“Dad here says he talked to him just last Wednesday, too. So that’s a promising clue,” he said, but Lydia’s eyebrows did not go back down.
“Did he, now?” she said. She folded the wrapper back over her taco and shoved it in the bag. “You know, sometimes your father gets his days messed up.” Greg looked at his dad, who was listening to Lydia talk with a small smile on his face. “Wednesday last week might mean Wednesday last year. Isn’t that right, Greg?”
His dad chuckled. “I guess so,” he said. She was talking about him like he was a child, like the man part of him wasn’t present. She was talking about him the way Greg’s mother always had. Greg had chosen Deb for how unlike Marie she was: unfailingly calm, unwounding, unwounded. He had run toward her corner like the corner Marie was in was spitting acid. That clearly hadn’t been his father’s tactic. His father, it turned out, missed the burn.
“Dad,” Greg said. He waited for his father to look at him. “It had to be last week, right? Because of the money on the table. If it was last year you wouldn’t have put the money on the table, right?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lydia said, and laughed, a throaty haw haw haw that made Greg like her, despite also feeling like she was getting in the way. Scrambling his father’s signal.
“What were we doing last Wednesday, G?” She looked at Greg’s father, who shrugged. “Was that the night we took the shuttle to dinner?” She turned to Greg. “The shuttle is a smelly van contraption that takes us residents on errands and out for dates, but only when there are enough people to fill each seat. The driver gets paid by the passenger.” She rolled her eyes and adjusted the sash on her robe. The bit of her chest that was peeking through was mottled and tanned and sexless, like the breast of a roast chicken. “I think that was the night,” she said. “We went to Panera. Then we came home and watched Wheel of Fortune, and then we hmm hmm hmm…” She winked at Greg, as if he would delight in hearing that his father wasn’t too fragile to perform, and in fact he did feel a small bit of happiness for his father, and happiness for himself, if he’d live to be as old as the old man. “Oh, and then you got a phone call! You did! You got a phone call.”
“I told you,” his father said. He was tired, his mouth slack, his eyes half-closed. It used to bother Greg, how around his parents he reverted to feeling like a child, petulant and voiceless. But now he was glad for it. For days, years maybe, he’d felt old, heavy, shabby. But he was a young man, compared with this decrepit shithole and its papery inhabitants, a cheap dollhouse and its cheap dolls. He was the midpoint between GJ and his father, caretaker for both. If only they’d let him. “I write everything down,” his father said, closing his eyes.
“Yes, we know,” Lydia said. She glided into the kitchen, her bare heels peeking out from under the long robe, like small brown dinner rolls. Bare feet and a robe. She was definitely at home here. His father already had a glistening of drool gathered in his lower lip.
“Greg,” Lydia hissed. “Come in here.”
She was filling the old ceramic teapot of his mother’s with water from the tap. “I’m going to make some tea,” she whispered. “Do you want?”
“No thanks,” he whispered back. His father used to drink Ovaltine every morning; that’s what Greg wanted, though it felt more like Lydia’s kitchen, not his father’s. Not a kitchen where he could feel comfortable searching the cabinets.
“So,” Lydia said, using her normal voice now. “Is he a user, this boy of yours?”
“What?” Greg whispered.
“I have one of my own,” she said. “My daughter. She’s probably about your age.”
Greg looked at her, not sure how to answer.
“A drug addict,” she said, enunciating so thoroughly that Greg could see the line where her dentures met her gums. “They’re real assholes, aren’t they?”
“Your daughter is my age and she’s a drug addict?” He wasn’t sure he understood her correctly. In all the years since GJ had been the way he was, Greg always figured he’d get it together one day. Get a job, a place of his own. Grow up. On the TV shows, the addicts were told over and over that if they didn’t stop, they’d die. It seemed like a given: Stop if you want to live. Use if you want to die. Lydia’s drug addict daughter was his age? Nearly sixty?
“Well, I should say she goes between drugs and drink. When she drinks she can at least hold a job. When it’s the other thing sometimes I don’t hear from her for a while.” She held the teapot over the stove, like she was trying to decide which burner. Finally she dropped it carelessly onto the one closest to her. Everything she did was loud, Greg was starting to realize. Unapologetic. “But old people rarely hear from their families, anyway,” she said, winking. “One day you’ll stop letting it get to you.” She turned the heat up on the burner, then leaned her hip into the counter. A younger woman’s pose. He wondered what she was like when it was getting to her. The not seeing her daughter. The not knowing.
“My wife and I, my ex-wife and I, we went to a part of town where GJ likes to go,” Greg said. He felt drawn in by this woman, opened up, like he couldn’t tell her everything fast enough. “We went to a place where bad things happen. Ugly things. My ex-wife says people go there by choice.” He thought of how he’d gone there by choice, all those years ago. How the woman had gotten down and crawled, scrabbling under the bar like a rodent. How he hadn’t been able to see her when she took him into her mouth.
“Free will,” Lydia said. “God gave us free will.” She raised a tan claw above her head, like she had the answer in class, then brought it down into a clap. “Assholes.” The teapot whined quietly, like a wounded animal trying to stay hidden. “I bet you tried some tough love. Am I right?”
Greg nodded.
“Haw. And I bet you’ve seen your fair share of rehab joints. Listen.” She grabbed his arm, little pincers working into the flesh. “At some point it can’t be your fault anymore. Maybe it used to be your fault. But it’s not anymore.” The teapot pitched higher, really letting loose now. Greg cut his eyes at it, hoping it’d signal her, but she dug in harder. “The day you understand that is the day you’ll truly be free.” She released him and snapped off the burner, the teapot’s shriek exhaling from a whine to a sigh. “Like me,” she said.
“You feel free,” he said. “What if something happens? What if she disappears? Our son has never done anything like this before.”
“You’re not listening,” she said. She wound the string from her tea bag around the handle of a mug. “I just told you that it’s not your fault anymore. Are you dropping little bags of dope down onto his head when he’s sleeping? Are you driving him to that ugly place and pushing him out of the car? Yes, you were probably a shitty father in a lot of ways. Guess what. I told my daughter every year on her birthday that she was too fat. Her dad left me for his secretary. Her stepdad was a child-toucher. I kicked her stepdad out and changed the locks. Do you know how many times I apologized for it all? Maybe it matters, but it doesn’t matter enough. Eventually you have to let go.”
My problem isn’t that I can’t let go, Greg wanted to say. It’s that I never held on. The trip he was on, that was his way of holding on, but it was still all wrong. Maybe it would matter, but would it matter enough?
“Jean over in one-F told me she used to put her baby’s hand on a hot burner so he’d learn not to touch it. She told me that like she was proud of it, how clever!” She blew into her mug. “Your own dad,” she whispered, “told me that he coupled with half the ladies on your block when you were a kid.”
“What?” Greg’s father had looked at his mother like she was a movie star. Like he was in awe and a bit shy around her. Led her around by the elbow all the way until the end.
“You know how it was back then.”
He didn’t. His mother had ruled the roost was how she always put it. She was beautiful. Half the ladies on the block … Mona, in her polyester pantsuits? Mrs. Helen, who always wore a kerchief on her head? When he’d live
d there after getting kicked out he saw her without it. Her hair was so thin at her hairline that she looked bald there. Had his father seen her without the kerchief, too?
“I’m saying,” Lydia said, “that no one is perfect. We’re all human and our children are human. Free”—she snapped her fingers—“will.” She snapped them again. Marie had told him people either forgave their parents or they didn’t. Lydia was basically telling him the same thing. He was surrounded by people telling him to give up.
“I think it’s admirable, what you’re doing,” she said. She waved her hand around. “You know, and all that.” She looked across the counter at the back of his father’s sleeping head. “He’s a good man,” she whispered. “But a shyster, too. People aren’t always all one thing.”
“I never understood why he chose to live here,” Greg said. “Out of all the other places he could have gone.”
“That’s easy,” she said. “It’s because this is where I live. Me and all the rest of his girlfriends.” She laughed and walked past him to go sit next to his father. “He’s awake!” she said. “Probably been listening this whole time.”
Greg walked the thirteen steps from the kitchen to the sofa and sat across from them.
“What do you think you’ll do now?” Lydia asked. She patted his father’s leg, slap slap slap. Driving here, Greg had imagined either finding GJ or, the more likely option, taking the old man out for a meal, treating him to Red Lobster, something like that.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I might drive back home.”
Lydia nodded; she approved. “Get back to your life. Your son will turn up. They always do.” Do they? he wanted to ask.
“I live here because it’s a short drive to the range,” his father said, his voice graveled with sleep. “You always think people do things just to piss you off.” He looked at Greg, his face placid, just a simple fact he was stating. “I just wanted to play golf. Now I can’t play golf anymore.”
“That’s true,” Lydia said. She looked at her own knees, shaking her head, bringing her mug up to sip from it.
“It was your mother who always fussed about how things looked. I never cared all that much. I just need a bed and some walls.”
“All the comforts of home,” Lydia said, patting his leg and winking at Greg again. Was it a grandmotherly wink? An innuendo wink? Again he felt like an intruder. His father had his own life here, a bed and walls and the company of this strange hawk of a woman. Had she been joking about the other girlfriends? His dad seemed exhausted; maybe she hadn’t been joking. The years he’d lived with his father were a fraction of the total years he’d lived so far. When it came right down to it his father was no more than an old roommate, someone he tiptoed around and was glad to be rid of. He guessed the feeling was mutual.
He’d always liked GJ, though. You’re named after me, not your father, Greg’s dad would often say. GJ had a solid golf swing; Greg’s was inconsistent at best, too powerful, smashing the ball beyond the green nine times out of ten. GJ was more patient, back when they still visited Greg’s father, back before GJ’s eyes slid around like they were trying to get away from his head.
“Did Lydia tell you she tried it once?” Greg’s father asked.
“Golf?”
“I think he means dope,” she said. “Right, Gregory, is that what you meant?”
“Right, right. Tell him.”
“Well, one day I decided to kind of give in and see what it was all about.” She put her tea on the card table, thought better of it, and put it on the floor by her feet. “My daughter was in one of her dope phases, so I went over there and told her we were going to do it together. Crack, she liked crack. Likes, I guess. We had to go into her closet so her landlord wouldn’t smell it. That was about maybe ten years ago now.”
“She smoked crack,” Greg’s father said. “And lived to tell the tale!”
“It tasted like a burning foot. But honestly it was wonderful, once it kicked in.” She looked at Greg, her eyes shining now. “Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for me to let go. I know what it feels like. We stayed in that closet for hours. When it was all over I felt foolish, like I’d let her see me get a pap smear or something, but I also felt like I understood her better.” For a moment, he recognized the look on Lydia’s face. A mixture of pride and sadness. Then she shook herself. “I told her she was an idiot for doing it and I left and we didn’t speak for three years. Tough love, haw!”
Greg felt impatient. There had to be more to the story. “I don’t get it—why would you want to smoke crack with your own daughter? And are you saying I should be doing drugs with my son? Dad?”
His father moved his feet like he was marching in place, waved his hands in the air like he was trying to bat mosquitoes away. Like Greg was a mosquito. “You’re not listening,” the old man said.
“I’m tired of people telling me I’m not listening!” Greg yelled. Here it was, the inevitable resurfacing of his childhood self. He had been trying to hold it in but there it sprung, the jackass in the box. “I heard you,” he said, trying to sound calmer, though his voice shook and whined. “You”—he pointed at Lydia—“are telling me I should give up and/or smoke crack with my son. And you”—he pointed at his dad—“were about to hand over an envelope of cash to a boy who would only spend it on more drugs. Tell me again how I wasn’t listening.”
“He’s not a boy,” his father said.
“I’m not telling you to give up,” Lydia said. “You see this?” She held her hands up to her face like an awards show presenter. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “I didn’t give up. I just moved on.”
“I wanted Lydia to tell that crack story so you wouldn’t feel so bad about driving around looking for your son in the two most obvious places I can think of. Especially when you could have just called ahead and not wasted your time. Lydia smoked crack with her daughter.” She snickered; her emotions were baffling to Greg, shooting out in every direction, the way the water shot out of the calcified showerhead in his bathroom back home. “You drove down to Florida. Neither of you had any better ideas. It’s all just a shot in the dark.”
“What do you think I should do?” Greg asked, no longer trying to disguise the peevishness in his voice.
Lydia and his father stared at him, Lydia’s eyes wide and almost luridly violet through the tears, his father’s drooping and lashless.
“I don’t know,” Greg’s father finally said. “Call hospitals and jails. Go home and wait by the phone. Or maybe you can throw a dart at a map like they do in the movies. Hell, maybe that’s what GJ did.”
“He said he was coming here, though,” Greg said, but he trailed off. His heart wasn’t in it. He was only seventy percent certain the phone call had happened, and that it had been GJ on the other end. Sixty percent. The envelope of cash could have been rent, could have been payment to Lydia for services rendered; the mean thought felt good as it passed through his mind. Maybe she took her dentures out. Maybe she talked dirty. Deb had read an article once that said STDs were rampant in retirement communities. The women leave a scarf tied around their doorknob, she’d said. And that means they’re open for business. They’d laughed and Greg had said something like Good for them! Now he felt annoyed by the thought. He and Deb built up to sex in a series of elaborate steps: first she showered, and then he did. Sometimes he just went in and shut the door and let the water run while he sat on the toilet, watching the dark trees beyond the frosted window bend and sway, like some kind of dance performance. He’d wet his hair in the sink, run a washcloth over his balls. Then he’d get into his boxers and T-shirt while Deb lotioned her hands and wrists for what felt like hours. Then they lay next to each other, holding hands. Then a hammering of pecking kisses. Fifty pounds ago, he would have moved himself on top of her once he’d begun kissing her neck. But now Deb had to straddle him, working her bent leg over his body like she was mounting a camel for the very first time, each shifting and apologizing. Then the silent, almost rit
ualistic pumping. Inevitably, Deb would ask, Are we there yet? Which was his cue to get there. Deb treated sex like a chore she enjoyed finishing and finishing well, but a chore nonetheless. She could get a dish to shine and squeak, but what did it do for her? Greg had often wondered what, aside from a sense of accomplishment, sex did for her. When they’d first begun dating there had been trips to St. Petersburg, Destin, Savannah, and those trips had involved a lot of eating and a lot of fucking. Fucking, that’s what was missing from the sex they had now. Maybe it was because fucking was what you did with a stranger, someone you were getting to know. There was room for surprise, shock, even. Now he and Deb knew each other well. And here his father was, fucking strangers, letting them wear his mother’s robe and boil water in his mother’s teapot.
But the truth was, after years of chaos, years of the push-pull with Marie and the terror of what GJ was doing to himself, he had brought this calm upon himself. He had drawn it up and over him like a quilt. Hard to breathe under there, sometimes.
“If he comes here,” Lydia was saying, “we can just call you. I can hide in the bathroom with my Samsung, lickety-split. Unless you want to stay here and wait,” she said, looking down into her mug. It wasn’t a real offer, Greg knew.
“No room,” Greg’s father said. He ran a finger back and forth under his nose. His nails were long and rounded, as if they’d been filed. His fingers and hands looked preserved, cared for, as if they were soaked in formaldehyde and taken out only to be manicured and petted. It made Greg feel queasy, looking at those nails. Another sign that his father was someone he barely knew.
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m heading out.” He could go back to the Taco Bell. They had Dr Pepper there, he saw. He could get a large, hell, an extra-large, and if they had it, could add a wedge of lemon, an old trick of Deb’s that made the drink taste like one big swallow of sunshine.
“It was so nice to meet you,” Lydia said, though they were all still sitting. Greg stood and leaned over to shake her hand again. “You’re just exactly like your father.” She winked again. Greg wanted to tell her that she was going overboard, she was being too obvious, but then she winked once more and he wondered if she just had a facial twitch.
Eat Only When You're Hungry Page 12