by Julia Pandl
“They keep the key here,” he said, holding it up. “You signed for this too.”
“Okay.”
He slid the key in the hole and lifted the lid. I felt a quiver of anticipation, as if that box contained some sort of miracle drug that would cure cancer and eliminate cankles. The pile of papers had a distinct, musty, back-of-the-garage-like smell. I recognized the odor from the old Gourmet magazines he had donated to the catering office. George picked carefully through each “document,” one by one, lifting it up, examining it, and setting it aside.
“This is Mom’s college diploma.”
“Thank God you’ve got that locked up.”
“This is an old copy of my will. The updated one’s at the house.”
“I know.”
“This is a pen.”
“Did you want someone specific to have it?”
“Here’s the title to Mom’s car.”
“Sure, absolutely,” I nodded. “Just in case someone steals Mom’s car, right? ’Cause those guys are lining up around the block.”
He held up another presumably important document, something with words blurred over the notary seal. “I don’t know what this is.”
“Dad,” I said, smiling, feigning disbelief. “Where . . . are . . . the . . . jewels? Where’s the cash?”
He laughed.
“C’mon, let’s go out to lunch.”
We walked across the street to Panera Bread. The place teemed with midday noise—spoons clanging, men and women chatting, kids screaming. We ordered our food and slipped into a booth, George on one side, Chrissy and I on the other. Halfway through his panini he looked at us and said, “You know, girls, I was thinking . . . about the movie It’s a Wonderful Life the other day. And . . . I realized . . .” He twitched. His eyes suddenly welled up. One quiet tear rolled down his cheek and socked me—both of us, I think—in the stomach. The surrounding noise fell to a dull murmur. “I realized . . . that I have had a wonderful life, kids. I really have. I have no complaints. I had a great wife, a great family. I did what I loved. Honestly”—twitch—“what more could I ask for?” He had a happy smile on his face, despite the tear. Chrissy and I just stared at him.
Those words, coming out of anyone else’s mouth, no doubt I would have called cornball. But watching my father serenely and unabashedly assess his eighty-one years was so profoundly reassuring that I felt like I was back in my childhood bed with my head on his stomach and my feet on the wall. Go ahead—try sticking that in a safe-deposit box.
8/20/07: Continuous pain med? Hospice??
8/21/07: Fentanyl Patch 12:50, 3 aspirin 3:30
So my siblings and I, we pulled our shit together. Not long after I moved in with Dad, we figured out that two of us spending the night with George was better than one. I lived there, and when I traveled for work my siblings cycled in and out. The calendar hanging on the fridge had two names scribbled on every day. Within a week, the number of toothbrushes in the glass next to the sink in the guest bathroom grew from one to seven. Somebody—Stevie or Jeremiah, I think—used mine. Starting when we were kids as a passive-aggressive form of torture, the practice of using the other guy’s toothbrush eventually became tolerated, even commonplace.
Impending death, just so you know, does not have the ability to kick history to the curb. It can’t. And do you want to know why? Because the child in us, not the adult, sits down at the bedside and holds the hand. Sure, we were taller, fatter, grayer-haired, and slightly more mature versions of ourselves, but we were the same kids who had doled out nicknames like Fatty, Witchy, Chubby, Lusky, Loser, and Little Lotta. We were individuals, and we were who we were, but by some miracle we all landed on the same page where George was concerned. We all understood, I think, that our future held no parents, so we let the past stay where it belonged.
In the beginning, Stevie stayed at the house a lot. We nicknamed him the A-Team, mostly because he displayed kind, gentle, hospice-nurse-like qualities, but also because he had inherited 90 percent of the family’s patience genes. The other 10 percent went to Johnny, Jimmy, Katie, Peggy, Chrissy, Amy, and Jeremiah. I did not get any.
I came home late from work one night and the house was dark, inside and out. I thought maybe Stevie had taken George out, but as soon as I got out of my car, I heard the TV. It sounded like a tank battalion rolling through the kitchen and out the back door. The volume on my father’s television went as high as sixty-four, and that’s where he liked it. Translate that into decibels, and it’s something like turning on a leaf blower and sticking it in a crib with an infant.
The two of them, George in his chair and Stevie on the couch, sat mesmerized in the glow of the screen.
“WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?” I shouted.
George shushed me, a little irritated.
“CAN YOU PAUSE IT FOR A SEC?”
Morphine had made the Pause and Mute buttons a little tricky to find. He stared at the remote with his finger at the ready for a good thirty seconds before finding the button. I glanced at the screen and saw a blurry black-and-white army of Nazi storm troopers stuck in mid–goose step.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“It’s about the war,” George said.
“I’m not sure it’s loud enough.”
“Dad wants to watch all his movies,” Stevie said. He smiled and took a swig of a Stella Artois.
George didn’t do movies, not like normal people anyway. First off, in terms of ability to operate the VCR, the thing might as well have been the space shuttle, and never mind the DVD player. When I was in college, on Friday nights the phone in my dorm room would ring, and before I could say hello, he’d say, “Okay, I’ve got the tape in, I pressed Play, and nothing’s happening.”
“Is the TV on channel three?”
“Oh . . . okay . . . there it goes.” Then he’d hang up.
Second, and you’ll have to pardon the expression, his movie collection sucked. He was a book guy and a bit of a snob when it came to films. To him, TV was ridiculous, asinine, and an insult to our intelligence. The two exceptions were games featuring the Packers and Seinfeld. Go figure. And he learned about movies while reading things like the National Catholic Reporter, Mother Jones, and the Progressive. Consequently, most of his selections remained wrapped in cellophane and consisted primarily of religiously and politically slanted historical dramas about people hardly anybody had heard of—guys like Alexander Nevsky and Andrei Rublev. They were great fun to watch if your other option was, say, prepping for a colonoscopy.
I rolled my eyes and said, “I’m getting ready for bed.”
An hour or so later Stevie brought George back to his room, and the two of us tucked him in for the night. After positioning his body neatly under the covers, and his hands in a casketlike fold, he looked up at both of us with weird, wide-eyed excitement and said, “Well . . . I think tonight’s the night, kids. I really . . . think it is.”
There was something hysterically comforting about his preparedness. Neither Stevie nor I could help but laugh at his let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road mentality.
“Dad,” I said, “if you can say ‘tonight’s the night,’ tonight is probably not going to be the night. But just in case it is . . . I love you.”
“I love you too. I love you kids.”
“I love you too, Dad,” Stevie answered.
At three in the morning we both heard him calling for us. Climbing out of bed and hurrying to his room, I wondered if perhaps he had been right. Maybe it is the night. Maybe this is it. The open door pitched a wide swath of light from the hallway across his body. His eyes were like saucers, his face paralyzed with terror.
I reached for his hand. “Dad, what’s the matter?”
“Kids,” he whispered quietly, petrified, “evil’s coming to town.”
“What?” Stevie asked.
“Evil . . . kids. Evil’s coming to town. Evil’s coming to town. Evil’s—”
“Dad!” I shook his arm. “Wake up. Y
ou’re dreaming. Wake up.” Still, I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see the kid from The Omen standing in the pitch black frame of the closet door.
“Evil’s coming to town.”
“Dad,” Stevie said, rubbing George’s leg, “it’s okay. It was just a dream. It’s fine.”
“Don’t leave, kids.”
“We’re not,” we replied in unison.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I told him.
“I don’t want to be alone.” He pulled his comforter over his chest.
“You’re not, Dad.” Again in unison.
“You’re not going to be alone ever again,” Stevie said.
We pulled up chairs and sat next to him until he fell asleep, neither of us saying a word.
At 6 a.m., Stevie and I met in the kitchen. I was making a pot of tea. He came around the corner in his boxers, his hair a slick, tangled mess. He stopped and stared at me.
“Know what’ll scare the shit out of you?”
He smiled.
“When your dying father tells you ‘Evil’s coming to town’ in the middle of the night.”
He scratched his head. “Think it was the movie?”
“Ya think?”
9/3, 6:00 a.m.: 1 morphine, 1 antinausea pill
11:00 a.m.: 1 morphine, 2 sennas
3:45: 1 morphine, 1 antinausea
Stella Artois, 1 piece of summer sausage
7:20 p.m.: 1 morphine, 9:30 p.m.: 1 morphine
It was Saturday, Labor Day weekend. Chrissy and I had snuck out for a couple of hours the night before, leaving Peggy in charge. Yes, I was a tiny bit hungover; I might as well admit that right out of the chute. The birds outside my bedroom window woke me up way too early. They’re pretty to look at, sure, but when they’re just out there, behind the shades, making noise on a Saturday morning, not so much. I flipped onto my stomach, pulled a pillow over my head, and wishing I had a shotgun, tried to go back to sleep. It was no use, though, because my bladder was awake too.
The house was dark, except for a few slivers of morning sun peeping through the dining room windows. Coming out of the bathroom, I looked down the hall and saw my father asleep. He looked peaceful and small. Cancer had taken weight off him so his CPAP machine had gone into the closet. Suddenly, like a little kid, I was overcome with the urge to climb in bed with him one more time. I wanted to grab a moment, one that was only his and mine, a quiet memory I could hang on to when all was said and done.
So I crawled in the bed, curled up next to him, and watched the pink wool blanket rise and fall along with his breathing. The ceiling fan whispered a little breeze over the two of us. I didn’t think anything, at least not that I can remember. I wanted to have deep thoughts. I really did. I wanted the journey, our friendship, everything, to come into focus. I wanted to be struck by a profound insight, some untapped philosophy about life and death, fathers and daughters. But George was dying; what else was there to know? I didn’t think. Instead, I lay my head on the pillow and put my hand on his shoulder. There was something harmonious about his breathing. His inhale and exhale were tempered and patient, like the birth of a new day. It was a tender moment indeed, chock-full of dramatic effect—as in, cue the theme song from Terms of Endearment. I knew it even then, and I was happy. But here’s the thing about tender moments . . . um . . . they’re tender, delicate, vulnerable to even the slightest variation in circumstance.
I closed my eyes, and before I knew what was happening the tiniest burp slipped out of my mouth. Honestly, it was infinitesimal, nothing more than a wee little hiccup, really.
“Julia?” he said, not moving.
“Yeah, Dad,” I said, anticipating something heartfelt and emotional.
“What did you eat for dinner last night?”
I rolled over and looked up at the ceiling fan. I tried to focus on just one blade as it whipped around in circles, but the motion made my eyeballs throb. “Um . . . let’s see . . . chicken enchiladas and about ninety-five beers.”
“Ugh.” He reached for the stainless-steel bowl—the same stainless-steel bowl my mother had peed in, the same bowl we continued to use to mix cookie dough and cucumber salad.
“Why?”
“Your breath is gagging me.”
“Well,” I said, chuckling, “I’ve got some really bad news for you, then.”
“What?” he whimpered.
“I just farted.” Again, infinitesimal, I swear. “And I think it might be a—”
Before I could finish my sentence, he barfed. And just like that, our tender moment vanished.
I wish I could say I helped him, but I didn’t. Instead, I cracked up laughing, rolled off the bed, and staggered down the hall. Shameful, sure. Embarrassing, absolutely. What else can I say? The truth is . . . sometimes reality stinks.
Antinausea, 1 morphine
Stella
1 morphine
Labor Day was different. It brought the grandchildren and a much sweeter reality, thank God. We had just finished dinner. I sat outside on the patio with a couple of the kids, poking my way around a battered pile of beef stew. George wasn’t a griller. He said it was too much of a hassle. So we didn’t do traditional Labor Day food—hamburgers, bratwursts, hot dogs, and chips on flimsy paper plates—like normal people. No, we did beef stew on my mother’s Wedgwood. The beef had been found in the back of the freezer, marked “St. Robert’s Tips, 2005.”
As I set my plate aside, one of my nephews, Michael, asked, “Can I borrow this book?”
“I think you can have it. Go ask Grandpa.” As I watched the screen door slam behind him, I thought, These kids really know him. They knew her too.
My parents were themselves as grandparents. They didn’t know how to be anything else. There was nothing multigenerational about their behavior. They were not touchy-feely; they did not have cute grandparent nicknames like Nana or Papa. They did not get down on the floor and play with my nieces and nephews, and they sure as hell did not babysit. The grandkids began piling up when I was just seven years old, long before my parents were ready, and one after another they marched into life until the number finally plateaued at twenty-four. My parents’ footing was precarious, I think, because their timing was off. The gap between their babies and their babies’ babies simply wasn’t wide enough. Still, they found ways to connect. My mother bought the gifts: birthdays, baptisms, First Holy Communions, confirmations, graduations, and Christmases. During Lent, when she quit smoking, she knit them sweaters, hats, and mittens, and the rest of the year she bought fancy Florence Eiseman stuff. Terry didn’t do trendy and she didn’t do cheap. She didn’t shop, either. Are you kidding? Shopping was for people with one, two, or even fifteen gifts to purchase. No, Terry didn’t shop, she bought. The people at Louise Godell, a children’s clothing shop on Silver Spring, scurried around frantically, licking their chops, when they saw her plugging dimes in the parking meter.
She was casually conversational with the grandkids, the same way she was with us, coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other. She was easy, approachable, and didn’t beat around the bush. Her map of the teenage psyche was tattered and worn, sure, but it didn’t matter; she was a pro at picking her way in the dark. Plus, she’d been over it a thousand times. Terry found her way in with them because she knew how to follow the crumbs. She knew which crumbs to pick up—faith and friendship, prudence and modesty—and knew which ones to leave behind—long hair, multiple piercings, loud music, mumbling, and sullenness.
And every year in July, George took them places, the girls and the boys separately. They went to the American Players Theatre and the House on the Rock in Spring Green, the National Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, the top of the John Hancock Center in Chicago, and the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. In time, these little excursions became affectionately known as the Grandpa Trips.
There were rules. Rule number one: no parents were allowed. Rule number two: you ha
d to be eight years old in order to go on the Grandpa Trips. This rule was broken only once. Julia, my sister Amy’s daughter and the youngest grandchild, was literally grandfathered in at age five. George never gave a reason. He didn’t need to. It was his trip. Rule number three: the older kids were “in charge” of the younger ones. Rule number four, instituted later, when the older kids could drive: no speeding.
Walkin’-around money was handed out. At the beginning of each trip, while sitting at a restaurant of George’s choosing (one that had a bar), they all received twice their age in crisp new bills, folded neatly in embroidered coin purses. With this money, the kids were allowed to buy whatever crap they wanted—stickers, beads, fireworks, or plastic dinosaurs. Of course, they had an elaborate system of fines too. If someone asked, “How long until we get there?” he or she was fined a quarter. The kids were allowed to order anything they wanted for lunch or dinner, but if they didn’t finish their meal, they had to pull out their walkin’-around money and pay for it themselves. As far as I know, it happened only once, and then the brokering arose. Meals were shared. The persnickety and the nondiscriminating eaters negotiated their way through pancakes, French fries, and steaks, and waste was eliminated.
After Terry and George moved back to Milwaukee, the Grandpa Trips ended on that patio. My siblings, the ones who had kids on the trip, would come over, sit around, and wait for the cars to pull up. It was always a whirlwind of stories about the plays, sure, or the museum, yes, but there were other stories too—about thirteen girls dancing in a downpour, which kid fell in a lake, which kid slept on the radiator, and which kid ordered a forty-dollar steak.
This Labor Day was quieter. I picked up my plate, went back into the house, and saw small stacks of books sitting on the kitchen counter, in the window bay, and on the couch. The other grandkids had followed Michael’s lead, picking out books. They chose poetry, religion, philosophy, and sports, whatever interested them, whatever they deemed inherently Grandpa. George did not buy books willy-nilly. The books he chose were always tied to an event in his life. Each one had a story bigger than its pages. Newspaper articles, theater tickets, and scribbled notes slipped to the floor as the kids stood around and leafed through the pages of Shakespeare, Dante, and Joyce. One by one they picked them up, carried them back to Grandpa’s room, and asked him to share the reason behind the purchase.