by Karen Olsson
She was down in the basement, shoving clothes into the dryer. I felt shaky and kept one hand on the table where we folded our laundry. My parents had let the housekeeper go, that’s why Mom was transferring gobs of damp bath towels from one machine to the other—in dozens of small ways she was holding our household together, but she was unhappy to be doing it. And there I was, serving up another nuisance.
“It’s sprained, maybe broken.”
“But she’s been playing on it, hasn’t she? Could it be just a bruise?” my mother asked, hopelessly.
“Anything’s possible.”
“Christ.”
Mom had confronted Courtney as soon as she got home that night and, after inspecting her big purple sausage link of an ankle, had dragged her to the emergency room. The worst part of it wasn’t that my sister was put on crutches for the rest of the season, that for our last game and the league tournament I would start in her stead and she would sit on the end of the bench in her street clothes and ace bandages; it wasn’t that we were eliminated in the first round of the tournament by a team we’d beat twice during the regular season, or that my sister was now treating me with a thousand cutting looks and under-the-breath comments, silences, snubs, slow rolling of the eyes, daily reminders of my zero worth. More than all that, it was that I’d set off a chain reaction: Courtney was furious with me, Mom was furious with Courtney and also (she couldn’t help it) with me, Dad stayed in his study most of the time, and Maggie, we thought little Maggie had no clue, but of course she knew as much as anybody. A couple of times I saw her sucking her thumb, a twelve-year-old. Courtney refused to sleep on the first-floor sofa bed and instead hopped her way up and down the stairs, which became the erratic drumbeat of our distress.
* * *
In March Dad gave his first congressional deposition, which would be followed by grand jury testimony in May and an appearance before the joint committees in June. Then would come a series of interviews with the Office of the Independent Counsel. We never knew what happened at any of them, we were never told. During those months he spent hours and hours—billable hours—at his lawyer’s office.
Further cutbacks were imposed: Did Courtney really need a salon haircut? What was the matter with last year’s bathing suit? It had as much to do with my parents’ panic than with the actual cost of anything. Mom still had her fund-raising job, and she started working on weekends, which wasn’t going to bring us any more money but which served as a distraction, I suppose, an escape. And she traveled more, visiting donors and going to conferences, two purposes that were combined in my imagination. I saw her floating through a ballroom full of wealthy donors wearing name tags, my mother in a chiffon blouse with a sash at the neck, kissing people on the cheek as she lifted the change out of their silk-lined pockets.
One day during that spring of our family’s unraveling, I’d come home from school before my sisters, and I walked into the first-floor bathroom, only to find Dad sitting on the toilet. I shrank and backed out before I understood what I’d seen. The toilet lid was closed. He was just sitting there, in an unlit bathroom. I stood outside the door. “I didn’t know you were here,” I said.
“I came home early,” he said.
My head was full of Shakespeare’s Henrys and Richards, the rulers of my assigned reading. It was as though Dad had come home from a battlefield upon which glory had been exposed as a sham, kings were only body doubles of kings, friends betrayed friends, and cowards outlived the brave.
“Do you have homework?” he asked.
“I have some,” I said.
“Is there anything you’d like some help with?”
He hadn’t helped me with my homework in years. It had been years since we’d discussed my homework, or played card games, or done anything like that.
“Not really,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Do you want to watch TV?”
He said that he did. He got a beer and I got a Coke; we turned on the set and watched Wheel of Fortune, and before one puzzle had been solved (CHERRIES JUBILEE was the answer) he’d fallen asleep in his chair.
Dad was now under a kind of low-intensity, erratic siege by reporters, a zillion of them all rushing to develop their own angles. They called the house, they sometimes stopped by. There was a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking, an urge to make the big story even bigger, so that suddenly men my father had worked with on the NSC staff were being talked about as possible Mossad agents—I heard him rant about this to my mother. He himself was never accused of anything so exotic, though he was named in some of the articles: there was one piece in Time that referred to a phone call Dad had supposedly made to an official in Costa Rica. “Like many of the young bucks on the NSC staff,” it said, “Atherton was tireless, committed to the cause, and sometimes arrogant.” After that, Mom actually called an editor at the magazine, someone whose kids we’d gone to grade school with, and gave him hell for it. “Arrogant?” I heard her saying. “Arrogant?” As for Dad, he was less angry about that one article than about the sheer amount of classified information that had come flooding out of the White House, every last administration official suddenly unburdening himself.
He continued playing video games on our Apple IIe, late at night. Apple Panic was the name of one: you had to climb ladders and lure pulsating bad guys into holes and then hit them with mallets until they vaporized. One day I turned the game on and saw that he had all the high scores.
* * *
On plenty of nights that spring, just Maggie and I were home, while Mom worked late or attended a conference, Dad racked up more hours at his lawyer’s office, and Courtney went out with her friends. We’d order a pizza and pay for it with money that Mom or Dad had left on the counter, and we’d watch fantasy households on TV, Full House, The Cosby Show, 227, The Golden Girls. All those hijinks and misunderstandings and reconciliations. Sometimes I’d look over at Maggie, who’d be sucking on a Jolly Rancher, one skinny leg launched over the chair arm, and I’d wonder who she was, who she would be. She was the changeling of the family, fair-skinned and fine-boned, and when we were younger she’d been content to spend hours on her own, drawing elaborate maps of other worlds or talking to her dolls in an invented language.
Or, we made the mistake of treating her as that, as an imaginative child instead of as a full-fledged person. On one of those nights the two of us were sitting in the family room with the TV on, and she got up and went to the kitchen, and when she came back she had a bottle of beer for each of us. I’d never seen my twelve-year-old sister drink before, but I shrugged off whatever concern might’ve pinged at me. A single beer wouldn’t kill her. And there was something about how we’d been left there alone, to guard the house that the rest of our family had abandoned, that made me think the hell with them. Cheers. I drank about half of my beer, rested my head on the sofa arm, and fell asleep.
When I woke up a different show had come on, and there were two more bottles on the coffee table—Maggie was on to her third. I found her in the kitchen, standing on the stool she needed to reach the wall phone, and dialing a number. As soon as she was done dialing she planted her free hand on the counter to steady herself.
“Is Brian there?” she asked, her voice all in flux.
I walked over to her and hung up the phone, then dragged her stumbling and protesting over to the sink and made her drink some water. Half of it went down her shirt. I grabbed a banana from the fruit basket and told her to eat it.
“No way,” she said. “You eat it.”
The stairs went slowly, and she was still talking about Brian, whoever that was, and suddenly I got angry. I told her Dad would notice how many beers were missing. Maggie turned her head back and forth.
“No. He won’t.”
At last we reached her room, and I told her to get ready for bed. I ran downstairs, gathered up the bottles, and took them outside to the neighbor’s garbage can. Back upstairs, my sister had passed out. I took off her socks, then tried
to take off her sweatshirt but it was too hard to do that. I put the blanket over her and then went to bed myself, though I didn’t sleep for a while, thinking Maggie would wake up and be sick. I kept listening for puking noises. None came. Courtney returned, my parents returned, everybody went to their rooms and slept.
2005
Dad had been instructed to report to the cardiac imaging center at 7:15 a.m., earlier than I’d ever gone to any doctor. The night before, I slept over at Albemarle Street, and in the morning we both came downstairs at around the same time Dad used to leave for work during his White House years, the hinge of the day just creaking.
There was a question of who should drive. I said I would, and he hesitated but then took his seat on the passenger side, put his hands under the flaps of his winter coat, and leaned his head against the headrest. Both of us were quiet, and the streets were still, lined with cold cars, everything crusted with frost. I wanted to ask him about his health, specifically about this appointment, but it was so early. He turned on the radio, which purred its bulletins from elsewhere.
The sky over the hospital parking lot was dark, but by the time we’d taken two different elevators and turned through hallways and arrived at the waiting room, a watery early-morning light rilled down from above, through skylights, landing upon a few synthetic plants and groups of chairs upholstered in dull orange fabric. Immediately, Dad was chuted into a Process: first he had to note his arrival on a slip of paper and place that in a plastic tray, then he had to fill out two forms, and then, heeding a sign that had been printed on pink paper, in an unusual font, he had to Please Wait Until Your Name Is Called. The sign put me on guard. I figured it had been placed there by some snippy person, dug in behind the reception desk, who had come to think of heart patients as needy morons and who felt under siege each time one of them had the gall to approach the desk before his or her name was called. It was true that these tyrants of the reception areas, in their jersey separates and scuffed pumps, had their antagonists (the ever-ringing phones, the hostile software) to cope with, and yet I did wonder at the fact that jobs of this kind, jobs that revolve around interacting with other people, were often filled by men and women who apparently despised other people. Had they always been so, or did the jobs make them that way?
Around the corner from the counter where Dad had filled out his slip of paper were two window bays with chairs pushed up to them, like the setup in prisons allowing visitors to talk to inmates. Only one employee was visible when we arrived, her small, froggy head attached to a large body. She was seated on her side of one of these windows; a middle-aged, sun-baked patient sat across from her, earnestly answering her questions as she recorded his responses on a computer.
My father and I were the only people in the waiting room besides that man’s entourage—four other people, his family, sprawled across the chairs.
I said, “Seems like an okay place.”
“I’d like it better if I could have a cup of coffee,” he said. He’d been fasting since the night before. He picked up a magazine.
Another patient arrived, a woman carrying two big tote bags, and then came a wiry man with a beard, wearing a Hoyas sweatshirt and black sneakers. More people followed, old people mostly, each scanning the room as they entered, filling out their slips, taking seats, peeking over their periodicals, waiting for their names to be called, and I thought about all the vexed hearts beating beneath all the sweatshirts and sweaters.
The woman in the reception area dismissed the man she’d been talking to, and then she called the name of the man in the Hoyas sweatshirt, who’d arrived a full five minutes after us. I wasn’t the only one to notice. Dad kept looking at her. Finally I went up to the counter. “Excuse me,” I started.
“Ma’am, take a seat, please,” the woman said.
“But my dad’s been—”
“Take a seat and I’ll be with you shortly.”
Shortly indeed. Behind her was a poster of the human heart colored red and blue, a hunk of meat with a tangle of plumbing on top.
“Don’t mess with her, is what I’ve learned,” Dad grumbled when I sat back down.
“Got it.”
“She’s what your mother would call a … a…” At first he seemed to have forgotten this label of Mom’s, but in fact it was just a word he was not used to saying, one that he uttered softly: “a bitch.”
Then she did call Dad’s name, his full name—the name of that person he was officially. His shirt had come untucked, and the wrinkled tail swung behind him as he made his way over to her. He took his time pulling out the chair and lowering himself into it, and once they got started, although I couldn’t hear the rote questions and answers, I could hear their mutual impatience, Dad’s and the receptionist’s. They were well matched, Churlish v. Churlish, the two of them making no secret of their disdain.
When she was finished with him, Dad walked back toward me, rolling his eyes. It was a shared moment, and perhaps an opportunity—I could’ve asked him then to further explain the condition of his heart—but we were in public, and I was too shy to do it.
A man in sage-green scrubs appeared and led my father away. I read a pamphlet that explained what would happen back there: he would be injected with an isotope, a radioactive tracer that would diffuse through his vessels, and then he would be slid into a machine that would take pictures of the flow of his blood. Dad’s veins and arteries, the cavities of his heart would be illuminated on a screen. A little while later they would have him walk, then run, on a treadmill, and the machine would take pictures again, after the exercise. Four or five people in addition to my father were being led through the same sequence of steps, which meant that the interior door kept opening and closing, these patients venturing in and coming back out again with needles in their wrists or dried sweat in their hair. And less frequently, the door from the hallway would open and a new patient would appear, to be entered into the cycle.
* * *
While Dad was still back there, a new man came in from the outside, satisfaction in the set of his mouth, in the calm mass of his forehead. The hearing aids he wore didn’t take anything from his air of contentment. A woman in a velour sweatsuit accompanied him, and both had the faraway faces of a couple that had exchanged maybe three words since breakfast. They seemed well-off, and not merely in the financial sense. Comfortable in the world. Then I recognized the man, remembered who he was. In the flesh he looked very different from his author photograph.
It was the woman who had the appointment—she went to the window to be interviewed and returned to her seat, calmly. Then the interior door opened, and in it stood a handsome older man with hair that was still thick and eyes that looked just like mine. He grunted, and he was Dad again. For just a moment I’d seen him without knowing him, a stranger to me and at the same time more familiar than ever. I’d seen the cast of his eyes and been reminded of this thing we shared—a kind of yearning without an object. What in other people might grow into a spiritual tendency in us had been thwarted, misdirected. It coursed around those branching tubes I’d seen in the heart poster, lost in the arterial maze, and manifested as a general, constant ache in our chests—in my chest, at least, and I assume in his—and a damp, expectant look that came over his face from time to time, I gather it came over mine too. I don’t mean to say that we were especially sensitive people. I mean that we were dumb about our sensitivities, we pretended not to have them, like people pretending not to have their own noses even though everyone else can see them plainly.
I was hoping against hope that Dad wouldn’t notice James Singletary sitting there. He took two rigid steps into the room, then stopped by a pile of magazines and started to sort through them.
“Tim,” the woman in the velour sweatsuit said. “Tim Atherton? Is that you?”
My father looked up, not bothering to pretend he hadn’t seen them already. “Gail,” he said. “Jim.” Then he took a seat right where he was, well away from them and also, as it happened
, across the room from me.
“Come over and say hello!” the woman said. Dad reluctantly got up again and scrutinized his own feet as he crossed the waiting area.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” said Singletary as he offered his crackled hand, which Dad took limply in his own and then dropped. In his other hand Dad was holding a TV Guide. “It’s been a long time,” Singletary said, answering his own question. He was shifting in his seat, narrowing his eyes, taking my father’s measure. “You been keeping busy?”
The man in the green scrubs called, “Gail Singletary?”
My father blinked at them. Anyone would’ve assumed it was the husband who was the patient, not the wife.
“She’s a nutritionist, a tennis player, healthiest woman I know, and they’ve got her coming in here for this deal,” Singletary said. “I smoked for thirty years, ate steak like it was going out of style, sat at a desk, and they tell me I’m doing great. How’s that for fair.”
Gail, who had probably heard this little homily before, barely acknowledged it before she disappeared. Singletary took off his sweater, exposing a golf shirt and veiny biceps. “So what are you up to these days?” he asked Dad.
Dad’s shoulders popped up and down. “I’m here, today,” he said finally.
“Sure, sure.”
My father glanced back behind him, at his original seat next to mine. I didn’t know whether to go join him or stay put.
“And you?” Dad asked.
“One thing and another. I’ve got a book that just came out.”
“Oh really?”
“The title is A Call to Honor. My editor came up with that.”