The apartment grew dim as I smoked; darkness comes on early in winter. I didn’t bother to turn on a light. I just lay there staring at the ceiling, enjoying my first smoke in weeks. When I was finished I closed my eyes and just remained motionless for a time, mellow in the afterglow.
Finally it was totally dark in the room. I shifted to a sitting position, stood and looked out at the deep twilight that had settled over the Circle. I considered for a moment going out, getting a meal somewhere, being with people—any people. But no. Anyway, the weather was nasty—as beautiful as the frozen rain looked from here, dropping onto the roofs and streetlamps and streets, I knew it was growing treacherous outside. There was little traffic for a Friday afternoon, and few people on the street.
I stood there for a long time, staring out. After a while I looked down, directly below the window, and noticed a figure standing on the sidewalk near a streetlamp eight floors below. It was too far and too dim for me to see in any detail the person who stood there, but I could make out—I thought I could, at least—that it was a woman, or rather a girl, with straight brown hair. Her coat was brown too. She stood with her arms at her sides, motionless. She was looking up. I had the unsettling sensation that she was looking straight at me.
3
Saturday brought a blue-sky, winter-clear morning. Whatever ice had accumulated the previous night was quickly melting away in the bright December sun and the streets and gutters were filled with trickling streams of dirty water. My mood was better—it usually was on Saturdays—and I agreed to come see Alice at her home in Arlington. “It’ll give you a chance to see Dad,” she said over the phone.
That was certainly true. Whether it was a chance I welcomed, though, was another question.
After wolfing down a scone and a hot mug of chai at Teaism, one of my favorite eateries in Dupont Circle, I boarded the Metro and sank back into my seat, letting the train take me into what felt like the interior of the earth. The car was nearly empty and I found my mind wandering, somewhat unwillingly, to Dad, to Mom, to Alice, to things that had happened decades before which should have held no relevance to me now, at age thirty-six, but which still seemed to exert an invincible hold on my mind.
Thinking of the past made me tired. But it insisted on being thought about.
When I thought about my father I pictured a man filled with wild angers and resentments, his hands flailing madly about in high dudgeon against whatever was enraging him at the moment: the goddamn government, goddamn taxes, goddamn liberals, goddamn niggers, goddamn faggots, goddamn lawyers, goddamn welfare, goddamn illegals, goddamn Supreme Court. His eyes would bug out and his mouth contort as he glared at me, his latest crazed pronouncement having just escaped his lips—how the government should require all citizens to arm themselves, for instance, or how it should be legal for a citizen to kill on sight any Latino not carrying proof of U.S. citizenship. (“There’s the solution to that problem,” he’d shout, glaring at me and pointing a finger-gun at my head. “Bang!”) Then, having delivered me of his newest country-salvaging strategy, he would inevitably pause, catch his breath, and demand to know, “Well, am I right or am I right? Huh?”
At ten, at twelve, at fourteen, I would agree that he was right. I’m frightened to contemplate now how many people I agreed to murder, to publicly execute, to imprison and torture without trial or hope of legal remedy, in order simply to appease my father’s anger—his endless grievances—in order simply to get him to stop talking.
But my father was neither an ignorant nor an uneducated man. Thanks to the G.I. Bill he’d been able to carry himself from a hardscrabble childhood in the southwest through a couple of years of engineering classes in college to an excellent position at a California aerospace firm, where he ultimately became a mid-level manager. Along the way he’d married the woman who would become my mother, found a little tract house in a nondescript town near his job, and, ultimately, had Alice and me. On the surface it was a sufficiently successful life, yet my father never seemed to quite believe in his success. His insecurities became resentments; his resentments became his mad tirades.
His drinking, of course, fueled all this. I remembered the sound of the front door being shoved open hard, long after midnight; the sound of his booze-clumsy feet thudding unevenly on the carpet. I was eight, nine. I would listen as Alice came out from her room, talking softly to him, trying to get him to go to bed; his softly slurred words, goddamn and shit and bullshit, but not angry now, just the murmurings of a man past coherence and virtually past consciousness.
C’mon, Dad, c’mon, Daddy, I’d hear Alice say. Put your arm over my shoulder. You need to go to sleep, okay?
Bullshit, he’d mumble. Goddamn bullshit…
He wasn’t always like this, of course. My memory holds within it wavering, static-streaked images of the three of us on summer vacation at Lake Shasta, sporting about merrily in our power boat, my bikini-clad sister attracting a great deal of attention for reasons I didn’t yet quite understand, my father gloweringly protective but proud, too. I remember dark-of-night marshmallow roasts at our campsite, my own clumsy tendency to light my marshmallows on fire, Alice’s patient assistance, Dad smiling, sitting a little to the side—drinking enough beer to put him in a mellow mood but not enough to incapacitate him—and sometimes bringing out a harmonica and leading a silly, laughter-rich family singalong. I remember a trip—two trips, maybe?—to Reno, Dad leaving Alice and me on our own to lurk about the kid-friendly sections of the Circus Circus or see a movie while he played poker late into the night, invariably in a good mood when we met up with him later, buying us sodas and cheeseburgers.
But these memories don’t hold up in my mind, don’t stay sharp and focused before me the way that the others do. I have to will myself to recall anything positive, anything unthreatening about my father. To me he is the man with the wild eyes, the shouting, the pointing at me and, “Well, am I right or am I right? Huh?”
I got off at Metro Center, stumbling my way through the crowd onto a Blue Line train that would take me into Virginia. I felt hungry for a cigarette again, though I had none with me. The prospect of seeing my father, even in his vastly diminished state, made me nervous and fidgety. We had hardly spoken in years. As always, Alice had been our go-between, sharing news with each of us. But a year or so before Dad had had a fairly serious traffic accident on 18th Street and it became apparent that he was suffering from something beyond merely the forgetfulness or ordinary inattention Alice and others had noticed in him. Finally he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; his driver’s license was revoked; and his life was essentially over, except for the living of it.
I tried to doze as the train went above ground and the Virginia landscape passed by the window. I knew none of these memories should prey on me, knew that worrying about such things just amounted to wasted energy. But I couldn’t stop, somehow, and as the train neared my station I felt depression pouring over me like a familiar, not-unwelcome shroud. I considered just getting off and taking the next train on the opposite track back to D.C., where I could call Alice from my apartment and make some sort of excuse. Then I could get back into bed, which is where I most wanted to be, and slip into a happily dreamless oblivion.
But I knew she would be waiting for me, and as I exited the station there she was: smiling and looking rather resplendent in a soccer-mom kind of way, with her leather boots, faded blue jeans, long gray coat loosely sashed around her, and a big silken scarf, rainbow-hued, which encircled her neck and shoulders. She had on a gray English driving cap, a typically whimsical touch. But what I noticed were her eyes. My sister is a beautiful woman, there’s no denying it—blonde hair reaching to her shoulders (wrapped now in a ponytail), an upsloping pixie nose, wide green eyes—but under the eyes I saw unfamiliar dark rings. Lines, too, deep little crevices in her skin, had imprinted themselves around the edges of those eyes. She was extraordinarily well-preserved for a forty-four-year-old woman—she looked to be in her early thirties
at most, the homecoming princess she’d once been still clearly visible to anyone—but I knew immediately, as others might not have, that something was wrong.
“Hey, Ben,” she said, as we exchanged a perfunctory hug and kiss.
“Hi, Sis.” I studied her. “You okay?”
“Oh God, does it show that bad?” She chuckled sadly. “I’m okay, Ben. C’mon, I’ll tell you about it in the car.”
“The car” was a Hummer, one of those giant tank-like monstrosities that had recently begun littering the American highways. Alice’s husband liked things big: big house, big car, big family, big money. Alice herself always seemed slightly embarrassed to be driving such a vehicle, though she would defend it by saying, “Well, it’s convenient. No problem packing the kids and all their friends in, that’s for sure.”
“So how’s Dad?” I asked, once we were on the road.
“Not so good,” she said. “Ben, I don’t know how much longer we can keep him.”
“Why? What happened?”
She sighed, her face pensive. “He’s been bothering Mindy.”
Mindy was her youngest daughter. “ ‘Bothering’? What do you mean?”
“Um—bothering. You know. He…he makes her feel uncomfortable, she says.”
“Why? What’s he done?”
“Well, he hasn’t exactly done anything,” she said. “But his…he doesn’t know where he is, sometimes. He doesn’t always know who people are. He remembers me and Jim without any problem, but he confuses the kids with each other. Sometimes he forgets that they are my kids. He just…”
“What?”
She sighed. “He just…tells her she’s pretty, that kind of stuff.”
“Well—that doesn’t necessarily—”
“No, Ben, I know, okay? I know the way he can be.”
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Well—when I was a girl—sometimes—when he was drunk—well, I just know what she means, anyway. Mindy. When she says he makes her uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable how?”
“Just—the things he says, sometimes. He would say the same kind of things to me when I was a teenager.”
“Just that you’re pretty?”
“No. More than that, Ben. Like—I don’t know.”
We drove in awkward silence for a few minutes. I felt strange, off-balance. This was not the kind of conversation I usually had with my sister.
“Alice,” I said at last, “you’re not hiding something from me, are you?”
“No.”
“I mean—about Dad?”
“No. I’m not. I mean it, Ben, he never—it wasn’t like that. I knew that he was never going to—to touch me, or anything like that. Even when he was drunk out of his mind I was never afraid of that kind of stuff. That wasn’t Dad.” She scowled. “But—sometimes, when you were out on your bike or something and he and I were alone, and he was drinking, well—he would look at me in a weird way. Like—like guys at school looked at me.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, it—” She stopped, fell silent. She was visibly struggling to express herself, another thing I’d rarely seen with this plainspoken, ultra-confident sister of mine. “He never exactly said anything, okay? And he certainly never did anything. Not at all. Just…the way he would look at me. It made me uncomfortable, just the way it does with Mindy now. And when he talked to me in those times it was like, ‘Sweetheart, you’re going to break some man’s heart someday.’ Stuff like that. Well, I knew what he meant. It was his heart I was breaking.” She seemed to think about it. “I looked like Mom, you know. A lot.”
“I guess you did. You still do.”
“Weird to think I’ve outlived her.”
“So have I, now.” She died when she was thirty-five; I was three. There was little of her left in me now. A softly-said word, the shape of her hands, how her skirt swayed as she turned a corner, walking away from me. And her voice. I remembered, or thought that I did, how, holding me in her arms, she would gently whisper-sing the simplest of all lullabies to me:
Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
But maybe I didn’t really recall this. Perhaps it was just my imagination, filling in the vast blanks.
When it happened last summer I was aware of the exact day when I’d lived longer than my mother. On August 7th I’d survived more time on this Earth than she had. Yet I didn’t want to say this to Alice—to admit that I’d consciously thought of it that day. It seemed private, something only I and my mother’s shade should know.
“Jesus, I guess you have.” A smile drifted across my sister’s face, then vanished. “Anyway, he—he gets so confused now. Yesterday I found a cake of soap in the refrigerator, you know? I just—we could keep him for a while, but this thing with Mindy, I’m just—”
“What a bastard,” I said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t say that. It’s not fair to him.”
“Oh the hell with fairness! You just told me you thought that he—”
“He missed Mom,” she said firmly. “He still does. That’s the problem. And I’m afraid that—well—I just can’t have him around her. Around us.”
“What do you want to do?” I dreaded the suggestion she might make: that he come to stay with me.
“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.” She looked over at me and smiled. “I do miss you, you know. When you disappear for months on end.”
“You know where I live, Sis. You have my phone number.”
“Yeah, but you never return your goddamn calls, do you?”
“A teacher leads a busy life. Don’t be offended.”
“I’m not offended. I’m sad. I hope you’re at least getting laid a lot, now that you’re single again. How is Kate, by the way?”
“I haven’t seen Kate in months.”
“Well, I never liked her, to be perfectly honest. But you knew that.”
“Yes.” And I knew why, even if she didn’t: Alice and Kate were too similar, shared too many of the same intensities. “And I’m not getting laid much, by the way. Too busy writing.”
“Writing.” She nodded. “I remember your novel. That was a nice little book.” For a moment, the sister I knew was returned to me—that note of disdain had crept into her voice. But it vanished as quickly as it had surfaced, and I realized that Alice was making a concerted effort to be nice—to not be the sister I knew. “But do you mean to tell me you don’t have women channeling in and out of that little apartment of yours? That’s not the Ben Fall I remember.”
I wanted to say, Sis, the Ben Fall you remember is dead and gone, but I said: “That was a long time ago, Alice.”
“Not so long. You were a good-looking kid. You’d still be good-looking, if you took care of yourself.”
“Thanks.”
But she was right. Once upon a time, for a period of a few years between the end of my last big relationship and the beginning of my marriage, I’d been what my students would call a player. It shocked me, now. My behavior seemed to belong to someone else’s past life, not mine. There had been dozens of women, young ladies who were attracted to me at least in part because I was in mourning, and it showed: but then, when I and the world were young, it showed on a svelte, graceful guy in his twenties, a published writer, a seemingly sweet, sensitive, melancholy boy with a tendency toward black clothing and poetic utterings. Oh, that boy was me all right—he was no act. But I learned fairly quickly that something in my persona brought out a motherly feeling in girls my age, and after an initial period of astonishment at my good fortune I took every advantage I could of this realization. There were one-night stands, one-day liaisons, one-week relationships. Lots of them. For years. It was hard to remember most of them now. A pale arm reaching up to my face; the sound of sighing, rumpled shee
ts, bare feet padding off to the bathroom; happy whispers from girls who didn’t know that our relationship would end within hours.
Well, with Kate I’d at last reaped the whirlwind. By the time she was finished with me—though truly, she wasn’t finished even now—that period belonged to my distant past. It would never come again. I was old now, tired, fifty pounds heavier; I could feel my slack belly pressing over the top of my belt. Running my hand through my hair, I noticed for the thousandth time how little of it there was left.
At last we pulled up to the familiar two-story architectural marvel that was my sister’s house, all glass and angled planes and beams of steel and redwood. I’d always thought it a curious-looking place, but my knowledge of architecture is nonexistent. Hell, it was featured in Architectural Digest. That’s something, I guess. And passing through the high front doors I couldn’t deny an airiness, a quality of light that was striking. With so much glass everywhere you felt practically bathed in sun when you stepped in. The hallway was festooned with little multicolored Christmas lights. They reminded me that I needed to buy a Christmas card to send to her and her family.
“Dad’s in the TV room, I think,” Alice said, leading the way.
It was a shock to see him. I knew he’d declined since we’d last been together a few months before, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sagging, sack-like skin, the gray pallor, the generally shriveled, sunken, hunched-over quality of the man. His eyes, drooping and red-rimmed, glanced up from the television (a gigantic home-theater unit, of course) without interest.
“Daddy,” Alice said, advancing toward him, “Ben’s here to see you. Isn’t that nice?”
“Hm.” His eyes showed no sign of recognition, but then Dad had always acted indifferent whenever I entered a room. His eyes returned to the TV screen. The sound, I noticed, seemed to be off. “Waitin’ for the game.”
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 4