by Mad Dash
“Um…”
“All your friends, and Joel’s, Mo would come, some clients, some of the neighbors…” I start naming people we know in common. “We could do it outside if that’s too many people, it’ll be warm by then. And…I know, a group photo, something fun and creative, not just bodies lined up. A keepsake, something really special for you and Joel. I’ll put on my thinking cap.”
“Wow, that would be so cool.”
“I know, and afterward, after you’re all hitched and everything, I’ve got a million photographer pals and they all need new websites, most of them. Whether they know it or not, and I know exactly who to tell them would be perfect for the job.”
“Dash.”
“What?”
“Thank you. Thanks for—”
“For nothing! This is all for me, a hundred percent my pleasure. Truly.” Guilt and regret are wonderful motivators. So is hearing Greta laugh like a conspirator—like a friend. Like someone I’d love to get to know.
andrew
eighteen
Andrew dreaded Wednesdays. His only class ended at eleven—it should be his favorite day. But, being the shortest, it was also the day he’d designated at the beginning of term as the one on which he drove out to Olney and visited his father. So he hated it.
He circled the well-tended grounds of Meadow Grove, closing in on the low, handsome brick building, Grove One, that housed his father and eleven other elderly souls in need of assistance with living. Whose white car was that? Dash’s?
Yes—he recognized the license plate as he idled past, pulling into the last spot in the row. Dash was here? She used to come with him once in a while, but visiting Edward was even more oppressive for her than it was for him, so he assumed she’d quit when she moved out of the house. He shouldn’t be surprised, though. How like her to come. How kind. He hadn’t seen her since the night he brought the tax returns to her office.
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see what he looked like, what she’d make of him—and at the same moment the front door of Grove One flew open and she came striding out.
She looked fit, strong, preoccupied. She had on turquoise jeans and a yellow pullover. Running shoes. She tipped her head back to see the clear sky, and her shoulders rose as she took in a deep breath. He knew exactly how she felt. His reaction after visiting Edward was the same: huge relief; a fresh appreciation of freedom.
He got out of his car.
“Andrew!”
If he had a hope that she’d come today, his day, on purpose, her obvious surprise at seeing him dashed it. She gave him an air kiss before they had to move aside for an incoming car. “Can you stay and talk?” he asked, gesturing to an empty bench in a patch of shade near the building.
“No, gotta get back. I just came up to get something—it’s still my free week. Greta’s handling the office and she says everything’s fine, we’re making money.” She leaned against his car and folded her arms. They could talk here, her posture indicated, just not for long.
He didn’t like her bringing up money. It wasn’t her style, and he was afraid it was because of what he’d said the last time—something offhand and thoughtless, possibly sarcastic, about how he’d be working while she was down in Virginia finding herself. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “we have plenty.” She looked at him strangely. Now he was saying uncharacteristic things. “What about veterinary school?” he couldn’t resist asking. “How’s that going?”
“I decided against it. There’s too much science.”
He bit his lip. “Em, I’d imagine there would be.”
“So now I’m thinking of the Forest Service. I could be a forest ranger, I’m good at nature.”
Her face was turned from him. He ventured an uncertain laugh. She was joking, wasn’t she?
“Oh—Edward’s mad at me because I made him sit outside.”
“Did you? I’ve given up on that.”
“I know, but it’s such a beautiful day.”
He glanced around. She was right; he hadn’t noticed before. A fresh, warm May day, seventy-five-ish, no humidity. Flowers everywhere. “Chloe thinks he’s gone down,” he said. “I see him so often, I can’t tell. How did you find him?”
“Well…he did seem weaker…more frail,” she said carefully. She was softening her report so as not to alarm him, a well-meant but unnecessary kindness. “His mind wasn’t quite as sharp. He talked about his mother—I’ve never heard him do that before. But he’s still himself. That’s for sure,” she said with a quick laugh, as if recalling something he’d just done or said that was more typical, a slight, some put-down, a deliberate hurt. “I guess I would say, all in all,” she finished gently, “he seems to be failing.”
“Thank you for coming to see him.”
“I couldn’t stay long.”
“But I appreciate it.”
“I should’ve come sooner. I’ve been remiss.”
“It doesn’t matter. Sometimes he doesn’t remember I’ve been here.”
“You’re a good son, Andrew. No, you are—you always have been.”
He shook his head, shoved his hands in his pockets, looked off in the distance. How nice they were being to each other. It flustered him.
Her new hairstyle made her look athletic. Younger, too—he should tell her that. He’d bungled it the last time, said the wrong thing, as usual. He blamed it on shock. Her hair had been long for so long, that blowsy, droopy style. He missed it, that was all. Missed the way she would shove her hands in it to lift it up, then let it fall.
“Where’s Hobbes? Didn’t you bring him?” She stood on her toes to see his car.
“Hobbes died.”
“Oh, Andrew. Oh no, I’m sorry. When?”
“About a month ago.”
“A month! Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable. “No reason. I suppose I didn’t think of it.”
“You—” She stared at him.
He held her gaze. They were stepping up to a new level of detachment, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. “Sorry,” he said, knowing that was inadequate. It wasn’t even true that he hadn’t thought of telling her about Hobbes. But he’d known she would be sad for him, sympathetic, warm, and he hadn’t wanted any of that. He’d wanted to do without her.
An old man in a motorized chair with a flag on it waved to them as he glided by. “Hi,” Dash called to him with her sunny smile. She should be a nurse, not a forest ranger. Activities director, that was it. She’d cheer the place up.
But now she was angry, rigid. She adjusted her shoulder bag and withdrew a step. The sun, backlighting her hair, blinded him. “Chloe has her English exam today,” he said to keep her. It worked; for a while they talked about their daughter.
“Are you all right?” Dash said finally. She sounded ever so faintly anxious. Didn’t he look all right? No, she was just taking care of the last bit of business before she could leave.
“Yes, fine. Are you?”
“Yes.” She took another step back.
Here it was slipping away again, and they were letting it. He was letting it. This was how their phone calls went: long pauses, mutual dissatisfaction. “We should talk,” he ventured. “About things, someday.”
She made a vague gesture; a safe answer, since she couldn’t know any better than he did what things meant. Breaking up? Getting back together? She was the one who used to take charge of this kind of business. Andrew, we need to talk, she’d say, and they would hash out whatever was bothering her. About him, usually. If anything bothered him about her, he simply put up with it.
He followed her to her car. It had a new inspection sticker on the windshield, he noticed. That was his job, getting the cars inspected. They were both learning all sorts of new things, weren’t they? The neighbor who always trapped Dash into collecting for the March of Dimes had trapped him this year.
“Is that your enlarger?” The contraption inside a big cardboard box in the bac
kseat. Alongside yellow boxes marked KODAK and sealed with black tape, more boxes of trays and containers and amber-colored jars. Darkroom equipment.
“Yeah, I went to the house this morning and got all this stuff out of the attic. I’m going to do some developing,” she said with satisfaction, buckling her seat belt and slipping the key in the ignition. “I can’t wait. I just hope I remember how!”
“I see. So you’re down there for the long haul, are you?”
“I don’t know, Andrew.”
“It’s a long commute.”
“Yes, it is.” She fiddled with the miniature silver camera on her key ring. “I’ve thought of getting a place, something small. Closer in.”
“That makes no sense.”
She shot him a fierce look.
“It doesn’t. You should live in the house. I…I should get a place.”
Silence.
“Is that what you’d like?”
“Andrew—don’t ask me what I want when you never say what you want.” She waited a few seconds. It was his time to say what he wanted, but he couldn’t think what it was. The engine turning over sounded like an explosion. He got out of the way.
This is really happening, he thought. This is now, the present moment. It’s real.
But it wasn’t. That was Dash’s car driving away, that was how she held her head, the way she rested her elbow in the open window. Despite everything he knew—and not only about his wife; also about history—at bottom, he wasn’t a man who could really believe in change.
His father lay in his expensive recliner with his head back, mouth agape, fast asleep in front of his blaring television set. Dash had brought him flowers, yellow tulips in a mason jar. The spacious room looked like a judge’s chambers—Edward’s conceit when he’d first moved in: all his diplomas and certificates behind his old desk and high-backed chair, one whole wall of bookshelves and leather-bound legal volumes. Ironic, now that he could barely read a newspaper. He spent his days in the recliner, dozing through sixteen hours of CNN tuned to a deafening pitch.
Andrew muted the TV and Edward roused, blinking, dabbing spittle from the side of his mouth. “Oh,” he said without surprise, as if Andrew had just returned from the bathroom. “Grand Central Station.”
“How are you, Dad?”
“Eh?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. I feel fine.” His standard answer. Andrew could only hope it was true, but Edward had congestive heart failure, chronic bronchitis, the beginnings of emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He tottered on his thin legs on the rare occasions when he was upright on his own power. He breathed oxygen through a tube in his nose twenty-four hours a day.
Andrew pulled the heavy desk chair over, positioning it beside the recliner so they were both facing the television. It was easier to talk that way, not looking at each other. As if they were sitting in a car.
“Dash came to see you.”
If he hadn’t heard, Edward frequently said nothing, pretending he had.
“Dash came,” Andrew repeated, pointing to the flowers.
Edward grunted. “Nice of her to stop by.”
No sarcasm intended, Andrew decided. His father was softening toward Dash in his dotage, possibly realizing all the things he used to loathe about her hadn’t taken the family down in disgrace after all. The proof was Chloe.
An aide came in, one of the kind, dark-skinned women with exotic accents who, as far as Andrew could tell, took care of all the old people in the country. “Medicine,” she sang in bright, carrying tones. Her nametag said she was Mercedes. She handed Edward a pill in a small paper cup, another cup full of water. “Drink it. Drink. Take your pill!” He smiled up at her, cooperative, obliging. The staff was always telling Andrew what a nice man his father was. The first few times, he was positive they’d confused him with another resident.
After Mercedes left, Andrew fell into a familiar quandary, whether to tell his father about Hobbes. Weeks passed, and he kept waiting for him to ask about his dog, wonder why Andrew hadn’t brought him, at least mention him. But Edward seemed to have forgotten all about Hobbes. Poor old boy, he deserved better.
Edward startled him by suddenly asking, “So what are you going to do about her?” His eyes, normally filmed over with boredom or weakness or ennui, were sharp and clear, and they were focused on Andrew.
“About…”
“Your wife!”
“Em. We haven’t decided what will happen.”
“Why not? How long has it been?”
He should never have told him they were separated. Why had he? Some idiotic bid for sympathy? “We’re working things out, Dad. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried.” He smiled his thin-lipped, patronizing smile. “I gave you credit for being a little smarter, that’s all.”
“As smart as you were?”
They glared, side by side, at a story on some Middle East bombing atrocity playing out on the silent TV.
“Just don’t take too long,” Edward grumped. “They leave.”
He couldn’t be talking about Tommie, his social-climbing harpy of a second wife; except for the money, he’d been nothing but relieved when she left him. About Ellen, then. Andrew’s mother.
All his life Andrew had wondered what their marriage was like. His memories of his mother were vague, more like dreams. She was the one he’d run to from monsters in his nightmares; she’d hold out her arms to him and he would be saved. He didn’t know if it was a real memory or a photograph he’d looked at so often it felt like a memory—of her sunny hair that smelled like a Mars bar, coconut and sugar, and of her warm body, always welcoming, embracing.
She’d died of cancer when he was nine, but he could remember nothing of her illness. Only her absences, the last one explained by his father as Mother having gone to heaven. The Batemans weren’t churchgoers, so the concept was shadowy. Andrew had imagined it as Bethany Beach, where they rented a cottage every summer. “This is heaven,” his mother would say as she lay on a towel in the sand, shading her eyes to watch the sun go down.
“Do you need anything, Dad?”
“Like what?”
“Socks, underwear, toothpaste.”
“No, thanks. You wouldn’t get the right kind anyway.”
“Probably not. Any shirts for the cleaners?” They didn’t do them right here at Meadow Grove.
“On the floor in the closet.”
Andrew yawned. The warm room was making him sleepy. “Chloe says to give you her love.” The old man wrinkled his lips for a smile. Andrew told him about her exam schedule, her plans to intern at an experimental theater in D.C. this summer. Edward put his chin on his chest, but kept his eyes open. He rarely left this room anymore, but his clothes were still a matter of pride to him. You’d never find him in a sweat suit or one of those matching velour outfits favored by so many of the other male residents: casual Friday at the law office—not that there had been one at Bateman and Tate—that was as far as Edward would let himself go.
But his eyesight was failing; it was a mercy he couldn’t see the dandruff or the shaven white whiskers littering the chest and shoulders of his fine sweaters. Unmatched socks, uncut hair, food stains on his trousers, jagged fingernails—Andrew was used to them by now, but they’d appalled him at first, shocked him on a shivery, deep, personal level. How horrified his father would be if he knew. And even though the fact of Edward humiliating himself had a certain quality of closure, even symmetry, Andrew had wanted desperately to save him. But the mildest offer of help met denial or disdain, and finally he’d seen that the only way to “save” his father was to collude with him.
He thought of Wolfie, the story he’d told him about gluing his watch inside Edward’s humidor. What if that small, indelible childhood humiliation had been some sort of watershed event for him, or the last among many, after which the entire point of his life was to disappoint his father? Get revenge on him by meeting his low exp
ectations? If so…
If so. He couldn’t imagine a decent end to that bit of subjunctive thinking. If so—good job? Happy now?
On the television, black people in some African nation held signs, protesting in front of a barbed-wire fence. They looked furious, all of them men, their mouths twisted, spitting anger.
“Dad, did you know Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?”
“Eh?”
“About two hundred. It’s not a secret, we’ve always known it—historians. We just didn’t talk about it. Two hundred slaves. And when he died, he didn’t free them. Washington freed his, but not Jefferson. A servant or two, that was it. Not even his mistress, or the children he got from her. What do you think of that, Dad?”
Edward’s eyes were closed, mouth slack.
“Nowadays we talk about it, of course. As we should. Gloves off. Practically a cottage industry of Founding Father bashers these days, everybody hard at work. They do it with computers and spreadsheets now, models, paradigms, statistics. Jefferson would’ve approved, actually. He loved anything newfangled. He’d have liked a new light shown on himself, too, because that would bring a balance. He was all for balance. And reason, and temperance, men behaving well. Health in mind and body. Health—he used to soak his feet in cold water every morning, thought it would keep him from catching cold. When his wife died, he went a little crazy for a while. Couldn’t rest, couldn’t sit still. He’d get migraines.”
Andrew leaned forward, holding his head in his hands. He might be getting a migraine himself; he could feel that premonitory ache on the right side of the back of his neck. Why was he talking about Jefferson? His father wasn’t even listening.
“He was definitely a racist—he believed blacks were inferior to whites. Truly believed it. But you’d have to, wouldn’t you, to make a man your slave? I don’t know if he was a hypocrite. He warned against the ‘amalgamation’ of the races, and he had children with Sally Hemings, his slave.
“How am I expected to defend that? I can’t. When I try, I hate the words I have to use, even though they’re true—he lived a life of his times, he can’t be judged by ours, in every other respect his principles were irreproachable, he was born too soon…”