by Ann Packer
“Can I hold him?” the doctor asks Lise, and while Dean’s wondering what’s odd about this, Lise nods, and the doctor lifts Danny and cradles him against his chest. “He’s a nice little bundle,” the doctor says, and all at once Dean understands that what he’s feeling is the awe of ownership, amazement that permission is his and Lise’s to give or refuse. Just two weeks and he’s an expert on Danny, on his Dannyness, each day placing into an infinitely expandable container every new thing he knows to be true about his baby. He thinks of what he knows about the dead baby—about Jasper—and it’s next to nothing: he liked to be flown through the air like an airplane, he loved to have his father tickle his toes. Dean’s had it all wrong: it isn’t that Lise had a baby who died, but rather that she had a baby, who died. He looks at her, creases around her eyes as she smiles at Danny, and he feels a little space open up in his mind, for all she can tell him about her firstborn.
The doctor turns to Dean now, holding Danny out like an offering. “Dad?” he says. “Do you want him back now?”
Things Said or Done
By the way,” my father says, “I’m probably dying.” Except for sleep, we’ve been together nonstop for the last thirty hours, ever since we met at the Hartford airport yesterday morning, but he has chosen this moment to unburden himself: this moment, when we’re carrying folding chairs through a windowless corridor in a neighborhood community center in Berkeley, California. Well, I’m carrying folding chairs, my elbows sticking out as the bottoms of the chair backs dig into my curled fingers, while he is empty-handed, strolling back toward the storage room.
“Sure, ignore me,” he calls when I don’t respond.
“You’re probably dying,” I call back.
Up ahead, the once homely rec room is growing more festive by the minute. Three young women with bare feet wind garlands of flowers up the frame of a makeshift gazebo, and five neat rows of chairs are arranged on the linoleum floor, with a center aisle for the bridal procession.
“My piss smells like raw meat,” he calls. “Plus I’m always tired. I’m thinking kidney disease.”
“Sounds right,” I call back.
I enter the room and set the chairs down for a moment. In the dry California air, my hair, which is curly enough, frizzes with static, and I find a clip in my pocket and pin a section away from my face. Beyond the grimy clerestory windows puffs of cloud float across the sky. It’s a crisp September day, auspicious for a wedding. The groom is my middle-aged brother, the bride a very pretty twenty-three-year-old girl who was until recently an intern in his lab at the University of California. Her name is Cressida, but on the plane yesterday my father began referring to her as “Clytemnestra,” and because I made the mistake of objecting, he won’t give it up.
Cressida’s mother directs me to start row number six with my chairs. Like her daughter, she is tall and long-limbed, and she’s as calm and unfussy a mother of the bride as I’ve ever seen. According to my brother she is fifty, a year younger than I, but somehow I feel as if I am by far the less mature of the two of us, probably because in this context she is all mother, whereas I don’t have children—unless you count my father.
I head back to the storage room, expecting to find him, but he seems to have vanished. Cressida’s younger brother, a high school senior with sleepy eyes, has discovered a cart with wheels, and I help him load a dozen chairs onto it and dispatch him down the corridor, glad for a moment of solitude. We’ve been working since nine o’clock, an early call after a rehearsal dinner that lasted till well after midnight. Like the wedding, the rehearsal dinner was arranged and catered by Cressida’s family, though they allowed my father and me to make a gift of the wine. It took place in their backyard, where a giant paella was served at picnic tables crowded with jars of daisies. There were about forty of us, family and close friends, and toward the end of the night Cressida’s mother made a point of telling me how sorry she was that my mother wasn’t arriving until today, which was nice but didn’t conceal—in fact, communicated—her bafflement that a retired librarian who lives alone could be too busy to spend a full weekend at her son’s wedding. It isn’t busyness, though, it’s history: decades of it, beginning with my mother’s decision to leave my father when I was sixteen. She had, for twenty years, tried to hold him together, but there were just too many pieces of him for that, and now she keeps a steady and inviolable distance.
“Ha,” he says, appearing in the doorway with his hands on the hips of his baggy khakis—pants so old a wife would not allow them and a daughter shouldn’t, but I can’t do everything. “There you are. That woman, the mother, is about to tell us to take a meditation break!”
“That woman.”
“Meditation and/or stretching. That’s what it said on her list.”
I frown to show I can’t believe he looked at her list, though of course I can believe it.
“Sasha,” he says, “she left it lying on the piano. I’m supposed to walk right by that?”
“As a matter of fact you are. Where were you just now?”
“Went to see a man about a hearse.”
This is an old family joke—it means he was in the bathroom. He claims it started as a misunderstanding of mine, that as an appealingly morbid little girl I heard “hearse” when someone on a TV show said he needed to see a man about a horse. I don’t remember this, but if it happened I’m sure I only pretended to mishear, that the apparent “mistake” was a calculated move to please him. Beginning when I was very young, he conferred specialness on me and then required that I earn it, and I was only too happy to comply, dividing my efforts between precocity (memorizing at age seven the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, for example) and fussiness (insisting on two thick foam rubber pillows for sleep every night; refusing ever to wear green). We lived in tacit agreement that I could be anything but ordinary. Like him, I was to breathe only the rarefied air of the never-quite-satisfied, and the more difficult I was, the more entranced he became. Which is not, it turns out, the best preparation for life. Or marriage, as my ex-husband would certainly attest.
“Anyway,” my father says, leaning against the storage room door and peering with apparent fascination at the back of his forefinger, “it can’t be good.”
“Your finger.”
“My health! Something’s wrong. My piss smells like chocolate.”
“I thought it was raw meat,” I say, but then Cressida’s brother returns with the empty cart, and my father gives up both the promise of a minor skin injury and the opportunity to be offended by me, both so he can lay a trap for the boy. Feigning nonchalance, he asks what’s next on the schedule.
“Schedule?” the boy says.
“What do we do after the chairs are in place?”
“It’s fine,” I interject. “We’re happy to do whatever.”
“Yeah, but there must be a schedule,” my father says. “A list.”
“I don’t know,” the boy says. “My dad just got here with the programs, I can ask him.”
“The programs!” My father glances at me: this is getting better and better. “What is this, a concert?”
“Well, they’re not really programs. More sort of souvenirs? With photos and poems and stuff?” The boy shrugs. “They’re nice.”
At the word “poems,” I turn my back on my father and begin loading chairs on the cart. Long ago, in another lifetime, he was a professor of English, and he still has proprietary views on what should be called poetry and what should be called—well, not poetry. I hope if I don’t look at him he’ll keep his mouth shut.
“Oh, um,” the boy says, face reddening, “now that I think about it—my mom’s going to try to get everyone to do partner massages.”
I shoot a murderous look at my father and say, quickly as I can, “She wants to make sure we don’t work too hard. That’s thoughtful.”
The boy glances over his shoulder and leans forward. “Do you mind not telling Peter? I told Cress I wouldn’t let my parents do anything dumb,
and—you know.”
“Sure,” I say. “No problem.”
He pushes the cart away, and now I have to look at my father again: he is grinning triumphantly, showing off his crooked yellow teeth. “What did I tell you?” he says. “Partner massages! Only in California!”
“That’s what you told me.”
And told me and told me. We’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast that offers—unexpectedly, I admit—an afternoon class in self-massage, and after my father made the obligatory joke about how we used to call that masturbation, he declared that in no bed-and-breakfast anywhere else in the country would there be anything offered in the afternoon but sherry or tea. Then we discovered there was a clothing-optional hot tub in the backyard, and it was as if he’d won the lottery. The thing is, we lived in California once ourselves, and his scorn can’t erase the fact that he thought of it as paradise when it was his.
My father is not an easy person in the best of circumstances, but he’s especially cantankerous when he has to see my mother. It’s been thirty-five years since she left him, but I remember it vividly: his heartsick weeping, his enervation, his despair. He was supposedly job hunting at that point, having been “let go” by the Connecticut boarding school where he’d gone when higher education didn’t work out, but after the initial shock of her departure he abandoned his search and hung around in his pajamas all day, waiting for me to get home from school. “Come talk to me,” he’d plead as soon as I entered the house, and he’d lead me to the study, where he’d been sleeping since she left, on the hard foam pallet of a Danish modern sofa. While I perched on a sliver of windowsill, he’d sit behind the desk and ask if I thought she’d ever come back, or even, incredibly, why she’d left, as if he’d been away for the bulk of their marriage and needed me to tell him what had happened. (He wasn’t away. Years later, in that cultural moment when the words “present” and “absent” cast off their classroom meanings and entered the crowded realm of the psychological metaphor, I joked to friends that if only my father had been more absent, things might have worked out between him and my mother.)
As we continue arranging chairs, I keep an eye on him, half for damage control and half to monitor his mood. The bride and groom were banned from the proceedings, and at noon the rest of us—assorted relatives and friends, my brother’s troop of graduate students—are offered a break and a snack and are instructed that this setup help is the only gift we are allowed to give the couple. “A little late telling us,” my father says, but under his breath, and I’m grateful he didn’t say it louder. I’m even more grateful that no massages were suggested, partner or otherwise.
I’m recruited to help with flowers, and I join a group stuffing blossoms into every size, shape, and color of vase imaginable. My mother will like the unfussy, inclusive mandate of this wedding, the leggy perennials, the homey appetizers I saw in the community center fridge. Her flight is due to land at three-forty, which is cutting it close even for her. Surprisingly, she will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast as my father and I, a mark of resignation, or maybe indifference.
I’m putting a bunch of white roses into a glass jug when my father comes over and says he’s not well and needs to rest.
“So sit down,” I say.
He looks at the ceiling, as if there might be someone up there to recognize my boorish insensitivity. “I have to lie down. Right now.”
“Right now?”
“I’m telling you, I’m not well.”
He looks fine, but I know better than to argue. I make our apologies to Cressida’s parents and lead the way to the car. Other people throw parties; my father throws emergencies. It’s been like this forever. When I was a kid I thought the difference between my father and other parents was that my father was more fun. It took me years to see it clearly. My father was a rabble-rouser. He was fun like a cyclone.
Peter found the B&B, which is on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood and looks very much like an ordinary Berkeley house: painted a bold burnt orange, its front yard landscaped with birch trees and a slate pathway. Inside, the owners’ private area is to the right; the breakfast room is straight ahead, already set for tomorrow with a basket of tea bags on the communal table and more of the stiff beige napkins we used this morning (made of bamboo, we were told); and to the left are the guest quarters, down a hallway that is still hung with photographs of the teenagers who once occupied these rooms.
The whole drive from the community center my father complained and sighed, insisting he really didn’t know what was wrong, only that something was, but by the time we reach his room he’s feeling “a little bit better,” and I leave him. There are two more rooms, a very small one next to my father’s and a larger one at the end of the hallway, and the proprietor insisted I take the larger one since I’m staying three nights and “the other lady” is staying only one. This means that tonight my parents will go to bed with only a thin wall between them, closer than they’ve slept in decades.
I’m more tired than I realized, and when I add up the transcontinental flight yesterday, the incredibly late night given that we were on eastern time, and the work of schlepping chairs all morning, I think it’s no wonder he wanted to lie down—I do, too. I close the blinds and take off my shoes and stretch out on the bed. There’s a separate guesthouse in the backyard, occupied this weekend by a couple from Melbourne, and I hear their voices and the occasional splash as they soak in the hot tub.
I’m just drifting off when my cell phone buzzes with a text. Viens, my father has written, as if the French will somehow mask the imperiousness.
I find him not lying down or even sitting but pacing between bed and window. “What’s wrong?”
“This Clytemnestra. Do you suppose she thinks we’re rich?”
“Uch, Daniel,” I say. “I was lying down.”
“You’re so blasé. My son is getting married.”
“And?”
“And I don’t want him to get hurt again.”
This is an allusion to Peter’s romantic history, with its long fallow periods and terrible ecstasies, though it is of course an allusion to my father’s, as well. Last night, staring across the picnic table at Peter, I caught a glimpse of the boy he was at thirteen, when his family fell apart, and I thought it made sense, how late he was marrying: he’d waited till he was older than our father was at the time his marriage ended. What this means, though, is that he’s old enough to be Cressida’s father, and I worry about the strains of gratitude in his voice when he talks about her.
“Also,” my father says, “it makes me feel old.”
“This is a happy thing,” I tell him. “You should feel young—most people are a lot younger when their children marry. You were only fifty-whatever when I got married.”
“And look how that turned out.”
“You know, you can think stuff like that and choose not to say it.”
“I was heartbroken about your marriage.”
“As opposed to my divorce.”
“That’s not fair,” he cries, but he’s smiling now, a coy, aren’t-I-a-naughty-boy smile. The truth is he has never been a fan of anyone I’ve dated.
Now he says, “You didn’t take me seriously this morning about my health,” a classic kvetcher’s bait and switch. I don’t respond and he says, “Are you saying you did?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“I noticed!”
“What does the doctor think?”
“I haven’t been,” he says. “She’ll order a scan, I’ll be like one of those suitcases at the airport.”
I say she might ask a question or two first, but he ignores me, looking off into the distance and caressing his chin. He says, “Have you ever thought about this? They have CAT scans and PET scans, but CAT scans aren’t a kind of PET scan—there’s a taxonomy problem. CAT scans should be a kind of PET scan, and there should be other PET scans, too—DOG scans, which would be, you know, Diagnostic Oldfart Geriatricography. And RABBIT
scans, Retired Alterkoker Bladder …”
I let myself drift as he continues. I think of this sort of thing as The Daddy Show, and long ago, when I was a little girl, I enjoyed it. In fact, there was a time when he staged a literal show every night before I went to bed, and it was the highlight of my day. Once I was under the covers but still sitting propped against my pillows, he put on finger puppets—a felt Daddy-O-MacDaddy on his left forefinger, a felt Sasha-the-Pasha on his right—and the two of them bopped through literature and history as narrated by my father, joining in the Norman Conquest, acting out parts of Twelfth Night, never an idle evening until I was ten or eleven and began making excuses about being tired or having homework. After that, he retired the puppets, but to this day he has not stopped performing.
“Did you see that New Yorker cartoon,” he is saying, “with the rabbits in the living room, sitting with their legs crossed holding martini glasses? I thought of a much better caption than the one they had. It should have said—”
“If you think you’re sick,” I say, “you need to go to the doctor.”
“But I’m scared.”
He looks scared, and I give him what I hope will seem like a sympathetic smile. I am sympathetic—somewhat, and more for the hypochondria than for whatever ails him—but the algebra of our relationship means it’s hard for me to offer compassion when that’s so clearly what he wants.
“Seriously,” he says. “It’s time I told you this. I’m scared, but it’s not death I’m scared of, it’s dying. It’s pain. Will you promise me no pain? I’m not asking you to do me in, just a very fast morphine drip.”