“I don’t need my mother on a date.”
“Well, you’re not going on your own.”
“Who said I wanted to go? I don’t want to go! And especially not with my mother.”
They sit in silence until their food comes, a salad for Samantha and a tuna sandwich for her mother.
“How come now?”
Her mother puts down her sandwich and waits.
“Why now, when he’s old?”
“Samantha, he’s always been old,” her mother said wearily.
“Apparently not too old to marry in the first place.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“You can’t just say that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can say,” her mother says, picking up her sandwich but not biting into it. “I made a mistake. For years I didn’t have enough money to leave him. I still don’t. But I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Because he can’t work anymore? Because he lost his marbles?” It’s true her father went crazy last year. He had hallucinations, movies he said they shone through the windows at night. Their mother had taken Samantha and Steve to visit him at the mental hospital, where he was drugged and groggy. Men were shouting obscenities from their rooms. His eyes were wet when he kissed them goodbye. He told Steve and Samantha not to visit anymore; he didn’t want them to see him here. When he came home he had a long lineup of pill bottles. He’s quieter now during the day instead of restless. He has a sweet, tired smile for her when she enters the bedroom that was Steve’s, but is his now. He rocks in his chair and reads The Labor Press, the same issue over and over. It only comes out once a week.
“You know it hasn’t been a proper marriage for years. His family should be rallying around him now, but they look at me like I’m the crazy one when I try to get their help. They act like I’m causing it.”
Samantha closes her ears. She had loved Auntie—her aunt Vera—who died of a heart attack last summer. And she loves her aunt Celia. When Aunt Celia and Uncle Matt still had the farm she loved how different it was from her house: the rag rugs her aunt made on a loom; the fields of berries and beans; the musty smell of the farmhouse and the animal smells of the henhouse and barn; the sauna where all the women sat together in the steam that hissed a white cloud with each ladle of water they drew from the wooden bucket and splashed over the rocks. She liked it when they sometimes talked Finnish around her, and liked it when they tried to teach her words. Her mother never took the sauna with them—said she was all clean and dry and didn’t want to get undressed. Now the farm is gone and Matt is dead and Aunt Celia lives in a little house in southeast Portland where she still grows blueberries and plums.
Samantha and her mother are on the edge of the argument that will do them in for the rest of the vacation. Usually Samantha backpedals from these edges as fast as she can, wanting to preserve some shred of normalcy so she doesn’t have to face the fact that she lives in a total freak show. She is tempted, though, so tempted, to say something to make the chasm between her and her mother split wide and irreparably. Maybe she’ll mention the two wives, say Dad should have stayed married to one or the other. It really wouldn’t have mattered which—neither would have tortured him the way her mother did. Yelled at him, demeaned him.
“Look, I don’t want to speak ill of his family. I know they love you. They’ve just hurt my feelings so many times . . .”
Or here, Samantha could say, “Who hasn’t hurt your feelings with some invisible slight? Who in the world has been spared your paranoia and bitterness?” She has so many grenades in her pack. So many pins her fingers are itching to pull.
“We could go to Hoover Dam tomorrow,” her mother says, fishing a brochure out of her purse.
The idea is so ridiculously boring that Samantha can’t help but snort.
“So you want to sunbathe instead?”
Samantha looks at the photos of the huge white concrete shell, the towers, the turquoise basin, the rock outcroppings and rim of mountains. She doesn’t want to sunbathe tomorrow.
She shrugs. “Why not?”
They stop at the front desk and buy the excursion tickets.
“You ladies will love this!” the woman at the desk in the ruffled blouse chirps, stamping their vouchers. “Make sure you take in the buffet at the Gold Strike in Boulder City. The motor coach will stop there, and you’ve got a coupon here for two dollars off each meal.”
They finish the day avoiding talk of her father, her father’s family, the divorce that will become final in two months, whether her mother will be able to keep the house, and where her father will live. She can’t imagine living alone with her mother, who will want to go on as if life has just gotten better, as if her father has not just been cast away to fend for himself in confusion. Her “Emancipated Minor” pamphlet is buried in the same bureau drawer as the pads of permission slips. It is her wild card; she’ll play it if she has to. Her mother goes to the pool to swim and Samantha stays back in the room, reading her novel. She wonders if Yuri is still there. She knows her mother will be scanning every young male, trying to pick him out.
That night they stroll up and down the Strip, cooled now to eighty degrees from the broil of the afternoon. Samantha feels dwarfed by the lights and the giant marquees and the waves of people. Her mother has, uncharacteristically, decided to spend her small winnings each day in hopes of a bigger win. Her purse holds a plastic cup with fifteen or so nickels, her last profits of the day. Going for broke still doesn’t mean using her own cash.
When they get back to the open-air entrance of their own hotel’s casino, the big dollar machine out front has no line. Her mother still has the token for today’s free pull. The machine is taller than she is; she has to reach up for the arm and then lean into it to bring it down. They can hear the mechanical workings of the reels as they spin. The first reel stops, with a little bounce, on a cherry cluster. Her mother squeals—already a winner. Luck stays with her: The second, then the third reel bounce into place, cherries across the payline. The bell trills. Her mother is clapping, and others are smiling at her, more in amusement than anything—Lady, it’s ten dollars. The dollar coins clank down with a heavy sound. Her mother scoops them up; she’ll go to the cashier’s cage and trade them in immediately for a ten-dollar bill. It will find its special envelope.
Indisputably minor, Samantha waits for her over the cooling vents, lounging under the fizz of neon. Night never falls here. It sneaks in at the street corner off the main drag, a little darkness muffled by the alarms of winners. It will be run out of town. Her mother disappears into the bright thicket of slot machines, her cup blackened by coins she hates to give away. What she likes is the illusion of risk. Meanwhile, a man in a white suit stands too close, compliments Samantha on her tan, which is really a burn, a skin she is about to shed.
INTERSTATE
Portland and Seattle, 1977
Her father moves to an apartment on 122nd Avenue, a soulless boulevard of fast-food outlets, discount stores, and rivers of moving traffic. The divorce sharpens his wits temporarily—meetings with his lawyer, papers to sign, property to squabble over, though there is not much property to fight about, just the ranch house with its corner lot. Carl got his lump sum for half of the house, took his collection of big-band LPs, his television set, the bureau Steve had abandoned when he moved out, a twin bed, a lamp, and some linens his sister Celia pitched in.
Her brother, Steve, is working in L.A., so it falls to Samantha to keep tabs. When she visits, she notes that her father seems to be eating only peppermint ice cream. Ants have established cloverleaf traffic patterns around the soaked bottoms of the grocery bags he uses as trash receptacles, and the bags themselves hold only empty cartons sticky with pink. She takes out the trash, wipes at the spot on the floor, buys ant traps. She doesn’t go so far as to do his laundry, though once she scrubs his bathroom in a whirlwind of disgust and vigorous intention, not breathing. She doesn’t want to take care of
him. She is eighteen, he is seventy-two. The balance of who is caring for whom is tilting too fast. She’s used to his being old, he’s always been old, but she isn’t yet willing to admit that he’s become her charge, her mother having washed her hands. Her own life appears before her like a stretch of wide-open highway, and she has no intention of narrowing it to the cluttered junk of 122nd Avenue. He is still her father, and she still needs one. He has his lump sum. He can take her to lunch if she drives, she can count on him to still reach for the check.
For the few months before she starts college she has taken a receptionist’s job in a medical office. They appreciate her for her good spelling and proficient typing, and she doesn’t make mistakes on the check deposit form. She isn’t scared of old people or medical smells. She likes her co-workers because they are kind, because they are to be in her life so briefly, a wayside stop. She can afford them anything. She has an old used car she bought herself, small paychecks, lunch hours to visit her father. She’ll find him shadow dancing to Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw. When he sees her, he stretches his arms open wide and she allows herself to be folded into them. The foxtrot is as familiar to her as Road Runner cartoons, as Partridge Family songs. Hasn’t she grown up to all of it? Undoubtedly her first foxtrots were in his arms when she was still an infant. She doesn’t remember those. She does remember standing in socks on his polished shoes, trying not to slide off as the dance moved under her. She still doesn’t have to know the steps. He leads with imperceptible tightenings of his arms; she frankly doesn’t know how he leads. But it is easy to foxtrot with him, or rumba or waltz. You don’t have to know much to do it.
He told her early on that she was a natural. Her mother must not have been; they never danced together that Samantha could recall.
She doesn’t blame her mother for not being a natural, and she is trying to stop blaming her for not sticking it out. If you are the third wife, if you are much younger and had to be talked into the marriage in the first place, if the marriage never seemed the way marriages were supposed to, like green islands of laughter and camaraderie (the image she has of her mother’s wishful thinking), are you to be blamed for jettisoning the thing when the children are older? Though the jettisoned partner is elderly and showing signs of losing his faculties? More than signs. Things Samantha has become adept at shunting to one side of her brain, a small drawer for them.
Even after she goes to college and lives downtown, they keep up their routines. She stops by, checks on the ants, does a bit of cleaning and washing (who else, now?), and then they drive out for lunch, usually a little batter-fried fish-and-chips place where the owners yell your number when the food is ready. Her father never allows her to pay a tab, even when she has money; this is like his always walking on the outside of the sidewalk and his no-nonsense leading on the dance floor. This is her father. The one who, when already retired, idled outside the school waiting to give her and her friends rides home, who only needed to hear that she lacked for something before his wallet was out, his fingers plucking through his thin supply of ones and fives.
When the pictures of starlets from People magazine start appearing taped to his walls, their eyes scratched out with pins, their lips gone white in some kind of rubbing, she wants no part of it.
“You don’t need these,” she says firmly, taking them down, tossing them on top of the empty ice cream cartons. “Why did you do that?”
“They were watching,” he tells her. “Like the movies that they shine at night.”
Tweaking the psychotropic meds stops the movies, but they make other things impossible, too. He still listens to the big bands, but now rarely dances. His checkbook unfurls streams of white adding machine tape where the teller has sorted out his balance for him, though he used to do the math okay. He sleeps away afternoons in his chair.
Samantha and her brother discuss places he could go next, how far the lump sum might be stretched. His older sister offers to take him in: Celia on her own after Matt died, her mind intact, but legs and hearing weak; Carl’s body sound, but mind unpredictable.
It is done. The new roommates have comic spells; it would make a good sitcom if you just had to live through half an hour of it—Aunt Celia sending Carl down to the cellar for a jar of plum preserves. She has a bum knee, so no sense risking those dim, uneven stairs. He descends nimbly, then wanders for a while in the dark, forgetting where the string is to snap on the bulb, forgetting in the search for the string what his errand is. He shouts up to ask, but Celia is deaf; she doesn’t hear. He trots back up the stairs, empty-handed, she asks where the preserves are, he slaps the side of his head—What a dummy—then trots back down, only to lose himself again in the dark.
But in general, living with Celia is the happiest place he could have found himself. Their youngest sister, Nora, brings them groceries, and takes Carl dancing at the Eagles Lodge. Five of the brothers and sisters in the family have died. The new order starts from Celia, now oldest; then Carl; then Emil, off in Eugene; then Nora. The baby of them all, Hank, died ten years earlier, of a mysterious and lingering illness that Samantha will later learn was AIDS. The three of them who still live in Portland, widowed and divorced, huddle together as if on a lifeboat. They speak both Finnish and English, they rock in rocking chairs and pass the time with television. They go on like this for months, then years.
Eventually Carl begins losing his way in the neighborhood, going out for a walk and not coming back until his retired nephew Bill locates him by trolling with the car after Celia has sounded the alarm. If Samantha is not ready to admit that things are bad, neither is her aunt. They conspire to send him on a little Amtrak trip up to Seattle, where Samantha has just begun graduate school. If there is anything he loves, it’s trains, cities, restaurants, visits.
Samantha has the schedule, she knows when the train is due. What is she doing that morning before its arrival? Probably nothing important, probably puttering in her studio apartment. It takes two buses to reach King Street Station from her studio in the U District. Two buses, plus the time waiting for the connection. She knows that, should have factored it all in. The first bus is not late, nor does it cover its route any more slowly than usual. The second bus is just a trip down the transit mall, down Third and across the streets someone taught her the mnemonic for when she first moved there: Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest. Two for each letter: Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine—only ticked off in reverse to get to the train station. The transit mall is clogged. Suddenly it’s become rush hour, although the way Seattle is heading, it’s almost always rush hour.
Six or half a dozen: Should she get off the bus and jog along the streets? Would that beat the bus? Ultimately, she does, so she is not only late, but sweaty and breathless. She finds him wandering there in the marble vastness of the grand public architecture of another age, his one small suitcase in hand, the train having arrived ten minutes ago.
She sees immediately what the waiting, the dizzy pattern of the mosaic tiles, the whiteness and coldness of the marble, has done to him. What she has done to him.
“You should have been here,” he says.
“I know, I’m sorry, traffic on the transit mall, bus took forever, ended up jogging.”
You should have been here. It is a remarkable statement from him, considering. Though his eyes are stretched wide, his pupils, pinpoints—she can see him slipping away through them—he is able to correctly assess the situation and affix responsibility. You should have been here—from him, who had never blamed her for anything, that she could remember, her entire life. Who never once raised his voice at her—could that be right? Or is she mythologizing? She thinks it’s right.
She should have been there; no excusing it away. What act of passive aggression, or perhaps of grad student depression, left her doing nothing much in her apartment all morning when she knew her father was at that moment on the train coming to visit her? Why di
d she not leave hours early, so that she is sitting on the wooden bench reading Virginia Woolf, drinking a coffee, ready to spring up immediately when the announcement comes that the Cascades train is pulling into the station? Why was she not outside on the platform scanning all the doors the minute a conductor opened them and put down his step stool, ready to assist frail passengers?
Years will pass and she will forgive herself many things, but never this. Her boys will be at birthday parties and sports practices, and her forever gesture of redemption, heart pounding from an old contrition, will be to be there always ten minutes early to claim them—never, never, ten minutes late.
What must ten minutes have felt like to him? It is the age before cell phones, but he is already losing memory of how to dial, or even which end of the receiver is up. In an earlier version of the two of them he would be found pacing outside the station, checking his watch, worrying about her.
But in this version, he is lost in a marble tomb that stretches on either side higher and wider than he can comfortably contain within his perceptions. The strangers clicking heels across that endless patterned floor know exactly where they need to be, their motions fluid with destination. He has, over the years, driven a Model T across the country, worked in Henry Ford’s automobile plant, been a hired hand on an Arizona ranch, played alto sax in a San Francisco speakeasy, mucked coal in a Montana mine, and devoted much of his adult life to balancing on girders, hammering ventilation shafts. He possessed skills, grace, and agility. All of these gifts vaporous now. He still has the compact muscular body but he is losing the ability to steer it. He stands in the middle of a great hall, wandering a few steps first in this direction, then that.
She comes, she is very, truly, sorry, she tries to take his bag (he won’t let her, he’s the man), she gets them onto the bus in the transit mall. With his daughter beside him, the two of them safely ensconced in a bus above the squawking traffic in one of the west coast cities he helped shape with skyscrapers, his pupils begin to gradually expand to a normal diameter.
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