by Delia Ephron
“Who’s Richard?”
“You’ll love him. If he talks. But he doesn’t talk that much in public.”
“Where does he talk?”
“At work—he’s a lawyer. Or with me.”
“Is this serious, or is it like that engagement you had in college? Mom predicted it wouldn’t last.”
“This is serious. We’re eloping next summer. I can’t have our parents at the wedding. Who knows what they’ll do.”
I spent the summer when Georgia eloped as a camp counselor in Maine. No sooner had I dumped my luggage back in my dorm room than the pay phone rang. I picked it up.
“She won’t go to school,” my father said. This was new: He didn’t say hello. He left the front off the conversation.
“What? She’s dropping out? Put her on, Dad.”
“Not Maddy, your mother. She says she doesn’t give a shit about Sydney Carton. She’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of scotch.” He hung up.
This was also new: No good-bye. He left the end off the conversation.
The next day, I answered again. And again I heard long-distance. Then crying. Well, not crying, sniffling. Very large sniffles.
“Dad, what is it, what happened?” I closed the phone booth door.
Still nothing but major intakes of breath.
“Are you all right?” I started breathing heavily too, inadvertently, in unison. I could see Joanne, the girl with the fiancé, coming down the hall to use the phone. Minutes went by. She stared at me so I couldn’t help but notice that she was waiting.
“Dad?”
No answer.
Joanne used her diamond ring to knock on the door. I twisted in my seat so I wouldn’t have to see her.
“She’s gone,” my dad said finally.
“Mom’s gone?”
“Yeah.”
Fine, I thought. Great, she’s gone. Thank God. No more drinking, no more fights. “Dad, don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be back.”
“She ran off with that redwood.”
“What?”
He hung up.
She ran off with that redwood. She ran off with that redwood. His words played over and over in my brain. Joanne rapped her rock against the glass again and glared at me. She ran off with that redwood. I stuck my tongue out at Joanne and yanked open the door.
I didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I couldn’t focus on anything. I had invented a system, five minutes of study, five minutes of daydreaming, which allowed me to relive necking each weekend with my boyfriend, Mark. But as I sat at my desk trying to study, then trying to think about Mark, my mind kept veering off to Mom and Tom Winston. Had she pined for him for five years, or had she been seeing him secretly the whole time? Did they meet at exits off the freeway all along the route from Westwood to Big Bear, or did they have a favorite rendezvous, a favorite room? Did he pin her on the bed the way he pinned those little frogs when he cut them open?
“It’s for you,” Joanne yelled. “Telephone.”
Maybe it’s Mom. Maybe she’s calling so I’ll know where she is.
I took the receiver and, holding it away from my head, stood outside the booth and listened. There it was again, but dimly, the long-distance sound, plus noise, horns, traffic. “Hello?”
“Evie?”
I slammed the phone against my ear. “Maddy, where are you?”
“In Malibu. In a parking lot. Guess what? I’m moving in with Isaac.”
“What do you mean? You can’t move in with Isaac. You’re only fifteen. What about school?”
“I don’t have to live at home to go to school. God, I knew you’d say that.” Her words turned into a wail. “Just leave me alone, all right? You don’t have to live with a drunk.”
“But I thought Mom moved out. Dad called last night. He said she left.”
Now she was crying. Gulping sobs. Big fat teenage tears. “Not Mom, dummy. Dad. Look, I’ll be at Isaac’s. He doesn’t have a phone. Bye.”
Dad? What was she talking about?
Two
The door is unlocked from the inside, an orderly opens it, and Angie wheels my father in. This place is not old, really, just battered. The painted plaster walls have scrape marks on them, probably from wheelchairs. The wooden trim around the doorways and windows, that homey touch signifying extra care and concern, is gouged, and the walnut stain is scratched and thin. “UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric”—the words are discreetly printed on a rectangular plastic plaque next to the door, which the orderly relocks after us.
The wheelchair squeaks on the linoleum as we go down the hall. We pass first an old-fashioned telephone booth built into the wall—it is nearly identical to the one in my college dorm years ago—then a room filled with rows of chairs. Assorted chairs in assorted colors, but mostly they have metal legs and metal arms, with cushioned vinyl seats and vinyl pads on the armrests. Old people are sitting in some of them. They are facing a television set, which is on. Straight ahead is something I will begin to call the cage. It’s an office that has a small opening fitted with a protective grate, like the kind in front of bank teller windows in dangerous neighborhoods. The nurses hang out here. There is glass on the sides so they can see out into the patient rooms that surround them.
My father twists around to look at Angie. It’s a strain for him to turn because he’s so fat. He takes up all the space in the chair, and when he turns, his shirt strains, almost to popping open. “What’s Claire doing here?” he growls.
“I’m not Claire, I’m Angie.”
“You know Angie,” I say. “She works at the Home, where you live. She’s helping me bring you here.”
Angie wheels him into a dining room. An older man in glasses and a woman, both in medical whites, come into the room, closing the door behind us.
The woman introduces herself. “I’m Dr. Kelly,” she says. She looks like a high school cheerleader. That young and wholesome. “This is Rob Bateson.”
“I’m the social worker,” he says cheerfully. “Why don’t we sit down?” He gestures toward the nearest Formica table.
Angie wheels my father to the table and then stands back, waiting for the rest of us.
“I’ll sit next to my father,” I announce. This is an unnecessary statement. In the almost twenty-five years since my mother left, my sisters and I have taken turns calling the doctor about him, putting him in loony bins, drying him out, buying him clothes. And when more than one of us are present, we even take turns sitting next to him. But today, at UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric, my father’s final incarceration, there is no one here but me.
I hear a squeal as Dr. Kelly jumps, throws my father a dirty look, then catches herself. She smooths the back of her pants, where he obviously has just pinched, then takes a chair, sits, and smiles calmly.
I’ll be out of here in a half-hour, I comfort myself. This is a trick my son has taught me, the way he gets through classes he hates.
They start asking my father questions. Your name? “Lou Mozell.” Age? “Thirty-nine,” he says.
“Eighty-one,” I say, smiling.
Where were you born? “The Bronx.” College?
“Harvard,” says my father. “I graduated with honors.” They write all this down dutifully.
“What month is it?” My father has no idea. “What day of the week?” He looks up at the ceiling, studying it as if there were something to see.
“Look,” I say, “this is ridiculous. My father lives in a Home. Every day is the same. How does he know whether it’s Monday or Wednesday? And this is Los Angeles. The sky’s always blue. Even I don’t know what month it is half the time.”
“These questions have been tested,” Dr. Kelly says, an edge to her voice.
“Well, they don’t make any sense.”
Meanwhile my father is refusing to say anything.
“Will you write your name, Mr. Mozell?” She offers a pen and her clipboard.
He obliges.
“Would you write a sentence
?”
He does that too. She shows me the clipboard.
He has written, “It’s too late.”
Oh, wow. I actually have this dumb high school reaction. Oh, wow. Heavy. And in my mind, I am already on the phone to my sisters.” ‘It’s too late.’ That’s what he wrote. Do you believe that?”
“Why don’t we show you to your room,” Dr. Kelly says to my father.
“Are you leaving me here?” he asks me. His hands, which have been lying listlessly in his lap, fly up and seize the arms of his wheelchair.
“You’re going to stay here for a week or two.” Maybe more, I don’t say. “You’re having memory problems, Dad. They’ll run some tests.”
“You bitch. You and Claire. You put me here before. You’re in cahoots.” My father flings a backslap at me but misses by a mile.
“That’s not Claire, that’s Angie, and you’ve never been here before.” I say this quietly, but I can feel my face flush.
Angie springs up. “I’ll take him.” She spins the wheelchair around. “I’m taking you to your room, Mr. Mozell,” she declares, as Rob Bateson jumps to open the door for them. “Bitch,” my father shouts as she steers him out, and Bateson closes the door behind them.
There is silence. A moment of respect for the departed.
“My father didn’t go to Harvard.”
Dr. Kelly laughs, then immediately crosses out the entry on her form. “Where did he go?”
“He went to, oh, what’s that school, you know, it’s in New York City, what is it, ohh—”
“Columbia?” says Bateson.
“No, no, downtown.”
Bateson and Kelly look at each other, stumped. Dr. Kelly actually winds some of her long sandy hair around her finger while she thinks. “New York University,” she offers tentatively.
“Right. He went to NYU. I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. I do know this is the month of May and it’s somewhere between the fourteenth and the twentieth, right?”
No one laughs. Bateson leans toward me across the table. “Are you close to your father?” he asks.
I hate this question. It’s none of their business. Their business is to find out what’s wrong with his brain this time. Their business is to adjust his medication so he functions. He just needs a new cocktail. He’s gone off his rocker before. He’s gone off many times. I will answer this question dispassionately. I will show that an inquiry about my feelings for my father triggers nothing. “I look out for my father but I am not close to him,” I say firmly. I smile to show that this cool answer is not only the truth, but easy.
“He wrote, ‘It’s too late.’ Do you believe that?”
“Really,” says Georgia.
It’s impossible to convey Georgia’s affection for the word “really.” She caresses it. She packs in multiple meanings: astonishment, disbelief, sometimes disgust, suspicion, pleasure, maybe even thrill, plus curiosity. All understated. She owns “really.” Also “possibly,” just because she knows exactly how to emphasize it.
“Do you think our father could possibly have meant what he wrote?” she asks me.
“You mean, can you be brain-damaged and cosmic all at once? I think so.”
“But what did he actually mean by it? Too late for what?”
It occurs to me I don’t know what he meant. “I guess help. It’s too late for help, right? But then it could be too late for anything to change, or for anything to happen, or just, too late.”
She says nothing. I assume she is mulling this over, but maybe she is just editing some copy on the computer while she talks to me on the phone. Sometimes Georgia switches off right in the middle of a conversation—she starts doing something else or thinking about something else. I have to work to get her back.
“He pinched Dr. Kelly. On the tush.”
“Really,” says Georgia.
Maddy shrieks when I tell her about the pinching. “What a riot.”
“It wasn’t a riot, believe me. You weren’t there.”
“You told me I could go away. You said you’d take him to … what’s this place called?”
“UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric.”
“Is it like a hospital?”
“More like a loony bin really, sort of a cross. Anyway, I don’t care that you aren’t here.”
“It’s my only vacation. We work ten hours a day, five days a week.”
“Maddy, it’s okay.”
But she’s on a roll. “We work fifty-two weeks a year, Eve. Fifty-two weeks!” I think about putting the receiver on the table. If you check out of a conversation with Maddy and then return several minutes later, you are usually in the same place. The identical thing happens if you watch the soap opera she’s on and then don’t see it again until two weeks later. “The only reason I can go on vacation now is that Juliana is supposed to be in the Bahamas so her boss can have an affair with the temp.”
“Who’s Juliana?”
“My character? Eve, don’t you even know that? God, don’t you ever watch the show?”
“Of course I do. I just didn’t realize what you were saying, Maddy, it’s no big deal.”
“You know it’s not easy to get to the phone here. It’s not easy to get to anything in Montana. You can drive forty-five minutes just to buy milk.”
I call Georgia back. “Maddy says it’s a forty-five-minute drive to buy milk in Montana.”
This is one of my favorite things—to serve as a conduit between my sisters. What is the joy in hearing something absurd from one if I can’t pass it on to the other? But this time I’m just using Maddy’s comment for an excuse, so I can unload more to Georgia.
“Imagine Dad pinching that doctor. It’s so sad, repulsive, I don’t know. I think he winked too. Is that all that’s left to you when you’re old? Eating and flirting?”
“He’s a pathetic old man,” says Georgia. I am certain I hear her shudder.
“That’s for sure. Dr. Kelly looked like Doogie Howser’s younger sister.”
“Well, Eve, she obviously wasn’t the doctor. Obviously, obviously. She’s a resident. What you have to do tomorrow is call and speak to the doctor. The real doctor. Find out who’s in charge of the whole place and insist that he or she speak to you directly. You know it makes a huge difference whether you’re speaking to the top or the bottom.”
“Maybe you should call.”
“Darling, I would, but you’re right there. I’m in New York, so if they have to call me back, it’s long-distance, which is a big thing to doctors, I have no idea why. Besides, I’m totally backed up on this tenth-anniversary edition. I keep thinking, On the one hand, I am so lucky my magazine has lasted ten years, on the other hand, why am I putting out a special edition, it’s a nightmare.”
I am hit suddenly with an exhaustion I get only when I converse with my sisters. I feel as if my mouth and ears are going to fall off my head. “I’ve got to go,” I say. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hang up. The phone rings. “Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Hi, Jesse, where are you?”
“It’s not my fault.”
“What?”
“It was an accident.”
“Goddamnit.” I burst into Joe’s study. “Jesse had another car accident.”
“Is he all right?” Joe spins around in his desk chair, knocking into phone books from different cities, stacked like building blocks around him.
“He’s all right.”
To make room to sit, I shove over a bunch of radio tapes that are littering his couch. “He’s on his way home. He had to tie his car door closed with rope. His insurance is going to go through the roof, but maybe we can convince the driver not to notify his insurance company. Would you take care of this?”
“I’m going out of town next week,” he reminds me.
“So you have time. Besides, they have phones in Iowa.”
Joe just looks at me. He knows and I know that I am going to make this call. We’ve been married too long to have a conve
rsation we’ve had sixty times before and already know the ending of.
I hear a car and peek through the blinds to see Jesse pulling up to the curb. He slides over to the passenger side and gets out. He strolls to the door, his shoulders moving back and forth enough to cause, with each step, the slightest ripple of muscle across his T-shirt.
“I’m home,” he yells, but not too loudly. There’s a bit of dread in his voice.
“Come in here. We’re in Dad’s study.” I hear the refrigerator open and close, and then Jesse appears, swigging water from a large plastic bottle.
“What happened?” Joe asks.
Jesse slaps a hand against his head and lets his mouth hang open a second to let us know he’s been through hell. “I was sitting there, okay, just opening the door, when this guy comes around a curve at about, I swear, sixty.”
Joe slips his fingers under his glasses and rubs his eyes. He’s tired in anticipation of this discussion. “You were parked?” he says wearily.
“Yeah, I was parked. That guy should look where he’s going. Thanks to him, I couldn’t take Ifer home.”
“Who’s Ifer?”
“Only my best friend, Dad. God.”
“Ifer is Jennifer, but there are so many Jennifers in the class that she calls herself Ifer. I told you, you forgot.” This is something I do to Joe when I am feeling cranky. Make him feel guilty for not remembering all the fascinating things I tell him.
“Why doesn’t she call herself Jenny?” asks Joe.
“Ifer is Kasmian,” says Jesse.
Joe’s glasses land back on his nose and his eyes snap open. He knows he’s just heard something that is going to turn out to be satisfyingly off-kilter. He’s no longer interested in the car accident. Too mundane. Jesse’s fine, he’s sitting right in front of him. But Ifer could turn out to be as intriguing as the woman in Iowa he’s going to interview who bakes six-foot-tall cakes. “So Ifer is a Kasmian name?” he says.
Jesse uses a tone of voice that means that you are ignorant but he will condescend to enlighten you. “In the Kasmian religion, Dad, four letters is good luck. ‘Luck’ is four letters, get it?”
“I hope these Kasmians aren’t nuts like those people who drank that drink in some South American country,” I say. “What was it? It starts with a large letter.”