Carlene finishes a mint and says to Netta, “There’s got to be a special place in hell for you.” She moves next to her father, or someone that used to be her father, and lightly strokes his arm: his knuckles, his knobby wrist, then the big, bare root of his elbow.
“Don’t get him too comfortable, now,” Netta says. “He’s just about ready for his bath.”
Carlene offers to take a turn cleaning him up, but Netta, as always, says no. To be honest, she doesn’t trust Carlene with people. Dogs—yes. People—no. Netta considers her granddaughter Mandy a prime example of how Carlene can take a good person and screw her up, turn her inside out. During all the time that Mandy was growing up, she chewed her fingernails until they had to be iodined and taped; she ate her own long, brown hair; she would sit in front of the TV with her knees up in front of her and suck on them like a child trying to consume herself. Later, on Mandy’s small body, the scaly patches of eczema bloomed.
Carlene won’t admit to being a poor mother, but Netta thinks she has gotten the message, because after Mandy, Carlene doesn’t have any more children; she turns to raising Australian Blue Heelers. They’re a breed that cozies up to Carlene. They lick her face when she bends down to them. They bark and yelp for her when she crosses the yard. Her brown station wagon is scattered with dog kibble, and it doesn’t even bother her; she just brushes the driver’s seat clean and drives away.
When Netta comes back to the room carrying a big spaghetti pot filled with warm—bordering on hot—water, Carlene quickly steps aside like a pedestrian moving out of heavy traffic. Netta has generously added some of her Peaches and Cream bubble bath to the water, and a small eruption of sweet bubbles glides down the side of the pan and plops onto Franklin’s sheet, but Franklin doesn’t complain. He hasn’t complained about anything in over four months, hasn’t fed himself, hasn’t been able to stand and take the short stroll down the hall to the bathroom, hasn’t even been able to hold his own pruned-up pecker to pee since they put the catheter in.
Months ago, the doctors advised Netta to find a good nursing facility, but all their words were like Chinese to her. She brought him home from the hospital and started at the beginning with him. “Your name is Franklin. You’re seventy-two years old. That’s the TV the kids gave us a couple of Christmases ago. We can’t get channel nine because the damn antenna’s no good.”
For once, Carlene and Netta agree on something: no hospitals, no old folks’ home. Carlene’s suggestion is to put Franklin in the living room, right by the window so that he can see out and—she doesn’t tell her mother this part—so that he can gently make his escape from Boise and what must be to him a pretty dreary world.
Carlene believes these are the things that will push her father into the next best world: absolute quiet, smoldering pine incense, warmth and coaxing and a big window through which his soul can slip away. She pulls up a folding chair, sits next to his big bald head, and whispers to him: “Look out there and let go, Pop. It’s time to let go.”
The first time Netta overhears her whispering those things to Franklin she walks up and kicks Carlene’s chair, would kick Carlene in that little, skinny, two-bit butt of hers, but she can’t get her leg up high enough. “Don’t you dare,” she hisses at Carlene.
Carlene turns on her mother. “Well look at you, all dressed up like the damn Red Cross! Making him hang on so you won’t have to be alone.”
Carlene and Netta would gladly part company. They have managed to live as adults in the same city for the past twenty-two years, sidestepping each other except for Christmas and birthdays, but in their plan to bring Franklin home they suddenly need each other. Carlene comes over and spends the days with her father. Netta takes evenings and nights.
Both women are silent as Netta pulls the sheets back and prepares to wash Franklin. It’s always a shock—that first, biting look at him: a scarecrow in T-shirt and socks; a pale, bony joke gone bad. Franklin, a licensed electrician for almost forty years, used to have a bumper sticker on his white Ford truck. Electricians don’t grow old. Their wiring just goes bad. Carlene says that for her that’s almost the worst part—the blank, dragged-out look on her father’s face.
“It takes time to get well,” Netta says, mostly to herself and to the walls. She looks for hope in the smallest of her husband’s gestures: a hiccup, a sudden, uncontrolled blinking of the eye. She knows the stories of people who have come crashing up out of comas, big and sleepy as bears at the end of eternal winters.
She begins scrubbing Franklin’s feet, starting on his soles, rubbing in much the same way as she cleans her kitchen linoleum. Carlene half expects to see her lather up a Brillo pad.
“Be a little gentle, will you?” Carlene tells her.
“He likes it,” Netta says. “He likes the stimulation. It’s good for him.”
Carlene has to go out and sit in her station wagon to cool down—Netta makes her that mad. She leans her head tiredly against the driver’s window. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply the earthy, tranquilizing smell of her dogs.
Netta is preparing for Halloween, which is in four days. She puts her chubby hand, with four fingers up, in front of Franklin’s face. “Four days,” she says to him, loud and slowly. “One, two, three, four,” she counts, making each finger bob. She gathers brown, crinkly leaves and randomly sprinkles them like fairy dust over the living room end tables. She sets a big, uncarved pumpkin on top of the TV so that the rabbit ears stick up behind it. She rolls Franklin temporarily away from the picture window while she decorates it with packaged cobwebs, then pushes him back in place.
She is surprised at how Franklin fits in with the holiday decor. Paper-skinned and mummy-like, he lies in front of the webbed window, already fitting in, contributing his best to Halloween. Netta can see that. She can see him struggling to come back, to move, to talk again so that they can have those crazy morning conversations that make him laugh and shake his head and threaten to go see if his old girlfriend, Danielle Berry, will take him in. Netta thinks, hell, if it would make him recover any faster, she’d double-time Danielle right over to his bedside, tie her there, feed both of them mashed potatoes and the baby-soft food of recovery.
Carlene can feel Halloween out there, the air thin and solemn, but unlike Netta she just can’t get the heart for it. Nothing out of the ordinary decorates her living room. Drake and Faye, her two favorite Blue Heelers, snooze at the end of the Herculon couch, though they aren’t really festive in any way, except for their braided brown and orange collars perhaps. Drake’s eyes are closed but they twitch, indicating—somewhere—the murky dreams of a dog.
Even though Carlene and her husband Ham have been invited to a costume party, Carlene decides that she won’t be anything this year. Last year she was a Viking, and Ham hung a potato six inches off his belt and told everyone he was a dictator. This year Ham has gone down to a local playhouse and rented a King Neptune outfit. For days he has carried his mock trident around the house, goosing Carlene with it, trying to get her in the mood.
“Can’t you see I’ve got other things to think about?” she tells Ham, who, as Neptune, is only momentarily put off.
The fact is, she cannot get her father to let go, despite the incense she burns, despite the calming voice she uses to tell him that everything is okay here, that all of his work is finished, that he can stop holding on. She waits, of course, until Netta has left the house for the morning.
She rummages in Netta’s haphazard filing drawer and finally fishes out what she’s after. She carries a green vinyl packet marked Riverside Memorial Garden back to her father’s bedside. She opens it to a page with a photograph of marble statuary, shows it to him, and reminds her father that everything has been taken care of. It takes Carlene a few minutes to find it on the down-to-scale map, but she finally pinpoints plot 124D, puts her finger on it, and shows her father. “Kinda on the hillside,” she tells him, “looking down over the river. Remember? It’s real nice. You helped pick it out a lo
ng time ago.” Carlene hopes that this will be one more string cut for the old man who seems not her father, but only a man using her father’s name.
She gets down at bed level and looks right into his face, but it’s like peering into a cavern. He looks back at her with the blank, rheumy eyes of sheep or cows, and suddenly she wants it done, she wants to take a kitchen towel and shoo his soul right out the window. “Go on. Bye-bye. Vamoose.” She imagines a white steamy haze scooting out the window, then rising higher and higher above the yard, a gauzy hand waving back at her. She knows that absolute relief could come for her in a moment that quick.
Midmorning, Carlene feeds her father applesauce, which is pure torture for her—feeding a man she once thought put the stars in the sky. He would lead her out into the darkness when she was young and they would lean against the house and look up. Holding his cigarette, he would extend his arm up into the blackness until the faraway, orangy end of his Viceroy seemed to burn a star into place. “There. Another one for you,” he would say, a sudden twinkling appearing way out there, and even when she was older—a woman lying in Ham’s arms, a mother fixing endless baby bottles—the stars, in some sense, were still from her father.
When Netta arrives home for lunch, she wrinkles up her nose, wants to know what that smell is. “Kinda like Pine Sol,” she says, looking behind the couch, then lifting the throw pillows.
“It’s nothing, Mom. Nothing,” Carlene says, knowing that Netta in no way could understand how pine eases and lifts a person from this life.
Netta has enrolled in a morning crafts class at the Y, and Carlene asks her how it was.
“I left at the break,” she tells Carlene. “Making grapes out of colored pipe cleaners is not a craft. Here,” she says, bends and takes some books from her tote bag. “This is what I did.”
She has checked books out of the library. The All New Book of Muscle Recovery. Better in 30 Days. The Home Care Manual. The lending period is three weeks, and Netta intends to memorize it all.
Carlene can feel the determined heat rising off her mother. She notices a thin line of perspiration on Netta’s upper lip. Under the sleeves of her mother’s cotton dress, there are the delicate beginnings of sweat rings. If Netta were not so dominating and petty, Carlene believes, she could feel halfway sorry for her.
All the little packages of saltines around the house, however, are there to remind her who her mother is. Netta, like some bag lady, shamelessly slips the little crackers into her purse whenever she goes to JB’s or The Rib House, as if they are as complimentary as matchbooks. She says it’s just automatic for her to take them; it’s from the days when she had teething babies to always think about.
“Get over it, Mom. The last time you had a teething baby was more than forty years ago,” Carlene tells Netta.
Carlene also notices how her mother slyly stashes away the last little piece of pie or cake or pizza, as if somehow she hasn’t gotten her fair share. Weeks later Carlene finds these little treasures still unwrapped in the back of the refrigerator, mushy as jam and covered with soft, green fur.
“Honest to God,” Carlene tells Ham on the night before Halloween when he surprises her with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee, “if I start squirreling things away like my mom, shoot me, please. You’ll be doing everyone a favor.” She grabs a pencil and uses it to open the flip-top can so she won’t break her nail. She holds the beer up in a quick toast to Ham, then leans back and takes her first long, cold drink.
“Tell you what,” he says. “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t get a costume ready for tomorrow night.”
Carlene’s doorbell starts ringing at twilight the next evening. Goblins and rabbits, witches and ballerinas crowd her front porch, then drift noisily away when it is apparent that no one is going to answer. Carlene has exactly seven mini candy bars in a bowl, which means she has popped thirteen of them herself while sitting at the breakfast nook, feeling black and weightless, listening to her doorbell as it becomes one long, fluid ring.
Later, when Ham comes out of the bedroom dressed in a sea-blue off-the-shoulder robe with a cardboard crown barely balanced on his head and the gold trident flaking glitter everywhere, Carlene turns around on her stool, gawks at him, and finally claps. She knows that this is as good as Halloween will get for her.
Although Carlene is dressed in everyday jeans and a shirt when they leave for the party, Ham doesn’t say a word, doesn’t suggest disappointment in the least. In a tight spot Ham’s discretion always comes through. He reaches down and puts his arm around her shoulder and as they walk toward the driveway they watch a tiny lion scurry down the street swinging an orange lantern, making bright arcs in the night.
On the way to the party, Ham suggests dropping by Carlene’s parents’ house since it is still early. Netta answers the door wearing an apron, the pockets stuffed to the top seams with Sugar Babies and Atomic Fire Balls. She throws her hands back and cannot stop laughing at Ham, who basks in her attention, strolling this way and that, thumping his trident on the wood floor.
Carlene walks over to her father in his bed. The polyspun cobwebs shimmer in the window next to him. His eyes are open, but she can’t get him to look at her, and automatically her hand comes up, she snaps her fingers and softly swipes at his nose, a technique that never fails to get a dog’s attention.
Carlene, for the life of her, can’t explain whether she is watching a reverie or some tangled predicament. He is down to 117 pounds, his big, bare collarbone holding up the frailest of necks, and still he won’t let go. All at once the anger that rises in her is so swift and complete that for a moment she can’t get her breath. Her lips part and her shoulders lift two or three inches. She backs away from him, whoever he is, until she feels the chair behind her and sits down. She picks up a Golf Digest and fans herself and the air comes back to her in small, bitter waves.
Netta is feeding Franklin miniature marshmallows that night—a Halloween treat, she says—depositing them by two’s and three’s until his mouth is full. Franklin chews by rote, making a soft white soup which sticks in the corners of his mouth.
By the time Carlene and Ham leave, Carlene has her breath back and is brooding again, ready to wring Netta’s neck. She sees that if nothing else works the old woman is bound to keep him alive with sugar.
There is a turkey scare two weeks before Thanksgiving. The news has reported a gross shortage of both fresh and frozen birds, which sends Netta into a tailspin. She hits five markets on her side of town, comes home with three frozen Butterball toms, six pounds of cranberries, enough yams for the block.
When she pulls into her driveway and stops the car, the memories start up, like a tune she can’t get out of her head—Franklin bustling out the front door to help her carry in groceries. He’d be peeking in the sacks before he even had them into the kitchen, hoping for licorice or peaches or a dark, resinous bottle of Old Crow. Netta wants him back so bad she can taste it—a shallow sweetness in the back of her throat, a raw craving. She opens the trunk and carries in the groceries herself.
“Want one?” she asks Carlene when she is inside the house, pointing at a turkey.
“What are these?” Carlene is holding up a deck of flash cards. Turkeys and Thanksgiving are lost—a million miles away.
“Oh, watch this,” Netta says excitedly, taking the cards from Carlene. She sidles up to Franklin’s bed and shimmies a thick hip onto the mattress. She does a quick, fancy card shuffle—something she learned in Atlantic City, turns the pile face up, looks at the top card, then centers it in front of Franklin’s face. “Tree,” she says, “tree,” bending her head forward with each hard t.
When there is no response from Franklin, Netta swivels around and says, “It may not seem like anything is happening, but the brain is a sponge, Carlene, and he’s soaking up our every word, and when he’s good and ready he’ll start spitting it all back.”
Netta moves to the next card. “Mouse,” she says, at least three times, pointing to the p
icture, which simply infuriates Carlene.
Before Netta can get to the next card, Carlene stops her. “Okay, okay,” she yells, “that’s enough.” Her arms are stiff at her sides. Her hands are balled into the tight fists that have started to dominate her life. “How can you do this?” she asks her mother. “How can you humiliate him? He is not getting better.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you have a medical degree now, Miss Smart-Ass,” Netta shouts. She turns her back to Carlene and stops the argument flat, her usual tactic.
Before she really has time to think about what she is doing, Carlene glides past her mother and scoops up the thick, blocky, first-grade cards right out of Netta’s hands. She walks to the front door and opens it, then pushes back the screen and throws the whole stack, Frisbee style. They catch the air and go down slowly. The rose card spirals. The hat card catches high in the privet. The zebra almost touches the ground and then is caught up again and carried to the neighbor’s yard.
Netta puts her hands on her hips and walks to the door and both women stand there looking out at the white whirlwind of litter across the brown grass. Sorrow has hammered its way so far into their chests that a moment like this—a sudden mess, something that now has to be picked up off the lawn—is strangely welcome in their lives.
Carlene turns to her mother and says that, yes, she will take one of the turkeys.
Each evening, in the voice of a librarian that she once knew from Okinokee, Netta reads the newspaper to Franklin. She polishes the vowels, repeats any important names, and in general tries to make sense of the world to Franklin.
“Ice Palace Collapses” she reads to him, an article sadly detailing how the local Jaycees’ icy Christmas wonderland melted due to a puzzling electrical short. “In only a few hours,” she reads, “the life-sized ice reindeer were reduced to winter slush.” She abbreviates the articles, tries to keep the news short and to the point for Franklin, who dozes often and unexpectedly. She is especially on the lookout for uplifting news—lottery winners, dogs that roam two thousand miles to find their owners, job openings down at the canning factory. She doesn’t actually see a smile on Franklin’s face, but for a moment his cheeks seem to draw up, he seems to want to smile, and certainly that counts for something.
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Page 11