by Bob Morris
“Please, Bobby, don’t start nagging at me. You just got here.”
This is not good, not the plan at all, to start off so poorly. We’ve had so many awful fights down here in the past. Always about control. We both have very firm ideas of how things should be done. Where to eat and what time, for instance. The volume of the TV in the living room. Sliding doors to the balcony opened or closed? How strong should the coffee be? Important things, the stuff of life. Once, when my mother was still alive, Dad and I fought so hard about something so minute it seems absurd to describe it (the proper exit from a mall, okay?), and I actually threw his backseat car door open on Federal Highway—this was around midnight—and told him to pull over so I could get out and walk to a hotel. He told me he was sorry I had come to visit. I told him to fuck himself, all this unfolding right in front of my mother, who never swore and hated seeing her “boys” fight. Big drama over nothing. But uncontrollable as the weather.
According to a therapist whom I was talking to at a bar down here, children do tend to get into conflicts while visiting their snowbird parents in Florida. It’s a combination of factors. Personal space issues for one, agendas for another. The kids want to get to the beach. The parents, who never set foot on a beach, want them home early so they can take them to early-bird dinner specials. They want to advise their children on how to raise children. Their children want them to butt out. They want to buy their grandchildren ice-cream cones, a deadly idea in an era of parents obsessed with childhood obesity. Control, control, control. Other than incest and alcohol, is there anything more disruptive to family dynamics? One friend of my parents, a perfectly nice, laid-back woman, had a daughter-in-law who didn’t like to see her having a couple of cocktails before dinner. So the daughter-in-law stopped bringing the grandchildren to visit. It was devastating and punitive. “She was drinking,” my mother explained at the time, “because her daughter-in-law was making her so anxious.”
Florida, in other words, can be a multigenerational mosh pit.
So why would anything go according to my carefully laid plans on this trip?
“We can still drive this,” Dad says as we pull out of the parking lot. “No problem.”
We approach the airport spur, with the front of his car rattling and smoking. Soon a distinct odor of burning—Toyota Teriyaki—permeates the air. People are driving past, giving us looks. My mood has gone murderous. The car seems to be getting worse by the minute. The temperature gauge is rising to high. I can’t take my eyes off it.
“Dad, we aren’t going to make it to your apartment,” I say. “It’s ten miles away.”
“Oh, yes, we are,” he says. “I can call Triple A from there.”
“The engine’s overheating. It’s about to catch fire. Pull over.”
“Not necessary. This is my car. I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you crazy? Pull over right now or you’ll end up getting us killed.”
We are in the middle of the little city of Palm Beach now, the billion-dollar sandbar I find so appealing. I love that he has made his winter habitat on the edge of such elegance. But I hate that his middle-brow silver sedan is now smoking and making a total spectacle of us at a red light on South County Road, within sight of two upscale restaurants and The Breakers hotel. A headband-wearing blonde in the palest blue cocktail dress crosses with her white poodle in front of us. She gives us a look that is both concerned and condescending.
“There’s a service station right here, Dad. You have to pull in.”
“I’ll do what I want. Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I will tell you what to do since you have no idea what you’re doing.”
Mad as it is, I grab the wheel and steer it to the right. He’s about to fight me when his cell phone starts ringing, or perhaps I should say singing. His natural tendency to answer a call in any situation takes over. He grabs his phone from his shirt pocket, letting me guide the car in as he applies the brakes and turns off the burning engine.
An attendant comes and looks at the broiling, hissing mess, shaking his head. “What happened?” he asks.
I just shrug and point to Dad, on the phone.
“Hello, Edie,” he’s cooing. “Marvelous to hear your voice! What a thrill!”
Edie?
Later, over dinner (next to the service station) at Chuck and Harold’s, one of the more pleasant restaurants on our regular list, he explains: “Edie lives down the road. I met her at a bridge game last year, and we played well together. She’s a terrific partner, and very pleasant to be with. A real friendship developed. Strictly platonic.”
“I certainly hope so,” I say evenly. “Mom was still alive last year.”
“But she wasn’t able to get out much,” he says.
I order another martini. What is going on here exactly?
An hour later, Dad’s car is declared out of commission. So a taxi takes us back to his apartment. It’s on Ocean Boulevard in a white wedding cake of a building called The President, sitting between the intercoastal waterway and the ocean. The owner, Dad’s landlord, has decorated it in a tasteful array of whites. The water view is very pleasant. Aunt Sylvia lives upstairs. She dresses like everyone else in this building, treating life as an occasion to look your best—women in pumps, men in sports jackets for brunch. Here life is not about sweatshirts and sneakers, and I like that. My mother never did. And my father’s essentially oblivious. He dresses how he wants.
The last time I was here my mother was still hanging on after five years of struggle. I can still see her everywhere in this apartment. There are even some leftover cans of Ensure, her dietary supplement, in the cupboard. Here’s the balcony where she used to hobble out in her housedress to watch me play tennis down below with Dad’s friends. Here’s the door that knocked her down in a fierce wind and ended up leaving her covered in bruises. She was so helpless. It was hard, watching her in her hopelessness. It was even harder seeing her thin, bruised arms and neck because she dressed in the most unflattering T-shirts. One day I convinced her to come downstairs to be with me on the dock. She sat in silence, her skeletal face sharp as a hatchet.
This was not the mother I knew, the one who was so easy to amuse.
“You know, Mom, we all feel bad that you’re so unwell,” I told her. “But it’s a sin to despair. Did you know that? I looked that up and found it in the Bible.”
“I look terrible,” she said. “My spleen is so enlarged I look pregnant.”
“But what is the point of being so down? You’re not in pain, are you?”
It wasn’t a fair question. Why should she cheer up at sixty-eight years old, with mortality hanging over her, years before it was due? She shook her head, thought for a moment. The wind whipped her thinning hair and slacks on the reeds that were her legs. Her neck was like a stalk sticking out of her T-shirt. Why couldn’t she dress up a little?
“Well, how about this? I won’t complain if you won’t criticize,” she said.
“Okay, but I just have to tell you one thing, Mom.”
“What, dear?”
“You could use some new shirts.”
“Oh no, honey. Please don’t start nagging about my clothes. I know I’m not stylish enough for you. I never have been. Why can’t you accept that?”
In a way she was right. A mother isn’t someone you can decorate according to taste, like an apartment. On the other hand, she is with you for life, isn’t she?
“It’s not about fashion, Mom,” I persisted. “When you get older, you can’t wear T-shirts and sweatshirts like that. It isn’t flattering, especially when your frame is so thin. You need shirts with collars, sleeves, and structure. It will make you feel better about yourself, I promise. And what’s with the hairnets? Aren’t those for bed?”
“My hair has gotten so thin,” she said as she touched it, yellow and wispy as sea grass blowing in the warm, salty wind. “When I step outside, it always gets messed.”
“So let’s see if we can get
you some hats, okay? Please?”
“Bobby, what’s the point?”
“Why not? What else do we have to do? It’ll be my treat.”
“Oh, all right. If you insist,” she said as she stood up. “Take me to Macy’s!”
So I did. In slow motion, we traversed a busy mall in Boynton Beach. And in the women’s department, with salesclerks looking at me suspiciously, as if I were a bossy stylist from hell, I found the half-sleeve blouses I imagined for her and bought them in several colors. Then she tried on hats that looked ridiculous. But she ended up laughing at her reflection in the mirror for the first time in years. And when we got back to the apartment, she tried everything on with the kind of energy I didn’t know she had anymore. For a woman who always said that clothes didn’t matter to her, those new blouses were making her feel better than all the pills in her medicine cabinet.
“Thank you, my little personal shopper,” she said.
I can still feel the touch of her lips on my forehead.
It’s morning in the apartment now, and I’m about to make Dad some French toast using Mom’s old recipe.
“So, Dad, Edie, huh?” I’m asking as I break eggs.
“Yes, and she’s great.”
“I was just thinking, is it a little early to be running around with another woman? I mean, it’s just a few months since Mom died.”
“It’s not that serious,” Dad says. “Edie’s not available all that often anyway. But when she is, we have fun. She’s the nicest woman I’ve met down here. Just a gem.”
As I shake my head in mild disdain (Kids these days!) his phone rings. It’s Edie. Thirty years fall off his face. His eyes get big as Alka-Seltzer tablets.
“Edie! I thought you were busy! No, I have no plans. I’d love to!”
The next thing I know, the French toast is languishing upstairs and I’m standing in his parking lot watching him get into Edie’s silver Lexus for a bridge game in Delray Beach, thirty miles away. She rolls down her window to look me over. She is silver-haired, carefully tanned, lipsticked, and wearing what looks like a Rolex on her wrist. Not pretty, but nicely put together. “You have such a handsome son,” she purrs. “And Joey, he looks just like you!” Then she blows me a kiss, rolls up her window, and drives him away. I watch her make a fast hard right turn onto Ocean Boulevard. Then I stand immobilized, eating their dust, a little in shock. For a moment there’s no traffic and I hear the ocean. I hear gulls calling out, too, in mocking tones. Are they laughing at me? I came all the way down here to visit my dad, and he just ditched me for an air-kissing seductress in a luxury sedan? Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have the day to myself. But I also have—as I stand in the sun in front of his building—an entirely unexpected feeling of emptiness.
I call my brother in New York, with the news flash.
“There’s a woman named Edie in the picture,” I say.
“You’re kidding.”
“That explains why he didn’t have time for you when you were down here.”
“Who is she?”
“All I know is she drives a silver Lexus that matches her hair. Three and a half months after Mom died, and Dad appears to be dating. Is this appropriate?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff says. “But since when has Dad been appropriate?”
CHAPTER 5
Geriatrix
Informational interlude. Here’s something I never knew before. Or let me put it another way. Here’s something I never had to think about until now: the Census Bureau estimates that 80 percent of all healthy widowers remarry, and many more end up in live-in relationships soon after a wife dies. There are no figures for senior dating or, as my dad calls it, “keeping company,” but ask boomers these days and they will tell you they have or know of an elderly parent who is reentering the dating game after being widowed. Men like my father have the demographics in their favor. There are three women available for every one of them, a virtual sample sale for those energetic enough to shop; and with longevity what it is today, not to mention pharmaceuticals, many are. To make it even easier for the men, they have no trouble dating younger women, while the overwhelming majority of widows tend to end up with men older than themselves due to the long-standing societal norms that even Demi Moore can’t undo.
One reason for men turning to dating soon after losing their wives? They enjoyed marriage the first time around. Another? They’re incompetent. “Babies,” one woman called them in an article I clipped on widowers and dating. In addition to being incapable of going to dinner alone (not necessarily the case with their busy female counterparts), men don’t like to come home to an empty house or do housework. They’re not just looking for love, they’re looking for lunch. Senior women, meanwhile, find it liberating to be free of the responsibilities of marriage and caregiving. They are more likely to be good at maintaining social networks that don’t even include men. Men who have lost their wives, on the other hand, are less adept at creating new social lives for themselves after so many years as half of a couple. So rather than spend a lot of time mourning, the way widows do, they get busy. As an old saying suggests, when there’s a death, women mourn and men replace. After a few weeks of not terribly expressive grieving, the men can be ready to move on. And that’s great, but what are the kids supposed to think the first time they see a freshly widowed parent in a car driving off on what appears to be some kind of date? And, more urgently, what the hell are they supposed to do?
CHAPTER 6
Cake, Rain
P.S. 27 is a public elementary school in Red Hook, a housing-project neighborhood in Brooklyn that is not near any subway stop. It’s so inconveniently located that I get sent out there in a chauffeur-driven town car when I make my four volunteer visits each winter. The organization that sends me pays for the car, an amenity that may seem counterintuitive to altruism, but works fine for me. It also helps that it’s a late-morning gig, so I don’t have to get up too early to make my contribution to society. As the author of one out-of-print children’s book—about a privileged little Fifth Avenue kitty with serious family issues—I am part of an “authors read aloud” program.
It’s a rainy Wednesday in February, six weeks or so after last seeing my father, when I get out of the car. Inside the school I sign in for a security guard. The fluorescent lights cast a harsh glow. The halls of the school are an institutional mint green. In the stairwells, there’s Cyclone fencing. Some children I pass in the corridors recognize me from previous visits and they yell and wave.
For someone so free of responsibility, volunteering in schools provides both real meaning for me and also, let’s be honest, something to brag about at dinner parties. My mother was always proud of me for my volunteer work. Oh, she worried about my going into dangerous neighborhoods, but she couldn’t help but be encouraging. She was a volunteer for years. She would read to people in a nursing home on Long Island and lead book discussions. I prefer to volunteer with children. I play ukulele, sing silly cat songs, read my book, and talk about writing.
I love an audience. Even second-graders will do.
Today, I’m not feeling so inspired. It’s my birthday, forty-five years old, and it does occur to me that, despite my ambition, I may be a little old to get much further ahead in life. There has not been another children’s book, let alone a series. My style column in the paper isn’t turning into a springboard for world media domination either. The other problem with my birthday, and I try not to let this bother me all that much, is that it falls on the day before Valentine’s Day. So it’s a double-barreled occasion for self-reflection.
Mrs. Stark’s classroom is on the third floor, across from the drinking fountain. It’s my second visit this winter. A sign on her door says, WELCOME AUTHOR BOB MORRIS! I open it and see a classroom full of faces focused on writing in workbooks. There are art and science projects all over the room. Mrs. Stark is a tough-talking young woman with a chipped tooth and a Brooklyn accent. She has what it takes to keep an overcrowded classr
oom in control, which seems to be, above all else, laser-sharp purpose and a sense of humor. She makes what I do for a living look like recess.
“There’s a chair for you there, Mr. Morris,” Mrs. Stark says.
I sit in an old tattered reading chair by the window.
“Okay now, class, stop writing,” Mrs. Stark says. “One, two, three!”
And just like that, they come to attention at their little desks.
“Look who’s here,” she says. “What do we say to our guest?”
“Good morning, Mr. Morris!” they call out in unison.
The enthusiasm is heartening. I must have done something right on my first visit.
“Now, class, I want you to take your things and find a seat—quietly—on the rug. No pushing. And leave Mr. Morris some room. Can you do that, please?”
With a minimal amount of fuss, they scramble to sit cross-legged all around me, vying for the spaces right under my feet. They stare at my ukulele. They work to sit up as straight as they can. They aren’t rich, but they are richly accessorized, with light-up sneakers, vivid Sponge Bob and Simpsons sweatshirts, and all kinds of plastic jewelry and geegaws in their hair. The new maximalists. They settle on the floor into a squirming, expectant mass, and Mrs. Stark calls them to attention again from her desk.
“Mr. Morris, before you begin, we have something we’d like to say to you.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Class? What do we have to say? One, two, three!”
There is a beat, about the length of time between lightning and thunder. Then, in perfect unison, they scream: “Happy birthday, Mr. Morris!”
Their delivery is kind of primal. And my response is, too. Tears fill my eyes.
“Now, class, starting with Juan,” Mrs. Stark says, “bring your things up to Mr. Morris.” One at a time, they shyly step up to me with handmade birthday cards.
I shake each hand and make a fuss over each card. When they are finished, Mrs. Stark leads them in the birthday song. When it comes time for me to sing my own songs back to them, they are watching me so attentively, so happy to have me here, that I lose control of my voice for a moment.