Rock, Meet Window

by Jason Good

  Throwing the papers at Sigmund, Dad screamed, “If you’re going to write letters to your friends calling me an asshole, you shouldn’t leave them lying around for anyone to read.” He stormed out, and SP started crying and ran out of the room, chasing him to apologize. I stayed in bed, smiled, and continued listening to the track “Pride (In the Name of Love).” For the first time in my life, I saw Dad fathering another kid, and I liked it. I wasn’t the sole source of Dad’s stress. Apparently, it could grow anywhere if properly seeded.

  Soon thereafter, Sigmund ditched the beret. He continued to wear wacky ties, dress shirts, colorful shoes, and sport coats with the sleeves rolled up. I pretended not to know him until I saw how popular he was. The other students at the American School of Florence—a mix of wealthy bilingual Italians, American military brats, and expat kids—loved SP’s Phil Collins look, especially his new girlfriend, Jessica, a six-foot-tall Dutch girl rumored to be of royal descent.

  Sigmund wasn’t letting Dad get in the way of seizing his European dream, but he wasn’t the only one experiencing rampant social success. I’d been busy mastering life, too. Via divine adolescent intervention, I realized that instead of taking showers or baths, I could wash my hair in the bidet each morning and no one would be the wiser.

  Soon thereafter, a large wart developed on the palm of my hand, which I made a habit of attempting to remove nightly with fingernail clippers. I’d also started chanting “chick woot” like a water-damaged robot. It was a reaction to stress, or hormonal changes, one for which modern parents might seek an evaluation, but instead, Dad just rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Jason. Look around you. Do you see anyone else chanting ‘chick woot’?” He might have been embarrassed, but the laughs he got from ridiculing me were worth it. Not only was this trip a new beginning for me, and for SP, it was also one for Dad.

  SP never stopped being eccentric. After high school, he enrolled at Reed College, which led to some graduate work at Yale Divinity School, where he dropped out after a year to practice Chinese medicine. I hear he now works at a holistic healing center, the kind my uncle Paul might visit. I missed my twenty-year high school reunion, but was told that SP drank a large, ornate bottle of boutique Belgian ale, and then tried to convince everyone they should put magnets in their shoes to “balance their energies.” I would email him for help with Dad’s condition, but I worry that magnets would cause all those leukemic cells to coalesce into a massive jiggling glob of cellular dysfunction.

  At the end of the year, we moved back to Delaware as planned, and SP returned to his family. But I could tell Dad and Mom were anxious to return to “Firenze.” Dad complained about the coffee and that Italy didn’t export its best wines. “It’s impossible to get a decent bottle of Barolo in this damn country.” They started making their own pasta. Dozens of cans of Italian tomatoes were stacked in the pantry (and in the dining room for everyone to see). Dad bought a special antenna so he could watch Rai Uno (an Italian network). “No American networks report actual news,” he said. If not for our Midwestern accents, terrible hair, and pale skin, one might have assumed we were recent immigrants. The year I graduated high school, Dad was offered the director position of the Syracuse program in Florence. He accepted, and together, he and Mom realized their expat destiny.

  Having overestimated the value of a 2.7 GPA and SAT score of 990, I decided to defer admission to Ohio Wesleyan, my safety school, and enroll in both semesters of the Syracuse abroad program. A freshman in a sea of juniors, I learned to speak Italian, find religious iconography in medieval paintings, and to drink Chianti straight from the jug.

  Mom and Dad spent five years in Florence. Eventually, though, as he always did, Dad became restless. Luckily, John Cabot University in Rome recruited him to be their president. Change had come to him once again without him seeking it. They found an apartment in Rome’s Trastevere section among the junkies and transvestites. Dad loved the grittiness of it. Mom not so much. After a few years, he grew tired of the bureaucracy and the “bullshit fundraising” required of the job. When a gang of gypsy children robbed their graffiti-covered apartment building in the middle of the night, it was time to move on.

  After three years as president of John Cabot, Dad started looking for a new position stateside. It was the first time in thirty years that he’d actually applied for a job. A year later, he and Mom landed in the Bay Area when Dad became the new dean of liberal arts at California State, Hayward. He made good money, and Mom had a job in student services, but they couldn’t afford San Francisco, which was probably for the best. Having not driven for over a decade, the commute would have sent Dad to a mental institution within months. The culture shock was immense. It’s hard to imagine two places more different than Rome and San Leandro, California—the former as old as civilization itself, and the later sprouting up sometime around the release of Van Halen’s first album.

  After his third year as dean, Dad realized he was a bureaucrat once again and started self-medicating with single malt scotch and obscure mystery series on the BBC. He exercised a clause in his contract that allowed him to be a tenured faculty member in the political science department. He seemed to enjoy being in the classroom, but he and Mom were never able to find their groove socially. Perhaps after living the exciting expat life in Italy, their standards were too high. The Bay Area is known for its political correctness, and Dad’s sense of humor has always been racy and caustic. “Aren’t there any cool people in your department at Cal State?” I asked. He rolled his eyes. “There’s one guy who thinks he’s a hobbit. Should I be friends with him? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  Dad engineered his teaching schedule so that he would have to go to the university only one day a week, and he spent much of his free time helping accredit an American university in Hanoi, Vietnam. He traveled there a few times, and despite loving the food, and subsequently introducing the rest of us to bizarre fish soups, the project lost its funding. After that, Dad stagnated, and became mired in the “I guess this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life” mindset. He feigned contentment, but he was just waiting for a new opportunity to demolish and rebuild, as he always had in the past.

  Romanian Gymnasts

  After spending three weeks at home researching, taking my pulse, sleeping restlessly, ignoring my own family, and trying to imagine what was in store for all of us, I returned to San Leandro, this time without Lindsay and the boys. I’d become bitter at home, my patience short and understanding limited. Lindsay suspected there might be another explanation besides sadness and fear. She did some research and, much to her satisfaction, found a few sources stating that men have a three-month emotional “cycle.” “Maybe you’re just perimenopausal,” she joked. I agreed, knowing that doing so would excuse my attitude, but I, too, wondered why I was so upset. Everybody’s father gets sick and dies.

  The flight to Oakland is blissful, a sailing sky spa where the ginger ale flows and the peanuts are free. I get in late and take a short taxi ride to my parents’ apartment. Mom opens the door in her nightgown, with Dad behind her clad in boxers and a T-shirt. The shock of Dad being sick has dissipated a bit for all of us. Despite being tired, we feel an obligation to sit together in the living room. It would be weird to simply say hello, exchange hugs, and then immediately go to bed. But after I fill them in on Silas and Arlo, and fix something for Mom on her iPhone, we fall silent. We have a big day ahead of us and need our rest.

  “Michael?” Mom yells back to the bedroom. She’s nervous. We’re all nervous—especially Dad. He’s getting the poison today.

  “What do you think he’s doing back there?” I ask. Mom shrugs, not wanting to legitimize Dad’s past and future complaints about her dawdling. If this were a normal outing, she might fill the time by disappearing for a few minutes to complete a task on her to-do list: a deft strategy to shift from being the waiter to the waited, as well as an effective means of driving Dad batshit.

  “I’m afraid there’s going
to be traffic,” she yells, and then turns to me. “You can drive, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Peering past the fireplace, I see Dad walking toward us, head down, gazing at his Ferragamo shoes. What he’d been doing was putting on a suit.

  “Let’s go,” he says. I think he’d already passed through the frenetic stage of anxiety.

  “Well, look who got all dressed up for his first day of chemo?” I joke.

  “What can I say? Your mom likes me in a suit.”

  “You know everyone else will be in sweatpants, right?”

  “Then you should fit right in.”

  “I’m not wearing sweatpants.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s that?”

  “It’s a sweatshirt,” I respond, realizing there’s little difference. It’s ridiculous for a man in his forties to wear a hoodie and Puma loafers unless he’s in the Beastie Boys. None of us knew the proper attire for chemotherapy. There’s definitely no dress code for spectators. This is outpatient stuff, anyway. We have plans to go to lunch afterward, and I prefer to be comfortable while eating.

  “Do you really think I shouldn’t wear this?” Dad asks.

  “I think you look nice,” Mom says.

  “Dapper,” I add.

  Mom closes the apartment door, locking the handle and both dead bolts. “I usually don’t do that last one unless we’re leaving town.” She has a smudge of red lipstick on her front tooth. I feel a twinge of guilt, like perhaps I’m not respecting the gravity of Dad’s situation. I pick through my wallet for a Valium.

  “I need you to unlock the door real quick. I forgot something,” I say, chewing up the pill.

  “Yup, no problem,” Mom answers.

  Dad rolls his eyes. “Jesus, your mother is incapable of criticizing you.”

  “Amazing, right?” I slip inside, jog into my room, kick off my stupid sport loafers, and throw my hoodie in the corner. The only button-down shirt I brought lay crumpled in my suitcase: a Western-style plaid with snaps. Hardly dressy, but it’s the best I can do. I put on a pair of shoes with laces, feed a belt through the loops of my jeans (I don’t own any other pants), tuck in my shirt, and check the mirror. I look like a cowboy spiffed up for happy hour at a hotel bar.

  “Nice shirt,” Dad says. I know he hates it, but less so than the hoodie.

  “You look nice,” Mom says as we enter the elevator.

  “Thanks.”

  Dad has always been anxious to complete whatever he’s doing. Always worried he’ll be late, he usually arrives early. As a kid, I saw him mostly on weekends, and even then he found it difficult to relax unless we had big plans. When I was six or seven, Dad decided one Sunday morning that he and I would go to the Columbus Zoo. Jack Hanna had recently overseen a large renovation. It included wooden bridges overlooking lush tiger habitats, scum-free tanks for marine life, peacocks prancing the grounds, chimpanzees that didn’t pace their cages like death-row inmates, and other upgrades that are now expected in modern zoos.

  That Sunday morning, I was taking a long time getting dressed, and I’m sure Dad was eager to get going. I had become compulsive about selecting my clothes, insisting on shirts with “stripes on the front, stripes on back, and numbers on the sleeves.” Such shirts are rare, and I threw fits when I didn’t have a clean one, so Bopie, my maternal grandmother, began making them for me. Bopie’s given name was Roberta, but, consistent with other ridiculous Southern traditions like pie with nuts in it, her Georgia family insisted she have a nickname: Topie. And I had trouble with T sounds. Bopie maintained a thick Southern accent, which I imagine she practiced nightly while petting a large ripe peach. She was a self-taught seamstress with a lot of confidence. The shirts she made had uneven sleeves and strange spots of random color that Dad suspected were subtle nods to the Confederacy: a small blue X hidden in a stripe, a red star between the numbers on back. I think it was more likely that Bopie spilled some of her favorite drink, Irish Mist, or pricked her finger while working. She had shaky hands and poor eyesight.

  It was only a thirty-minute drive to the zoo, but in those pre-air-conditioning and pre–DVD player days, thirty minutes was the modern equivalent of five hours for a parent. Luckily, the lack of seatbelt laws allowed me to lounge inside a pillow fort in the way-way-back of the station wagon. Sometimes I would climb up front to stand next to Dad as he yelled at the “morons” on talk radio.

  He was probably wondering what the hell could take a kid so long to choose between four identical shirts. But he managed not to rush me. On special occasions he was calm, steady, and happy, like he is now with his grandsons. His patience paid off. When I came downstairs, I was wearing the outfit Mom bought me for my uncle’s wedding the year prior: a white dress shirt and a tiny brown clip-on bow tie. The shirt was a little too small, but I still managed to tuck it into my high-water jeans. Dad took a picture. He was proud to be escorting Alfalfa to the zoo.

  On our way to the appointment, Dad’s suit coat hangs in the backseat, flapping against Mom’s head.

  “Isn’t that bugging you?” I ask.

  “What? Oh, I didn’t even notice,” she responds, as the coat shifts during a turn to cover nearly half her face. She’s too nervous to change anything.

  “Jody, you can move my damn jacket if you want.”

  Mom pins it to the window with her hand, “No, no. It’s fine.”

  “Okay, then.” He looks at me and rolls his eyes. It’s the only moment we share during the twenty-minute drive to the hospital. Aside from Dad questioning the navigation system, as well as the two other GPS devices he insists on using as backup, none of us speaks much at all. I assume we have the same thing on our minds. Or maybe my aggressive East Coast driving has them paralyzed with fear.

  When the elevator doors open, I am reminded that all hospital waiting rooms look the same. The chairs are purple and barely comfortable: cheap without being utilitarian. The carpet is thin with a dense floral pattern to hide stains (urine, blood, lattes, and so on). The tables are made of dark laminated wood and smattered with wellness magazines and pamphlets outlining the treatment options for diseases to which I thought my family was immune. An acoustic rendition of “Sailing” by Christopher Cross plays on a loop, but not quite loudly enough to determine if it is indeed “Sailing” by Christopher Cross.

  Dad has been here before. It’s the same building where, just a few weeks ago, the doctor said his options were to start chemotherapy immediately or check himself into hospice and die within three months. The doctor recanted later, in favor of a softer diagnosis, but I’m sure Dad’s still rattled from it.

  The three of us sit in silence, messing with our phones. For the first time, this all feels real. In a few hours, Dad’s blood will be filled with some toxic garbage that we hope might reteach his bone marrow how to make functioning blood cells again. It seems like magic, but what other choice do we have?

  I notice a short-haired woman rush up to the reception desk. She’s panting. “I’m mother fuckin’ late because some goddamn Korean lady was walkin’ slow as shit,” she tells the receptionist, who stares at her while sipping the last drops of the soda from her McDonald’s Extra Value Meal.

  “When was your appointment, ma’am?”

  “Two-thirty,” she answers, scanning the room to see if anyone else is paying attention.

  Tragically, she catches my eye.

  “I’m late for my damn chemotherapy for the second time this month!”

  I smile. “Well, I’m sure they can still fit you in.”

  Dad looks up. “What? Who are you talking to?”

  Now he’s on the hook, too. “Whatchu here fo’?” she asks him. “The chemotherapy?”

  “Yes, I’m here for my first round of chemotherapy,” Dad answers professionally, hoping it might discourage any further discussion.

  “Ma’am?” says the receptionist. “Your appointment was for two PM.”

  “Yeah, I know that. What I’m tellin’ you is that I’m late for
that appointment because a Korean lady was takin’ her sweet time in the hallway and then in the elevator she up and pressed the wrong damn button and now we all in the basement and I’m thinkin’, shit, I’m gonna be late for my chemo again. Second time this month!”

  She turns back to Dad. “What kind of cancer you got? Mine’s in the colon.”

  “Oh, umm, I’m being treated for leukemia.”

  Uninterested in his answer, she continues, “I shouldn’t get so upset about all this. It’s bad for my colon and all, but damn that woman was walkin’ slow. You ever get behind a slow-ass Korean lady like that?”

  “I believe I have experienced something similar, yes,” Dad responds, as I wince. Mom still hasn’t looked up from her phone. She’s smart like that.

  The short-haired lady, no longer panting, showed a little vulnerability. “I got this upset last time I was late and it got my blood pressure all up in the high range.”

  I see this as an opening to shift the conversation toward an ending. “Life is just too short to get upset about stuff like this, right?”

  “Whatchu know about life? I’m seventy-five years old. You wanna know about life? Oh, I been there. I been there and back again! Ain’t nobody no how gonna tell me nothing about livin’. Let me tell you . . .”

  I interrupt her. “Well, you don’t look seventy-five.” When I don’t know what else to do, I compliment people. She waves me off and turns her attention back to the receptionist, who is still typing. “I can fit you in at three,” she says, not making eye contact. The short-haired lady seems pleased. She prances to a chair across the room, sits down, pulls out a compact, and applies some lipstick. I look over at Dad, expecting him to acknowledge how bizarre this all is, but find him stoic.