The carriage shuddered and began to roll.
John asked the steward for an extra blanket, but its warmth had no effect.
The guidebook warned of fundamentalist rebels shooting at these trains; I imagined the black window strafed by bullets.
Click-clack, click-clack.
Weak and sweating through my clothes, almost beyond thought now—except for the conviction that getting on this train with John had been the biggest mistake of my life.
7
JOHN SAID, “LOOK,” and I sat up to behold in the window of our compartment the hazy gardens of the Nile, plots of the purest green and rows of spindly trees, filing slowly past in the ancient early morning light. “Wow,” I said. My fever had broken. In the next field a slender figure in a white turban and pale blue robe, his back to us, glided calmly between the calmly glowing furrows. Now and then we caught a glimpse of the river and the sandy banks on the other side. It was as if the train had traveled backward in time while I slept, and even now was crawling still further into previous eras, slowed by the effort. The landscape before us had nothing to do with the train or anything else invented in the past five thousand years. John and I were invisible, gazing out like spirits on an untouched world.
8
THE HOTEL IN ASWAN was a rundown sixties high-rise of chipped pink stucco, with cracked balconies overlooking debris-strewn lots.
We were on the far edge of town on the far edge of Egypt.
It was hard to find anything I could eat.
Locating a decent doctor here seemed even more out of the question than in Cairo.
We had prepaid for the room, and it felt too extravagant to move to a better hotel where, say, toast and tea might be served.
John went out to explore the city, returning at lunchtime to tell of dark-skinned men offering him “Nubian banana” on the corniche.
“It’s definitely more like Africa here,” John said, entranced.
Indeed he had been entranced ever since we stepped off the plane, as if Egypt were his ideal hallucinogen.
I spent the afternoon alone in the hot room—sleeping, sweating, writing in my journal, going to the balcony now and then.
Distant palm trees, the sliver of a sailboat on the shimmering water—the very felucca John was on?
“Like a wheel of fortune,” sang my Walkman, “I heard my fate turn, turn, turn.”
Memory of overhearing my mother say to my father, “Why can’t you do something nice for me, like taking me out to dinner, without my having to ask you?” I was six or seven. The fact that I remember the exchange is evidence of how rarely she stuck up for herself like that.
Here the desert went right up to the Nile’s banks.
Memory of her blood in the toilet bowl.
“I want to run away,” I wrote, “not only from here but from all of my life.”
Memory of helping G. pick out a new bed and, after we had brought it to his apartment, his declaring it was presumptuous for me to assume we’d spend the night together. “I feel invaded,” he said.
“A warm knife in my belly,” I wrote, “another in my head.”
Tourists were advised to take a taxi convoy to the temple of Edfu, because a single car was subject to rebel attack, but in any case I doubted I would be well enough to go.
I stared longingly at the guidebook’s photo of Edfu.
I began debating again whether to break up with John.
I was hoping for some kind of self-help rule, a clear line marking when you should or shouldn’t leave someone.
Living under full sway of my illusions will forever be one sense of the word “Egypt” for me.
Perhaps America could say the same thing of “Islam.”
“I seem destined to see little more than this crappy hotel room.”
If, say, during lunch I had stopped to observe even for one moment John’s wide face and green brown eyes, I might have brought myself to my senses, at least a little.
For a minute I thought maybe I was feeling a little better.
It was very hot and I could muster walking for less than fifteen minutes before stopping to rest on a bench overlooking the Nile.
I had never seen a sunset like this: lacy rags in clumps, connected by ropes of cumulus, sometimes the ropes crossing at right angles, all of this in a single plane high above the Nile, above sand hills, like an orchestra of ragged clouds, rows of gray, dark gold, bright gold, all arranged around the conductor of the sun—
A man in a long blue kaftan stood in front of me—“Smoke, smoke. I take care of you.”
I moved to another bench.
I’m not usually one to see pictures in the sky.
Four cassocks seemed to be dancing wildly off to one side, their hands linked, and soon they were spun apart by their own dancing.
As it turned out, I was much better the following day, in both mind and body, and in Luxor John and I went out to see the gigantic pillars of Karnak; a cramped tomb painted above with grape vines; the vast temple of Queen Hatshepsut cut into the hillside, where fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians would be knifed or gunned down by rebels only a month later …
John and I did go back into couples therapy, but not until five years later.
For now, I continued sitting by the Nile, gazing into the sunset, re-asking myself all the riddles of the day.
And then there it was, a parting in the clouds in the shape of a question mark, blurry but unmistakable, with even a small blue chink below for the dot.
I stared at it in thwarted wonder, until new shapes appeared—a plus, a circle.
I stumbled back to the hotel to wait for my boyfriend.
SUNNY VIEW
1
ALONG THE DRY pinkish hills I drove west on the Interstate toward the white brown hazy flatness below, where my eighty-eight-year-old mother lay in a hospital bed.
She had broken her hip just outside my parents’ hotel room in Yosemite and had been taken by ambulance first to the closest hospital and then to a larger hospital in Modesto for surgery.
My siblings were all on their way to Santiago, for my nephew’s wedding.
I’m not describing a dream: the wedding really was in Santiago.
My mother’s illness had jolted me out of my usual joys and problems, just as it now jolts this narrative out of the past.
I wasn’t speeding but had with all good speed bought a one way airline ticket, booked the car reservation, mapped my route from the airport, woken early, climbed into the radio cab to JFK, boarded the plane, exited the plane, rented the SUV, and gotten on the road, all in less than twenty-four hours, hoping that each step would bring me closer to everything turning out okay.
Until now (October 2003) my parents had never been seriously ill.
Though I could see nothing of the vast smoggy valley below, I liked sitting up so high in the SUV.
If there was news of Iraq on the radio, I wasn’t listening.
My parents hadn’t told us about the accident until after my mother’s surgery, two days later.
“Hang on for Mom,” said Dad, and her weak, clogged voice came on the line.
Notes on the back of my journal:
surgery “successful”—plates and screws—yesterday—started physical therapy today—stay in a facility in San Jose 3 weeks—“skilled nursing facility”
To Do List: Save Mom.
Down in the Central Valley I merged onto an older highway and after twenty minutes or so looped around onto one of those glary California boulevards of dingy stucco apartment complexes, telephone wires, huge fast food signs, and empty treeless sidewalks.
The haziness of San Jose was nothing compared to the haziness of Modesto.
The Vagabond Motel, where my father was staying, consisted of several two-story wooden structures lined with identical blue doors and floor-length aluminum windows.
Outside the lobby I ran into the Hendersons, the couple from my parents’ church who that morning had generously driven up fro
m San Jose, but almost before I could thank them Mrs. Henderson exclaimed, “When we got here we found David [my father] just wandering around the motel—he couldn’t find his room, and we had to take him there.”
I stammered, as if in my father’s defense, “He’s probably very upset.”
To say that I myself was upset just then would place too neat a label on an amorphous array of emotions regarding an already scary state of affairs whose complexities had now apparently multiplied to include the total failure of my father’s memory.
Mrs. Henderson reiterated that my father didn’t know where he was and that I would need to watch him carefully—meaning, I assumed, that I had fallen down on the job so far.
Indeed, my siblings and I had been ignoring his increasing senility for years.
I might have expected the Hendersons to accompany me to the hospital or at least to my father’s motel room, but they made it clear they weren’t staying a moment longer in Modesto, now that I—the Family Member—had arrived.
Possibly I’m being unfair. I’ve found that life and death situations heighten my sense of both gratitude and indignation.
I asked the desk clerk for a room next to my father’s.
Outside the lobby, three separate palms in a bed of lava rocks.
2
ONE SATURDAY NIGHT when I was eleven, there was nothing good on TV and we came upon a black and white movie that Mom said must have been an old serial—one cliffhanger after another, including the heroine literally hanging off a cliff—and Mom could barely contain her laughter.
She loved unintended humor.
Another time when there was nothing good on, my oldest brother, Paul, suggested we turn down the sound and put on a record; just as someone died on a submarine, the Beatles sang, “Your mother should know.”
My own mother laughed and laughed.
She was remarkably open to such experiments, which I gather Paul and his college friends had conducted while stoned.
I mention these stray happy memories to counterbalance what follows.
In the hospital my mother said, “Dad didn’t want to call you kids, but I said we had to. He can’t drive. He can’t go look at nursing homes for me. He can’t see well enough now even to cook for himself a can of soup.”
He must have been standing right beside me, but he had always blithely ignored my mother’s criticisms.
I don’t recall his reaction when I had first arrived at his motel room; possibly he put on a brave face; possibly he was simply numb; I don’t remember him seeming nearly as addled as the Hendersons had described, but of course I was now on hand to provide the necessary hints.
My mother explained that only part of her hip had been replaced, which meant an easier rehab than for a full hip replacement.
The thin colorless hospital gown didn’t cover her well; her chest looked exposed and pale with its dark moles and purplish spots; and her hair was a lopsided clump of gray.
I had never seen her look so terrible and I feared for her life.
At the other end of the ward, the hospital social worker offered me her list of three nursing homes in San Jose that had room for my mother.
Rehabilitation would take several weeks. Medicare would pay for nursing care and for physical therapy but not for the ambulance to San Jose, nor for any sort of care beyond the prescribed period of rehab, though my mother would probably still require assistance when she returned home.
I tried to take in these simple facts but as I sat in the social worker’s small office, staring at her stacks of colored forms, it all seemed immensely confusing and complex, as if I had just arrived in a foreign land.
I asked whether my mother might go to the retirement community near San Jose where my parents were already on the waiting list, and the social worker said she could arrange that if Sunny View had a bed available in their nursing facility. The next step, she said, was for me to go look at Sunny View and the other homes on the list in order to make a selection. I didn’t think to ask what my criteria should be.
Back in my mother’s room: the IV taped to her thin, blue wrist, and my father saying, “I know, dear …”
3
THE VAGABOND’S SLICK polyester bedspreads, rust, gold, and green in a “patchwork” pattern, and the cheap white quilting when the spread was turned back.
On my Walkman, Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan, in his Scottish brogue: “I’m tired of crying on the stairs!”
Vague memory of my father and me having dinner together in a Denny’s-like restaurant and, in the morning, eating free doughnuts in the motel lobby before going to the hospital again.
Fortunately it seemed like a good hospital.
My mother didn’t want us to stay long; she was anxious for me to get down to San Jose and get cracking.
Objective statement: She couldn’t seem to hold in her head both her good and bad feelings toward my father, so she had to vent the bad ones onto some third party, such as her friends or her children.
“If we were already at Sunny View, then all this would be taken care of,” she said now, meaning that if my father had not resisted moving to the retirement community when an apartment the right size had become available two years earlier, we would not have to find a nursing facility now, nor would I have to look after my father while she was recovering.
The deterioration of her hearing in recent years seemed to have bolstered her fiction that my father could not hear her complaints about him, even if he was two feet away.
At some point, either in the hospital or later, she complained of his bungling the call to the front desk at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, to alert them of her fall.
He hadn’t been able to see the numbers on the phone in the room.
“I said, ‘Just dial zero! The bottom key!’ But he’s never been good in a crisis.”
My brain rushed first to save her from him, then him from her.
Noelle, my therapist, later referred to this as “sequential mistrust.”
The old sensation of being ripped in two, but I’m thick cardboard and hard to rip, so I’m mostly being twisted this way and that.
I’m like my mother that way—weirdly strong.
4
APHORISM: HAVING TO choose between your parents as a kid leads to crippling inner turmoil as an adult.
Panicky belief that I had to take drastic action to protect myself from anything I didn’t like about John, hence I continued the practice of leaving him in my mind, though not with the same intensity as in Egypt.
I still also preferred imaginary arguments to actual ones.
A year earlier we had begun seeing a couples therapist, Armin, in order to address just such problems.
We had nearly broken up.
Mainly we were trying to learn how to have an honest disagreement, a simple enough concept in theory.
I, for one, had not yet weaned myself from needing a referee, Armin, in order to speak my mind.
And then there was my nasty tendency to blame John for things we both had done or decided.
Sample entry from my journal that fall: “Yesterday Noelle and I reached the same point again—my ambivalence won’t protect me; being half-committed to John won’t keep me safe—I need to fully commit and see what happens.”
Part of me would like to tell you more about couples therapy, and part of me knows it has to remain between John and me.
5
IN THE CAR, on the same hazy Interstate going west back through the grassy hillsides, just as we crested a very long grade, my father broke down crying.
“I don’t want Mom to die,” he said.
He was ninety and I was forty-six and I had never seen him this way.
I thought:
1. This is the last thing I need right now.
2. He’s no good in a crisis.
3. I need to take care of my mother!
The pink hills dotted by black live oaks, the dirty too-bright sky, and the raised lane markers ticking past the SUV’
s shiny white fenders.
A concept in couples therapy that I was still trying to grasp was what Armin called “Detach With Love.” It had something to do with seeing myself as distinct from John, with my own opinion, yet still connected to him.
Now, in some minor miracle of therapeutic training, an unafraid yet receptive state of mind unaccountably took hold of me, allowing me to glance over at my father and simply see him there, crying in the seat next to me.
Here the reader might expect a physical description of him, but the only picture that comes to mind is that of his limp hands in his lap and the blank haze outside his window. In fact, I may not even have glanced over at him, since I was driving, or because I was afraid to look too closely, and anyway what I saw at that moment wasn’t physical.
I thought:
1. Does his crying stop me from what I need to do today?
2. What if I simply let my father cry?
3. In fact, I want a father who can cry.
And in this way, I was able to say to him, simply, “I know, Dad,” and to reach out and pat his shoulder.
The process took perhaps ten seconds, from his outburst to my freaking out to my comforting him, and I had kept one hand on the steering wheel the whole time.
I hadn’t even changed lanes.
Already my father’s sobs were subsiding and I understood that he had required from me a surprisingly small amount of kindness.
6
I WANT THOSE ten seconds to last forever so my life could always be that calm and revelatory, but now I must describe the rest of my stay in California.
I imagine my father began to cry because at the crest of that hill he fully realized we were returning to San Jose without my mother, which is exactly what he feared might happen in a bigger way.
There may have been a previous outburst at the motel or the hospital, and I ignored it, or maybe he had tried to be strong until now.
My father and I were silent for several minutes as I continued driving down the gray pebbly freeway, which was now descending through the arid hills into the Bay Area.
The Tooth Fairy Page 10