I’m just not following this.
We do a drive-by of these colleges. There’s the University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Amherst College. We get out and walk around, but it’s the end of summer and the heat has made the trees shrivel up. There are a few students on campus that Willow doesn’t like the look of. She doesn’t like the look of any of the campuses.
So it’s a lot of driving around from place to place. Tim wants to stop and buy tobacco. We park the car in the center of town.
“So Julian, where can I buy tobacco?” Tim asks.
“At Augie’s,” I say.
“Augie’s!” Dad says. “Augie’s closed thirty years ago.”
Dad gives Tim directions to some other store. We wait in a fast-food chain place and drink soda. Willow is hungry but she is not going to eat fast food, she wants something different.
And now Dad wants to go back to his house because he is coming down hard. He needs a toke, a puff, a bowl. The hot and hungry and hormonal teen is a bad thing, but I am probably more afraid of the dad. I am trapped, stuck in a pool of rage while everyone around me has a little nuclear meltdown, except Tim, who is oblivious. He’s down the block, ambling along. He has no idea that there is multigenerational seething here. The thing is, if he were here and I were the one stalling everyone, he wouldn’t notice, either.
He is so lucky! He doesn’t have to be in a rage, nor does he appear to notice the rage of others. He gets to live on a nice planet, the one called Planet Oblivion. Is it because he is a Brit? The only time he ever gets angry is when I say something. Then he explains that I am paranoid or wrong.
In all the thirty years I have known him there have only been two people he has announced he didn’t like. Two people, out of all the thousands he has met, dined with, talked to. He is friendly, outgoing, warm, interested in others—if only I could be a little bit like him. But no. Try as I might, for me, other human beings are a blend of pit vipers, chimpanzees, and ants, a virtually indistinguishable mass of killer shit-pickers, sniffing their fingers and raping.
At last we are back at Dad’s house. Lunchtime!
My family doesn’t want berries and yogurt for lunch—we have been coming here for fifteen years as a family and they have never wanted berries and yogurt for lunch, but that’s all there has ever been. Somehow Tim and Willow find bread and cheese, fill their plates, and hack away at it.
I am surprised Dad is keeping cool. All my life he went nuts if you didn’t sit down and “do” a meal like human beings, with plates and forks and spoons, all at the same time. Dad even dumped one girlfriend, years and years ago, when I was about the age Willow is now, because she went into the kitchen (they were living together by then—Dad made her get rid of her dog first) around lunchtime and she got some food out of the fridge and ate it. Dad didn’t say anything at the time. He went off in a black rage. But very shortly after this he threw her out.
Dad is right, though. It is civilized to sit down and eat off plates, together, as a unit. Of course, in all these years I have not been able to get my family to do this at home. I tried, believe me. For years I said to Tim, “Look, we have a little kid, can you get home at six o’clock one night a week so we can have dinner together as a family?” But he never did. The subway was always delayed. Something or other was always happening.
After I visit him, Dad usually sends me a hate letter. I have hundreds of them that go back decades. I already know this one will be about how my family did not sit down for lunch or offer to make lunch, but just went to the refrigerator and got out cheese and ate it with bread!
I’m whimpering now thinking about this future letter. “Dad,” I say, “I can’t make them sit down for a normal meal, I’m sorry.”
Dad nods. I can’t believe it, but he seems to accept that it is not my fault. Of course, I will still probably get a hate letter from him. Sometimes he writes to tell me that my mom was a lousy fuck. Sometimes he writes to tell me I am worthless, that I will never amount to anything. Sometimes he writes to ask me for money to reimburse him for what he spent when I was growing up, or in college.
But for now, I am safe.
Dad goes to his room and great spunky wafts of smoke curl out from under his doorway. When he returns, he is pacified. He is not so high that he’s in the giggly touchy-feely state, but he’s calmer, happier, not furious with me. I know there will be about an hour’s peace this afternoon, then he will have a nap and then it will be time for dinner.
Tim and Willow go out in the canoe. Dad sits out on the deck with me. It is very beautiful to look out over his swamp. “My friend Bruce—the one I gave my guns to when I was depressed—is going to come over for dinner after you go. He’s about to have open-heart surgery.”
All of Dad’s friends are in bad shape. The men come over a few times a week to share a bowl and admire his property. Dad’s other friend Josan is dying, but fortunately Josan has a wife with a hundred million dollars who threw him out but rented him an apartment and hired a nurse to look after him.
But Bruce is a young man who’s going in for open-heart surgery and is afraid. “He thinks he’s going to die on the operating table.” Dad laughs maniacally. “But at least I already got my guns back!”
I don’t know if he’s forgotten that he told me earlier that day, but he launches into the sawed-off shotgun story again.
“I keep it upstairs, in case someone comes out here.”
“Who, Dad?”
“If there was a nuclear war, people would come up here from the cities. I have to have a way to protect myself and keep them off. If someone was looking for drugs. Once, two girls came here. They knocked on the door and said they were looking for their mother.”
“They drove miles down the dirt road and then turned onto your dirt driveway and drove another mile until they got to your house? Then they got out of their car and knocked on your door and said they were looking for their mother?”
“Yep.”
“Did you know their mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who were they?”
He shrugs.
Before dinner, Dad goes to his room to smoke (the fourth time that day? or maybe the fifth?) and after dinner, when Willow, Tim, and I are sitting there, Dad decides . . . to tell us about his guns.
His sawed-off shotgun is illegal, he keeps it under his bed—I think—and maybe some other guns up in his closet? He is just . . . on and on, and I am learning he has a lot of guns, how many I don’t know. But I do know that he gave his guns away and got them back because it is the fourth time that day I am hearing this story.
The evening passes. I don’t know what we do, do we play Scrabble? Are we all sitting on Dad’s bed on the beaver blanket, watching a movie on his giant TV screen? Dad starts talking about his guns again. He’s mumbling, to himself, and it dawns on me: Daddy’s nuts!
I am in the middle of the woods with my kid, who is applying to college, with this crazed old man who has drug dealers stopping by and can’t stop smoking pot and talking about his guns. He’s nuts and dangerous! It takes me a long time to put all this together. I am very slow to understand people. But I know I’ve got to get my family out of here.
“Just then,” Dad says, “the chief of police came in and said, ‘You can’t sell that sawed-off shotgun! It doesn’t work. It’s illegal to sell a gun that doesn’t work.’ ”
What law is that? I thought you couldn’t sell a sawed-off shotgun because having a sawed-off shotgun is illegal, whether it works or not.
There is something really wrong. I have brought my family here, and even though my father hasn’t shot anybody before (as far as I know), that doesn’t mean he might not feel the urge to shoot someone now. Or this “unreliable” drug dealer might come back and Dad might decide to shoot him, or the drug dealer might decide to shoot back and my family is caught in the crossfire. Or even worse, Dad might think he hears an intruder and shoot my kid. Later, after the shooting, he might tell the police,
“I thought someone broke in, I forgot completely I had houseguests!” What are they going to do, put an eighty-three-year-old in jail?
This is actually a highly possible situation. You don’t know my father.
I go downstairs. “Tim, we have got to get out of here. The guns, the guns, the guns, the drug dealer. You want to have your drug dealer come over while you have houseguests, including your granddaughter? Just say, ‘I left something at a friend’s house and he’s stopping by to drop it off.’ You don’t keep saying, ‘My drug dealer is coming! My drug dealer is coming!’ And what if this dealer—a nurse at the hospital!—was in trouble with the police and turned in his clients and they came out here and took Willow?”
For once, Tim kind of agrees.
“I’m not kidding. I am afraid. We have to get out of here,” I say.
I would not put anything past Dad. No matter how much he asks, I can’t find him a gallery! I am barely surviving; it’s hard enough getting my books published. If you want a gallery you have to go and schmooze the right people. It was bad enough that my grandmother was always asking me to get her a show for her paintings. There are two parts to art: the work and the business side. You have to do both, right? Sigh. It doesn’t matter. All I know is, at this point, what’s Dad got to lose? His artworks—the sculptures, one of which, he will explain to you, represents two figures with their heads connected, having an orgasm, the free-form stained-glass lamps the size of dinosaurs, hanging from the ceiling—have never gotten any attention, and he’s now in his eighties, so what’s he got to lose?
But where are we going to go? It’s the middle of the night . . . well, 11 P.M., but there are no motels for miles—let alone one that will accept eight poodles. (I’m not saying I’m normal, either.)
“Okay, so what do you want to do?” Tim says. “I don’t think your father is going to shoot us, but . . . I don’t want to stay here, either.”
“We’ll have to stay here overnight, but I’m afraid. Could you please go talk to my dad?”
Tim returns after some time. “Your father wants to see you. He wants to know what’s going on.”
“No! I don’t want to discuss this. Tell him he has to give you the gun he keeps under the bed and put it in the trunk of the car. Then I can sleep at least.”
Tim comes down with a couple of .22s and another gun. We go to the car together while he puts them in the trunk. “Where’s the sawed-off shotgun, Tim?”
“Your dad says he doesn’t have a sawed-off shotgun under the bed.”
Dad comes out. “What’s going on?”
“Dad, I need you to give me your sawed-off shotgun from under the bed.”
“I don’t have one under the bed.”
“Then where do you have it?”
“On top of the closet.”
“Give me the sawed-off shotgun, Dad!”
So I get some of the guns stashed away for the night. Probably not all.
In the morning we give the guns back and get ready to leave. That’s when Dad’s girlfriend arrives, as we’re trying to rush off. “Oh, what a shame not to see you. Is there nothing we can do or say to get you to stay?” she says.
“My daughter’s hysterical!” Dad says.
“No, I’m not hysterical,” I tell him.
“She is hysterical,” he tells the others. “I have always had guns. You knew. I had to get a gun, back when I was still in practice and a former patient began making threats. It was to protect myself.”
I could have reminded him, “Dad, she came to you for her sexual problems and you fucked her. And she was making suicidal threats, not threats against you.”
But he probably would have denied it, because smoking pot makes you forget things, and also because he’s fucked so many of his female patients, he wouldn’t have remembered which one it was.
“You would never be able to live out here,” he says. “Not two miles from here, a seventy-year-old man was shot and killed. You can’t live here, not without a gun.”
SO, NATURALLY, DAD DISOWNS ME. He decides to give his estate to the Audubon Society instead.
my mom
My mother is lying on her side with her diapers full of shit. She was a professor of English at Cornell University and an award-winning poet when she retired less than three years ago.
It is not possible she is going to read this—or, if she does, she is going to read the same line over and over again, like she did the other day from The New Yorker. “ ‘Manuel Uno is two years old and already five feet high at the withers.’ ” She read it aloud. Then she laughed and said, “Who is Manuel Uno?” and read it over again. It was something about an aurochs, and she asked me, “What’s an aurochs?” I explained that, according to the article she was reading to me, it was some type of primitive or prehistoric cow.
Then she read it out loud, again, laughed, and said, “What’s an aurochs?”
After she took her first serious fall, I left my life in the city and came to her house in upstate New York to look after her. There was feces everywhere. It was on the floor and the walls and the refrigerator. I took her to a doctor. “My mom has had chronic diarrhea for many months,” I said.
“Have you given her Pepto-Bismol?” the doctor asked. “You can try it in tablet or liquid, available at your local drugstore.”
She kept falling. I got home health care. Things got worse. No doctors helped.
The home health aide quit. She put a big sign on the front door that stated: “I did not want to tell your mother, but I had to quit because there was FECES EVERYWHERE.”
My mom had gone out and read the sign. She was hysterical. “Why did she have to put that up?” she cried. The whole neighborhood saw it.
I put her in a nursing home.
My sister-in-law Veronica told everyone, “Tama thought it was ‘necessary’ to put Phyllis in a nursing home.” She’s married to my brother, Sam. They live in Alabama. She sits at home and watches talk shows and soap operas. He is a doctor. After work he does the shopping, cooking, and cleaning.
I didn’t think it was necessary to put my mom in a home. It was necessary.
Now I go to her nursing home every day. There is a woman there who staggers around, holds back tears, and repeatedly asks, “Where is my daughter? Do you know where my daughter is?” No matter how many times you tell her, “Your daughter is at work, she will be here this evening,” she still asks. There is another woman who used to be a concert pianist. She wears a big bib, with pictures of kittens or puppies, tucked right up under her chin. She wanders around shouting, “When is dinner? I’m hungry!” They could have just finished eating, or it could be two in the afternoon, but still she is in a rage about having nothing to eat. At any time someone is going around with a tea trolley containing tiny gray muffins or canned diced peaches with whipped topping or Jell-O. They stuff her and stuff her, but the woman still yells for food.
At lunch the residents get milk that’s pink. I hope it’s strawberry flavored. Lunch is the big meal there. They have a cup of soup and then the main dish, chicken with mashed potatoes and a green vegetable—well, greenish. There are group meetings for the more functional residents where they’re asked what they’d like to see on the menu. Of the ones who can articulate, some want roast beef and some want pizza.
Mary, one of the residents, spends mealtime diddling the sugar. She takes off the top of the container and might dump it on her food or in her glass of water, then stirs and stirs until the water is cloudy and adds some cream or mashed potatoes and takes a sip.
This is an upscale place, too. I don’t mean it is super fancy, but it is expensive. It doesn’t stink the way some old people’s homes do, except in my mother’s room, where it usually smells like shit because her diapers are full and she just goes in them all the time.
I am trapped.
a supermarket in ithaca
I hated being in Mom’s house when Mom was still living there. I hated living in upstate New York. I had to get out. My only
escape was . . . the supermarket. That is what I did for fun. Not going out—to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, openings, premieres—because as far as I knew, there was nowhere worth going! I didn’t have friends there and Mom panicked if I was away for more than a half hour, frantic, ready to call the police.
I would make up an excuse for something we needed, just to get away. But then I had to get in the car. I had to drive that 1995 Mazda, and every single time it smashed itself into the side of the garage. I have a driver’s license but had lived in the city my whole life and never drove. There are subways in New York City that take you from point A to point B, more or less. There are taxis. There are buses. There’s nowhere to park a car. Not driving is normal if you live in New York City.
When I first got upstate I just sat in the car in the garage shaking. I couldn’t even start it. What if I did and it decided to go into the wall? (It did.) What if it decided to back up over a person? So far, no, but who knew what it was going to do?
When Mom drove, she always explained that it took two people to drive, and my job was to look right when we came to a stop sign, while she looked left. Then we discussed whether there was any oncoming traffic. The discussion took a long time. Then she had to check on my side, to make sure. I had a license but had always known I would never be able to drive. Now I was forced to.
The supermarket wasn’t exactly a fun destination. It was just a place to go. Actually, that supermarket got me so agitated that I was ready to kill. There were signs like this one:
You don’t have to put “cold cereal” and “hot cereal” on two separate lines! Just put “cereal”! Why do you have pancake syrup in this aisle? Why? It belongs in the baking goods aisle! And what is “diet”?
Presumably, the manager was severely mentally ill. I assumed he was male, because you didn’t see many women working there except the registers or those little free-sample stands trying to get you to buy frozen strawberry Slurpees with agave sweetener made right there in a blender and served on a pita chip. Why couldn’t I just feel sorry for the manager?
Scream Page 2