The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

by Jonathan Evison

  The truth, of course, is that nobody can afford to. I’m twelve grand in credit card debt, and digging myself deeper every month. Before I became Mr. Mom, I had decent options. Okay, options. But the job market slowly passed me by.

  “Well,” says Forest. “Whaddaya say? Let’s eat.”

  Though I do my best to uphold my end of the dinner conversation—praising the curried chicken, lauding the swiss chard, extolling the virtues of the Gato Negro as I swill more than my share—dinner is mostly a silent affair. Afterward, Forest and I retire to the shaggy domain of his basement, where we sit on the overstuffed sectional drinking Michelob, as SportsCenter unfolds silently on the big screen.

  “You wrote her a poem?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Whoa, whoa, slow down, Bob Frost. Dude! What were you thinking?”

  I don’t have an answer for that.

  “I thought you gave up writing poetry for girls in college. It never worked then.”

  Only shame prevents me from pointing out that it worked on Melissa.

  “It wasn’t really a poem,” I half mumble. “More of a note.”

  Forest takes a pull of his beer and shakes his head grimly. “Christ, what did she say when she read it?”

  “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “How long has it been since you left it?”

  “Six days.”

  I’ve confirmed his worst fear. He closes his eyes, squinting as though to fight off a headache. Scratching the back of his neck, he asks: “Did you . . . you know?”

  “No.”

  He winces.

  “What?” I say, lamely.

  I’ve disappointed him again. He’s disappointed himself by overestimating me. Here he’s presented me with the opportunity to take a small step forward, and like an impatient child, I’ve stumbled.

  “Just . . . forget about her,” he says, waving it off.

  But even now I’m tempted to drive out to the casino and watch her float through the air or to slide another note beneath her door in hopes that I might set things right. If only to smell her hair again, if only to lie next to another body for one more night.

  when does now begin?

  While I’m quick to fault Trev for his futile exercises, for mapping the places he’ll never go, my design for a future with Janet is every bit as futile. Janet will never come back to me. Janet has moved on. She’s put her grief beside her and started shacking up with Jim Sunderland and his hermaphrodite kid. As far as I know, she is standing on her own two feet, which is more than anyone around here can say.

  Manning my post on the sofa with my unfinished crossword in my lap, I am more alert than usual this morning, listening to Trev’s labored breathing from the bedroom. He’s been sleeping considerably later than usual this week, down with a virus that threatens to settle in his lungs. A bug my body could probably beat in a day or two, but given the havoc that MD has already wrought on Trev’s respiratory functions, a pesky virus like this could prove to be deadly. All week long a dark cloud has hung over the house. It doesn’t matter that it’s sunny in Tampa. His fear is palpable. He sits motionless in his wheelchair before the television, conserving energy, completely unmoved by Doppler images of Tropical Storm Erin, resistant to the chubby charms of his favorite meteorologist—no matter that her pendulous breasts are packed inside her blazer like a pair of baby pandas. There is no mention of giving her a Dirty Muskie or a Gorilla Mask. Trev blinks slowly like a tortoise at the TV. His lips are blue. He hardly talks at all. This morning Elsa is around the house, having canceled her lessons for the day. Last night when his breathing was shallow and frayed, she hurried him to the emergency room at Harrison, where she paced the tile floor until the wee hours.

  But the ordeal came to nothing more than another sleepless night. After two hours on the ventilator, Trev’s breathing returned to almost normal. He’s slept fitfully throughout the morning. Twice in the last hour, he has called for her, and she has turned him over in his bed. It is Elsa who sits beside him while I wrestle with 23 Across. I can hear her talking softly to him over the hum of the respirator, and though her words are lost on me, I know they’re as comforting as words could ever be.

  When she is not ministering to Trev, Elsa moves busily about the house, stacking bills and magazines, watering plants, changing laundry. On this occasion, when I hear her filling the sink and stacking the dishes, I don’t budge from my place on the couch. Elsa pauses long enough in her duties to take a bite of a muffin and make a cup of instant coffee. But no sooner has she begun to stir the coffee than Trev calls for her again. From across the dining room she sees me stand, and bids me at ease with a shake of her head. On command, I sit down and pencil in avoid for 23 Across. Setting her coffee aside, she answers Trev’s call. Again, I hear the soft drone of her voice as she turns him on his side. When she emerges from the bedroom, she takes up her coffee and walks through the dining room to the far side of the living room. She looks out the window with the sleepy eyes of a Komodo dragon and blows on her coffee so a ribbon of steam curls up her face.

  “He’s irritable when he’s like this,” she observes. “He says things he doesn’t mean.”

  I want to go to her, to offer myself as comfort, to say the words that will smooth her wrinkled resignation, but I haven’t got the guts.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Just stay a little longer,” she says into her coffee cup.

  But for the muffled hum of the ventilator and the rasp of Trev’s breathing in the distance, a dense silence settles in as she gazes out the window, where a rogue sunbeam flashes silver off the wet driveway. Now I see that Elsa is looking right at me with great sadness in her sleepy eyes.

  “It’s not our fault,” she says.

  battle of the blur

  None of my zippers work anymore, which must be some kind of metaphor. Listing ever so slightly before the urinal, I’m not surprised to discover that my fly is already open. Tonight is Max’s birthday. We’re having a little party at the Grill, where happy hour ended some two and a half hours ago. I’m wearing my blue cords for the occasion (in spite of the lazy zipper) because they’re the only pants I own that still manage to achieve some kind of slimming effect, an illusion, I fear, that’s beginning to lose its crisp edges with every cheeseburger.

  This evening is sure to end badly. Already, I can feel hints of the old blur coming on: the dull throbbing in the chest, the thick, slow coursing of blood behind the temples, the heaviness of limb which signals my approaching oblivion. Zipping my fly up futilely, I’m determined to fight the blur this evening, determined to feel and remember, to walk among the living, even though I have nothing to hope for.

  Rejoining the party to the tune of Motorhead’s “Fast and Loose,” I see that a second larger table now abuts our own. We are being joined by five of Max’s Bremerton friends. The tall guy with the trench coat and the dirty glasses is vaguely familiar. There is a short, ample redhead dressed like a witch. Her black leggings fit like sausage skins—which is appropriate because this is basically a sausage party. The other two Bremerton friends are also dudes, skinheads dressed like rappers, with tattoos above the collar, both of them with initials for names, not J. J. or B. J. but awkward-sounding ones: G. R. and C. L. or P. K. and K. W.

  Full introductions are made, shots are procured, and the bar is soon abuzz with our chatter. The jukebox cycles more Motorhead, Bon Jovi, the Boss. The tables get stickier by the minute. The world is still tactile, still memorable. I’m winning the battle. The tall guy is talking to me about Atlantis, the Pillars of Hercules, ziggurats in pre-Columbian South America. I wish he’d clean his glasses—it’s all I can do to resist leaning over and doing it myself. Teo is arm wrestling a skinhead who keeps calling him “bro,” while Max appears to be making headway with the redhead, who giggles more than you’d expect for a witch. She’s unwittingly slopped a big gob of nacho cheese on her cape. These people are slobs. I’m beginning to feel superior this eveni
ng in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

  “Your fly is open,” says Forest, nudging me.

  “Dude, what about the Olmecs?” says Dirty Glasses.

  Big Red giggles as Max leans over and shovels the cheese off her velour cape, licking his finger. A little orange string of it still dangles from his mustache but not for long. Big Red leans over and licks his mustache clean.

  “I’m out, Holmes,” Forest says, clapping my back as he stands. “I wanna see the girls before Mel puts them to bed.” He looks around the table and back at me a little uneasily, as though he can see my future. “You sure you don’t need a ride?”

  “I’m good.”

  “He’s goin’ to a party with us,” Max says.

  And sure enough, twenty minutes later, after we’ve cleared the big tab with the usual confusion, the whole group of us arrive at a house party out near the Olympic College campus in a sagging green craftsman with a dead lawn. No sooner have I mounted the front steps than I’m accosted on the porch by a ruddy little pug-faced man who pulls me aside and starts breathing a fog of Jägermeister into my face. He’s totally gooned, his eyes lolling around in his head.

  “Dude, dude, check this shit out,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  He wrestles clumsily with his open cell phone until his eyes light up, and he thrusts the phone up into my face.

  “Dude, check it out.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Wait, wait, this way,” he says, tilting the phone horizontally, and pushing it even farther into my face.

  Squinting, I still don’t know what I’m looking at, but it’s fleshy and hairless.

  “Is that your baby?” I ask.

  “Dude, that’s my dick!”

  I push past him, and he slaps me on the back.

  “Aw, man, we’re cool, right?” he calls after me. “We’re cool?”

  Dirty Glasses Dale and I help ourselves to a beer and settle at the kitchen table, vacant but for a jumble of empties. A pair of short girls sashay into the kitchen, also talking loudly. One of them, the blonde, has the most vivid fake tan I’ve ever seen. She’s perfectly orange. Her eyebrows are albino blond. They look like they might burn your fingers if you touched them.

  “Hey psst,” I say to Dale. “Look, an Oompa Loompa.”

  But the reference is lost on Dale, who is in earnest, still furrowing his brow at the inexplicable development of the water clock in a culture that couldn’t grow beets a hundred years prior. “Gotta be Atlantis,” he says. “There’s no other explanation for the widespread development of technology that quickly.”

  “Is anyone sitting here?” says Oompa Loompa.

  “Go for it,” I say.

  Construction cone orange or not, Oompa Loompa is smooth-faced and kind of cute. Her friend, not so much. She’s got a big overbite. From the side she looks like a bottle opener. But I’m guessing she probably looks better through Dale’s smudged glasses, because he’s all over her right from the get-go.

  “So, do you live here?” Oompa Loompa says to me.

  “Nah. We’re here with Max.”

  “Max just left,” she says.

  “Oh. Well, I guess we’re here by ourselves.”

  “I’m Cindy,” she says.

  “I’m Ben.”

  Suddenly, there’s a bloodcurdling scream from the bathroom down the hallway, and the pug-faced kid with the cell phone bursts out the door clutching his groin with both hands. He slumps in the threshold of the kitchen with everybody staring at him.

  “Dude,” he says. “Come here, come here, you gotta help me.”

  “Me?” I say.

  “Dude,” he pleads. “You gotta come here, man, you gotta.” Waving me onward over his shoulder, he begins shambling down the hallway, clutching his abdomen and moaning like Tina Turner as he goes.

  Warily, I follow him to the bathroom, and he shuts the door behind us.

  “What’s the deal?” I say.

  He corkscrews his face and fresh tears stream down his cheeks. “I was smoking,” he moans, releasing his crotch to expose his wrinkled red member.

  “Jesus!” I say, recoiling.

  “It huuurts,” he says.

  I reach for the doorknob, but he grabs my arm pleadingly. “Dude, what do I do? I’m serious, what do I do? It huuuurts.”

  “Hell if I know, put a Band-Aid on it.”

  He looks up into my face with the most desolate and apologetic of all expressions: the expression of a guy who just burned his penis with a cigarette and wants you to put a Band-Aid on it.

  “Dude, I can’t do it,” he says. “I’ll pass out.”

  I heave a long sigh. Rifling through the medicine cabinet, I wonder why it is that the winds of fate have blown me here. Why in a house full of people did the little pug-faced man choose me to minister to his injured penis? How did he know?

  “Hold still,” I say.

  He winces at first, but then sighs with relief as I apply a curlicue of Neosporin to the popped blister. His dingus feels like a salamander between my fingers, though nothing in my manner suggests that I am disgusted. I am, after all, a pro.

  “You’re not a fag are you?” he says.

  “Nope,” I say, smoothing over the Band-Aid and releasing his penis.

  “That’s good.” He gives me a pat on the shoulder. “Hey, man, seriously, thanks.”

  “No problem,” I say, rinsing my hands. “Do me a favor, though.”

  “Yeah, dude, name it.”

  “Stay away from me.”

  I can see the hurt in his little pug face. But you know what? I don’t give a damn anymore. I’m developing a taste for superiority.

  Rejoining Dale and the girls in the kitchen, I see that Dale is making headway, talking some crap about the Phoenicians owing their ancient trade routes to the Atlanteans. The Bottle Opener is either smitten with Dale or she’s from Atlantis, because she’s eating it up.

  “What was that all about?” Oompa Loompa wants to know upon my reappearance.

  “Guy hurt his thumb,” I say, reaching into the fridge for a beer, popping it, and guzzling a third of it in one motion

  “That guy’s a freak,” she says.

  Look who’s talking, I want to say. You look like a fucking jack-o’-lantern. “Yeah,” I concur. “Total freak.”

  “Your fly’s undone,” she says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Dale has produced a pot pipe from the depths of his trench coat and begins loading it. I don’t know how he can see what the fuck he’s doing through those glasses. He sparks the pipe and passes it around. The conversation becomes hopelessly stilted. Even Dale can’t seem to string together sentences. Cindy is changing colors like a lava lamp. The tentative emergence of a freakishly overweight tabby from behind the dead ficus near the head of the hallway ultimately provides the group with a much-needed focal point. For three or four minutes we sit stupefied, sipping our beers, observing the beast’s every movement without comment as it licks and circles and runs its spine along the bottom of the refigerator. I can feel my jaw slackening. I’m drained of all my drunken swagger, all my superiority. I begin to wonder if there’s anywhere I belong or anyone to whom I could ever belong again—a trapeze artist, a sword swallower, Janet. Certainly, I don’t belong here. A small part of me—perhaps the hopeful part or maybe the courageous part—wants to suggest that we all pile into the Suburu and go buy Slurpees. But then I remind myself that I’m a would-be divorcee, who used to be a father, and most of me wants to run from this house as though it were burning.

  stations

  Elsa is around the house again Monday morning, having cleared her schedule of all lessons for the third day in a row. The house is immaculate: no stacks of mail, no heaping recycle bin, no dishes glutting the sink. The carpets have been vacuumed, the pillows aired, the fishbowl cleaned. Everything smells of citrus and pine. And still, Elsa circles and sweeps and dusts.

  In the three hours since I arriv
ed with my sack lunch and my crossword, I’ve yet to be called into service. I’ve scarcely moved from my station on the sofa. How long before Elsa runs the feather duster over me? I feel obligated to stay alert on the sofa, poised for action should my assistance be required in lifting Trev or warming up the van or hauling out the recycling. Though this last task is nowhere in my service plan, today I’m willing to test the boundaries, willing to throw all those mnemonics out the window for a little occupation. The Monday crossword was a pushover. The cat is presumably out roaming the farm and can offer me no company. I’ve already eaten my banana and half of my tuna sandwich. And to make matters even more excruciating, the face of the dining room clock is in full view as the minutes crawl by. Somehow I can’t bring myself to turn on the television. It’s one thing to sit around being useless and another thing to watch television. Instead, I gaze at the darkened screen and wonder if it’s another scorcher in Miami, whether it’s raining in Davenport.

  I should probably be thinking about the job market, as Trev’s condition has only worsened over the weekend. While I was out bandaging penises and spilling beer in people’s laps, the virus settled in Trev’s lungs. While I was nursing my hangover on Saturday, Elsa took Trev to Harrison once more for chest x-rays and a CT. He’s been on the respirator full-time ever since. Since the machine makes sleeping on his side difficult, Trev’s even more restless than usual in bed. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he calls for his mother, and they talk softly as she tends to his itches and clears the sweat from his watering eyes. On those frequent occasions when Trev needs the toilet, it’s Elsa, not me, who lifts him out of bed and onto the toilet, Elsa who awaits his call outside the bathroom door.

  Around 12:15 p.m., Trev’s cell phone starts ringing from the pouch of his wheelchair. Three times the ringing is cut short by voice messaging. When the cell finally relents, the house phone starts ringing almost immediately, and Elsa picks it up.

  “What is it, Bob? . . . Yes, Bob . . . No, Bob . . .”