“Sure,” he says aggressively, flicking down his cigarette butt. “I could pick apart my marriage. I could even do it in public like half my female colleagues do—like you, Sandra—you women who make your living at it. But if male authors wrote half the things about their wives that female authors wrote about their husbands, we’d be run out of town! There was some Sunday magazine piece recently where the writer—good Lord!—she went on for page after page complaining about her husband’s cooking! He’s a great cook, sure, makes great meals, and watches the kids, and rolls out the trash cans but she feels—boo-hoo!—that he lingers too long in the kitchen and buys too many expensive ingredients!”
He leans in with half a sneer: “Meanwhile, a wife can gain thirty pounds during pregnancy, keep it on for decades, and God forbid the husband ever utters a peep about it. A peep!”
Everyone halts for a moment.
Craig makes a good point.
And of course he is right about that.
He abruptly excuses himself for the evening to go home. Craig is still married.
DESSERT IS petits fours and other floating-cloud, ornate-flower-invention desserts from Judith and Roland’s favorite Studio City bakery. Everyone applauds our cook, and Judith alights on Roland’s now-collapsed lap, in her pale evening gauze and her ballet slippers, to deliver a pronouncement.
“I was married once,” she says, “years before I met Roland. My ex—who was an academic—and I used to argue about the best way to broil a salmon. Neither of us was grateful for the gift that someone else might cook it, albeit slightly incorrectly. It was a horrible way to live.
“In the end, I think, if you’re going to live with someone, there should be rules. Each person must have their own bathroom, absolutely. Roland and I even have our own bedrooms, which is wonderful because he snores.”
“As does she,” Roland adds.
Judith lifts her hands. “How would I know?”
“Indeed.”
“I think in the end, however, when you find ways to be together, there is the matter of coffee. Which is to say, imagine someone you supposedly love brings you a cup of coffee. Perhaps that cup of coffee is too strong, too weak, too milky, too sugary, not enough of all of the above, whatever. I would say instead of critiquing all the parts of the coffee that aren’t right, just say thank you. Just appreciate the gift of coffee. Even if you have to dump it into the sink when they’re not looking. Say thank you.
“Staff helps, too,” Judith adds, as Roland takes her hand and both get up.
“Also dancing,” Roland says, pulling her in, as they move together to some bossa nova.
“See?” Judith says. “Who cares if he snores? He’s a great dancer.”
With a surge of fondness, under the glowing night sky, I think of Mr. Y, who is also a great dancer, the best. I think of texting him some fond short message, to get that little hit of him.
But I know all too well this is the top of the cycle, and tomorrow—with all of its customary realities and harrowing exigencies—will be the bottom. To contact Mr. Y would be like continuing to punish him, continuing to whip him around in this laundry cycle.
What is the point of calling Mr. Y? We’ve both done this already.
And actually, it’s the end of our romance.
I fell in love with Mr. Y at Burning Man based on such a hopelessly absurd romantic notion. This notion did not occur to me in the moment when I told him I guessed I loved him. Rather, it came to me in the moment when he had—surprisingly—admitted that he always figured we’d end up together when we were older. He may have just meant it with a shrug. He wasn’t planning to do anything about it. Perhaps he was a bit lazy. But I had woven it into such a high romantic Merchant-Ivory notion. The notion was that, like some Good Soldier, he was content to patiently bide his time for three decades, and in the meantime was content to dedicate himself, without reward, to chivalrously serving me.
What a foolish idea!
When I now picture Mr. Y’s face, all hard-eyed and contorted, while he flies at me in rage (“You need help wiping your own ass!”), I realize that we had had mismatching expectations. He now has only revulsion for me because I have been under a diva illusion. And as for me, the tide has washed out and I am no longer in love with this person, because all along I had thought he was different from other men.
How so? This was a straight man you could converse with for ten hours about movies, food, friends, family, romances we had in our twenties, scuzzy college dorms we had lived in, gardening (how we both wanted to but didn’t), dogs (how we liked them but balked at caring for them), spicy versus sweet mustard, methods of dry cleaning, sex, religion, and our feelings, and never run out of things to talk about. This was a man you could call day or night who would always pick up. This was a man happy—even delighted—to take you dress shopping, with far more patience than I myself might have for this process. (I am the sort of person who will run out of Ross Dress for Less screaming, whereas he is very interested in comparing sale-priced belts.) This was a man who had known me (or at least parts of me) for ten years, and who slid easily and organically into the highest flights of poetry and romance, who needed no seducing. This was a man with whom I didn’t have to pretend to be someone else or hide different parts of myself in order to earn his love. I had thought he was the sunny island my shipwreck had landed on. I had thought he was the final safe harbor. I had thought he was this calm glowing orb hovering in a cloudless blue sky of unconditional love. I suppose I thought he was my mother, or at least the manifestation of the love of my mother, or perhaps her living ghost.
As I say, as though watching a movie, “How sad.”
The Sudden Death of My Father
MY FATHER CALLS ME in terror. He can’t get out of bed. It is Sunday. Thomas has weekends off. This is typically fine but . . .
“Help me,” he whispers.
I feel a panic flood of cortisol.
It is not like my dad has been in exactly perfect health over the last decade.
After age seventy-eight, if you asked my father, “How are you?” he would already exclaim: “I’m dying!” At his eightieth birthday party, when he tremulously lifted his centimeter of red wine while watching my girlfriends dance, I mourned his visible frailty. At eighty-two, he was passing out on bus benches, hitting his head, causing his doctors to insist on a pacemaker (which he refused). By eighty-five, battling Parkinson’s, he was still hobbling down to the beach to attempt rickety calisthenics and swimming, but “he’s barely swimming in those two feet of water,” Kaitlin worried. “It’s more like falling.”
By eighty-seven, he was physically slowing, like a clock winding down, and then he started, under great protest, to use a wheelchair on and off, but then . . . he seemed to plateau. Indeed, recently, with Thomas’s extraordinary care, because he was lifted everywhere, and spoon-fed, he actually seemed to be coming back.
When I brought the girls to visit most recently, he was sleeping in his daybed with a pair of socks over his eyes. From under the socks, he said to Hannah, “Oh, you’re pretty. Are you one of the mean girls in your school?” and for some reason she immediately fell over laughing. She got his strange Martian brand of humor. I have no reason why.
My irascible dad’s will to live—to watch PBS, to eat ice cream, to shuffle through the garden on a walker—is strong. You can hear it in his voice.
But not today.
This is a different, hollowed-out-sounding man. A ghost already gone.
A pulse-pounding ninety-minute drive through traffic later, I storm into the house and rush to his bed, which happens for reasons of maximizing rental space, to be in the dining room. I find to my panic—“Papa? Papa?”—that I cannot rouse him. He lies in that waxy, inert, folded-up pose that looks unmistakably like death (I had seen it when my mother died of early Alzheimer’s at sixty-nine).
I dial Kaitlin in San Francisco. We haven’t talked in ages, but now the Margaret Thatcher silence must be broken.
> “This is it—it’s really it—Papa’s dead,” I sob over the phone.
“Oh no,” she breathes softly, like a mourning dove.
We both exhale.
And yet, as the dust motes dance in the familiar golden light of our family home, my sister and I find ourselves spontaneously, tumblingly, observing to each other how we are sad . . . and yet oddly at peace.
Yes, our history with this man has been beyond checkered: In our childhood he had been cruelly cheap (no Scholastic Book Fair, no heat, no Christmas); in our teens he had been unforgivably mean to my mother (they had those horrible fights about money, he cursed at her, called her bad words in front of us); in my twenties, I myself rebelled (by dropping out of science!) and fled; in my thirties I softened and we became wry friends—why not, he couldn’t harm me now; in my forties, sensing that these were the last days of a fading elder, the memories of whom I would reflect on with increasing nostalgia, the door opened for real affection, even a kind of gratitude. After all, I had benefited professionally from using him as fodder for my writing, as he had benefited financially for years by forging my signature on all those ghost checking accounts—the great circle of life.
The point is, no matter how vexing and impossible and just plain unfatherly your father is, you only have one. When he goes, something is gone that you are never going to get back. One of those things, of course, is your childhood, or the possibility of reviving the illusion of ever having had a happy one . . . which was long gone anyway. And, in the end, my father does have a certain authenticity and trueness. He is always uniquely himself. And when I lie on my own deathbed, that is one thing in life that I will miss. Or if I don’t truly miss it, it will at least give me a great cosmic chuckle.
Which is to say, standing on this silvery-lighted sandbar of midlife, somewhat complexly, there is real grief now at seeing my father go. Then again, I am a big girl—actually, a middle-aged woman, with some one thousand hours of therapy behind me—and, chin up, I will get through it. Unlike in the case of our mother, who had left too abruptly and too early, my business here is done. It’s a time of endings, it appears. But it’s all right. Life is actually so long that I have successfully completed my Kübler-Ross stages.
So perhaps the timing of my father’s passing, though sad, is fortuitous.
The conundrum this morning in the dining room, however, is that although my father isn’t rousable, I can’t say for sure that he is actually dead. (Remember that he has that lizardlike resting pulse of 34, so even in his waking state he’s sort of like the undead.) He doesn’t seem to be conspicuously breathing, but neither is he conspicuously hardening.
I pose this conundrum to Kaitlin who has, among other things, a master’s degree in biology. Tormented pause. She suggests I call the Malibu paramedics and have them make the official call.
I do so, awkwardly explaining to 911 that while my father is not quite alive, he is also not thoroughly dead. He doesn’t seem to be suffering or struggling to breathe or hemorrhaging blood or anything. He’s just sort of a lukewarm log. Whatever is happening is not acute.
Within five minutes a massive fire truck roars up and half a dozen buff Malibu EMTs pile out, like the cast of some hit CBS prime-time drama. They strap my eighty-nine-year-old father onto a gurney, stick an IV in, zip him off, sirens blazing, to the emergency room, and immediately start mobile triage work on all of his vitals.
An hour later, a surprisingly benign diagnosis? Simple dehydration. (He wasn’t drinking the water that Thomas is always exhorting him to—only coffee and orange juice.)
In short, with a sudden angry snort, my father wakes up!
“Son of a bitch!” he yells at me. “Why did you bring me here?” He immediately demands ice cream.
Jesus!
What am I supposed to do?
Where is this all going?
The Caregiver’s Journey
I RECEIVE A GIFT and a note from my friend Patty. The note reads: “I am thinking of you during these difficult times with your father. I know when caring for my own mother, it was both the hardest and most beautiful experience I have ever had. What really helped me was this Adult Daughters retreat in Esalen (brochure enclosed).”
The gift is a pashmina, lavender-infused mini-chocolates, and a calendar featuring flowers and inspirational proverbs and sayings about something horrible (featuring a nautilus shell) called the Caregiver’s Journey. The note continues, “I love this quote from Gail Sheehy from her book Passages in Caregiving: ‘It opens up the greatest possibilities for true intimacy and reconnection at the deepest level. The sharing of strengths and vulnerabilities, without shame, fosters love. And for some caregivers, this role offers a chance in Second Adulthood to compose a more tender sequel to the troubled family drama of our First Adulthood. We can become better than our younger selves.’ ”
Really? I mean, really?
Gail Sheehy and Passages—what a laugh! She will live to rewrite Passages for another fifty years. To humor the occasion, I open the book at random and read this:
In my books and speeches since 1995, when I published New Passages, I keep predicting liberation ahead—the advent of a Second Adulthood, starting in one’s midforties and fifties. At that proud age, having checked off most ‘shoulds,’ people generally feel a new sense of mastery. Haven’t you done your best to please your parents, your mentor, your boss, and your mate, and now it’s time for you? The children are making test flights on their way to piloting solo. Your parents have become giddy globe-trotters, piling up frequent-flier miles and e-mailing playful photos of themselves riding camels. . . . Now you can finally earn that degree, start your own business, run for office, master another language, invent something, or write that book you keep mulling.
I have an urge to find Patty and throw the book in her face.
But I don’t.
I carefully place the Caregiver’s Journey calendar in the recycling bin, and immediately wolf all the chocolates.
Ladies of the Lake
MR. Y HAS LEFT a cryptic message. Still living at Wilson’s sprawling bachelor pad, presumably, he and I have not seen each other in four weeks, and have only exchanged a few texts. His first-ever phone message is friendly and guarded and wry, in that sort of punch-one-in-the-arm-type way, inviting me to be his date to the closing-night party of Jam City. It sounds awful. I am telling Kaitlin about this as we round Balboa Lake (yes, we do have the occasional lake in Los Angeles) on one of those healthful walks she enjoys. It’s so windy we are less walking than beavering our way, heads down with determination, around the lake. All around us other ladies in Asics and visors are also beavering around the lake. It’s almost as though we women power the lake, as though we’re its worried turbine engine.
“How is it going otherwise?” she asks me.
“Oh, it’s tough,” I say. “Grimly I clock forward. Everything is emotionally flat. There’s nothing in life to look forward to. Every day I Scotch-tape myself together, I staple myself together, I glue myself together, and get up to forge forward into, well, this wind. I do it for the girls. I stay in there. I sledgehammer into the ice, put my ice pick in, grimly hang on to the side of the mountain.
“I found myself thinking, you know, of Mrs. Sedaris as she appeared in David Sedaris’s story ‘Let It Snow.’ I taught that in my writing class last year. There were too many snow days in a row so, going crazy from their constant company, Mrs. Sedaris locked the children out of the house, and sat at the kitchen table quietly smoking and drinking. Then she fell down in the snow and lost her shoe. The children collected her.”
“And?”
“And I realize I am at the point in my life where, instead of thinking of myself as one of the bright semi-young lights of This American Life as at one distant time I used to be, I actually think a lot about Mrs. Sedaris. I am not David or Amy Sedaris, I am really much closer to their mother, who sits at the kitchen table during the day haplessly smoking and drinking and who loses her shoe in the sn
ow. Oh God.”
“Hmm,” she says. “What else are you reading?”
“Good question. It’s hard to find a book to get into these days. Since Mr. Y’s been gone, I just want something comforting at night, like a cozy English country cottage of a book. In the middle of a sunny meadow where the bees bzz-bzz-bzz and the dragonflies go zzp-zzp-zzp. I want a book to gently entertain and lift and then tranquilize me. I want kind of a Zoloft of a book.”
“I never travel without a P. G. Wodehouse or a David Lodge. I just adore those books. I bring my foldable night-light along, and everything’s perfect.”
“Well, I always think that sort of comforting midafternoon voice is going to come from Anna Quindlen, your funny, smart, sensible friend who sort of always has your back. So when I was staying at Judith’s, I took to my temple-like guest bath Anna Quindlen’s Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, a book I thought should be its own cozy warm bath.
“But while reading it I soon began to freak out and feel like a failure. I realized that Anna Quindlen is a warm, sensible, self-deprecating essayist who also happens to still be happily married (no blow ups, no affairs) to her high-school sweetheart after decades and decades and who very sensibly gave up drinking, flat, in her twenties because she thought it wasn’t a terribly wise idea. Her worry is that she has collected a few too many plush throw pillows in her beautiful home with her husband whom she loves.
“God, I felt like a hideous monster failure with a crippled fucking claw. Anna Quindlen was a judgmental beeyotch masquerading as a nice person, and I hate her. I realize this puts me in the can’t-win position of attacking a clearly very nice and successful person, with my crippled fucking metaphorical claw. But if only we could see women crash around a bit more, particularly in middle age. If only our cropped Katie Couric hair could be let messily down.
“I mean,” I press on, “I think of a famous poet I know whom we’ll just called Devorah. Devorah was interviewing for a good university job teaching poetry. She is both celebrated and a bit scary—with a dessicated overthin look that would look amazing on any of the Rolling Stones but that people might perhaps find off-putting on a fifty-six-year-old woman. Even though she is incredibly thin and wears cool rock-and-roll belts.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 15