Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  He slips his hand under her old sweatshirt, finds she’s still wearing her bra. He snaps the elastic of a strap gently until she tells him to stop, but in a soft whiny voice that makes him continue. He slides his hands inside her bra and she wriggles over onto her side, still pretending to read.

  “Booby,” he says, his fingers cupping her breast. He squeezes gently, lifts her bra over her breasts, puts his lips to her ear. “If you love somebooby,” he breathes, and she starts to giggle. “Set them free.” And she starts to turn toward him as he croons, “Free, free, set them free.”

  “Cakes of baby?” she says in his arms. “Pie of honey?”

  Afterward they lie together, she draped over him, her head cradled against his chest, a position they both love yet only find comfortable after sex.

  “Hubster,” she says, and he says, “Hmm?”

  “Hub-a-lub,” she says, and he says, “What?”

  “Hub-a-licious,” she says, and he says, getting it at last, “Wifey.”

  Outside, the dripping has slowed to a single slow beat, and in the silence they squeeze each other tight, clenching until they can barely breathe, until their joints pop, until they’re finally sure nothing can ever come between them.

  Today is Sunday

  ON SUNDAY I visit my father, the first time since Christmas, and he tells me my timing’s bad. He’s off to visit his own mother in hospital.

  My grandmother’s senile, eighty-eight, hasn’t recognized anyone for donkey’s years, but he still drives the thirty miles to the hospital once or twice a week. He slipped a disk last winter climbing a ladder, and he has a pinched nerve in his back that can double him over. It’s bothering him now as he looks for his shoes. He clutches his side with one hand and winces, but when I ask him if he’s okay, he says it’s nothing.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “Old age,” he says, as if it’s a war wound, and gives a little groan.

  “Oh, great.”

  I try telling him it’s pouring out and the forecast is for sleet. I ask him to give it a miss this week. I’ll make lunch (he pulls a face). There’s footy on the box. But this is a mistake. He won’t put himself first. The old lady, I tell him at last, won’t even notice, and he looks at me as if I’m a stranger.

  “I was just thinking of you,” I say quickly. “Christ. Am I not allowed to care?”

  He pinches the seams of his trouser legs, tugs them up an inch as he sits to put on his shoes.

  “There’s a difference between caring,” he says, pulling his laces tight, “and carrying on.”

  I stand over him for a moment. His hair, what’s left of it, is salt-and-peppery, but when he straightens up I see his stubble is coming in pure white.

  “At least let me drive you,” I say, and he tells me, “Suit yourself.”

  I make him sit in the back so he can stretch out a bit, and he asks if I’m his bloody chauffeur now. The idea tickles him. He calls me James. Puts on the plummy voice. Gives me a wave like the Queen Mum when I ask him if he’s comfy. The whole bit. In the mirror, I watch him light a cigarette. He’s supposed to have given up. Doctor’s orders. Ages ago. I haven’t seen him smoke in maybe ten years. He catches me watching him and makes a face.

  “Don’t mind, do you?” he says, and I tell him, “Oh, no. Course not. Be my guest.”

  “Champion. Only I remember when you was a lad,” he says, taunting now. “You used to make a big song and dance about me smoking. You thought your old dad’d drop dead any second.”

  “I was a kid,” I say. I watch him in the mirror as he takes another drag. He puts his fingers to his lips, palm in, and removes the cigarette. It’s a gesture I haven’t seen since childhood.

  “Asked you once what you wanted for Christmas and you said for me to give up. Proper whiner, you were.”

  “Crack the window, would you?” I say. “It was for your own good.”

  He taps his ash on the window frame and shakes his head. “Selfish,” he says. “Spoiled.”

  “Did Mum know?” My mother, who died three years ago.

  “Did she heck.”

  “So what d’you do? Drive out here each week and have a smoke?”

  “I think I deserve it,” he says.

  The car thuds over the compression plates of a bridge.

  At a traffic light, I turn to him and say, “Give us one, then.”

  He doesn’t know I smoke. Since school. I think of us now, before I left home, both sneaking them on the sly under my mother’s nose. No wonder we never tumbled to each other.

  “So that’s how it is,” he says bleakly. “Monkey see, monkey bleeding do.”

  I hold out my hand, but he just looks at it until the lights change.

  “Drive on.”

  He blows smoke through his nostrils and smiles and for a moment he looks young again, the spitting image of the fellow in our old photo albums.

  It makes me think of an afternoon in our back garden when I was little. A birthday party perhaps, summer, a bunch of kids, my mother, my gran. He had this trick of keeping a football in the air longer than anyone else. He’d just stand there on one foot, his thin hips swaying slightly, swinging his leg lazily back and forth like a pendulum, the ball popping up off his toes. I was dead proud of him. He looked as if he could go on forever. Still, it started to get boring after a bit. I wanted a turn—even better, I wanted him to teach me—but he just kept going as if he were setting some record. In the end, my grandmother called, “Give Paul a go, then,” but he shook his head. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of fags, drew one out, and lit it—all without losing control. He puffed away contentedly, grinning around the cig, eyes half closed against the smoke, until all of us were staring at the curving, trembling tip of ash.

  …

  I haven’t been to the hospital for three years. It’s a sprawling Victorian setup, half closed now that a new hospital’s opened in town. The main building, with its crenellated clock tower, is perched on a hill overlooking landscaped gardens and rolling fields. The lawns are neat, but the flowerbeds are empty mounds of earth. When I was still living at home before college, my father taught me to drive out here. The quiet roads were good for practicing maneuvers—reversing round corners, three-point turns—but we still ended up in a shouting match every time I ground the gears or clipped the curb. He was always whinging that I took the speed bumps—“sleeping policemen,” he called them—too fast, and I creep over them now.

  The door to my grandmother’s ward has two handles, one in the usual place, the other about a foot from the top. My father grasps both and turns them together.

  Inside, we find her in a corner of the lounge, so shrunken and slumped I hardly recognize her. Her head lolls back against her chair, too heavy for her creased, deflated neck, and she peers at us damply from hooded eyes. We pull up chairs and my father takes her hand. He talks to her, just nonsense really, the noises you’d make to a baby, and while he talks he rubs her hand. When she drools a little, he wipes her face with his handkerchief. He tweaks her nose when he’s done, and the old lady smiles vaguely. I look at her other hand, where it lies in her lap, but I don’t take it.

  I wish he wouldn’t treat her like a child.

  “Here,” my father says to her. “How about a banana?” He pulls one like magic out of his pocket. It looks strange in the ward, bright and exotic, and I remember him telling me once they only had bananas for Christmas when he was a boy. He un-peels it carefully and offers it to her, but her eyes are unfocused. My father touches it to her lips, and when her mouth stays closed he rubs the tip of it back and forth—I want to tell him to leave her be—until she opens wide. Her lips close on it, sucking, and he twists it gently to break off a piece in her mouth. Slowly, absently, she begins chewing, and I look away.

  There’s a white board by the door for the nurses to write messages on. “Today is Sunday, March tenth,” it says. “It is a cold, wet day.”

  “Promise me,” my fath
er says quietly, “if I ever get like this, you’ll do me in. Knock me on the head or something.”

  He looks at me as if it’s a dare, and I stare back at him.

  “Oh, right,” I tell him. “No bother.” And then, “Do you ever wonder how it makes me feel, you asking that?”

  “You’ll thank me,” he says with sudden heat. “You don’t believe me? Listen.” He lowers his voice. “I wish my mother would die. D’you hear me? I wish my own mother would die. How d’you think that makes me feel?”

  He turns back to her and I watch him stroke her cheek. He calls her “pet,” and she bends her head to his touch.

  “Oh, stop looking so worried,” he tells me, glancing over. “I’ll be gone long before that. My old fella had a heart attack before he was fifty-five.”

  I called my father on his birthday last year and asked him how old he was and he told me sixty, and for a second I thought he was pulling my leg.

  My grandmother has fallen asleep. Her head rolls, her mouth falls open, and a ball of chewed banana drops onto her collar. My father picks it up daintily in his handkerchief, sees me watching, pretends to toss it my way. I flinch but don’t smile.

  “Why do you carry on, then?” I ask him. “Keep coming all these years?”

  “Because.” He shrugs and then, to her, he starts to sing very quietly, like out of The Wizard of Oz, “Becoz, becoz, becoz, becoz, be-coz. What else can I do?”

  When he decided she couldn’t get on by herself anymore, she came and lived with us for a few months, but she would forget where she was, get angry, storm out, get lost. He thought she’d walk through plate glass, burn the house down, get hit by a car. (“All the things I used to worry about happening to you when you were a youngster,” he told me once.) When he first moved her here, he wouldn’t let my mother or me visit for a couple of weeks.

  “I just want a word with the nurses before we’re off,” he says now, getting up stiffly. “Keep an eye on her, eh?” I make as if to tip my chauffeur’s cap, but I feel uneasy alone with her.

  I remember a visit, eight years ago maybe, when I was still learning to drive. He told me to wait outside in the car—the old Cortina—while he settled her down and said goodbye. I watched him come out to the car in the rearview mirror. I remember seeing him struggling with the handles on the door and hurrying across the car park toward me. When he got in, he told me to get going. I still had to think about everything then: starting the engine, giving it gas, putting the car in first, balancing the clutch. When I was ready, I checked the mirror. There wasn’t another car in sight, but I wanted to make all this second nature before the test. In the mirror, I saw my grandmother at the window of the ward. I thought for a second she was waving, and then I saw her hand turn white as it struck the glass.

  “Come on,” my father said tersely. “Stop faffing about.”

  I signaled, revved the engine, lifted the clutch, and stalled the car. The hand brake was still set.

  “Fuck’s sake.”

  I went through it all again. Put the car back in neutral. Turned the ignition again. This time I didn’t look in the mirror, remembered to release the brake, but the car still jerked, roaring, out of the car park. “Of all the cack-handed . . .” My father pulled on the brake with a tearing sound and shoved me out so he could take over.

  When I look up now, my grandmother is staring at me. She’s breathing hoarsely, making sounds deep in her throat. I’m about to get a nurse when she says, “Don?” My father’s name.

  “He’ll be right back, Gran,” I tell her, raising my voice a little. I look away in the direction he’s gone, but there’s no sign of him, and when I look back she’s still staring at me.

  “Don?” she says again. “Donald?” And at last I take her hand and tell her, “Yeah.” She falls back to sleep like that, her hand in mine. The skin is loose on her bones, wrinkled and liver-spotted but disconcertingly soft.

  When my father comes back he asks me if I’m ready, and then he sees me holding her hand and he says we can stay a little while, so we do. We’re silent, both a little embarrassed. She doesn’t wake again, but we watch her chest rising and falling until we take our own breaths in time.

  “Was she all right while I was gone?” he asks at last, and I nod. I don’t know how to tell him what happened. Not without risking some clumsy hurt. The lie makes me feel as if I’ve cheated him, as if I owe him something, but at the same time sharply protective. I’m going to have to keep this secret, carry it until he dies, and the idea of outliving my father suddenly makes me feel old—older even than him.

  …

  Later in the car he says, “I didn’t mean it before.”

  I look over at him.

  “About putting me out of my misery and that.”

  “I hope not.”

  He reaches into his pocket for cigarettes.

  “Would you pack that in if I asked you?” I say.

  “Nah.”

  He rattles his box of matches.

  “I couldn’t have done it anyway.”

  He grins. “Think I’d have asked you otherwise?”

  He lights up, and in the dusk his face flares briefly. It makes me think of the long nights as a kid when I was afraid to go to sleep in the dark, when he’d sit with me after he turned the lamp out, smoking so I’d know he was still there by the glow of the cigarette. We had a joke, something we’d seen on TV or read in a comic. When he turned the light off he’d put on a stern voice, strike a match below his chin, and intone, “The face of tomorrow . . . today.”

  I see a pub on the way back and pull in.

  “Want a bevvy?” I say, and he tells me, “Yeah, all right.”

  Inside, I ask him what he wants and he goes, “Pint of bitter.” And then, “An’ a short, eh? Since you’re driving.”

  When I bring the drinks to the table, he’s fishing his cigarettes out.

  “You want?” he says, holding the pack out. There’s one extended.

  “Go on, then.”

  I watch him dip his head to light his, the gesture so familiar, and then he holds out his cupped hands and I bend my face to take the flame.

  “Your health,” he says, lifting his glass.

  Afterward, he settles himself in the back seat and tells me, “Home, James.”

  About the Author

  PETER HO DAVIES’s collection The Ugliest House in the World won the Oregon Book Award and, in Britain, the PEN/MacMillan and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes. Born to Welsh and Chinese parents in England, Davies teaches at the University of Michigan. His stories have been selected for both Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories.