by Bob Morris
“Do me a favor, Bobby,” he says, as he hands me the keys. “Get the car for me.”
“Why, Dad?”
“I’d rather not walk in the cold. My hip is bothering me.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “The car’s right there, just a minute’s walk. You have to walk a little. You can use the exercise. It’s good for your circulation.”
“Please, Bobby. Just get the car for me. Why do you have to argue?”
Why do I have to argue? It’s just that he can be so lazy. Joe Morris is a man who refuses to walk anywhere. He once refused to get out of the car in California to take in a redwood forest I desperately wanted him and my mother to see.
“I can see from here,” he said.
“Dad, please get out. I promise it’ll be worth it.”
“You go ahead. I don’t feel well.”
“Really? What’s the matter, honey,” my mother asked.
“I’m nauseous. I think it was the drive up here,” he moaned.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You just don’t want to walk. Come on, Mom, come with me.”
“I think I’ll stay here with Dad,” she said.
“No, you won’t. Come with me.”
I’d been living in mellow central California for a year, meditating, taking the kind of drugs that were supposed to give you some detachment and perspective in the late 1970s, before Prozac totally removed bad moods from the culture. But I was too angry to accept no for an answer. I walked her to the beginning of a path into the forest, well marked and unthreatening in the filtered light of a California afternoon. She hesitated.
“Come on, Mom,” I said.
“I don’t want to, honey. I’m worried about Dad.”
“He’s fine.”
“It’s not nice to leave him behind in the car.”
This was nothing new in our little Oedipal triangle. By early adolescence, I wanted her love as much as he did, and as the soulful son with artistic aspirations, I wanted to lead her to the enriching experiences he couldn’t provide.
“Let’s go back, honey,” she said.
“Okay, but first I want you to look up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just look up.”
She did. Up above, the branches of redwoods rose into infinity, catching the sunlight like windows in a cathedral.
“See that, Mom? See how the branches are moving?”
“Oh, look,” she whispered. “It’s like they’re praying.”
It was a delicious moment. I had rescued her from him and his limiting ways. Not that she was so expansive. She was limited, too, the one who worried in contrast to his freewheeling spontaneity. She fretted each time I wanted to change jobs. She canceled plans because of snow flurries. She worried too much about the future. The wind increased, the trees swayed. Suddenly, Mom turned to go, breaking the spell. I stood, stock-still.
“You’re going back to the car?” I called out.
She turned. “I have to. You stay as long as you like. We’ll be waiting.”
I let out a sigh. My father had won. She was his captive. I still don’t know why I dragged him to that redwood forest. What was I thinking? The only thing nature does for him is make him sneeze. Mountains? A little too high. Beach? Too much sand for his taste. He has no idea what is good for him. And even though he’s old now, that doesn’t mean he’s wise. His Pavlovian response to my message machine beep is a captain’s log of superficialities—what he ate for dinner, where he played bridge, the plot of the movie he just saw, that goes on and on from here to eternity, or at least until his voice is finally unceremoniously cut off by the beep. My mother tried to tell him not to leave long, rambling messages. He told her to stop nagging him. He’s telling the same thing to me now, in the parking lot of this diner, where he is refusing to walk to his car. I stomp off to get it with the angry little steps of a five-year-old who can’t have his way.
Are we going to be working this same material until he dies? If he goes from loving to furious around me from time to time, it’s only because he doesn’t know how else to respond to my nagging and cynicism.
We drive to the train station, passing the endless athletic fields of my youth. By the age of ten, I wanted my father to be like the other jock fathers in our community. He was great at singing in the car, teaching me jokes, and helping me make funny home movies. But I could see he was as uncomfortable as I was with a football or basketball. It took some effort to keep from being bullied in gym class. Well, like father, like son. He liked Ping-Pong. He liked tennis. Wimp sports.
When I was twelve, I was on the court with him at our beach club for a father-and-son end-of-summer tournament. It was a sticky night, and the bay smelled of seaweed. The lights were on, glaring white mercury beams overhead that might have been towering over a prison. My tennis whites were my uniform. I felt totally trapped. I wanted to be home watching the new fall sitcoms. It was, after all, the debut season of The Partridge Family. We weren’t going to win this match. Why did I have to bother going through such motions? I moped around the court, rolling my eyes. My father had an oddly good game based on annoyingly high lobs, drop shots, and dinks. Sometimes he’d even switch hands when he played, totally confounding opponents as he sent balls sailing slowly past them. He was always an encouraging and gentle partner. “Move up! Bend your knees! Watch your alley! That a boy!” He meant well. But his unsolicited coaching drove me crazy. I kept double-faulting.
“Throw the ball higher,” he said, with increasing intensity.
“Get back up to the net, Dad,” I snapped.
He would not. He needed to stand on the baseline and give me pointers. Our opponents were waiting, and so was the crowd of people watching us from lawn chairs.
“Leave me alone, and just play,” I said in a voice wavering between boy and man.
“I will when you stop double-faulting. Give me a nice high toss on your serve.”
I did and served better. We won a point. At the next, we found ourselves together at the back of the court, an awkward place. A ball came right to my backhand.
“Got it!” I called.
He poached it right out from under me and lobbed it too shallow. Faster than you could say “bonk,” an overhead smash humiliated both of us. Why didn’t he let me take that shot? The next thing I did—and I still see this in slow motion—was rear back and, with my well-honed backhand after years of lessons, nail him hard with my racket right in the center of his right arm.
“Oh!” the crowd gasped.
“Ow!” Dad cried. He dropped his racket and went hopping around the court like a turkey full of buckshot. More gasps from the onlookers. “Oh my goodness,” said Selma Weinstein as she stood up from her beach chair in shock. Mary De Luca put out her Kent in her ashtray and called out, “Joe, are you all right?”
He gestured at her with his hand, as if to say, Get away! I’m fine.
Sadly, I can’t even remember feeling concern for him. Just embarrassment at his reaction, not my behavior. I had not hit him that hard. And it was with a wooden racket, after all, not one of the new metal ones coming into vogue at the time. Why couldn’t he just smack me back in retaliation and tell me we were going home? Maybe if he’d been a tougher guy, I wouldn’t have taken such advantage of his gentleness.
“So then, nothing else to report?” Dad is asking at the traffic light near the station. Breakfast is already repeating on me with the unpleasantness of childhood memories.
“No interesting trips planned? Anything new with your social life?”
“Social life, Dad? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Romance, the usual.”
“Um, no, but thank you for asking”
“Okay, fair enough,” he says as we roll into the station. My train is already on the track. How many times have we barely made it to a train because he is so habitually late? How many times has he kept me waiting here when I’d arrive from the city? Is this why I’m always so late myself? I see him and
am terrified he’s the man I will become. And because I’m good at blaming, I resent him for the bad habits he’s passed on to me.
“My train’s already up on the track,” I say, interrupting the plans he’s trying to make for next weekend. “I’ve got to go, Dad. Talk to you later.” I grab my bag and jump out of his car, slam the door, and run for the train, suddenly feeling alive again to the possibilities of my city life far from this stifling suburbia.
“See you, Dad!” I run and make the train as the warning bell rings and the doors close. From my window I watch his car leaving the parking lot and making a left turn toward the home where he now suddenly lives alone.
It is only as the train picks up speed that I realize I didn’t thank him for breakfast or extend a hand to him to say good-bye.
CHAPTER 3
Fa La La, etc.
Holiday time is always a good run for me, party-wise. Without the pressing concerns of getting home for Christmas stocked with presents, I’m free to flit from one overreaching event to the next. And when you traffic in my socially superficial style world, the invitations keep coming. Staff party for the posh travel magazine where I’m a contributing editor. Annual blowout in Soho given by the hipster president of a big publicity agency. I am booked every night in the middle of December, showing up in the red plaid Christmas pants that I hope people know I’m wearing with irony. Other nights it’s all about the black velvet jacket that reeks of all the sophistication my upbringing lacked. Usually, I arrive alone at parties, with nobody on my arm. And that’s okay because I’ll know all kinds of people once inside. These are my party friends—journalists, stylists, publicists (but no socialists) with whom I’m intimate at the least-intimate occasions—the hot dressers and hot nobodies, like me, who are best friends for a few hours once a year.
“Bob, that last column was a riot!”
“Bob, you’re so fabulous, why don’t you have someone?”
I rarely answer. It’s Christmas Eve now, and I’m with my pal Marisa’s family in New Jersey. Marisa is a bling-dressing, high-stepping cartoonist whose vixens have blown-out hair and blown-up breasts. We’re taking a cigarette break outside in the misty December air. My problem with Marisa these days is how preoccupied she is with her new love, Silvano, the owner of an important Italian restaurant. It’s been hard adjusting to her recent infatuation. Just last fall, when she was complaining about how he flirts too much with the beautiful women who accost him in his restaurant, I told her to let him go.
“Love is as overrated as Tuscany,” I said. “And so is marriage.”
“You’re just jealous I have a boyfriend, Bob,” she snapped.
“Well, don’t be looking for an engagement ring is all I’m saying. And for God’s sake, don’t be giving up your apartment just because you’re shacking up with him.”
“I can’t believe you’re so cynical about love,” she said.
I can’t either. But since then, her relationship has solidified, and I have learned to curb my cynicism, even though I still mock her for being at his beck and call. She’s happy—she’s found someone who makes her laugh all the time. And deep down I know she’s right—I am jealous.
Marisa’s parents are pleasant people with a modern 1970s ranch. They are as proud of her as my father is of me. Her art is all over their walls. But she doesn’t seem embarrassed by that. In fact, she seems completely at ease in her childhood home. Her sister is here with her husband and child. It doesn’t bother me to be the lone single person at the table. And I’m not at all surprised when, after dinner, Marisa announces that she and Silvano are getting engaged. Like everyone else at the table, I make a big noise of congratulations. Raising a glass, I say, “I couldn’t be happier for you, babe.” But driving home alone past the competitive Christmas lights of the deep Jersey suburbs, I let out a sigh. “Well, so much for her,” I mutter. One more friend lost to love and marriage. I’ve been watching my friends march off into the battlefields of love for years now, and I’m always on the sidelines, waving good-bye.
When I get back to the penthouse of my brother and family, where I usually stay alone for the holidays so I can pretend to be wealthy, the phone rings. My brother is calling from Palm Beach. Every year, he makes it a point to drop in with his family and play the good son, before heading farther south to the Caribbean, where the weather is much better. He’s staying at The Breakers this year. Florida has been cold and rainy. But he is enduring it so Grandpa Joe can see his grandchildren. I know my father appreciates their visit. But this year he hasn’t been around to dote much.
“He blew us off for brunch today,” my brother’s telling me. “Can you believe that?”
“What was his excuse?”
“Who knows? I bet it was a bridge game.”
I laugh. “He ditched you for bridge?”
“Yup. We use up half our Christmas vacation to be with him in fucking Florida, where it’s cold and rainy, and he’d rather play bridge than see us. He’s too busy running around to spend time with his own grandchildren.”
I’m thinking that would be fine with me. How much of the old man does he want to see anyway? How much driving around in his car seeing the nonsights? But my brother doesn’t think that way. To him, it isn’t about what fun he can have with my father. It’s about the appropriate face time a family should have together—obligation and respect. He’s in Florida, thinking that this would be the year to huddle together, think about Mom, mourn, and heal. But Dad plays ditchy-do.
“Are you going to tell him you’re disappointed?” I ask.
“What good would that do,” he says. “If he doesn’t want to talk about Mom, it’s his problem.”
“Well, it’s nice you’re down there,” I say. “You’re doing the right thing.”
“Yeah,” he says, “but I can’t wait to get out of here tomorrow.”
Frustrating as he can be at times, with the expectations he has for impeccable behavior from all of our family, Jeff is a good man. And I miss him now. I miss his good-natured wife, Janet, and the children, too. It’s so quiet in this apartment without all of them. I’m used to being here when my cerebral niece and rollicking nephew are all over me. I’m used to being the crazy bachelor uncle who blows in to entertain the family with irreverent commentary, and makes every birthday party into a Vegas floor show. Just as my brother and his wife depend on me to spice up the conversation and get them reservations at tricky restaurants, their children depend on me to be the naughty entertaining uncle. And I depend on them for the intimacy that comes when you read children stories at night, hold their hands while crossing the street, sit them on your lap and make funny noises into their ears. They are as much my children as I’m ever likely to have in life. I live for their giggles. But right now I have this elegant penthouse that’s usually so full of their laughter all to myself. All my friends are out of town somewhere fabulous. My father is having fun in Florida. Me? I’m here feeling like the tired and lonely old man he’s supposed to be. The Empire State Building is lit up red and green. The stars are out over the city. Silent night. Silent week. And that’s okay. I’d rather be alone than tangled up with someone who isn’t just right for me. New Year’s Eve is coming. I don’t have a date. Nothing new. It’s fine. Alone is fine.
CHAPTER 4
Flori-Dada
Palm Beach International Airport is clean, manageable, and suburban, just the way my father likes his life. It’s January now, four months after my mother has died, and with the lonely holidays behind me, I’m making one of my winter visitations when airfare is cheap. It’s a strange feeling, knowing my mother won’t be at the airport to meet me. Sometimes I miss her. Most of the time, now, I am relieved not to have to worry about her failing health. It surprises me how often she is out of my mind completely.
With carry-on bag on my shoulder, I emerge from the jetway, passing the usual herd of white hairs. Ladies in sequin sweatshirts. Men in windbreakers and baseball caps. All in every shade of pastel imaginable
. It’s a flock of snowbirds thick as pigeons. They are all waiting for their children, grandchildren, anyone young to get off the plane from New York. These migratory retirees—white and middle class—number nearly a million in Florida. They are aggressive about their pursuit of the good life, and proud to show their kids the orange tree in the backyard, the alligator in the lake by the golf course, and to gift them with the warmth of the sun. As they greet their cherished visitors at the airport, they beam with pride. Yet there’s desperation in their eyes, I think. Is it reasonable to expect so much pleasure from your children? Is it reasonable to expect anything but the same old patterns of behavior from parents?
I step out onto the sidewalk and here’s something new: the front of Dad’s car is falling off. Half of the fender is mashed in and hanging off like it’s just had a stroke or been stricken with Bell’s palsy. The left side is steaming and hissing in the airport parking lot like a collapsed soufflé. I was planning on saving money on a rental by using his car while down here. I always stay with him because hotels are very expensive. The whole point was to get in some face time with both him and the sun without paying for much except airfare. The freelancer son takes a holiday. Now I won’t have any wheels to use to escape him. I tell myself to stay pleasant, avoid confrontation.
“What happened, Dad?”
“I hit the median.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all.”
“Don’t tell me you were talking on your cell phone.”
“I was calling to check your flight status.”
“Or were you answering a call from any one of your friends? I told you to stop answering that phone when you’re driving. You’re going to have your license revoked. Imagine not having a car around here! What would you do, Dad?”