“Let’s get out of here before we wash away,” I said, pulling the car out onto the old brick street that ran behind the Pink Mall, heading us home.
Listening to the slap of the windshield wipers, I kept hearing Terrell. Remembering her saying: I’m out of my mind over him. We’re head-over-heels. He wants me to leave. He wants us to get together. He wants to tell everybody. Then I could see him, her man, in my mind’s eye—out there in that godforsaken dry countryside where they’d had to put down first the cattle and then the emus, baked and parched right out of business—waiting for her plane to come in. Him thinking of her out of her clothes; thinking that they were finally going to get together. I kept seeing him standing there, looking at the sky as sleet began to ice up the runway, the moisture too little and too late to help, enough only to turn the ground and the air treacherous. Skip Rowland. It did make a difference to know he had a name.
When I pulled into my driveway, I could see the kitchen light on, and the backyard light, and knew the girls were all right. I’d be glad, in truth, when the teacher was back in residence in her side of the duplex. She didn’t sit, but it would be someone on the premises. I said to Red, “We’ll have to take Felice home.” Thinking that I owed Mayfair one for her help, even though, in the end, I’d been unable to lie about my sister’s visit.
“Sure,” Red said, his voice raw.
I cut off the ignition, but didn’t move. “Red? Did you mean it when you said to put ourselves in his place, the guy?”
“I’ve been trying.”
I turned so I could see his face by the yard light, the rain steady on the car roof above us. “All right, then.” I took a deep breath. “We can’t leave him standing out there at the end of that West Texas runway forever. I’ll call him for you.”
“Call him for her,” he said.
Then he walked around, getting drenched, and, throwing his seersucker jacket over my head and shoulders, while the two girls stood in the doorway staring, carried me across the sodden, puddled backyard into the house.
15
I felt restless, edgy, bereft in some way, after the departure of the old friend I’d been so appalled to see at my back door. I knew I’d have to write my mother, to say that Red had come, since all our children knew. But I hadn’t the heart for it. A casual way to talk about what hadn’t been a casual visit escaped me. And dissembling had already got me in enough of a fix.
Instead, wanting company, I called Karl on his car phone, to see if he had time, between the showing of homes in the waxing and waning neighborhoods of our bend in the coast, to spend some of it in my bed. It took a day or so until we found a few hours with Birdie gone, and all his prospective buyers taken around to homes dry enough to show. Until we had a few hours free to close my bedroom door, and, discarding our clothes on the bare wood floor, fall together for a little mutual warmth on my navy blue sheets. It wasn’t great romance, or even especially steamy sex, but there was something good to be said for the feel of a friendly body, for being satisfied and satisfying.
Lying bare, cool beneath the fan, my arm across Karl’s shoulders, I wondered if all German necks were flushed after the act, if all Germans dozed.
“You ever think about another kid?” he asked after a spell, rolling over on his back.
“That I got one was an outsized piece of luck.”
“You could have two.”
“I’m forty-three—”
“—If you had a bigger place?”
“Come on, Karl.” Sometimes he got to talking about how if his wife had quit chasing around and let herself get knocked up, he could be a Sunday daddy like half the rest of the parish. I never knew what revived his regret; more than likely it was prospects looking for four bedrooms, two baths. For nurseries upstairs.
“You could start over,” he said. “Have one around when the Bird starts college.”
“You could find a nice young single mom with three or four. You know as well as I do that there must be about half a million on this part of the Gulf alone. All seeking compatible realtor for long-term relationship.” I roughed up his barber-styled hair. I knew he didn’t really want to get himself that embroiled, that responsible, or he wouldn’t have moved into the garage apartment behind his folks’ house after his divorce.
“Yeah.” He felt around on the floor, probably in some old reflex looking for a pack of cigarettes, then flopped back on the bed. “But who wants to mess with somebody who you don’t know? Who you more than likely wouldn’t like. Who wants to take a chance? At my age?”
“I’ll write you a reference,” I said, giving him a smile.
By the time Birdie came in, having had her last private cello lesson before school started, he and I were dressed and in the kitchen.
“Hi, Karl,” my daughter greeted him politely.
“Hello, Bird. What’s up?”
“We had a visit from my Uncle Rufus on Saturday.”
“And here, today, is your ‘Uncle Karl’?” He gave me a look that indicated I hadn’t leveled with him.
Birdie let loose her shawl of hair. “He really is my uncle. Not like you.”
“The head cheerleader at my high school had an Uncle Rufus. He ended up in the pen.”
She giggled, heading to her room. “I know you’re kidding.”
“My brother-in-law,” I clarified.
Karl narrowed his blue eyes as if trying to read my face. “Keep repeating that word brother,” he said.
I laughed. After a quartet of years, we knew each other fairly well.
He helped himself to some iced coffee in the fridge, having failed to find a beer. Sitting down at the table in the other kitchen chair, he asked, “The brother-in-law want to talk about your sister?”
“He did.”
“A lot of unfinished business when someone dies. That right?”
I nodded.
“Hell.” He looked toward Birdie’s room, in case that counted as cursing. “There’s a lot of unfinished business when they don’t, not to mention all this stuff still going on with my ex. But you always think you’ll have time to get around to it.”
“You do. You think that.”
But I didn’t want to talk about Red and my sister anymore. I felt saturated with the subject. I hadn’t even begun to think about my promise to call some total stranger out there in cow country and tell him I hoped he was bearing up. Or how I’d felt when Red carried me across the yard in the rain. Or, for that matter, to wonder where present company, a well-meaning guy who liked to kid around with my daughter, fit in.
After he left, I fretted about Birdie. What on earth, I wondered, must it be like for her? For a girl, growing up, not to have an in-place, permanent, unchanging, postulating daddy? I couldn’t even imagine my life if I’d been raised only by my mother, Agatha. It made me close my eyes and grind my teeth to think of it. Mothers, a case could be made, taught you, or felt it their duty to teach you, how to be female. How to be a member in good standing of their notion of family. But daddies—daddies gave you that sweeping, certain, pontifical view of the outside world, past, present, and forevermore. It didn’t matter what the content of their world was—History repeats/History doesn’t repeat; growing beef is gold on the hoof/growing beef is a crapshoot; the Law is a compass/the Law is an ass; you’re entitled to a piece of anything you repo/anything you repossess belongs entirely to the original owner—you expected, growing up, to have that daddy in residence, holding forth. Just as you expected, as you came of age, to have that defining mother.
Somehow, my fault or not, I had cheated my daughter out of her due.
What had she lost growing up in a world without a daddy? Some sense of the Other. I could still shut my eyes and have the early intimate smells and sights of that bearded parent return to me. The images of his constant grooming. The mouthwash, the toothbrush, the little sets of scissors for trimming his whiskers and nose hair, his eyebrows, the finger- and toenail clippers, the pumice stone for his calluses, the almost e
rotic collection of prescription medicines in the bathroom cabinet, long out of date, for fevers, coughs, colds, assorted bugs. Nose sprays, eyedrops, oil for earaches, rubbing alcohol, and liniments for sore muscles. Him in the old navy cotton robe with its daddy smell that he wore before dressing, to be decent in a home with daughters. The way every act performed was accompanied by its history.
I could see him sitting on the side of his bed (their double bed), a towel spread on the floor, working on his professor’s aching feet, discussing ingrown toenails and infections, plantar warts, bone spurs, bunion plasters. A world before sports shoes and podiatrists. See him leaning close to the bathroom mirror, shaving, speaking of his grandfather who’d used a straight-edged razor and leather strop, his father who’d used a mug and brush. See him working a piece of floss awkwardly between two teeth as his periodontist had taught him, reminiscing about the days of pulling teeth with pliers and a shot of whiskey, of his grandfather’s false teeth in a glass beside his bed, his father’s missing molars and visible gold crowns. I’m sure, if we had been sons, my sister and I, there would also have been personal talk of constipation and erections, and a recounting of the early ways of handling the problems of each.
Should I have kept Buddy about at all (substantial) cost? Just to have his Jockey shorts on the floor, his electric razor in the bathroom, neon-colored muscle shirts on every piece of furniture? The smell of aftershave, the sound of him moving around in the bedroom like an elephant behind closed doors? Just to give her an exposure to daddy, a dose of daddy, a vaccine of daddy? Big guy, proud of his build, bound to get on his only daughter about her weight, her hairy legs, why didn’t she have a boyfriend, how come she was a runt just like his mother? No. No, better she have her imagined daddy, the guy in the photo with one of his temporary sailboats—great grin—calling up to ask, “How’s the birdie?”
I was standing there, lost in a fog, trying to get my mind around all this, just standing, when the phone rang. I couldn’t say I had a premonition—I didn’t believe in them anyway—but, just as if I’d conjured him up by thinking about him, here was my daddy.
“Ella, girl,” he said, his voice quavering, “we almost lost your mother.”
“What, Daddy?”
But he was a flood of words. He seemed to feel that as long as he was speaking, as long as the connection held, matters were under control. “I drank a whole glass of orange juice while I waited for the ambulance, thinking to myself that there’s no good to be gained with my ticker giving out while she’s flat on the floor. Swallowing, I read in the Tufts Health Letter, I think it was, helps you with stress.”
“Daddy, tell me what happened.”
She fell, he said. As if that explained the matter.
By this time, Birdie, perhaps picking up on something in my tone of voice, had stopped practicing and come into the kitchen, so I wrote it for her on a scrap of paper: Grandmom’s in the hospital. And she sat down by me at the round table, looking solemn.
How helpess I felt. When Terrell had been around, she would have been the one to call, to tell me exactly what had happened in swift, clear words. Tell me how to hear “she fell”; tell me what to make of it. Daddy, in his third year of retirement, had somehow retired also from the daily conversations of the outside world.
“They say she’s out of the woods.” He sounded at a loss. “Your mother.” He made a sort of gargling sound. “We nearly lost her.”
I tried to make my voice calm. “Was it a stroke, then? She had a small stroke?”
“Your mother got a letter. It was a bit of good news, at least to my way of thinking. But I suppose that’s a moot matter that can wait. Good news is what it was, a letter.” He stopped, then went on, as if recollecting. “Afterwards, she sat out there on the porch talking to me, most likely, I didn’t hear what all, on account of working on my history, around the corner. My old ears. Then she quit and it wasn’t half a minute later I heard her fall.”
“Is she—” How did you ask such things? Can she hear you? Recognize you? Speak? “—all right?”
He choked up. “She kept on about your sister.”
“Daddy, listen. Are you there now, the hospital? Where are you? I could drive over tomorrow and spend a few days. How long will she—?”
Birdie took the pen and wrote: Me, too!!!
I tried to calculate. School started so early now; here it would start next week, three weeks before Labor Day, and it must be the same at home, students starting back in what were the crushingly hot days of August. Our noise-sensitive tenant, the elementary school teacher, Margot, had already returned and settled into her well-draining half of the house. Even Yale, Red had said, required their freshmen on-site by September 1.
Birdie added: I can take care of Granddaddy.
How could I deny her that?
“Do that, Daughter.” Daddy sounded winded. “I’m not up to coping with trouble the way I used to.”
I called Mayfair to let her know our change in plans, as much to have someone to talk to about my mother as anything else, since Birdie would of course be telling Felice the minute I got off the phone.
“It must be that generation,” Mayfair said. “My aunt made a trip to look up an old teacher of hers, and when she got there, the woman could only see next of kin.” She made a murmur of sympathy.
“Mother seemed indestructible.”
“Don’t our mamas always,” she agreed.
“And our daddies—?”
“Daddies? Who’s that?”
Austin
16
We found Daddy, as he’d instructed, on the intensive care floor at the recently enlarged hospital not far from their house. He looked dressed to chair a departmental meeting—summer-weight navy suit, vest, starched blue shirt from his cache of blue shirts, striped yellow tie (from some Father’s Day?)—and not as if he’d slept sitting up in his clothes, which, by his account, he had. When I told him he looked pretty smooth, he explained that he’d learned this trick from his brother Reuben, who’d been a judge in Ector County and said that you should never go into hospitals, law offices, or county courthouses without a tie and dress shoes, or they would decide you were an indigent—since that’s what they’d been hired to do, sort the able-to-pay from the unable-to-pay.
“Guten Tag,” Birdie said to him, giving him a bear squeeze.
“Hi, Girlie,” he told her, looking grateful.
Waiting for it to be time to go into the ICU to see Mother, he and I sat in the hospital coffee shop, while Birdie stayed upstairs with Red and the boys. Daddy told me once again all about the study correlating swallowing with reduced stress, and, as if to test the results, drank two tall glasses of water and ate two triangles of limp toast, chewing three times longer than necessary to turn them to paste, though I didn’t know if chewing was up there with swallowing. Maybe it just had to do with moving the jaw muscle, for he also talked as if her life, and maybe his, depended on it.
“I studied those health letters,” he reported, “and it paid off for her. Lucky this wasn’t me in there, since she hardly even scans the index. There was this article on ischemic strokes—it was in the Harvard Heart Letter or maybe the Berkeley Wellness Letter, I save the lot of them—about how minutes make the difference. You wait more than three hours, trying to figure out if maybe the person has a sinus headache or just fell asleep sitting there because the afternoon turned muggy—I’m being hypothetical here, since your mother fell—you’ve lost your margin of good fortune. But this is a topic people of our age, your mother and I, should keep abreast of. I’m saying this is a key topic of the older folks, and I had my data right here.” He tapped his head and looked at me.
I could hardly sit still, much less drink even coffee. In fifteen minutes, I would see her, and the pit of my stomach felt loaded with lead. One part of me worried about her, her leaking or occluded or only grazed vessels, one part of me worried about that look of grief that I knew would cross her face. Seeing that it was only me.
“You grasp the idea, Ella? If they can give the patient, that’s your mother in this case—” He waved his hand for a water refill. “But anyone, it could be me next time, the tissue plasminogen activator, they call it tPA, right away, that’s the key. I asked the doctor right out, the consult, the neurosurgeon, the same thing I’d asked our usual man, ‘Did I get her here in time for the tPA?’ and they said I most definitely did. Though when we were waiting for that ambulance, time seemed to wobble and not move, and I had myself a bad fright.”
“She’s lucky to have you, Daddy.” I tried to pull myself together.
“Your mother has been under a lot—I’m not sure you understand—been through a lot of stress.”
Riding the elevator upstairs beside him, I found myself short of breath, my hands clammy. Trying his remedy, I made myself swallow. My mother, I feared, flat on her back, her body having misbehaved, would be even more in control than ever, to compensate. I’d left Old Metairie, driving like crazy for most of the day, in the same café au lait sleeveless dress I’d worn with Red, minus the black T-shirt, which I’d thrown into the bag with my best watering shorts and a pull-on black-and-blue synthetic skirt from some previous incarnation. Where had all the linens, hanging in the closet of my mind, gone? Where the manicured nails, the soft French braid? I had arrived looking exactly what I was: the out-of-state, out-of-favor, and out-of-funds remaining daughter.
Going into the waiting room, I tried to prepare myself for seeing Red again. Wanting not to make too much out of what happened last weekend in Old Metairie. He’d wanted information; I’d supplied it. Still, I’d sat in my small blue front room late each night, waiting for the eleven o’clock train, thinking about him. How much I’d liked him back then; how much I found I liked him now. How totally impossible anything more developing between us was.
“Hello, Rufus,” I said, and felt a moment of shame that I was so glad to see him, that maybe the reason I’d leapt at the chance to drive my brains out to get to Mother’s bedside was the fact that he’d be here, too.
Ella in Bloom Page 10