I left to wait for him by the front doors. That was February too and the streets were thick with black serpent-patterned slush, a hissing as cars passed. Eventually the party sounds started to die down, so I went back in, took his keys from his jacket pocket, put him in the back seat of his own Cutlass Supreme and drove him home as he, still in high spirits, sang “MacNamara’s Band” out of tune. My mother hadn’t waited up.
Now that he was sober, he liked to take taxis everywhere, as though he didn’t need to prove any more how lucky he was. His mood swings had moderated with old age so that I was taken off guard by this surge of energy in the middle of the night. My mother had never seemed particularly surprised by what her life with him threw at her. With her firm resolve, she kept to her schedule of giving piano lessons in the afternoons, watching Jeopardy in the evenings, deadheading roses in the summer. The Sunday morning she was told by the resident doctor that the leukemia diagnosed the week before would take her life was the day she willfully fell asleep and slipped away without a goodbye. She hadn’t won much at slots, but she had won the death lottery.
“I feel badly that she didn’t get to go again. She was packed and ready, but we didn’t go and then she died.”
This sad little narrative is a lot less complicated than their marriage was.
“So take me, Dad. I’ll go with you.”
He clucked, half laugh, half reprimand, and I could hear his dentures click. He had lost weight since my mother died and nothing seemed to fit him right. We were still sitting in the bank’s parking lot steaming up the windows.
“There’s no need for that. You never liked games. Not even cards when you were little.”
“You’re right. I always felt trapped, like I was waiting for Godot.”
“Who?” my father said.
“Godot. It’s a play. The coin falls the same way every time, with no way out.”
“If that’s the way life worked out, you’d win every time. If you knew … ”
“But that’s it, Dad. You don’t know. You’re just stuck in the pattern and have no real control.”
He shrugged and looked out at the parking lot. We had reached an impasse of sorts. He was hoarding his optimism, keeping it away from my dark fatalism. But I couldn’t let it go. For some reason, he made me angry.
“I’m not that lucky, you know,” I said.
“You’re alive, aren’t you?” he said but his voice was pensive, not snappish at all and I felt a little ashamed of my words, as though I was whining.
“Yes, you’re right. It’s a billion-to-one shot that I’m even here. Me and my broken cookie jar.”
“What cookie jar?” he asked.
“The only thing I ever won was a Noah’s ark cookie jar made in China. The giraffe snapped off at the neck within a couple of weeks. I won it at a bridal shower for a wedding that never happened.”
“Why not?”
“The bride-to-be slashed her fiancé’s leather couch with a knife and drove away—recklessly—into the night.”
He laughed. “He must have made her awfully mad.”
“Drinking was involved.”
“Well, those are some little kids that will never get born. And maybe that’s the biggest stroke of luck of all.”
I was surprised at this conversation, how perceptive, how direct, and so unlike the father I had known, who seemed so oblivious to life and so uneasy in his own skin most of the time, or at least when he was sober. Now that he was alone and in his eighties, he was taking a clear-eyed look around.
THIS IS HOW I end up at the casino with my father. He’s dressed in his best Las Vegas style, with a turquoise-stone cowboy tie cinched in with narrow leather cords, white shoes and a charcoal dress jacket that sharpens his shoulders and emits a faint sheen, almost electrical, like the skin of something that lives underwater in the dark. He sits below me at the high rollers’ blackjack table and I can smell his strong aftershave, a little too assertive, and the whiff of his urine bag strapped to his thigh. I’m used to it when he’s at home, but here, the smell is unpleasant and I wonder if the pretty woman standing before him dealing cards is holding her breath.
I am standing too, behind him, just to his right, and I wonder if he senses me, but he seems completely engaged in the game. Something brings out a side of him I have never seen before. He’s not grunting, caveman style, but he might as well be with the abrupt and bossy way he uses his hands. He taps his index finger on the green felt table to indicate that he wants a card, flicks the same finger dismissively, as though shaking off gristle and fat while dressing down a deer, when he’s decided to hold. The dealer follows his cues with her eyes. The exchange between them is wordless. And chips change hands. He loses $500, then gains $800. Neither of them acknowledges the loss or gain. She rakes his chips towards her firm belly or pushes them towards him. Her motions are like a tide sweeping a beach clean.
Then he’s down $5,000 and produces a handful of $1,000 chips from his inside breast coat pocket.
“Dad,” I whisper, “Didn’t you have a limit? You didn’t buy those tonight.” He closes his hands over the chips and leans his knuckles into his chest where his heart is so that I understand that these are the lucky chips that he’s carried with him from the night he found my mother’s purse. He’s spending his luck, like seed potatoes that have already yielded so much.
Although he seems in control, I see that one of his pants pockets is inside out, a flash of white like the tail of a fleeing deer. A dark bird flies across the overhead lights, but when I look up there’s nothing there. I think of that old saying: We enter and leave life with no pockets.
The dealer doesn’t look above my father’s bald head. My hope to catch her sympathetic eye fades although I don’t know what I mean to accomplish with my worried expression, my lifted brows. The cold at my back shifts as I’m aware of the warm presence of other people suddenly drawn to this table. All around me are other silent standing witnesses, barely breathing as he throws himself upon the laws of chance. Others are drawn to witness spectacular losses and gains. The hum of the slot machines beyond this quiet room is a constant high-pitched whirr of music, tuning for an orchestra that never begins, a spaceship that never lands, an expectation, anticipation, a sound calibrated to heighten the nervous system to alertness, a wind keening, carrying all of us towards the end of the world.
I can’t stand to watch my father any more. What bothers me is not really the throwing away of money, thousands at a time, but the prurient crowd pressing close to him that risks nothing.
“I’ll be in the slots room,” I tell him, but he’s too focused to do more than nod.
I find a quiet row and fish some quarters out of my purse but can’t find a place to insert them into the machine. The directions are too small to read without my glasses so I sit staring at the little cartoon cherry, watermelon, two oranges that spell out the last gambler’s parting shot.
“You need to put money on a card,” the man seated beside me says, not turning to look at me, not breaking his rhythm on the slot machine. “Machines don’t take change any more.”
“Thanks. Do you mind if I just watch?”
His focus and the way he nods reminds me of my father, although this man looks as though he’s been down on his luck all his life. We’re sitting off in this row of machines away from the crowds. These are the five-cent machines, unattractive to the glitzy gamblers in evening wear and high heels.
The sleeves of his plaid shirt are rolled up to his elbows, his jeans are cinched in by a leather belt and there are deep furrows on his brow and beside his mouth. His lips move slightly and I imagine a sibilant whispering sound although I can’t hear over the loud hum and ringing of the machines.
He hits the button with his closed fist and swiftly opens his hands, palms to the glass, to cover the spinning symbols. He only removes his hands when the line is fixed. Then again and again, in perfect rhythm, he hits and hides, hits and hides.
“Is that part o
f the game?” I ask him. “Are you more likely to win that way?”
“It’s just superstition,” he says.
If he can’t see what is coming, maybe the gods are more likely to be generous. If he is humble and patient and waits, even when the nights are so long they seem to go on forever.
I WAS LUCKY those afternoons after winter had retreated from the yard, the way time slowed down to sleeping and waking, occasional words.
More than most people, he must have known from an early age that death obliterates the numbers, or at least fixes them so that they have no vitality any more. Near the end, when he was weak but still came downstairs to sit in his easy chair in the sun, he told me that his grandfather had been a stonemason and had carved his own tombstone, along with his daughter’s and my grandfather’s. The stones were stored in the seed shed, too heavy to shift, but my father saw them from early childhood with their patient dates carved into the stone, grey granite for the men, pink for his mother, chiseled with the years of their births and the expectant hyphen.
“The stones vanished, one at a time,” he said sadly. “First my grandfather’s, then my father’s. When they reappeared in the graveyard with those end dates carved as though by the very same hand, it was as shocking to me as the mysteries of Easter Island.”
“Or Stonehenge,” I said.
“Lost people. Just gone.”
I could feel him tallying up numbers, seeing again those gravestones facing the sea in Nova Scotia. His grandfather—88 years; his father—83 years; and his mother—93 years.
What did your dad die of?” I asked him.
“Oh, just old age,” he answered, as though this state of affairs had nothing to do with him.
After a pause, he told me, “If I only got two more years from treatment, it wouldn’t be worth it. But I’m fine here. I’m content.” He must have done the calculations and estimated that he should be good for 89 years, far more than the 84 he currently had.
Less than two months is what he had from that moment of calculation.
WHAT WAS LEFT of the money he won, after a month-long losing streak, was spent on private nursing care, even when I had to be home or at work, so that he was never alone and no matter what he would never be subjected to the cheap exhibit of a flashing red light on the quiet crescent, no noisy sirens hospital-bound. No more being ferried across the river to open himself to fate. Fate was right there, in his dim bedroom where the curtains were drawn against the strong summer light.
He stopped drinking ginger ale one morning. Swallowing must have taken enormous energy because for the last couple of days he’d left his lids half-closed, his eyes rolled slightly upwards as though he was seeing a flickering reflection on the inside of his forehead.
I put the glass with its straw down and held his gaze.
“All done, then?” I asked.
He didn’t nod, but he closed his eyes. All that was left was the waiting. I didn’t long for the waiting to be over. His breathing changed like waves, shallower, then deeper, shallower and deeper, absences of breath now and then before the tentative intake of air started again. He needed nothing from me. I didn’t need to be there, but I wanted to be. How fortunate for me that our relationship would end when my orbit had swung back from the cold of deep space. In my years of being apart from him, I imagined how I would receive news of his death. I had steeled myself to distance, the protection of a starless void between us, expecting that he would die one day by his own hand.
During the last day or so, I sat staring at the dim white wall of his bedroom, not at him, wanting to give him some privacy and dignity. Memories of our past formed, vague and blurry, as though the wall was hung with an old sheet like those Sixties slideshows I only ever saw at other people’s houses. The images were fewer in number than I would have thought. The last six months were the most vivid. I thought of the morning, just six weeks before, when he was told that tumours lined his liver and lungs, his nodes, his viscera, and he asked me, “If it came on this fast, do you think it could disappear just as fast?”
“I don’t really think so,” I say. “No. Probably not.”
He was a living but finite man and maybe he deserved to hear better odds. I wish that I’d gone along with his hopes, given him a few more imagined years. Those years he felt entitled to now that there was peace after grief, his daughter back in his life, a run of good fortune. I wish I’d been more generous. Maybe he was asking for my words, my own hopes for him to be in my life longer. He wanted me to fill with ardent beliefs the way his wallet and pockets filled up with chips and cash, the way his body filled with the sinister exuberance of his own cells.
Feigning Death
I’VE FINALLY STARTED DREAMING about my mother. In the first dream she was quiet, buried under the driveway asphalt. Then I met her on the street—a polite greeting between the two of us. Finally, she’s sitting with me in my house, dividing up her possessions although there is no one else there to take what they are owed.
“I could give you the silver tea set,” she offers and I consider and decline. Her hostility is not aroused so I know this is a dream.
“But I’d like the tea cups from your bridal shower,” I say and she agrees, evenly. She picks up a blue-flowered cup and saucer that have miraculously appeared between us and they change hands.
Then she lifts the next object from my cherry table suddenly laden with these objects from my childhood. She holds her opal ring that is surprisingly not on her finger, as though considering where it best belongs. Her death is not mentioned or grieved although this is understood as the reason for this meeting.
“It’s beautiful,” I say quietly and she nods a little sadly, very regal, her hair blue-black as the last queen of Ireland she claimed she was descended from.
Then she puts the ring down between us without offering it to me. Her fingers are long and strong, the good architecture of a pianist.
THIS DREAM WAS so different from the last interaction I had with my mother in real life. A couple of hours before she died she rose from her bed and put her hands around my throat, softly reaching all the way around to the back of my neck—those strong dry fingers slipping into position with all her strength held in abeyance. The sensation was much like that of a milk snake that was once draped over my shoulders, the slide of its languid dry weight around my bare neck. Her hands felt as strong as that, and leisurely, as though there was all the time in the world.
I rose up gasping from the reclined chair, my heart pounding, an awkward scramble that seems to have become part of my physical vocabulary since turning 50. The light from the streets outside the hospital flickered across her bed. She hadn’t moved. The bruised arm lay still along her side, her face was angled slightly away from me. My hand was still holding the ball of her foot pointed as though wearing invisible high heels. Her stillness was a trick she was playing on me, as though feigning death.
WITHIN A FEW DAYS of her death, my brother and I started to tear her drawers and closets apart, pitching concert programs that dated back to the 1940s. Look magazines from the 1960s, olive-green sweaters pilled and stretched, pointy-toed shoes, crushed hats with moth-eaten fishnet veils and feathers, lists of her piano students and a tally of the fees they paid, starting with $2.00 just after the war, rising precipitously through the prosperity of the 1970s and reaching her all-time high of $40.00 an hour. We didn’t have the fortitude to call back the last student she had when she went into the hospital, an innocent voice on the answering machine wondering about her next lesson. Lists and expenses and receipts. My face grew hot when I saw newspaper clippings about my books, my younger face pixelated and yellowed. Little had I known all that she recorded, how much she needed to hang on to.
When my brother was out of the room, I opened her secret drawer, stuffed full of stockings with seams up the backs, holy cards of the Virgin Mary dated each Christmas in her own mother’s hand in dark blue fountain pen, a couple of rosaries with tiny black prayer beads, and a surpri
sing number of little leather-bound prayer books. I lifted a Crown Royal bag heavy and shifting with old costume jewelry, rifled through the treasures that I hadn’t been allowed to take away when I was a child. I emptied her good purse, feeling a little sick, seeing all her things useless and unneeded. So I filled it with my own wallet and hairbrush.
I took her lipsticks from the ledge in her bathroom so my father wouldn’t have to see them lined up there, all dark shades. I felt like I was thieving and couldn’t bear to slide the plum colour onto my lips. It smelled a little off, like meat covered over by a flowery chemical scent.
SHE HOLDS OUT her closed hand, looking at me with some impatience. Her diamond wedding ring flashes, prismatic. I cup my hand below her fist and wonder what she will let fall. Sand or dust or tiny bones. But a slippery shape falls almost weightless onto my palm. A salamander, skin as tender and dark as a bruise. A tickle, a whisper of movement and it’s gone.
WE STOPPED AT THE THRESHOLD, became invisible under our pale gowns, our gloves cooling our hands, masks locking in our breath so that our voices echoed in our heads. Only she was flesh and breath and vivid with life, the bag of scarlet seeming to run out of her veins instead of the other way around. Five years is a long time. She looked at my grown children and at me. “Your eyes are the same,” she said. Something essential recognized, finally. But my daughter interpreted it differently. “That’s genetics. They’re probably the same as yours.” She seemed detached but not at all unhappy that we were there.
“No appetite,” she said. I threaded a straw through the hole in her oxygen mask misted with her heat and she drank quietly, the spirit level rising ever so slightly, the lightness of her need like the feet of water gliders on a side pool as the stream tumbled over rocks and fallen logs, obstacles of life, just one channel over. One day later, her last word in answer to my question, “You seem to be in pain? Do you want anything?” “No,” the final word, whispered, with a drawing-in of her eyebrows, too tired to open her eyes. All the rest was dreams and mystery.
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