Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  Endless, endless, endless.

  Whenever she does get in my car she invariably asks “Are you taking me to the police station or the mental hospital?”

  “Why would I take you to the mental hospital? If I wanted to petition you, I’d call the police, have it done, period. Go down to the court, the whole schmear like I did the time you were wandering around the streets in the middle of winter, completely goofy, going around telling people in restaurants that you were psychic and they were trying to kill you and then tell them your name—my name—and I started getting calls from Arby’s and MacDonald’s, ‘Your daughter was just in here and said they’re trying to kill her and she gave us your number. What should we do?’ I guess that was a strong enough signal saying you wanted to be committed, huh? And besides, when you were in the mental hospital over at St. Lawrence, you had a great time. I remember visiting you there, happier than you’d ever been . . .”

  And it’s true, when she was in the St. Lawrence Mental Hospital she was up, up, up. Total access to this soft-drink ‘bar,’ Coke, root beer, lots of good food, people all over the place, daily psychiatric help . . .

  She had actually taken a couple of courses at Lansing Community College, for a time actually seemed to be on some sort of track, but that was decades ago . . .

  Lost.

  Lost.

  Yesterday was classic.

  Heat wave in Michigan. Up close to 90 in mid-April.

  I go over to Charter House after having lunch with Bernadete over at the hospital. Cecilia doesn’t hesitate to get in my car. No problems. She’s dressed in a long purple dress with immense sleeves all wet at the bottom like she’s been doing dishes or washing babies.

  I start to drive her home and she says “I’m not going home for a couple of hours. I’m going to look at a room downtown.”

  “OK, where?”

  “South Walnut. Just turn at the next corner. Left.”

  I turn left and look at the street sign. It’s North Walnut, not South.

  Go down a block and turn around.

  “What’s the number?”

  “You’ve got to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  “OK, OK, what’s the number?”

  “South Walnut.”

  “But what number?”

  “Maybe we can go somewhere for a while.”

  “You want to come over to my house?”

  “No. Just ‘somewhere.’”

  “But where?”

  “There was something green in the roast beef in the roast beef sandwich they gave me today at the club. Green.”

  And she digs into her purse, pulls out a huge something all wrapped in paper towels. Unwraps one layer, another, another . . . four layers down and she opens it up: a bunch of thinly sliced roast beef.

  I pull over to the curb and look at it.

  “Where’s the green?”

  She gets all disturbed, starts fingering into the mushy mess.

  “I can’t see it, find it. Maybe it was the light at Charter House. Maybe . . .”

  Keeps fingering it.

  “There’s no green. Just toss it out for the birds.”

  “No, there was green in it . . .”

  And she rewraps it, puts it back into her purse, fingertips all wet with beef and sauce. Which she ignores.

  Pulls a little packet of pills out of her purse.

  “They just gave me a new batch of Closeril pills this morning.”

  Anti-craziness pills.

  She’s been taking them for years.

  “So?”

  “But they’re different . . . different.” Pulls out another little pill-packet. “Look. On the old Closeril pills the name is stamped on the pills, but the ones they gave me today don’t have the name stamped on them.”

  She thumbs one of the old Closeril pills out of its plastic container, insists that I look at the name embossed on its surface.

  “OK. I see it.”

  “But the new ones don’t have the name on them.”

  Let me see them.

  She hands me the package and printed all over it is Closerphine, not Closeril.

  “It’s a different name.”

  “But the same medication.”

  “OK, but it’s probably a different company. Maybe they’re cheaper. So they don’t emboss the name on the pills. Maybe it saves money.”

  “But they’re different . . . the name is supposed to be on the pill . . .”

  OK. No progress here.

  “Give me the address . . .”

  I’m at the very beginning of South Walnut now.

  “Mom says that if I move out she won’t have any more to do with me.”

  “So stay with her. She’s seventy-four now, she wants you around.”

  “But Clint hates me. He doesn’t want me around. I don’t want to hurt their marriage.”

  “But you’ve been there for fifteen years. It hasn’t seemed to hurt it much. So give me the address.”

  “You promise you won’t tell anyone at Charter House?”

  “OK, I won’t tell anyone at Charter House.”

  “It’s 502 South Walnut.”

  Who wants to live down here? We’re right next to the State Capitol. It’s all huge Michigan government buildings.

  But I keep looking, finally finding this 120 year old red brick farmhouse that must have been there long before they built the capitol or anything else.

  Right across from the Runciman Funeral Home.

  I’ve always wondered how a funeral home stuck it out right next to the Michigan State Capitol, but it has.

  There’s a “For Rent” sign on the old farmhouse.

  I pull over so she can get out.

  But she goes back into her purse again and gets the roast beef package out again, starts unwrapping it.

  “Come on, Cecilia, I can’t park here . . .”

  Puts it back in her immense purse full of maybe twenty pounds of coins.

  “OK,” opens the door and starts to get out, “I have to go to the washroom.”

  “There’s an office building right next to the house there.”

  “I think it’s part of the mental health system. I can’t go there.”

  “Why not? You’re in the mental health system!”

  She gets out of the car.

  “Goodbye. Thanks for the ride . . .”

  And she starts walking down the street away from the office building, past the red brick house.

  Ya basta! Genug! Ça sufit! Enough!

  It’s so easy to blame Mimi for never touching her, always seeing her as the “nigger” in the family. Take the hundreds of family pictures I have of Mimi with her arms around Hughie and Marcella and Cecilia off by herself as hard evidence of her rejection of Ceci.

  If there wasn’t so much goofiness running around in the family.

  One of Lucia’s brothers, Mario, was always Mr. Eccentric—oops—Dr. Eccentric, a great pathologist, but in his personal life . . . not “crazy,” but certainly eccentric. And my own Aunt Coral dying in the Illinois State Mental Hospital . . .

  But I see Cecilia every day; never miss a day as long as I’m able to get around . . .

  Marcella, her younger sister, the baby of the first three, also getting counseling.

  I never cease to wonder at the miracles of genetics. Her mother was as Indianish as you can get, with just this drop of Hungarian in her name, but the Hungarian was kind of lost in the Peruvian.

  Marcella comes out with blonde hair, all kinds of hair, and blue eyes.

  And now her daughter, Gabrielle, is exactly the same.

  Gabrielle, 7, very cute, very bright, very aggressive; I don’t see any quirks or madnesses in her . . . just on-track braininess and aggressiveness.

  She is married to this guy who used to be GFO at Ford. Or something like that. Way up there.

  Lived in Ann Arbor in this gigantic house with the 20-foot ceilings on the first floor. You felt you were in the lobby of some State Capitol
somewhere.

  Nice looking guy. Wears a wig that you don’t notice. Thin, tall. Half Irish, half Lebanese.

  Got a little sick of Ford though, and got a GFO job with Donleavy in Holland, Michigan, right on Lake Michigan.

  Only Marcella refused to move.

  “I love Ann Arbor. Everything’s there, the University of Michigan, all kinds of concerts, all kinds of things going on, and Gabrielle is ‘established,’ has all her old friends there. I want her to have stability . . .”

  Stability.

  It’s funny. Just a few years ago Ford sent Kevin to Portugal for a couple of years: Cascais, kind of an extension of Lisbon.

  I visited them there. Loved it. Loved Lisbon.

  Could speak Portuguese, even if it was a Brazilian version of the language.

  Which got me in, in, in . . .

  Like I’d be sitting on a bench in a park on the edge of this bay that Lisbon is on, some old guy would come along and sit down next to me.

  “Tudo bem?” (Everything OK?)

  “Tudo bem.”

  “Ahhhhhh, Brasileiro.” (Aha, a Brazilian.)

  “Não, sou de Chicago.”(No, I’m from Chicago.)

  “Si, cago?” (Yes, I shit?)

  “Não, a cidade, Illinois.” (No, the city, Illinois.)

  “Ahhhhh.”

  Always that problem with Chicago, which comes out in Spanish and Portuguese as “Yes, I shit.” I remember one times decades ago in Lima, when I was giving a lecture and someone asked where I was from, answering Chicago, and the whole audience laughed and laughed and laughed.

  But the old guy, once he’d gotten through the Chicago-bit, started telling me about himself. This little peninsula out on the other side of the bay. He owned tons of houses, apartments, was one of the wealthiest guys in town, nothing else to do but be old and sit around, “a veces penso que sería melhor ser pobre e trabalhar dia e noite en vez de pensar, pensar, pensar . . .” (Sometimes I think it would be better to be poor and work day and night instead of thinking, thinking, thinking . . .)

  I told him about my son-in-law working for Ford here in Lisbon, my daughter, and her Peruvian mother.

  We talked for hours and when he left he told me he’d see me the next day, same place, same time.

  Like we’d been buddies for years.

  Marcella couldn’t understand how everyone reacted so positively. We’d be on a train and I’d start talking to some old lady and she’d invite me over to dinner the next day.

  “How do you do it?” she’d ask.

  “Well, how about starting out by learning the language?!?”

  She’d been speaking Spanish, period. Getting along somewhat, reminding me of Mimi when we’d been in Brazil thirty-five years earlier, getting off the plane (me with a Portuguese dictionary in my hand) and saying “Portuguese is just medieval Spanish.”

  Sure.

  And German is just medieval English.

  I remember one time Mimi walking around in Rio, totally lost, asking someone “Donde estan las tiendas?” which in Spanish means “Where are the stores?” The guy she asked looked all confused. “Não temos mais tiendas.” (We don’t have any more tents.) Tiendas in Spanish means ‘stores,’ but in Portuguese it means ‘tents.’ I guess stores were tents in ancient times . . .

  So Marcella started studying Portuguese, finally got inside the language, the culture, started really loving Portugal/the Portuguese.

  It was during that trip to Portugal that I had my first impotence problems.

  Usually, when I wasn’t with Bernadete, I’d just take care of myself sexually once a day. Do it. Five minutes. And not worry about it.

  But when I was in Portugal and I tried to do it, nothing happened; hours passed—half the night—and finally about five AM it happened; the first time I had problems.

  It turned out to be E. coli plus hyperplasia,

  Lots of dried codfish—I had had a bad case of diarrhea—it was the beginning of years of prostate problems, ending up with cancer and radiation therapy . . .

  More about that later.

  Marcella and I though, for the first time in years and years, started hitting it off, became pals, I became a pal to my son-in-law, and a loving, doting grandfather to my granddaughter, Gabrielle.

  Now, years later, it couldn’t be better.

  The past is forgotten, and we are totally in the NOW, NOW, NOW; it’s existential paradise.

  Like last week, Kevin drove from Holland, Michigan to East Lansing, Marcella drove from Ann Arbor, and they got a hotel with a pool, we went out to lunch on Saturday afternoon, then went to see HAIR at Michigan State (the gigantic, imposing Wharton Center)—a performance so good that I cried—especially at the opening song about the Age of Aquarius, again at the end, the song about letting in the sunshine.

  Before the play Kevin suggested that we take a walk around our new neighborhood in East Lansing.

  Kevin, Marcella, Gabrielle and me taking a walk? Bernadete was out taking Chris shopping.

  So we took our walk. The most luscious, pretentious, snobby neighborhood in East Lansing, all these imitation Tudor half-timber houses, imitation English parsonage houses, imitation French provincials with Mansard roofs, lots of ranch houses, brick Cape Cod-ish places full of peaked doorways and windows, even a couple of Prairie School Frank Lloyd Wright imitations. Two blocks down even another Alden Dow house like ours: concrete blocks and lots of windows.

  “I love this neighborhood,” Kevin said, relaxed, happy, never one walk through the downtown neighborhoods after we’d moved down there. Too proletarian, ghettoish, poor.

  “Well, it’s great to have you around.”

  And it was—is.

  Nice to have Marcella just call for fun now and then during the week, tell me about herself and Kevin:

  “Well, I pretty much have him in line now, no more big executive bullying around the house . . . and he’s agreed to spend two or three days a week in Ann Arbor with me and Gabrielle. She needs him; we need him.”

  After years of alienation, suddenly the kind of closeness I want/need.

  Especially now that I’m suddenly old, with prostate cancer, going through radiation, trying to get rid of it, keeping in mind Dr. Wilenski, this guy over at the synagogue who is ninety-three and going strong.

  I got a chance to talk to him at an eighty-fifth birthday party for Thelma Saper last week, and when I told him I had prostate cancer he brushed it aside.

  “Prostate cancer? I had it twenty years ago, went through radiation therapy and now I’m usually the oldest man at any party I go to.”

  A good model to keep in mind, right?

  OK.

  So much for the kids Lucia and I had.

  Margaret, the oldest of the second bunch, is at Harvard, married to this Frenchman who teaches at M.I.T. They live in Cambridge, have two kids, Rebecca (4) and Alexander (2).

  I hope she comes to visit this summer.

  Last time we went to Boston, about a year ago, I practically walked myself to death. Bernadete and I stayed in this hotel in Cambridge, walked across the bridge to Boston, walked the length and breadth of the whole city, all the malls, the stores, along the ocean—loved it.

  Poet friend, Bill Costley, came to see us. More walking. Clam chowder and beer, fish, fish, and more fish. Rebecca’s favorite place of all was the Egyptian exhibit at the archaeological museum at Harvard. And she loved to walk around in Boston Commons, watch the ducks, just sit and play with her coloring books.

  Active as hell.

  We’d go have a coffee at some place on Harvard Square and Rebecca wouldn’t/couldn’t sit still, would be climbing on whatever fence she could find, climb, dance, jump, explore . . .

  Strangely oriental-looking.

  But I found a picture of my mother that looks a lot like Rebecca. Same orientalish eyes. Sent it to her for her thirtieth birthday with some other pictures of my mother and father, and my mother’s favorite porcelain doll (which is probably worth a thousand
bucks by now).

  Alexandra down in Kansas City?

  Kind of lost, directionless now after having broken up with her latest boyfriend.

  Was going to get a job phone-marketing for the Kansas City Symphony (“I’m calling on behalf of the Kansas City Symphony; we have a special offer we’d like to make you . . .”), worked one day and that was it.

  “I have all these phobias I have to take care of. Agoraphobia, this phobia, that phobia; I don’t really feel up to working . . .”

  But artistic genius that she is, born with oodles of talent . . .?

  She got really pissed at me during one of our daily phone-chats when I said, “You’re not that far from becoming Cecilia, really. You drop out, no work, getting supported by us . . . it’s not too far from getting on the crazy-cat dole, disability . . .”

  She started to cry.

  “I’m a student. I want to study psychology, want to get an M.A., maybe a Ph.D.—”

  “And then?”

  “And then, then! The main thing I have to do now is take care of myself, work on my phobias and fears, and then, if I don’t find anyone, OK, I’ll have myself and my job, ça sufit/that’s enough.”

  OK.

  Maybe handing out the money to her the way we do is the wrong thing to do, maybe we should be like Arctic Foxes, bite their kids when it’s time for them to leave, a little nip here, a little nip there, until out they go, on their own . . .

  The same way with Chris.

  So, so easy on him. $400.00 a month play-around money, lives on the top floor of our classic Victorian house in downtown Lansing; 100% updated. A great house.

  And we’re building him a room at the back of our other house in East Lansing. The Alden Dow house. A kind of Frank Lloyd Wright-ish place, the back of the house all glass, the living room, dining room all one huge two-story space.