we didn’t want his house so Cletis and Daddy had an awful fight. I tried to explain to Daddy we didn’t need his ol’ house, how I’d be happy living with Cletis on the back of a flatbed truck. And I had to explain it over and over to Cletis too, because even though I refused to move he took to sulking. Then one day I went to the Popular Dry Goods and bought some clothes and towels, just a few things, on my old charge account I’ve had my entire life long. Cletis had a fit, said I had spent more money in two hours than he made in six months. So I just took it all outside and poured kerosene on it, set fire to everything, and we kissed and made up. Oh, Little Lou, I love him so bad, so bad! Next darn fool thing I did and why I did it I’ll never know. Mama had come to call. I guess I was just feeling like a married lady, you know? A grown-up. I made coffee and served Oreos on a little dish. Blabbed my big mouth about S.E.X. I suppose I felt I was big enough to talk to her now about S.E.X. Oh God, well, and I didn’t know, either, so I asked her if I could get pregnant if I swallowed Cletis’s come. She tore out of the trailer and ran home to Daddy. All hell broke loose. That night Daddy and Rex came and beat the living daylights out of Cletis. Put him in the hospital with a broken collarbone and two broken ribs. Talking about he was a pervert, and putting him in jail for sodomy and annulling the marriage. Can you imagine, going down on your own lawful wedded husband is against the law? Anyways I wouldn’t go home with Daddy and just stayed at Cletis’s bedside until I could bring him home. And we were fine, happy as those old clams again, even though Cletis took to drinking a lot, account of he couldn’t go back to work for a while. Then last week I look out and see this brand-new Cadillac in our driveway, with a huge stuffed Santa sitting in it, and satin ribbons all around it. I laughed, you know, ’cause it was funny, but Cletis said, ‘Happy, huh? Well, I ain’t never going to make you happy like your precious Daddy does.’ And he left. I figured he’d just gone off on a tear and he’d be back. Oh, Lou. He’s not coming back.
He’s gone! He went to work on an oil rig off Louisiana. He didn’t even call. His trashy mother told me when she came to get his clothes and his saddle.”
Little Ben had actually eaten all that burger and most of the banana split. He threw up all over himself and Bella Lynn’s jacket. She tossed the jacket in the backseat, washed him off with napkins dipped in water while I got him out some clean clothes and a diaper. He didn’t cry once though. He loved the rock and roll music and the hillbilly music, and Bella Lynn’s voice or her hair, never took his eyes off her.
I envied Bella and Cletis, being so in love. I had adored Joe, but had always been afraid of him, trying to please him. I don’t think he ever even liked me much. I was miserable not so much because I missed him but for the whole failure of things and how it all seemed like my fault.
I told her my short sad story. How Joe was a wonderful sculptor. He had been given a Guggenheim, got a patron and a villa and foundry in Italy, and he left. “Art is his life.” (I had taken to saying that, to everybody, dramatically.) No, no child support. I didn’t even know his address.
Bella Lynn and I hugged and cried for a while and then she sighed. “Well, at least you have his baby.”
“Babies.”
“What?”
“I’m almost four months pregnant. That was the last straw for Joe, me having another baby.”
“It’s the last darn straw for you, little fool! What are you going to do? No way those folks of yours are going to help. Your ma will just kill herself all over again when she hears this news.”
“I don’t know what to do. Another really dumb problem … I wanted to come so bad but they wouldn’t even give me Christmas Eve off at the escrow company. So I just quit, and came. Now I’m going to have to look for a job pregnant.”
