Super America

by Anne Panning

  “If only you hadn’t slept with Rose Vancheri and acted like I was too stupid to know it,” she said. “How about that?” She threw the wet dishtowel onto his lap. It landed right where his legs had been amputated. He’d taken to wearing sweatpants because the fabric could be more easily rolled up than jeans. He threw the dishtowel to the floor.

  “That’s not true,” he said, but something in his voice caught.

  “Isn’t it?” She pushed his wheelchair out of the way, then rushed out of the room. Scared of any further confrontation, I followed behind her, but instead of going upstairs, I went and stood in the dining room and watched it snow. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and let my hot breath fog it up so that I could see nothing but white inside and outside. Today marked the end of the twentieth century, I thought. Despite what had just happened between my parents, I thought we should make a note of it, do something special, commemorate what it was like to be alive in such an age. I could hear Harry’s voice mocking me in my head (“Seriously,” he’d say, “You are such a loser”); nonetheless, I went to get my camera and began to think up shots that would reflect the lifestyle of a twentieth-century person: the portable phone lying on the couch, my father’s yellow Jogman tangled up in knots, the computer sitting on the dining room table as if it were a person. The latter seemed to me the most telling, but just as I was setting up the shot my father wheeled out of the kitchen facing me head on, and—I couldn’t stop myself—I shot frame after frame of him advancing toward me, a grim look on his face, a dark smile buried in his eyes.

  “Nick,” he said, “come on. You understand.” It was not a question but a statement—and an incorrect one at that.

  My mother had taken a leave of absence from her job at the college day care center. She’d worked there even since its inception in 1985, when female faculty members began having children and needed a supportive, innovative curriculum that mirrored the Montessori schools, which all of them favored but couldn’t afford. My mother was the executive director, and therefore no one gave her any grief when she announced she was leaving to help her husband and would return after the first of the year. She’d left the place (which smelled of canned peas, wet diapers, and bleach) in the hands of the assistant director, Lorraine Ford, a woman I heard my mother complain about absolutely every single day when she came home from work. Lorraine was old (in her sixties), set in her ways, had never had children of her own, and was simply, according to my mother, intolerant. Nonetheless, she was happy to be in charge and kept my mother abreast of the goings-on by calling her every Friday evening with a full report. My mother actually seemed to cherish these calls. She’d take the phone into the kitchen, pour herself a cup of hot tea, and sit at the kitchen table with her feet drawn up underneath her and exclaim, agree, nod, or question whenever it was appropriate. I could sense these calls gave her one last bit of contact with the outside world since it seemed ours had shrunk after my father’s accident.

  It’s not that my father was helpless on his own. Most of the time my mother could leave him alone for stretches of time and it was fine, but once, and only once, my mother had run across the street to her friend Lucy’s, ostensibly to borrow an egg for something she was going to bake, and didn’t come home for at least a couple of hours. Harry was gone as usual, and I had been up in my room on the phone with a friend. When my mother came home, she’d reported to Harry and later to me that my father had been on the floor between the kitchen and the bathroom; he had fallen trying to get himself on the toilet and couldn’t manage to hoist himself up. He’d cut his elbow and scraped up his face. “We must never, never leave him alone when there’s not an aide in the house,” my mother admonished us when he was napping later that same day. “Let’s make that a family rule.” It seemed she was talking more to herself than to us, though we both nodded sagely and agreed that the dangers were more than any of us had thought.

  Our mother’s going back to work coincided perfectly with Harry’s and my return to school, leaving our father in need of an aide in the house from eight to three every day. He already had a steady crew with Belinda, Rhonda, Julie, and Hank, but they all worked for many different “clients,” as they called them, and my mother feared my father might fall through the cracks if we didn’t hire one of them permanently and exclusively. Again, my father’s generous insurance plan had agreed to cover what for others would have been considered a luxury.

  Even though it was freezing outside, we all sat around the dining room table the evening before our various returns to work and school eating bowls of maple nut ice cream. My father, who’d declined a bowl, presented a problem with this plan as we all ate: he insisted that he was ready to go back to work immediately and wouldn’t be needing any aides at all. He vowed to plunge back into his old life with what seemed a falsely inspired enthusiasm. “I’m ready,” he said. “Look at me!” He lifted his hands up in the air and made fists.

  I’d heard him several times on the phone discussing cases he’d left in the hands of his two partners, but I was never able to gauge what their reactions were to his comments, which were sometimes off the wall and hard to understand. Sometimes his memory switch seemed to trip on and off at a moment’s notice. One minute I’d think he was following what I was saying, then the next minute he’d ask me how school was even though he’d only just asked (and I’d answered) that very same question.

  “Peter,” my mother said, her speech padded by the ice cream melting on her tongue. “You’re going to have to give it some time, remember? We talked about this.” I couldn’t help thinking she’d started talking to him as if he were a child, but then that was the custom of someone who interacted with small children on a daily basis. “Try to be patient, huh?”

  He glowered at her, then looked at Harry and me as if for support. “What do you guys think?” He placed his hands on his lap and waited. “I mean, wouldn’t you guys like to see me out there being a productive member of society again instead of sitting around here all day?”

  Being played as a pawn between my parents was more than I could stand; there was no way to win. I cocked a single eyebrow at Harry (he’d always been jealous of me for this skill he lacked) to help me out. He was older—let him step up to the plate for once, I thought. But I knew the only reason he was home with us at all was because Rebecca and her family were in Buffalo for her grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday party. He’d been moping around bored all day without her.

  “Dad,” he said. He licked his spoon clean on both sides and tried to hang it off his nose. It fell, clattering to the floor. “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone,” he said. He picked the spoon up and tried again. “Especially to us. I mean, come on.”

  My father turned instantly to my mother and laughed. “I see you’ve trained them well,” he said. “They know just the right things to say. Gotta perk their old dad up, right? Gotta be supportive. Rah, rah, rah!” He pounded his fists on the wheelchair arms. Then, after turning his chair in a semicircle, he said, “I mean, wouldn’t you guys like to see me out there being a productive member of society again instead of sitting around here all day?”

  None of us said a word. For a second I wondered if he was having a laugh on us. But then he said, “I’m ready! Look at me!” He even raised his hands up in the air again as best he could and made fists. We listened as he rewound the whole conversation for us and seemed to have no idea he was doing so. “Can I have some ice cream?” he said. “What are you eating?”

  My mother hung her head over her bowl like she was praying. Harry went to the freezer and dished him up a bowl. I sat quietly trying to make myself disappear.

  Life settled into its own odd routine again after the New Year. We’d hired Julie as my father’s caretaker not because she was necessarily the best but because she lived in town and could get to us even when the weather made the roads impassible. She also had a degree in psychology from the local college, was a trained aerobics instructor (and was strong, an importa
nt factor in lifting), and had once assisted a New York state congressman who’d lost both his legs in a car accident. She was twenty-eight years old, according to our mother, but looked my age. Every time she was in the same room as me I found myself dropping things, bumping into walls, excusing myself for some misstep or other. But Julie always smiled warmly at me. She’d place a caring hand on my shoulder or rub my back in quick, therapeutic circles and say, “How we doin’ today?” What I loved was her thick blonde braid that hung down her back like a Viking’s. In fact, everything about her seemed Nordic and indestructible: her large, wide frame, her cool blue eyes, her blunt and capable fingers that could lift, grip, tuck, and smooth.

  “If you ever want to talk ...” she said one day after I’d come home from school and stood watching the all-news cable channel in the living room. The millennium hadn’t caused as much trouble as they’d thought, and now even that was a news story. I didn’t realize she was talking to me until I turned around and saw it was just the two of us in the room.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “right. Thanks.” My backpack lay at my feet, and I quickly picked it up and ran upstairs. In my room, I lay on the bed looking at the picture I’d taken of Julie the first time she’d come to care for our father. The lighting was dark, which I liked, but the detail I really loved was that she held a piece of paper between her teeth. It was our address, scrawled down on a grocery receipt. You could tell from the photograph that she thought it was funny, getting her picture taken like that. You could tell she had a great sense of humor by the way her eyes gave off their own light.

  That evening my mother had her monthly staff meeting, which was always followed by a round of drinks at Blue’s Tavern; she had warned Harry and me that she’d be home late so we should help out with dinner. Since Julie was not just my father’s aide but also a fabulous cook, she often went ahead and pitched in with dinner if it seemed like our mother was too tied up. I could smell a garlicky marina sauce that practically made me swoon as I went downstairs. The living room was dark, and I found the kitchen steamed up with water boiling for noodles. Julie stood holding a bouquet of noodles, waiting to drop them in. Harry was gone and my father was nowhere to be seen. I thought it was too late for his nap, though.

  “Where is he?” I asked. I never knew if I should refer to him as “Dad” or “Peter” or “my father” with her, so mostly I just avoided it.

  “Actually he’s out,” she said. She must have registered my surprise, because she said, “I know! Isn’t it great? His first big outing.” She threw the noodles into the water and stirred with a wooden spoon.

  Even though the temperatures still hovered around zero, the snow had thankfully tapered off so that the snowplows had finally been able to clear the streets. Everyone had dug themselves out and most of the sidewalks were clear. Still, I couldn’t imagine where my father had gone off to, and with whom, and I asked Julie these things.

  She stood with one foot balanced against the other leg. It looked like a yoga move. “Well,” she said, “friend of his from work, I guess. Rose?” She turned down the noodles just as they were ready to foam over the sides and make that horrible burnt smell I hated. “She said they were going to get some sushi, and—”

  “In Rochester?” I asked. I was starving but couldn’t focus on the thought of food.

  “Well, you certainly can’t get sushi in this sorry town,” Julie said. “I mean, right?” Bellport was not exactly known for its restaurants. It had two Italian places, two Chinese places, pizza parlors galore, and one struggling Mexican restaurant that no one liked much because the food was authentically Mexican instead of the fast-food fare people had come to expect.

  “So when will they be back?” I glanced nervously at the clock, gauging how long it would take my mother to return.

  “Pretty soon,” she said. “They left about an hour and a half ago.”

  I thought about this. I hadn’t heard any vehicle pull up, but then I realized I’d been listening to music with the headphones on. I’d let my guard down, which I should’ve never done.

  “How about Harry?” I asked. “Where’s he?” Suddenly I had a panicked realization that it might just be the two of us for dinner.

  “Take a wild guess,” she said. She poured the noodles into a colander and spoke through a cloud of steam.

  “Rebecca’s?” I glanced in the dining room and noticed the table was set for two.

  “Bingo.” Julie ordered me to take my place at the table as she served. She pulled a basket of warm garlic bread from the oven and two fresh green salads she’d already prepared from the refrigerator. “Sit, sit,” she said while I hovered uncertainly around my chair. “I’ll join you in a second.”

  I sat. She came back with a bottle of red wine and poured herself a glass. “I shouldn’t really be drinking on shift,” she said, “but just a small glass. While your father’s gone.” She lifted the bottle towards me, then seemed to think better of it. “If you were old enough, Nick ...” she said. “Sorry.”

  I laughed nervously and drank from the ice water she’d poured into my glass.

  “Unless you can keep it a secret?” she said. She scrunched up her face uncertainly, and there was again that look I’d caught in the photograph of her: a sense of fun bordering on transgression.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Better not.” I heard my voice crack on the word not and wanted to erase it.

  “I’m sorry—do you pray before meals?” she asked, fork poised above her plate.

  “Oh no,” I said. I tried to modulate my voice so it wouldn’t betray me. “That’s something we never do.”

  “Well then,” she said, “bon appétit.” She raised her wine to my water.

  I thought of my father eating raw fish in Rochester with a woman my mother had accused him of sleeping with. Up until this point, I’d been operating under the assumption that my mother’s insecurities had simply given way to full-blown paranoia. Yes, my father was a good-looking man. Yes, he had a certain charm that was hard to resist—or he used to. But these days I didn’t know what was true, and maybe, I thought, I didn’t want to know.

  One Friday night in late January, my mother and father were playing cribbage in the living room. Our cat, Nomad, kept batting playfully at the cribbage pegs as if she were a kitten and not the old timer she really was. There was nothing good on television, so I had it muted on a weight lifting program on ESPN while my father played jazz on the stereo. He kept telling me to really listen for the oboe, because that was what he wanted me to take up next year in band. I had never played an instrument and didn’t intend to. I was all about my camera and harboring the secret fantasy that I would one day become a famous photographer known for my edgy portraits. I’d already decided I’d call my outfit simply “Foster” and sign all my photos that way, electing to keep my first name out of it in order to appear serious. I guessed that I’d likely have to move down to New York City to make an honest go of it.

  That night it was snowing again in such a way that when I looked out the window, the flakes seemed to be flying horizontally across the sky. We’d all become so accustomed to it that winter, though, that people simply carried on as usual. Harry, in fact, had convinced our parents that it wasn’t bad enough to keep him from going to the Black Cat in Rochester to see a new film noir with Rebecca. Her father was an English professor who specialized in film studies at the college, so she was always prodding Harry towards more intellectual movies than he was naturally inclined. Earlier, I’d heard him scraping his windshield in the driveway, then the muffled sound of his door slamming, then the little wind-up sound of reverse as he backed onto the street.

  The phone rang and I was sure it had to be Harry, telling us he was stuck somewhere and couldn’t make it home. I thought maybe he was even using it as a way to spend the night with Rebecca somewhere and applauded him his cleverness. I knew they had sex, because Harry, whether carelessly or purposely, left boxes of condoms in plain view on his dresser. Every tim
e I went in there to ask him something or borrow something, they sat right there, exposed. I guessed my mother didn’t even see them. She was too caught up in other things.

  I was both right and wrong about the phone call—right in that it was Harry but wrong about the purpose of the call. When I picked up, I could tell he was on Rebecca’s cell phone, because the connection was fractured and there were blank spaces punctuating his words. The only thing I could make out was that he’d totaled the car. “Totaled it—shit—” was what I caught. My mother eyed me hard and held her cribbage peg above the board. My father looked at me sheepishly, and the echo of my mother’s words, “just like his father,” rang in my ears.

  “Where are you?” I said, then repeated it, louder. “Harry?”

  My mother popped up. Even though it was only eight thirty, she had already changed into her pajamas and a light blue fleece robe I would later always associate with that horrible winter. “Is he okay?” She stood next to me, smelling like the peach-scented lotion she rubbed on her hands and arms every evening after dinner in long, smooth strokes that struck me as almost sexual. She grabbed the phone brusquely out of my hand. I figured she was responding in flashback mode to my father’s accident and gave her a wide berth.

  “Harry, what happened? Where are you?” Yet again I was left standing helplessly beside her while she received bad news. Assured that he was okay, she ordered him to call her back on a regular phone with all the details. After she hung up, we all sat looking at each other with big eyes. I thought it must’ve been illuminating for my father to experience what it had been like for us the night he’d had his accident. This way he could see how much pain one family member could cause another. But I was beginning to lose faith in our family’s relationship with fate. What were the odds of two misfortunes so close together? I was beginning to think the best course of action was to simply stay housebound.