by Devan Sipher
“Nice photo on the beach,” I wrote.
There was no response. For more than a minute. Then: “What are you doing looking at my pictures in the middle of the night?”
I felt like a five-year-old caught looking up a girl’s dress. (It happened only once, and I was picking up a stray marble.) I had blown it. Then I received a second IM:
“:-)”
It was on. “What are you doing messaging strangers at strange hours?” I wrote.
“Someone has to take pity on all the lonely men at their computer monitors,” she quickly replied, upping the dare level.
“I thought that’s what your pictures were there for.” I marveled at the amount of damage I could do with a mouse and a keyboard.
There was radio silence. I started typing. “I do much better on delayed telecast.”
“Are you hungry?” flashed on my screen. Followed by, “Get your mind out of the gutter. I know a great all-night kebab place.”
My phone rang, and I jumped, thinking it was her before remembering that it couldn’t be.
“Gavin!” It was my grandmother. She had a habit of calling late when she couldn’t sleep, forgetting that, unlike Gary, I was in the same time zone. “I’m so glad you’re there.”
“So what’s your feeling about skewered meat?” ComeFlyWithMe queried, as if I needed more enticement.
“I like meat,” I typed, cradling the phone against my shoulder.
“How much?” was the response.
“Bernie had some kind of seizure.” My grandmother’s voice was shrill. “I think it starts with a ‘P.’ I can’t remember the name.” She sounded frantic.
“It’s okay, Grandma.”
“No, it’s not okay. I’m telling you he had a seizure.”
“I mean it’s okay you don’t know the name.” I glanced at my screen. “How much?” appeared a second time.
“Ostrovsky. I think that’s the name,” my grandmother said.
“Of the seizure?” I asked.
“Of the doctor. A young doctor. He talks very fast. He said Bernie needs emergency surgery.”
Images of skewered flesh and surgical instruments flashed through my mind in disturbing combination. Multitasking wasn’t working.
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I typed, wincing with every keystroke. “I’d really like to meat some other time.” The pun seemed funny in my head, which is where I devoutly wished it had stayed, since ComeFlyWithMe didn’t write back.
“Gavin, I don’t know what to do.” My grandmother was near tears.
“I’m going to call the doctor,” I said, already Googling the hospital. A craving for kebabs lingered in the pit of my stomach.
“The nurse gave me a paper to sign, but I don’t have my glasses.”
“It’s okay.” I repeated gently, “I’m going to call the doctor.”
“Tell him I don’t have my glasses.”
I remembered being five and bawling in her arms. It was after a traumatic tricycle incident with an unrepentant palm tree. She told me it was okay to cry, that crying got all the pain out, and she rocked me back and forth while I buried my face in her sweater.
“It’s okay, Grandma.” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Chapter Fifteen
Turbulence
My flight to Fort Lauderdale was rain delayed. While the plane lurched between tempestuous altitudes, I gripped the armrests and imagined my parents waiting for me at the airport gate. They hadn’t been able to do that since I was a kid, but as the plane pitched and dipped, I was nine years old again, running down a jetway into their arms. My father threw me in the air, his coat smelling like cigarettes even though he didn’t smoke.
“Did you have a good time with your grandma?” he asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “She said I can come to Florida by myself again anytime Gary has soccer playoffs during Thanksgiving.”
“Any collisions with fast-moving palm trees?”
“That was years ago!” I protested.
My mother’s lipstick was candy-apple red, and she rubbed some of it off my cheek after kissing me.
“Did you miss us?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Not at all?”
I shook my head vehemently. Then I threw my arms around her neck.
Upon a bumpy but gratifying landing, I tried to remember the last time I told my parents that I loved them. I hurried through the Delta terminal, uncharacteristically eager to do so. Thirty minutes later, my warm feelings were wilting in the Floridian heat. My carry-on duffel bag hung from one shoulder and my laptop case from the other, as I paced the pick-up zone, searching for the metallic lavender cruise ship my parents considered a car. I had already called my mother’s cell phone twice, but it had gone straight to voice mail. After another twenty minutes, I was beginning to worry and called again.
“Gavin,” my mother answered cheerfully, “it’s so nice to hear your voice.”
“Where are you?” I asked, suspecting I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I’m putting you on speakerphone in the car. Can you hear us?”
“I can hear you. Where are you?”
“Gavin, tell us if you hear us,” she repeated.
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
“You hit the mute button,” I heard my father say.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “I don’t even know where the mute button is.”
I hung up and called back.
The phone rang several times before my mother picked up. There was much amplified jiggling, as if the handset were being scraped against every surface in their vehicle.
“Why are you calling?” my mother finally asked. “Did you miss your plane?”
“My plane landed an hour ago,” I said with the adolescent whine nurtured over years of waiting for them curbside. “Are you anywhere in the vicinity of the airport?”
“You’re not supposed to be here until two,” my father said.
“I told you he was coming at noon,” my mother scolded.
“You never said that,” he replied.
“Dad,” I said with as much affection as I could still muster with sweat dripping down my neck, “I specifically called you this morning to remind you.” Bad choice of words. At seventy, he was sensitive about his memory.
“I don’t need you to remind me of anything,” he snapped.
I wasn’t going to convince my father he was mistaken, and I knew I shouldn’t want to. I vowed silently to be a better person, but what I said out loud was, “If you don’t need me to remind you, then why aren’t you here?”
“I need you to give me the right time!”
“I said noon!”
“YOU NEVER SAID THAT!”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was going to be loving and demonstrative. They were going to be … functional.
“Did you congratulate Gary?” my mother asked. I had no idea what I was supposed to be congratulating him for. “Gary and Leslie are celebrating their seven-month anniversary.”
“Who celebrates a seven-month anniversary?” I asked.
“People in relationships,” my mother said pointedly.
“Gary’s in a relationship with another girl every year,” my father groused. “The whole advantage of being single is not having to put up with being in a relationship.”
“Just what have you had to put up with?” my mother wanted to know.
He proceeded to recite a list, which I assumed was chronological, since he started with the seating arrangement at their wedding reception.
While they prosecuted crimes and misdemeanors of the previous century, I sat on the curb. It was the closest I had come to resting in two days. I had spent most of the flight working on my column about Amy and Mike, which had gotten short shrift on Sunday as I coordinated both my trip and Bernie’s medical care, while also checking hourly for JDate messages from ComeFlyWithMe. I had sent an e-mail explaining what had happened, but I hadn’t
heard back from her.
I did, however, hear from SaneJane, who didn’t seem all that sane. Her name was Janet, but she liked the rhyme. The first e-mail she sent was a simple hello, saying she liked my profile. The second e-mail was checking to make sure I got the first e-mail, because she had some kind of computer glitch. The third e-mail was apologizing for the second e-mail. She attached a photo with a live python wrapped around her, suggesting a fondness for danger or bestiality. In either case, I decided it was best not to respond.
But I was in continual contact with my grandmother, who wavered between feisty optimism and atypical despondency. I tried my best to comfort her and promised I would be there as soon as possible. What was stopping me was my parents.
We had been on the phone for twenty minutes, and the only thing quickly approaching was my article deadline. If I was going to be on the phone with anyone, it should have been with Roxanne Goldman, the Today producer I was supposed to finally interview the next morning. I should have called her to reschedule before calling my parents. Or I should have called her publicist. But what I really should have done was rented a car.
“How far are you from Fort Lauderdale?” I interrupted.
“Fort Lauderdale? We’re on our way to Palm Beach,” my mother said.
“Why on earth are you going to Palm Beach?”
“Because that’s where you said you were coming in,” my father said. “You told us two o’clock at the Palm Beach airport!”
“He said noon!” my mother interjected.
“In Fort Lauderdale!” I howled.
They responded simultaneously: “You never said that.”
My grandmother seemed smaller than I remembered and almost girlish in her sweatshirt and leggings, with her silver hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was sitting at the side of Bernie’s hospital bed, where he laid inert with his mouth open, eyes closed and various vinelike tendrils mooring him to equipment along the perimeter of the room. A soft beeping pulsed as my grandmother attempted to feed him from a small glass jar.
“Come on, Bernie,” she said, bringing a spoon to his lips. “Open wider.”
“Grandma, they’re feeding him intravenously,” I said.
“That’s not food. I made him a beautiful tuna casserole with green beans and walnuts and celery. Just the way he likes it.”
“He’s going to choke.”
“I put it in the blender and made it nice and smooth. Do you want some?”
“No.”
“It’s delicious.”
“It’s pureed.”
She leaned toward him as if anticipating him sitting up and voicing an opinion. He remained stationary, taking shallow breaths with a raspy rumble of phlegm in his throat—probably from the casserole.
“I need you to help me wash him,” she said. I had told her I’d do whatever she needed, but I’d been thinking more along the lines of grocery shopping.
“Wouldn’t it be better to let the nurses do that?” I asked.
“I waited until you were here because I hurt my back the last time,” she said, dipping a washcloth in a plastic cup of water.
“That would seem a good reason to let the nurses do it.”
“Did you come to help or aggravate me?”
She untied the top of his gown and pulled it forward, exposing pale skin hanging lifelessly from his formerly barrel-chested frame.
“Lift his left arm,” she said. I would have preferred to feed him blended tuna.
I tried to remember if I had ever touched him before, other than to shake his hand. I was nineteen when they married after a two-year courtship. I had often accompanied them on dates, and he had never complained, showing up in his bold-colored jackets, eager to take the slender arm of my grandmother, who strutted out of her bedroom in short skirts and high heels that showed off her runner’s legs. As a suitor, he never arrived empty-handed, brandishing flowers, jewelry and once a refrigerator. And always with chocolate-covered peanuts for me. He had a thing for chocolate-covered peanuts. He would toss me a bag, still proud of his pitching arm.
“Raise his arm,” my grandmother said impatiently. I couldn’t explain my hesitation to her, but I felt I was violating his privacy as I took hold of his left elbow.
She wrung out the cloth before gliding it slowly along the length of his arm in short strokes. There was something unsettling about the maternal way she caressed him, as if he was now her child rather than her spouse. Ill at ease, I looked out the window.
The Delray Medical Center was a sprawling low-rise complex of generic eighties architecture. Despite the sunshine, it seemed a dreary place. If it wasn’t for the occasional (very stationary) palm tree, it could have just as easily been in Jersey. Given the makeup of the local population, that might have been a comforting thing.
“I haven’t seen your parents today,” my grandmother said, which was her roundabout way of asking where they were.
“I thought they drove you here this morning.” My grandmother didn’t drive, having been too poor when she was young for a car (or lessons) and never learning once she was older.
“I took a taxi after my run,” she said.
“Why didn’t you wait for them to pick you up?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you?”
I had flown more than a thousand miles, rented a car and still made it to the hospital before them. “They’re on their way,” I said, not sure if I was trying to convince her or myself.
“They’re always on their way,” she said. “It’s about time they got somewhere.” She pursed her lips as she massaged Bernie’s fingers, tracing the hills and valleys between them. “You write about all these weddings. So when am I going to dance at yours?” It wasn’t the first time she had asked, but the question always left me tongue-tied.
“When I find the right person,” I stammered.
“I didn’t go out with Bernie because he was the right person. I went out with him because he asked me.” Her tone was kind, but the words stung. Questioning my judgment was usually my parents’ domain, and I couldn’t understand why a woman ministering to her fourth ailing husband would be proselytizing about marriage.
While I adjusted Bernie’s appendages as instructed, my thoughts drifted to my unfinished article. I wondered if Amy and Mike knew what they had potentially signed on for when they promised their devotion “until death do us part.” Would they have made a different decision if they were standing where I was now?
“I need you to hold him up so I can do his back,” my grandmother said. I recoiled at the unavoidable awkwardness. I envisioned myself lying in Bernie’s place, helpless, half naked and suffering the indignity of being infantilized by a wife and grandson. But would I even have a wife and grandson?
My grandmother pressed a lever on the bed, partially elevating his torso, and I positioned myself behind him. I gently pushed him forward, but he slumped to the side.
“He’s going to fall,” she yelped.
“He’s not going to fall,” I said, running around to the other side of the bed to keep him from falling.
“You can pull him up by his wrists,” she suggested, but when I tried, his head fell back at a painful angle.
“Grandma, I really think you should wait for the nurses to—”
“If you don’t want to help me, I’ll do it myself.”
“Indomitable” was a word I often used to describe my grandmother. “Stubborn” was another. Against my better judgment, I climbed onto the bed and straddled Bernie’s legs. Then I hooked my arms under his, careful not to yank loose any tubing, and pulled him toward me, cradling his head in my hands.
That’s when I remembered the first time we had physical contact. I was visiting my grandmother during spring break, and he invited us to dinner at Arturo’s, a fancy Italian restaurant in Boca. He was the new beau. I was hungry. When he picked us up, I scooted into the back of his silver Mercedes, leaving the front seat for my grandmother. He turned around and swatted the top of my h
ead. “You always hold a door for a lady,” he said before bounding out of the car and over to the passenger’s side, where my grandmother was blushing.
“His skin color’s better,” she said, delicately swabbing the back of his neck. “It’s pinker.”
It looked greenish to me.
“That’s good,” I said. His cheek brushed against mine. It felt like sandpaper. But slack. As if there was no muscle beneath it. More like Jell-O. Jell-O covered in sandpaper.
This was not the same immaculate man who had his hands manicured with clear polish once a month. In Judaism there’s a period of shivah, where you sit in mourning with the bereaved. I felt like I was mourning Bernie while he was still alive, while he was hanging limp in my arms.
I recalled the way my grandmother used to giggle at his racy jokes, and how her leg would kick up when he pecked her in my presence. I found myself mourning her as well. Mourning the younger her and how they used to be together.
“Who’s going to take care of you?” she murmured in his ear.
“He can’t hear you, Grandma,” I said tenderly, watching her fingers glide along the curve of his shoulder.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t talking to him.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ripe for the Picking
“She was standing in moonlight in a red sundress.” Ari Oz was describing for me the first time he saw Roxanne Goldman. It was at the Sports Illustrated Olympic party, the night before the closing ceremony in Athens.
“You must—how you say?—picture frame it,” he said, his Israeli accent adding to the evocative setting that was already spurring pangs of envy. “Orange half-moon. Dance club on the beach. And a tall woman with lips the color of pomegranates.”
I’m going to die alone.
It was my persistent thought since returning to New York. Like a neon sign inside my brain, lighting up at irregular intervals. I didn’t have control over when it illuminated, but couples gushing about how they met was a fairly reliable trigger.
“She had a martini in her hand,” Ari continued, “and her hair—how you say?—floated in the wind.”