by Melissa Bank
I said, “Mimi said, ‘ Really fine.’”
He turned and faced me. “You gave it to Mimi before showing it to me?”
“Yes,” I said.
He sat up and turned his back to me, and lit a cigarette. “Why would you do that?” he said, and his tone put me in the third person.
“What you said—I need your approval too much.” I lit a cigarette myself and said, “I rely too much on your judgment.”
I could tell how angry he was by how he smoked—deep drags with too brief intermissions. “I rely on your judgment,” he said. “I ask you to read my editorial letters.”
“You don’t need me to, though,” I said.
“Of course I do,” he said.
I said, “But if I wasn’t around to read them, you’d be fine.”
He said, “You planning on going somewhere?”
~
Mimi called me into her office. “You did a wonderful job on the novel,” she said.
“But I am a little surprised that it took you as long as it did.”
“Oh,” I said. I thought of the time my Girl Scout leader told me that I hadn’t earned enough badges; she’d said, “You have to work at scouting, Janie.”
Mimi said, “I didn’t mention it yesterday because I didn’t want to diminish the work you’d done. I probably wouldn’t mention it at all,” she said, “if you didn’t also take so long reading submissions.”
She was looking at me and I knew that she was expecting a pledge of future speed.
But I just said, “Yeah.” And, “Yeah,” again. Even to myself, I sounded like somebody who smoked cigarettes in front of the drugstore all day.
~
I was sulking in my office when my mother called. She never called in the middle of the day, so when she said, “How are you?” I said, “What’s wrong?”
She said, “Everything’s fine.” Then she told me that my father had pneumonia and had been admitted to the hospital.
Mimi told me to take as much time as I needed.
Archie left work and met me at his house. He sat on the bed while I packed. “It’s going to be hard in Philadelphia,” he said. “I don’t want you worrying about us.”
In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he’d see a look of pleasure cross his mother’s face and ask what she was thinking; she’d say, I was just thinking of your father. “That’s how I want us to be,” Archie said.
I smiled.
“What?”
I said, “I was just thinking of your father.”
XI
I asked my mother when Henry was coming. We were in the car, on our way to the hospital.
She didn’t answer.
“Mom?” I said.
“Yes?”
“When’s Henry coming in?”
She said that he had a wedding to go to on the Cape that Saturday, and he’d either come before or after.
“Are you tired?” I asked.
She nodded.
At red lights, she stopped, coasted, stopped, coasted. I was getting carsick. “Do you want me to drive?” I asked.
“I can drive,” she said. But she pulled over and got out, so I could take her place at the wheel.
~
My father had plastic oxygen tubes in his nose. He didn’t smile when he saw me.
“Hello, love,” he said.
I bent down to kiss his forehead.
He was in a VIP suite, which had wall-to-wall carpeting, a mini refrigerator, and velvety wallpaper. “This is a brothel,” I said.
He said, “Don’t tell Mom.”
Out in the hall, I saw Dr. Wischniak and asked when my dad would be going home.
He said, “I can’t answer that yet.”
I said, “Is my father dying?”
He looked at me steadily. “We’re all dying, Jane.”
~
All through the day, my father’s doctor friends visited, in their white coats. They sat on his bed and patted the blanket where his legs were. My dad asked them questions about their children—“How’s Amy liking Barnard?” or “What’s Peter up to this summer?”—trying to make them comfortable.
When he asked how my job was, I said, “Okay.”
“Really?” he said.
“No,” I said. I told him that I wasn’t sure I belonged in publishing. “I’m getting worse instead of better.”
“You keep talking about whether you’re good at this or not,” he said. “The real question is do you enjoy it?”
“I might hate it,” I said.
He reminded me that I loved books.
“I don’t read books,” I said. “I read manuscripts that aren’t good enough to become books.”
“What do you think you’d like to do instead?” he asked.
I said that I’d been thinking about writing a series of pamphlets called “The Loser’s Guide.” I said, “Like ‘The Loser’s Guide to Careers.’ Or ‘The Loser’s Guide to Love.’” I wasn’t sure whether I was kidding or not.
“Any other ideas?” he said.
I told him about a jewelry store with the sign PIERCING—WITH OR WITHOUT
PAIN.
He laughed.
“But I wouldn’t want to pierce anything but ears,” I said. “Maybe the occasional nose.”
~
The drugs he was getting made him nauseated, and my mother tried to tempt him to eat. “What about a pastrami sandwich?” she said. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring a baked potato and a nice steak.”
I said, “You always say, ‘a nice steak,’ like there are also mean steaks.”
On our way out to the hospital parking lot, I told her that maybe talking about food while Dad was nauseated wasn’t such a great idea.
“He has to keep his strength up,” she said.
The way she spoke reminded me more of humming than thinking.
~
At home, we had a glass of wine on the screened-in porch, both of us still wearing our visitor tags from the hospital. The sky was the dirty violet of rain coming.
I tried to bring up topics other than my father. I asked about the neighbors I remembered. “How’s Willy Schwam?” He had a scholarship to Juilliard. “What happened to Oliver Biddle?” His father died; mother and son moved to Florida.
The Caliphanos lived there now; they were raising their granddaughter, Lisa, because her mother was a drug addict. Lisa was a serious little girl, my mom said, adorable in braids; she’d knocked on the door last week and said, “I have a feeling there are rabbits in your backyard.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, ‘Let’s go see.’”
My mother told me about all the neighbors, going up one side of the street and then the other. After she went upstairs to bed, what stayed with me wasn’t the good news—
the scholarship or babies or golden anniversary—but Lisa growing up without her mother, Mr. Zipkin losing his job, and the Hennessys getting divorced. I sat out there on the porch, with a cigarette and another glass of wine, listening to the crickets and the occasional car. It occurred to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace.
XII
Over the weekend, my father told me he was concerned about my missing work; when was I going back?
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” I said, deciding then.
He said, “I’m glad.” Then he looked right at me. “It means a great deal to me that you’re here.”
~
My mother said that there was no reason for Henry to come, as long as I was here.
But I kept expecting he would, and Archie did, too. “Stay as long as you need to,”
Archie said, “but don’t forget I need you here.”
~
One night, Archie told me I sounded vague.
I said that it was the suburbs. “They put tranquilizers in the water.”
My mother was standing there, and smiled.
“Honey,” he said, “I’m no
t getting a clear idea of what’s going on down there.”
I tried to explain, but I realized I wasn’t sure myself. So I called Irwin Lasker, one of the doctor friends who visited every day. Dr. Lasker was gruff and his sarcasm had frightened me as a child, when I’d been friends with his daughter and slept over at their house.
“The doctors are telling you what you need to know, Jane,” he said, and he sounded angry. “It’s up to you whether you want to listen or not.”
I got angry myself. “Maybe when you hear about blood counts you get the big picture, but I don’t.”
He didn’t speak right away. When he did he was grave, and I realized I’d asked him to imagine his own daughter hearing about him. “It’s just a matter of days, Jane.”
When I told my mother what he’d said, she cried, and then she got angry at Dr. Lasker.
“Mom,” I said, “I asked him to tell me.”
She said, “Irwin’s a pessimist.”
~
The next morning, her eyes were so swollen from crying they were almost closed. I got her to lie down and brought her ice cubes in a washcloth and cucumber slices. We waited to go to the hospital until the swelling went down.
She put on her prettiest summer dress. This was her way of making my father feel she was okay. But it was something else, too. It was almost a superstition—like if she looked pretty enough everything would turn out well.
I didn’t know what I looked like. I was seeing myself in the mirrors of my adolescence, where I’d discovered that I’d never be a beautiful woman. It mattered to me less now than it ever had, but when my mother said, “Put on a little rouge, Jane,” I did.
She watched me anxiously, and I said, “You look like you could use a tall glass of suburban water.”
She nodded, not getting my joke. She stood in the doorway in her pretty floral dress, a watercolor of her former self.
XIII
As a doctor, my father must have known what was happening. It may have been gradual but it seemed to me that all of a sudden he became very quiet. When his friends visited, he answered their questions, and that was all.
~
I worried that he was thinking about dying, but I wasn’t going to bring it up; I asked if there was anything on his mind.
“Yes,” he said. “How’s it going with Archie?”
“Pretty good,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
“I know you were relieved when I broke up with Archie last time,” I said. “Will you tell me why?”
He said that he’d noticed Archie’s insulin in the refrigerator at the shore that weekend.
“Diabetes is a serious disease,” he said. “But he didn’t treat it like it was. He wasn’t taking care of himself, which made me think someone else would wind up doing it.
His daughter didn’t seem to visit or feel much of an obligation to him. I worried that you’d be the only one. I didn’t want you to spend your life that way.” He paused. He asked me if I knew how long Archie had been diabetic—an important prognostic factor, he said.
I said I didn’t. Archie’s standard line was that Beefeater had eaten his pancreas.
I must have looked worried, because my father said, “It’s hard, isn’t it, love?”
I said it was.
~
I began to notice how formal he and my mother were. She spoke to him in a soothing voice, but distantly, and he was just as cool. He acted as though dying was his own private business, and I guess it was.
~
Walking back with my mother to the car, I said, “Wasn’t it hard keeping Dad’s illness a secret all those years?”
She looked at me as though I’d accused her of something.
“Did you and Dad talk about it a lot?”
She said, “At first we did.” Then she told me that she’d cried to him once about how scared she was; he’d told her that he could not comfort her about himself.
I said, “Did you ever want to talk to anybody else about it?”
“No,” she said. “It was between your father and me.”
~
My mother told me that Henry might not come down this weekend as planned; his firm was entering a competition and Aldo had asked him to draw the trees—a big honor.
I realized how angry I was that Henry wasn’t here, and I called him right back and said, “You should come right now.”
“That’s not what Mom said.” He told me that it wasn’t just the competition, he wanted to research the newest treatments for Dad’s disease; he’d read about one in Scotland, but so far they’d only experimented on mice.
“Mice?”
We had to be open-minded, Henry said; we’d given conventional medicine a chance and it wasn’t working. In a different voice, he said, “I can’t just sit around waiting for Dad to die.”
“Henry,” I said, “Dad isn’t going to Scotland.”
“Maybe we’ll have to force him,” he said.
I was about to say, Force Dad? Instead, I took a breath. “Please come,” I said. “I need you here.”
After I hung up, my mother avoided looking at me. I said, “What do you think I did that was so wrong?”
“I didn’t say you were doing anything wrong,” she said, in the even tone she now used with my father.
I said, “You’re not talking to me anymore.”
“That’s not true.” She turned her attention from the dishes to the stove and back to the sink.
“Mom,” I said, “you look at me like I’m the enemy of hope.”
“Sweetheart,” she said. Her voice was creamy. “This is hard on all of us.”
~
Henry arrived the next morning.
At the hospital, he took over, talking to the doctors and the nurses. He reminded me of my father in an emergency; he was calm, getting all of the facts.
We went into my father’s room together. He was sleeping. My mother was sitting by the bed, and Henry put his arm around her, which I’d never seen him do before. I was grateful to him for that.
My mother wasn’t angry that he hadn’t come sooner, of course. I didn’t think my father was either. After all, Henry had done as he was told.
~
At home, in the kitchen, Henry and I split a beer.
“Oh,” he said, and he took a gadget out of his bag. I recognized one of Rebecca’s water purifiers. He attached it to our tap, and then ran the faucet. He handed me a glass, and got one for himself.
“It tastes the same to me,” I said.
He said, “Your taste buds are dead.”
In a Southern accent, I said, “That girl is a waterhead.”
He said, “I like her.” Then: “When’d you get back with ol’ Archie?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “May?”
He nodded. I steeled myself to be teased, but Henry just said, “Ready?” and turned off the kitchen lights.
~
In the middle of the night, the phone rang.
I sat up in bed not breathing right and waited for my mother to come into my room.
“Jane,” she said, at my door. “It’s for you.”
I followed her to the phone. It was New York Hospital. Archie was in Intensive Care.
XIV
I took the first train to New York in the morning.
At the hospital, I was told that Archie had been moved from the ICU to a regular room. He was asleep, so I went into the hall and asked the resident what had happened.
She told me that he’d been admitted with severe front-to-back abdominal pain, dizziness, shortness of breath, intense thirst. Then she spoke in the medical language I’d become accustomed to not understanding.
I interrupted and asked what had brought this on.
She said that he had a flu and because he wasn’t eating, he hadn’t taken his insulin, which was a big mistake.
“But nothing about drinking?” I asked.
She said, “I haven’t spoken to him myself.”
When I went back into the room, Archie was up. “I thought you needed a vacation,” he said, trying to smile. “But it’s kind of a busman’s holiday.”
I said, “I hate buses.”
He said, “I have acute pancreatitis.”
“I thought it was just average looking.” I looked up at his IV. “What’re you drinking?”
I asked.
He said, “I’m sorry you had to come.” Then he fell asleep again.
~
I went to the pay phone and called my father’s hospital room in Philadelphia.
“What’s going on there?” he asked.
I told him what the resident had said about the flu and insulin. My father said, “He went into DKA, diabetic keto acidosis,” and explained what it was so that I understood.
I was relieved to hear him sounding like himself.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “this was what I was talking about.”
“I know,” I said.
Then, he said, “Did the resident say anything else?”
I said, “Something about acute pancreatitis.”
He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Is Archie an alcoholic, Jane?” He sounded as though he already knew.
I didn’t want to answer. But I said, “Yes.”
His voice was gentle. “We’ll talk about that when you come back.” Then he said, “He’s on an IV, getting sodium and insulin?”
“Something clear,” I said.
He told me that Archie would be fine.
I said, “How are you, Papa?”
“About the same,” he said.
I said, “I’ll come as soon as I can.” And he didn’t argue.
~
I met Archie’s real doctor in the hall.
“You’re Jane?” he said.
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “now listen to me.” I couldn’t tell whether he was furious or just in a rush. Did I know how serious this was? He told me that Archie could’ve lapsed into a coma and died. The doctor seemed to hold me responsible: I needed to regulate his diet and exercise; I needed to be vigilant about monitoring his blood sugar.
I said, “You better talk to him.”
He said, “I’m talking to you.” Then he walked away.
~
I sat by Archie’s bed and repeated what his doctor had told me. I said, “He wants me to boss you around.”