The next day they drove to the hospital. Daniel cracked the car window, and the winter air drew his cigarette smoke out like a thin ghost. He saw square porches, bricked-in flower boxes, and shiny black lampposts standing before each entrance walk; the familiar landscape soothed the itch of memory. He hoped they would pass the church with the stained-glass windows he and his friends had smashed with rocks when they were in the sixth grade. The day after they’d done it, he’d heard his mother on the phone, discussing the incident, which had destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of stained glass. She had speculated, as had the papers, about the rise in juvenile crime and what it meant.
“You must’ve been very angry,” Jacquie had said when he told her about it.
“I was just being a kid,” he’d returned.
“A very angry kid.”
He’d rolled his eyes.
The ugliness of the hospital pleased him; it seemed appropriate. The lounge was furnished with smudged plastic chairs, a vinyl couch with a strip of duct tape on it, and a candy machine. People sat in various attitudes of unhappiness. Daniel looked at them. One man looked back. His hair was standing up, and his hands appeared numb. He looked as though he might say something hostile. Daniel looked away.
A girl with a bitter mouth and blue eye shadow that deepened violently in the crease of her lids handed them purple guest passes. A female voice, enlarged and blurred by a loudspeaker, clouded the hall. The elevator bore them up. They entered a room. Daniel saw a person he didn’t identify as his mother until Albert said, “Mom?”
Tufts of pale, silken hair floated from her partially shaved head. Blue veins lined her scalp. The skin on her face and neck was lax, but it looked stiff as old papier-mâché. A ghostly array of bottles hung from metal poles around the bed. Little rubber tubes were taped against her arms. A thick rubber hose protruded from her distended mouth like a visual bray of anger. She was held erect by a brace at her back. It was a minute before he noticed that holes had been drilled into the frontal bone on either side of her forehead and metal rods had been driven into the holes. Her head was suspended in a metal hoop centered by the rods. Her eyes were closed. Her breath rasped. Daniel thought, Frankenstein. He began to sweat.
“You can talk to her, Dan,” said Rose. “She’s sedated, but she understands.”
Albert sat in a chair beside the bed and touched the papery arm. “We brought Daniel, Mom. He’s here from California.”
Her eyes opened.
Daniel’s ears were suddenly filled with internal noise. A tremulous black fuzz blocked his vision. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He stumbled out, palming the bumpy wall of the hallway. He banged his shins on a bench and sat on it, dropping his head between his knees. The fuzz parted to reveal an expanse of gold-flecked tile.
“Daniel?” Rose’s voice. “Are you all right?”
When they got back from the hospital, their father called. He invited Daniel out to dinner, without Albert and Rose. He preferred taking his sons to dinner one at a time, a preference neither brother questioned.
Before hanging up, his father said he was involved in a new business. His last venture, importing tropical fish, had lasted two months.
“It’s some weird thing to do with informational videos,” said Albert. “Some crap for tourists in hotel rooms.”
“That sounds viable,” said Daniel.
“I doubt it,” said Albert.
The comment annoyed Daniel, and he changed the subject. “Has he seen Mom?”
“Yeah,” said Albert. “He’s been good that way.” He sighed and stiffly stretched in a hard, ungiving little chair. “He was there the first night they brought her in. All Mom’s family were there, and I guess it was a bad scene. It might’ve been better if Rose and I were there, but we didn’t arrive until after.”
With a sort of angry relish, Albert told his second-hand version of the story. When their father arrived in the waiting room, no one in the family could tell him what exactly had happened to their mother, what condition she was in or where she was, apparently because they had been given inadequate information by the hospital staff and were too timid to press for more. Their father roared around the waiting room, cursing and calling them all sheep. Aunt Pauline wept and Uncle Jimmy called their father a bastard. A nurse came out of her station and told their father what he needed to know, and everybody shut up.
“Once again, Dad does the thing everybody wants done but no one will do,” said Daniel.
“Yep,” said Albert. A smile of unhappy vindication made his dull eyes glint. “Later, after we got there, Grandpa came up to Dad and tried to make up, but Dad told him to fuck off.”
“Oh, man.” But Daniel felt a sneaking little triumph for his father.
Albert half looked away, as if he knew what Daniel felt and didn’t want to think about it. Instead of saying anything, he got up and went to the refrigerator to get a drink from his water jar. He was only thirty-five, and already he walked like an exhausted man in late middle age.
Daniel and his father went to an expensive mall restaurant with a railroad theme. Booths were tricked out to look like the seats in trains, and there were framed pictures of trains on the walls. Wait-people dressed like porters had their names affixed to their jackets on plastic cards. Daniel never went to restaurants like this in San Francisco, but he secretly loved them; they made such an effort.
His father sat away from the table, his long legs crossed, a cigarette lax in his fingers. He was very handsome. He wore an expensive suit. His eyes were harsh and watchful, his thin mouth downwardly taut. Daniel admired him.
As they ate, his father described his new project, producing instructional videos for people who have to stand in line, at the post office or the DMV or anyplace where lines are formed.
“I was thinking maybe you could represent us in San Francisco.” His father’s eyes shifted up. “If you’re interested.”
“I’ve never done that kind of work before.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’d be a natural.” His father speared a slice of lobster meat with a tiny aluminum pick. “The next time you start worrying about your career as a musician, I want you to do this: Just put on your best suit, then go stand in front of a full-length mirror and take a good look at yourself. Just see what a good impression you make. You’ll always have that. Whatever happens, with your music or anything else, you can always sell.” He drew on his cigarette, his eye wrinkles tensing. “Although you would have to cut your hair.”
No matter how thoroughly his father failed, Daniel saw him as a suave, sneering gambler who might win at any time. The ridiculous tropical fish business, the trips to South America, the drunken squabbles with surly young girlfriends in motel restaurants, the seedy hotel rooms, the dirty socks that surely accumulated under the beds of the wifeless—it all merely added to his allure. Even the vision of his father rising from a badly scrambled bed in a box-shaped motel room and staggering into the bathroom to vomit gave Daniel a pang of admiration and love. When he was a teenager, his father had said to him, “You’re the son I don’t worry about at all. You’re a cat that lands on its feet. You could be stuck in the middle of the desert and you’d find your way.” He loved his father for saying that to him.
“How did your mother look when you saw her?”
“Well. . .” Daniel hesitated and, to his dismay, smiled. “It was horrible. I almost fainted.” His smile was watery, his lips felt weak—why was he smiling at all? He had exposed a tender spot. “I had to leave the room.”
“It is horrible.” His father vigorously uncrossed his legs. “Horrible and unfair.” He meticulously separated some lobster meat from its shell, then lost interest in it. “You know we had a bad relationship. That marriage was ruined by her family. But your mother and I are still close in a way I’ve never been with another woman. We’re still man and wife, even if we never speak to each other again.” He chewed rapidly and lightly, then swallowed
. “Marriage means some-thing to me, and so does family.”
“Me too,” said Daniel.
His father looked up. “I still can’t believe that idiot family of hers. Sitting there letting nurses tell them what to do.” He snorted and poked his tongue around in his mouth. “Probably all doped out on Prozac.”
Daniel noticed a red-haired girl with large sweatered breasts at the next table. Her mouth was darkened with bad lipstick gone awry, but she handled her utensils very gracefully.
“How is Ray?” he asked. “Do you still see her?”
“Sometimes.” His father smiled, a little harshly. “She’s crazy as always. Last time I saw her, we went to some restaurant, pretty late at night. She had coffee and she poured about four sugars into it. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to eat so much sugar, and she went nuts. She said, ‘Everybody hates guys like you. What the fuck do you know about health, you alcoholic asshole?’” His father snorted mildly and shook his head, his mouth a rude line.
Then he noticed the redhead too.
It was late when they left the restaurant. The night cold reached in through Daniel’s nose and seized his lungs. Buildings and cars looked stunned and abandoned in the intense cold. His father’s big car shuddered in the wind. Its rusted, corrugated ass end stuck out beyond the other cars, proud and devastated. They got in the car and sat silently for several minutes while his father worked to make the engine turn over, grunting slightly as if he were lifting a heavy object. In the small, cold enclosure, Daniel felt his father intensely, felt him trying really hard.
Jacquie had never liked his father. “He’s a handsome prick,” she’d said once. “But he’s a prick.”
“Don’t call my dad a prick,” said Daniel. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
They tried to scoot to the far sides of the bed, but it was so mushy in the center that they rolled together anyway.
When he got home he called Jacquie. She was glad to hear from him; she had thought he was still mad at her. “I realized I must’ve sounded cold,” she said, “but that’s not how I meant it.”
“It’s okay. You were just freaked out.” He imagined Jacquie sitting invisible in the car with him and his father, feeling his father. He pictured an expression of understanding slowly altering her face. If they knew each other as he knew them individually, he thought, they would love each other.
“I was thinking about this thing that happened when I was a kid,” she said. “I mean, in relation to what I said to you about the accident.”
He thought of being with her on their bed, massaging the little ribs between her breasts. These bones were spare, and they gave slightly if he pressed hard. She loved to have them rubbed, especially the places in between the bones.
“We were going to the ice cream social at my school,” she said, “which naturally I liked because it meant a ton of ice cream and cake. But as we were pulling out of the driveway, we ran over our cat, Midnight. She was up under the wheel, and she didn’t get out in time. It was awful, because when we got out we saw her hips were crushed but she was still moving reflexively, trying to get up.”
He listened, alert and puzzled.
“I said, ‘Look, she’s still alive,’ and my mother said, ‘No, it’s just reflex,’ and my sisters immediately began to sob. But I didn’t.”
“Do you think you were shocked?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think I just wanted to go get ice cream. We went to the ice cream social, and I sat there and packed it in. My sisters were too upset to eat, but not me. My mother said, ‘Why aren’t you crying?’ I just shrugged, but later I felt guilty about it.”
“Well, it’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”
“No. And neither does my therapist.”
“What did your therapist say?”
“That I was probably not as oriented toward the sensate as my sisters. That I was probably a cerebral child and that plain death didn’t seem terrible to me. Like, the cat’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s go have our ice cream.”
“But it’s normal to care about pets.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just had a different set of responses than the conventional one.”
He sighed and stuck his feet in front of a furnace vent made of metal strips and dark, heat-breathing slits.
“Actually I remember getting more upset about Midnight’s brother, Walnut. He was obviously very distraught when he saw her body. He walked around the house for days, looking for her and meowing. That did seem sad to me. Partly because he didn’t understand what had happened and we couldn’t explain it to him.”
He got off the phone feeling okay. But later that night he lay in bed, wide awake and furious at Jacquie.
He visited his mother every day during the ten days he stayed in Iowa. He got used to the thin hoop haloing her impaled head. The tube came out of her mouth, and her eyes began to show expression—usually a dull and cantankerous one. Cards and flowers proliferated in her room. Daniel noticed with irritation that nothing had come from Jacquie.
Finally she was able to talk. “How is Jacquie?” she asked.
“Pretty good.”
“That’s good. She’s a nice girl.” Her voice was devoid of inflection, flat and invulnerable. There was an undercurrent of grudging bitterness in it, as if she had concluded some time ago that there was no hope for her but was willing to pretend otherwise so that you wouldn’t feel depressed, even though the pretense was a nuisance. Daniel realized with discomfort that she had talked like this for years. His mother’s eyes shifted vaguely around the room. “She is a nice girl,” she repeated. Her hand began to twitch on the rumpled bedsheet. He put his hand out to still it. It felt like an injured and panicking bird. His hand sweated, and he wondered if it repelled her. No, he thought. Just hold her hand.
“Has Harry been to see you?” he asked. Harry was a talkative gynecologist whom she had been dating for the last three months.
“Oh, yes. Several times. I think he’s afraid of running into your father.”
“How is he?”
“Oh, he’s Harry. He’s incredibly Harry.” She smiled, and her eyes wrinkled elfishly. He saw for a second the pert little girl that smiled at him from old black-and-white photos in the family album. “Tell me about your music,” she said.
He told her about his one steady job, in a dark little bar with a crippled neon sign that blinked “Free Crabs—Funk Nite.” He told her about playing in the park and being chased by cops. He told her about the time the famous piano player had told him he was “the death.” He wasn’t sure what it meant to her. It could seem seedy and pathetic.
He finished talking, and they were quiet. She whispered. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s just sit quietly together now.”
The flat rasp of her voice made the endearment strangely poignant to him. He shifted his sweating fingers, stretched them to air them out, and then took her hand again. The room was a lulling beige-and-cream terrain permeated by the muted hum of the building. He listened to it and became aimlessly thoughtful. He thought of Mrs. Harris, whose son had been killed in an amusement park accident several years before. He had liked the son, and yet, when confronted with the weeping Mrs. Harris, he’d been embarrassed and hadn’t known what to do. He wished he could see Mrs. Harris again, so that he could hold her and console her.
His mother opened her eyes. “I’ve never felt so much pain before in my life,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.” She closed her eyes again.
Daniel stroked the length of her arm with his hand. When he was little and he had a headache, his father would put his hands on either side of his head and say, “I’m drawing the pain out of your head and into my hands.” He would stand over Daniel with his hands firm on the boy’s skull, a terrible look of concentration on his face. Then he would step away and say, “Now your headache is gone.” Daniel would still have a headache, but it didn’t matter. He loved it when his father
came to take the headache away.
He held his mother’s shoulders, watching her face for signs of relief. Her cheeks sagged, her eyes were peevishly closed. It struck him that this was only an extreme form of her habitual expression. She always seemed to be suffering in some remote, frozen way. He had been so used to it that he hadn’t recognized it as suffering. He didn’t think she did, either. It seemed to be her natural state. It seemed natural in part because of her courage, which was also habitual. He thought of her driving on the highway, dressed in her checked business suit, drumming her fingers on the wheel and moving her lips in silent conversation with herself.
The door opened. A dark-haired nurse with a still face came in, pushing a small metal machine. His mother poked one eye open and regarded the nurse like an animal from within a lair. The nurse told her she had to do a test, extract something. “It won’t be painful,” she said.
“Bullshit,” snapped his mother.
Awake at four in the morning, Daniel thought of calling Jacquie again. But he was still mad at her about the cat story and half afraid that if he called she’d say something else that would piss him off. He sat alone at the kitchen table, swatting his drum pad. He felt he was learning something important, something to do with families and with himself that he needed to sort out.
But Jacquie had a thing about families; in the abstract, the subject almost always made her scornful and antagonistic, especially toward parents. She was the kind of person who saw child abuse everywhere. When she went to visit a married friend, her friend’s daughter, who was three, brought home painted Easter eggs she’d done at day care. The kid had wanted to eat them, and her father had said no, because he didn’t think they were free-range chicken eggs. The child cried and threw an egg on the floor. Her father spanked her and made her clean it up. Daniel didn’t think that sounded so bad, but Jacquie was furious. She was even madder at their neighbors, who she said “mocked” their children.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 12