by Marian Thurm
He pulled the Porsche over to a fire hydrant on this busy street, and put the car into “park” but kept the engine running. Nearly overcome with anxiety now, his legs began to tremble and he thought of his breakdown in the middle of his first semester at Michigan. And he remembered how, after his high school girlfriend Lucy Eisenstein had dumped him at the end of that summer, he couldn’t get out of bed and would have stayed there twenty-four/seven if not for his mother and sister. Both of whom had worked so hard to pull him from his bed and back into the world, so that he could leave home and go to Michigan and start his freshman year. Clare or his mother would sit with him patiently as he struggled to eat a few mouthfuls of dinner at the kitchen table, and on his worst days, when she just couldn’t get him up and out, his mother would bring food on a plastic tray for him so he could dine in bed, even though his father vehemently disapproved and shouted at his mother to stop treating Roger so tenderly. This had continued for a week or so, but then he went off to college right on schedule. But he ended up in Emerald Hills a few months later anyway, and it turned out to be a place where he spent far too many hours at the pool table in the patient lounge, playing eight-ball and one-pocket with a couple of his fellow nutjobs, as he thought of them.
His hiccups had finally subsided, he realized now, and he put his hands over first one knee and then the other to stop his legs from shaking. Maybe he should cancel his lunch meeting—not a smart move—but how would he be able to concentrate on business knowing what he’d just learned about his sister? When was her meeting at Dana-Farber? Could he join them and hear what the doctors there would have to say?
What he heard was the dead silence as Clare and Marshall considered his request, and then his sister saying, “No, no, thanks, but not necessary. It’s just going to be Marshall and me . . . Oh, and Stacy’s already offered to have Nathaniel stay with you guys while we’re away overnight next week. And I bet you can guess how well that went over with a sixteen-year-old,” Clare said, laughing slightly. “He was totally insulted that we didn’t trust him to stay home alone, but of course he’s got to stay with you anyway.”
Wait, Clare had called Stacy before she called him? Roger knew it was petty and maybe even juvenile, but he was offended that he hadn’t been Clare’s first choice. She and Stacy had become close friends over the years, but, even so, he was Clare’s brother, not an in-law, and deserved to be at the top of her list, didn’t he?
“I understand,” he said, but, in truth, he didn’t. He looked out the window of his Porsche, and saw a dwarf in khaki shorts and a red T-shirt light up a cigarette as he stepped out of a convertible that hadn’t bothered to pull over but merely stopped in the middle of the street. The little guy had a sleeve of tattoos on each arm, and had slammed the door with real force; maybe, Roger thought, he was pissed off about something. As the convertible drove past, he saw that its license plate said “NICEHUH” and that it was a new $90,000 Mercedes SL.
Nice, huh.
His sister had a malignant tumor the size of a grapefruit wrapped around her spine.
He put his head down on the steering wheel and shut his burning eyes.
S
He was back from Boston, and the next day it seemed imperative that the whole family go to see his mother. Will, who had officially entered the Terrible Twos though his birthday wasn’t for another month, turned around and went straight for the front door almost as soon as they arrived at Renaissance Living Center to visit Beverly. The doors parted automatically, and Will was out on Second Avenue moments later, beguiling the handful of elderly residents who were seated on plastic lawn chairs in front of the building, enjoying their cigarettes.
“I’ll get him!” Stacy yelled over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “You take Olivia and go upstairs to your mother, and I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
Holding hands, Roger and Olivia boarded the elevator, which was nearly filled to capacity—with a pair of elderly women and their metal walkers, a single man in a wheelchair, and three caregivers from the West Indies and south Asia dressed in pink uniforms. A thread of saliva hung from the old guy’s lower lip, reminding Roger of his father, who’d suffered from Parkinson’s for too many years before his death.
Just before the elevator door closed, a man with white hair in a shoulder-length ponytail got on, along with his companion, an attractive woman in her seventies who was wearing too much dark eye shadow. “In your own sick way, I have to say you’re perfectly normal,” she said loudly to the ponytailed guy.
Roger tightened his grip on Olivia’s small warm hand.
They got off on the Alzheimer’s floor, and Olivia, who was four now, dropped Roger’s hand and ran toward Beverly’s room. The walls of the hallway were painted a soothing lavender and adorned here and there with framed artwork that had been done by residents of the floor. They resembled the drawings and paintings Olivia brought home from preschool, Roger noted, and sighed. His mother’s work was not among the things that were displayed, for which he found himself grateful.
Halfway down the hallway a door opened, and a woman and her caregiver emerged from the apartment. The caregiver held a cell phone to her ear with her right hand, and put her left arm around the woman’s back. “Come, Jewel,” she said, “we’re going to take a nice long walk up and down and up and down, okay?”
The woman with Alzheimer’s had a wide, expressionless face and stooped shoulders. She was wearing a pleated plaid skirt, and like a teenager in the fifties, saddle shoes and bobby socks.
“You’re Beverly’s son.” The caregiver smiled at Roger. “Jewel and Beverly are best friends.”
Roger smiled back at her, though he had no idea what she could possibly have meant by “best friends.” His mother could hardly hold a thought in her head and rarely engaged in conversation for more than a few minutes at a time. “That’s nice to hear,” he said lamely. “Thank you.”
Starquasia, his mother’s caregiver, stood at the door to Beverly’s apartment, and ushered him in. “Your mom had a little accident, but she’s all cleaned up,” she reported, and gestured toward the palm-sized darkened area on the pale gray carpeting. “Just watch where you step.”
“Look what Starquasia gave me!” Olivia said, and ran to Roger with a lollipop in her mouth. “My lips are such a pretty green!”
He wanted to tell Starquasia not to give his kids teeth-rotting candy, but he knew that she was wonderful with his mother and it seemed best not to say anything.
Walking farther into the living room, which smelled faintly of pee, he smiled at his mother, who was seated in a reclining leather La-Z-Boy and dressed in black sweatpants and a long-sleeved black shirt even though it was summer. He hugged her, and prepared himself for what he knew would come next.
“Such a lovely young man, do I know you?” his mother said.
Olivia, arranging herself at a snack table now with a set of colorful markers and some blank computer paper, didn’t look up; she’d heard it all before and seemed to understand that Beverly had lost her way and could not be led back again.
“That’s your son,” Starquasia said helpfully. “That’s Roger, he comes here all the time, Beverly.”
Beverly looked skeptical. “He does? No, I don’t think so. Honestly, I’m quite sure I don’t know you, young man, but it’s a pleasure to meet you.” She put out her left hand for Roger to shake. Her nails were painted a cheerful crimson, and her hand, which he held in his own, was soft and a little puffy. He’d been warned by both Beverly’s neurologist and geriatrician that Alzheimer’s patients often turned angry and mean-spirited, but, if anything, his mother had lost her edge; she’d become the proverbial sweet little old lady, and, in a way, he found it disconcerting.
“It’s me, Mom,” Roger said, because Starquasia had told him that there were moments now and again when his mother was lucid—what the hell, who knew, she might actually recognize him, if only for an instant. He no longer called her on the phone since the conversation
generally went nowhere and for some reason it pained him less to talk with her in person. But it was all so fucking depressing, and there was no getting around it.
“It’s my pleasure to meet you,” his mother said delightedly. “But tell me why you look so sad.”
“Clare is very, very sick,” he was surprised to hear himself say. “If I seem sad, that’s the reason.”
Olivia looked over at him now, and Roger regretted not having kept his big mouth shut. “What’s wrong with her?” Olivia said.
His mother’s face filled with compassion. “That’s terrible,” she said. “Is Clare a friend of yours? Whoever she is, please tell her how sorry I am to hear that she’s ill.”
“Clare’s your daughter,” Starquasia called from the other side of the room, where she was washing a couple of dishes in the tiny aluminum sink near the door.
“You never told me I had a daughter,” Beverly said. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Roger, who was standing awkwardly beside her chair, still holding on to her hand. He contemplated dropping it and backing away, but it seemed cruel, and so he continued to stand there, like a sentry on duty, though one with less than exemplary posture.
“You know,” said Beverly, “it occurred to me that I haven’t seen my mother and father in ages. Do you have any idea where they are?”
“They’re gone, Mom.”
“Gone?”
“Dead,” Roger whispered. “Since 1951 and 1968, respectively,” he mumbled.
His mother seemed even more bewildered than usual. “But that can’t be. I saw them in Neiman Marcus in the Bal Harbour shopping center the last time we were down in Florida.”
“Daddy?” Olivia said. “Don’t IGNORE me. You said Aunt Clare was very sick.” She had a thick orange marker in hand, and a slash of purple ink at one corner of her mouth; her formerly white baby teeth were stained a startling chartreuse, thanks to the lollipop Starquasia had given her.
Now Stacy appeared at the door with Will at her hip. She greeted Starquasia, and went to Beverly and kissed her.
“Please come back soon!” Beverly told her. She ran her finger across Will’s bare knee. “What a sweet little boy,” she said. “Who do you belong to, darling?”
“Hmm, that reminds me,” Stacy said. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” Roger said obligingly.
“Two,” Stacy said, holding up a couple of fingers.
“Two who?”
“To whom!” said Stacy. “You like that?”
“Love it,” Roger said, deadpan.
“Me me me!” Olivia said. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” Beverly said, and Roger patted her shoulder.
“Water,” said Olivia. She looked at Beverly, who was staring into her lap now.
“Water who?” Roger and Stacy said in unison.
“Water you doing in my damn house!” Olivia said, laughing so hard she slipped off the folding chair she was seated on, and landed on the floor.
Beverly was smiling now with what appeared to be the greatest pleasure. “You’re such lovely people,” she said. “It was so nice to meet you, and I hope you’ll all come back soon.”
Roger and Stacy gave each other a look; he wished he could turn his mother’s pathetic routine into something funny, wished he could see the humor in the way her severely diminished brain insisted on seeing the world, but, instead, he found every visit here unnerving and disheartening . . . And now there was his sister, whose life, he suspected, had been permanently altered by the MRI that revealed the monstrous mass of unruly cells that were trying to kill her. Something poisonous and sinister and, her oncologist said, as large as a grapefruit—why couldn’t it have been the size of a lemon or an orange instead? And why the citrus fruit analogy? Why not large as a runty cantaloupe or an enormous tomato? Why malignant and not benign? Why his sister and not someone else’s? Why had this good, menschy human being been dealt pain and suffering and not pleasure and comfort instead?
He worried that the odds were not in Clare’s favor and that optimism would not, in the end, prove helpful. But perhaps he—along with the MRI and the radiologist who reviewed it, and the oncologist who reported it—was wrong. Perhaps (and here was where he gave his most recent brand of atheism the heave-ho and mentally fell to his knees and prayed) Clare would live a good long life and be lucky enough to trade knock-knock jokes with her grandchildren someday.
S
“Knock knock,” Roger tells his wife.
“Who’s there?”
“Dwayne.”
“Dwayne who?” She looks at him expectantly.
“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning. And twust me, it’s no joke,” Roger says.
S
He wakes her up to inform her that he’s feeling sick. Sick with grief, he tells her tearfully, and she doesn’t know what to say. He tells her that the taste of that grief coats the length of his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and that he doesn’t think it will ever go away. She understands that he is speaking metaphorically, but, even so, he sounds like someone in urgent need of help from a mental health professional, and so Stacy suggests that a call to Dr. Avalon right this minute, in fact, might be a very good idea.
“Let me dial the number for you,” she says.
“It’s five in the morning,” Roger points out. “And anyway, I’m done with the guy. Finished. Finito.”
She hands him a honey-colored Kleenex, but he lets it drift from his fingers onto the bedroom carpet. She takes another from the box on the night table and wipes his eyes for him, as gently as she does for their children. She thinks of her recent phone call back in New York to her old colleague Barbara Armstrong, who’d listened with the greatest sympathy as Stacy allowed herself to confide in her. They’d talked about Roger and the remote possibility of a short, soothing stay in Emerald Hills—still in business after all these years, but way too expensive these days. And Stacy knew Roger would never agree to it anyway, no matter how hard she might plead with him. There was an uneasy pause in the conversation, and then she’d heard Barbara use the words “New York State psychiatric facility” and “involuntary admission,” phrases which Stacy had routinely employed in the old days when she’d worked with her homeless clients, but which she now found intolerable. She knew, without Barbara reminding her, that with certification from a couple of doctors and an application for admission made by her—as next of kin—and based on a claim that Roger had a mental illness likely to result in harm to himself or to her and her children, she could have him admitted for treatment. Against his will.
Serious harm to himself or to her and Will and Olivia? Of course not, she told Barbara. He’s really depressed, but he’s hardly what anyone would call a psychopath.
I’m sure he’s not, Barbara assured her, but got Stacy to promise to keep a close eye on him. Call me anytime, she said. Text me. E-mail me. Whatever you need.
I will, Stacy promised her.
“I’m pretty sure it won’t be the first time Dr. Avalon’s been awakened by a patient,” she says now, picking up the landline next to the bed.
“NO!” Roger says, and he means business: his fingers are around her wrist, squeezing it so fiercely, she actually cries out in pain before dropping the phone.
“You’re hurting me!” she says. Never, in all the hours and days and years they’ve been together, has he ever hurt her. “Let go!” she says.
But he keeps on squeezing until finally, with her free hand, she makes a fist and smacks him in the chest with it, though not hard enough to bruise him.
She contemplates saying, If you won’t let me call Dr. Avalon for you, I’m leaving you.
Leaving. You.
And taking Olivia and Will with me.
But how can you threaten a broken-down man with tears in his eyes? You can’t, and though it kills her not to speak up, she keeps her mouth shut and her threats to herself.
~ 22 ~
Between his mother and his
sister, Stacy thought, Roger had too much on his plate these days, sorrowful burdens that weighed him down so heavily, you could actually see it in his posture—those slumped shoulders of his that she gently reminded him to straighten whenever she happened to notice. There were some business problems as well, she understood, watching as he examined his BlackBerry at the dinner table every night, studying text messages and e-mails so intently, you would think his life depended on what he found there. His answers to her questions about the projects his real estate company was developing were never greatly detailed; rather, he responded in the most noncommittal way possible, then followed up with a shrug, a vague shake of his head, and, occasionally, a roll of his eyes. The truth was, Stacy wasn’t as interested as she might have been. It was the business world, a world she’d ignored her whole life and probably would, she thought, continue to ignore. It was, perhaps, a failing of hers and she knew it, but this was who she was, who she had always been.
Now that Olivia was in kindergarten and Will in preschool (finally in preschool, she thought, as if it were an accomplishment she’d been aiming for since the day he was born), she had, at long last, a few good solid hours a day to devote to the umpteenth draft of the novel she was still working on for Professor Sarno’s class. This was the novel about the homeless, WASPy twenty-something, partly modeled on her former client Kim Sutherland. Stacy had taken one course after another with Professor Sarno (whom she’d finally been able to call “Dave”) over the past couple of years, and when he left the New School and moved over to Columbia’s School of General Studies, she went with him. She still had a minor crush on him, though she’d admitted it to no one except Jefrie, who thought it was “cute” and assured her that crushes were perfectly healthy.