I am still deeply worried about the idea that he could get someone pregnant and yet could never be a real father—which is why I will insist on having medical power of attorney, so that I will be able to make the decision about a vasectomy for him after he turns eighteen.
But that is in the future. As I look at my little boy now, I see a person who may never be able to be responsible for another life, but who is nevertheless capable of deep affection, caring, and consideration. Sure, those emotions started with machinery and electronics—trains, buses, iPods, computers—and particularly with Siri, a loving friend who would never hurt him. But he may be ready for humans sooner than I think. Even if the social norms of the rest of the world don’t always apply.
Gus has only seen Parker outside of school one other time, but they are together in class and at lunch every day. I had to convince him to go to the school dance; once there, Parker grabbed him, threw her arms around him, and got him on the dance floor. At my suggestion he gave her a huge Hershey’s Kiss on Valentine’s Day—I told him this would make her happy—and he was very pleased with himself for pleasing her.
Until a few days ago he would only say that Parker was his “good friend.” But then, late at night, he whispered to me, “I have a crush on Parker.”
“That’s great, sweetheart. But how do you know?”
“Because she told me,” he said.
Fourteen
Toast
“I think you already know this by heart,” I say.
“Just one more time,” Henry pleads.
I don’t know how plans for my death turned into a favorite bedtime story, but fine. Whatever it takes to make him go to bed before midnight. “OK,” I begin, “so what I want is for you to stuff me—”
“Like in Psycho?”
“Well, in Psycho the mother was grotesque,” I continue. “I never understood why Norman Bates’s taxidermy on the birds was so good, and his mother became a shriveled mummy. Anyway, I think nowadays I can be freeze-dried and look great.” I have no idea if this is true, but it seems like it should be. “So, first you give any usable organs away. Then, I am freeze-dried so that I look exactly like myself, only better. I’ll pick out what I wear beforehand. It all depends how old I am at the time. If it were tomorrow it would be something from the Sundance Catalog, because I can still dream, but that won’t work if I’m ninety. Anyway. Then, you prop me up in the corner of your living room where I will be doing something I enjoy. Give me a book or my computer.”
“. . . or I’ll have you squinting into your iPhone where you can play Scrabble for eternity,” Henry says.
“That would be fine,” I say. “Just make sure I look happy. Like I just came up with ‘quetzals’ or something.”
“I have another plan,” Henry says, warming to the subject. “I am going to cremate you. And Dad, too. And then I’m going to put googly eyes on your urn. Because everything is better with googly eyes.”
“And what about Dad’s urn?”
“Also googly eyes. And matchsticks for eyebrows, turned so they look angry.” This is John’s expression in real life.
“Well, sure,” I say. “But you know, first of all, I prefer being stuffed, and if I’m not stuffed and then you don’t give me a big party I’m going to haunt you. Second, Dad wants his ashes spread over the woods in Northumberland where he used to play when he was a child.”
“OK, now I’m depressed,” he says. “Listen, you’re getting the urns with the googly eyes and he’s getting the matchsticks. Because I want to be able to tell whoever I’m dating that I want her to meet my parents. Every girl likes that. And then I’ll bring her home, and you and Dad will be in the urns . . .”
“I can see why you’re doing so well with the girls,” I say.
“But it’s a joke that never gets old,” he says. “To me.”
“Right.”
“Unlike you and Dad. Who get old. And die. And get googly eyes.”
“If I’m not freeze-dried and stuck in a corner, looking really good, you’re out of the will,” I add.
Gus has wandered into the room and listened to about half this conversation. He has no idea what we’re talking about. He just wants to make it all better. He comes over and throws his arms around me.
“Henry, don’t worry. Mom and Dad will die, but then they’ll be back.”
Gus believes this. And not in some sort of metaphysical or spiritual way, either. He just knows we’ll be back.
* * *
These last five years have been years of loss. This tends to happen when you have kids at a time in life when others are having grandkids. John’s parents of course are long gone. My own parents have died in the past few years, one after the other. They were wonderful people, and I want my children to remember them, and they won’t.
Of course, kids are pretty resilient. This was Henry at ten, the night after my mother died:
Henry: [teary, at bedtime] We’re never going to see Grandma again, NEVER. She was awesome, and she was your MOM, and YOU’LL never see her again, and I know she’s in heaven and she’s with Grandpa and everything, but I’ll miss her so much and . . .
Me: What is it, honey? Tell Mom.
Henry: Um. Do we get her house?
Me: Yes.
Henry: I can get a trampoline! Yesss!
Most kids are wired to recover. And as the years go by, you find ways to make the people you love live on. You mythologize. My beloved golden retriever, Monty, for example, has a kind of living presence in our home, even though he went before my parents. “How many tennis balls could Monty hold in his mouth, Mom?” Henry will ask, apropos of nothing. “Did he really always greet people at the door carrying your underwear?” And always: “He was really, really dumb, wasn’t he, Mom?”
We do what we can to erase or at least reshape the final painful life chapters of the people we love. Very shortly before he died, my father was bouncing in and out of sanity. Sometimes we were having long interesting conversations about the first black president, and sometimes there were raccoons jumping into his bed and stealing his Mallomars. The last time I visited my father we were discussing the news, and then he turned to me and said, “I know what you’ve been up to. I realize journalists don’t make much money, but you don’t have to keep selling drugs to support your family.” The realization that I had a secret life as a drug dealer made him angry, and he screamed at me to get out of his house. He refused to talk to me anymore, and a few days later he died.
This is not exactly the last conversation one would want to have with one’s father, but like most horrible things it eventually struck me as funny, and Henry, too. These days, if I’m complaining about work, Henry will say, “Look on the bright side. You can always go back to being a drug dealer.”
My mother was a much sweeter human being than my father and died with all her faculties, which gives us a little less to laugh about: Henry was a year older when she died and could not bring himself to go to her funeral. But now, five years later, he still salutes every time we walk by the rehab place near my home where she spent some of her last months.
And he does get me chortling at old videos. “Look, this is going to be you in a few years,” he’ll say, showing me a tape of my mother talking so intelligently and thoughtfully about one thing or another, surrounded by utter chaos. She had a bit of a hoarding problem. She could not throw away magazines or newspapers, because she would “get around” to reading them, so she had New Yorkers in her bedroom dating back to the early ’80s. She had a similar fixation on old batteries. There were buckets of them lying around. “They still have some juice in them,” she’d say when I tried to throw them out. “You never know when they’ll stop making batteries.” Apart from believing old batteries would see us through the Mad Max hellscape she apparently envisioned for the future, my mother was tremendously sunny. For years she refused to do anything about the spiders in her bedroom, claiming that they were good for the environment, and when I looked up one
day and screamed, noticing there were hundreds of tiny dots on the ceiling, she beamed. “Babies!” she exclaimed.
The hardest loss, in a way, was not my parents but my aunt Alberta, my mother’s sister. There is always one person in the family who is the family rock, the preparer of holidays, the rememberer of every event large and small, and she was it. When her ovarian cancer had spread everywhere, she went into hospice with a few days to live, and proceeded to be there for about six months. She almost made it to ninety-one. One day toward the end, in the summer of 2015, I crept into her room and watched her. Without opening her eyes, she whispered, “What’s new?”
“Oh, not much,” I said. “You know, the kids are starting school soon, so I’ve got a lot to do.” Then I said the most preposterous thing I could think of. “Also, Donald Trump is president.” At which point her beautiful menthol blue eyes opened very, very wide, and we both laughed and laughed.
Later, when she had fully woken up and we were dancing around the issue of her illness, she said, “I’m sorry, I know it’s selfish of me, but I don’t want to go yet. There are still so many things I’m interested in.”
Now that all the elders are gone, it is Henry I look to when I want to reminisce—mostly because he likes to reminisce. But when they were sick and dying, Henry was frightened to come near them. Sometimes, to my everlasting shame, so was I. I have never been a tremendously tactile person. And I could never say “I love you” without a tug of embarrassment. The crepey skin, the whiskers on my mother’s chin that she could no longer tend to herself, these filled me with horror. I could pat through the bedclothes. I could not hold hands.
That’s why my visiting companion was always Gus.
Gus could do all these things, happily. It never occurred to him to be frightened. If he noticed the smells of rot and ammonia that are so much a part of the last weeks of life, they didn’t bother him. It never occurred to him to not reach for a hand or lean in for a squeeze, even if that body in the bed could not squeeze back. Most days, I think about the deficits of not understanding a concept as abstract as death, and of course it is a deficit. But I’ve seen the upside of Gus’s cluelessness in every hug, every touch, in the very inability to know that my parents would not be getting out of these beds.
* * *
When Henry was seven or eight, he picked the gift for his father’s next birthday: a wheelchair. “Mom, it’ll be perfect. We’ll wheel him around and his legs won’t hurt anymore.” This was when John was still getting around perfectly well, accompanying Gus every weekend on his beloved forays to the airport, train stations, Port Authority. At that time Henry just thought medical equipment was cool; he had a hankering for oxygen tanks, and it took a while to convince him we didn’t need to have them hanging around the house.
The years have gone by, and John, who avoided doctors his whole life, has been working his way through his ailments. This year: heart valve replacement for aortic stenosis and a deep basal cell carcinoma on his nose requiring a skin graft. He’s still holding out on the knee replacements, because even though he’s just sailed through major heart surgery, he is convinced that knee surgery will kill him. He is no longer able to take Gus out on jaunts. He hasn’t been able to return to England to see his family this year, either. He went to the gym religiously three times a week, and now the visits are less and less frequent. Although he still returns to his apartment every night by subway—because fleeing a menopausal wife and two teenage boys is apparently worth the pain—I’m not sure how much longer he’ll be able to do this. There is a slowing. There is a softening.
That core of toughness is still there, though, maddening as it is. That inflexibility, too, even when a little change is entirely in his best interest. His knees are bone-on-bone, and yet he still insisted on taking the subway home when he could barely walk; a cab was out of the question because he might have to talk to the driver. That reminded me . . .
“Hey, did you finally take that test I gave you?” I asked him a few weeks ago.
“I did,” John said.
I grabbed the questionnaire before he could change his mind, and as I read it my jaw dropped—because his answers to the questions bore almost no relation to the person I had been married to for twenty-four years. Asked to respond to the statement “It does not upset me if my daily routine is disturbed,” John said, “Slightly disagree.” This, from a person who needed to head home on the same train, at the same time, every day of his life. I particularly loved his response to “Other people frequently tell me that what I’ve said is impolite, even though I think it is polite.” John had checked the box “Strongly disagree.” Earlier that day, he had walked into my office, seen my officemate, Spencer, who had just returned from the barber, and said, “I prefer you with longer hair. It makes you look younger.” Several days earlier, when I was venting a little about needing to lose weight, he surveyed me carefully and said, “Your stomach’s not too bad. And you’re pear-shaped. That’s much better for your health than being apple-shaped.”
Why, thanks! I spend much of my life silently responding to John’s “polite” observations with the thought, Who asked you?
Using his dubious answers to score the questionnaire, he was entirely neurotypical. When I filled in the answers to reflect my own observations over twenty-five years, he was up to his bad knees in spectrumness.
* * *
As friends have pointed out, I am perhaps the only idiot who marries someone thirty years older who has less money than she does, but what can I say? I love the guy. Unfortunately, that age gap that seemed simultaneously exciting and comforting when the difference was thirty and sixty seems less so when the difference is now fifties and eighties. Henry engages his father’s aging by making constant fun of him to his face. When the subject comes up with me, it’s a different story. A few weeks ago, when Henry’s beloved Jets continued to do what they do best—lose—I came into his room after the game and saw him sitting in the dark with his head in his hands. “I just want them to be in the playoffs once so I can watch that game with Dad before he dies,” he said.
And Gus? With him there are no discussions, no questions. Dad couldn’t take him out because he is old and has bad knees. Simple. Solipsist that he is, he’d keep asking, though. Or did, until a few months ago. There was a shift. It seemed as if his computer came to his emotional rescue, as it so often does.
When Gus is home, he checks in with me about the weather almost every half hour: “Mommy, today’s high is sixty degrees—ahhhhh!—with a 20 percent chance of a storm. That means it probably won’t happen, right?” We rate the temperature according to how it makes us feel, temperate being “ahhhh,” hot being “uggggh,” and cold being “eeeeeeeeee.” (Henry likes to do his impression of a TV weatherman for Gus: “This morning will start with a low of EEEEEEE, reaching AHHHHH by midmorning; tomorrow, a small heat front rolling in from the South will bring UGGGGHHHHHH to New York City and the suburbs . . .”)
Gus’s go-to site for weather is accuweather.com. But then one day, he began adding info to his weather report.
“Mommy, ‘Jogger Attacked, Dragged into Wooded Area in Central Park,’” he said. Then he disappeared.
“What did he just say?” John asked.
He didn’t seem to want to discuss the stories, but he wanted me to know. “Mommy, ‘New York City Bomb Suspect Pleads Not Guilty to Attempted Murder Charges.’ Bye.”
I was always curious to see what attracted his attention. At first, the deaths seemed to involve terrible accidents—drowning in floods or getting run over by trains. But eventually they became more personal. Gus may not be ready to talk about mortality with a human like, say, his mother, but maybe his machine gives him what he needs in a way I can’t.
“‘New York City Man Kept Dead Grandmother in Garbage Bag for Months,’” he said. “Also, today’s high will be sixty-eight degrees . . .”
“Wait, Gus. Just wait, don’t walk away.” Henry and I had been giggling about the Gus Doo
m Report for days, and I had to make sure I didn’t laugh. “That is a horrible story. Why do you think the man did that?”
Gus thought for a moment. “Because he’s a villain?”
“Well, there’s that, and he might be mentally ill.” “Might” seemed a bit of an understatement. “But even if he was a sick guy, he may have loved his grandmother and just couldn’t let her go, even after she died. Can you understand someone not wanting to let go of someone they loved after they were gone?”
“Gone?” he said. “You mean when they’re dead?”
“Yes, honey, when they’re dead.”
“People die, and then they shouldn’t be with you like that,” he said. “But . . .” He struggled with the thought. “They come back when you think about them. Then you can keep them.”
Yes, you can, darling.
* * *
When I learned I was pregnant, I confess my first thought was not the cheeriest one. It was, Oh, good! I’ll have someone to hold my hand when I die.
I think Henry will be there, my wonderful impossible boy, making me laugh and think as long as we can talk. But it will be Gus holding my hand.
Fifteen
Bye
Henry and I are watching our new favorite documentary, Baby Animals In The Wild, where we turn the sound off and supply the narration. His animals are all Scottish and mine are all elderly Jews, because those are the only accents we can do. “Laddie, aye, the banks of the River Spey are running this year. I could go for a wee dram with my dinner,” he says as a mother bear catches salmon for her cubs. “These bones, they’re killing me, they get stuck in my teeth,” I say. “And you know how much lox costs these days? In my day, it was a penny for lox and a schmear.” We can do this for hours, despite no one finding it funny but us.
“Do you think Gus will ever live on his own?” Henry says as an elephant helps her baby get out of a ditch.
To Siri with Love Page 16