Even as he grew more prosperous, his impatience with our country club friends (the kids next door) cast us all as softies, spoiled brats, the very crowd that must have sniggered at his homecut hair and outsized apron. I can see them, Faunderoys in green velvet, peering through the gold letters of his family name across store windows showing sawdust, a clock advertising a starch, flypaper clogged with its own regretted successes.
Now sure only of insomnia, I sleep at once. Immediately I dream of medicating my parents. They each stretch out on pink shells that are, I slowly recognize, alligator-shaped soapdishes, only huge. My folks have shrunken to fetal size, their skin is sticky, sticky but drying. I must feed them each milk. I squeeze it through an amber glass eyedropper—old-fashioned as Madame Curie’s gear; it is the forgotten eyedropper our family used to sustain baby rabbits found in the high weeds of rustic North Carolina during the early 1950s, centuries ago.
Daylight Comes and I Wanna Go Home
“e’ve got your whole schedule planned already. Some work, more play, makes Jack …” Mother greets me over the sound of bacon frying. “Excellent,” I say, as Father often would, when he was better, younger.
We now glance at him, a frown, the official bearing. He’s outdoors already—trying to fill the birdfeeder. His movements were once so precise, so torqued. Now, spilling blond seed everywhere, he scowls at us, then tries to bodyblock his small mistake. A blur of millet in the foreground while, beyond, a sticklike floating gator seems to idly watch my dad. Plans, Bosco?
During breakfast, a tiny white TV blares news, gives cutesy handicraft hints. After the Tampa Trib yields local football scores, Dad asks if I am sufficiently coffeed up to maybe help with those few chores? Since I am here after all …
He’ll need a hand in trimming the lower fronds off that fast-growing palm tree out there. See the scrubby one past the feeder? Darn thing keeps blocking part of the lake and golf course view. Quickly, I agree.
I change clothes.
I dress down.
Mom, already fixing lunch salads, hurries outdoors first. She opens a folding lawn chair then helps Dad shuffle forth and settle. Yesterday’s car-search robbed him of so much. She retreats. And Dad, just from this exertion, is huffing. He tries pretending it’s intentional—one form of chuckling. “So, best get, this done, ha, huhn, ha, yes, ha, yeah, good lick, work, har.”
He will supervise me from there. Ten feet nearer the house than this shaggy five-foot Sego palm. My father is a former tyro of the golf links. For me, he was once the sound of a lawnmower after dark. He now admits he has grown too winded to even use a saw: “Disgusted with myself, but there it is.” I appreciate this admission; a new tenderness? A tenderness?
—I vow to myself I’ll try to do my job here with real medical precision. Whatever residual rage I feel, I’ll put away. There are two kinds of people in the world. I want to do right by him. Because it seems I can.
My father founded an insurance agency. My father made major money and never lost a big-time client. My father taught Sunday school and tithed and was called a true gentleman by most persons in Falls, North Carolina, black or white. His unwed prettyish secretary remained in love with him for thirty years, and he never took advantage of her, never let us joke at her expense. In public he still acts sunny, always ready with the latest joke, a back-slapper, speaking to everyone at every party, including all the help.
His truest life has involved, not any one philosophy, but a day’s headlong listlike physical activities. My father can announce his admiration for thirty-year-guarantee roofing-shingles and with a passion that lets you participate, then marvel. What a great idea, shingles! Were bird feathers or gator scales mankind’s first shingle inspiration? He is a literalist, which makes him—if heard correctly—a metaphysician. But Dad, of course, would argue against this. Too fancy. Too much my idea, too fey, Ivy, and “brainy sounding.”
He is accustomed to giving orders factually and then he’s used to pretty much getting his way. But a major general’s role depends, of course, upon his being correct most of the time. Or at least some of it. Now, Dad can’t catch his breath; and what’s worse, he cannot hold a memory. He could never tolerate sloth in others; he always drove himself so hard. Bad luck was something weaker people chose. Dad seems shocked at all he’s lost a grip on. Fact is, he forgets he forgets.
Poor guy keeps exposing himself to ridicule because he can’t quite believe a brain as good as his might fail him (and his followers) and in ways so public. But instead of retreating, instead of letting my always-subtler Mom take charge, Daddy creates daily showdowns for his own mind, forcing it. (Forcing: His solution in business, childrearing and, for all I know, sex.) But his mind now balks. From his own mind. Just as I and my brothers forever balked. From our sire’s direct orders.
Whenever proved wrong again, the old man blinks around, seeking someone else to blame. For minor infractions, he once beat his sons, each in turn, using his own doubled cowhide belt; now, while I, stooped, prepare to again audition as his yardboy—a job I failed for eighteen straight years—I picture him, whipping it, using the belt, it curled like a grey tabbycat on one of those white couches—whipping his own brain.
He studies me hard; he wears sunglasses, long sleeves, a planter’s hat. Its floppy brim means to block a sun that’s given him—thanks to golf and bright Florida and Nordic ancestry—nine skin cancers. “But the good kind,” he likes to say. Amazing what we all can get used to.
As a kid, I grew so klutzy under this man’s critical and freezing glare. But, today, following orders, I do not hurt myself. For once, I’ve not even dropped the tool yet. Helping him, I understand that every time he has looked out at this lake, Dad has seen only the one spreading raggedy-ass palm, spiting him, so needing a man’s taming discipline.
He now calls which dry fronds must go, “Not that, lower, yeah. More like it.” As he becomes excited over work finally visibly achieved, his voice does not grow easier—but cross, more the distant monarch’s. “Forget that one. I already told you.”
The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe this state, their Elba. But I hack at offending branches with regular motions I would never use if doing this for me alone. I smile, pretending I’ve become a “How To” book. I am the butch brunette model in the black and red checked shirt, a young Rock Hudson teaching the patient millions “Proper Palm-Pruning 101.”
I’m uneasily aware of joy at forgetting ailing friends left North. And, miracle, today, for Dad, my work seems acceptable: for the first time in nearly half a century. I am implementing the exact orders issued by this decorated war veteran.
To Dad’s credit, he resists his usual withering “helpful hints”: what blade angle might be just a little better.
Today, my heterosex brothers with their bored pretty wives and hyper country-day kids are staying far away, states safer. “But we understand that,” Dad said last night, “After all, they have responsibilities.” What am I, chopped liver?
Today, with Christmas Eve dead ahead, only I—the queer one—am here, doing for him, hanging out. I do feel glad not to be busying that corner room of St. Vincent’s Hospital, fluffing Robert’s pillows yet again, reading aloud to him (with expression) all today’s music reviews from the Times. Whether he can hear them or not.
Now that Dad can’t manage, I must appear far abler. Lumberjack at last! Moi? But around his sudden weaknesses, I feel mainly sad. Alive and well, he still had a chance to figure it all out. As for his finally accepting me, thanks only to pure default, I am both touched and quietly, jaw-grindingly, enraged.
Across the lake, a golfer small with distance approaches one flagged hole. Spying Dad, he waves. “Ed Albertson. Wave.” Dad waves, then I do.
“You must miss it, golf.” I try again.
“Sure. But, pity like yours really only makes things feel worse.” Okay. That’s it, forever.
But I turn,
look back at him. He appears some guy deciding, finally, whether to go ahead and be a kind person for his last few years, or not. Dad’s white hair stands out like fluff on a baby bird. He rests baffled under layers like some old-timey lady movie star resisting Hollywood’s sun.
But, finally unjudged by him, I cannot begin to hint how male, how dexterous I have at last become. (My brothers and I used to laugh at Dad, out in the yard, practicing his putting, his face all pilgrim agony, no joy allowed in him. None of the willing easy sexy New York foolishness that literally means Life to me!)
I have always tried to make my work a form of play. Even at this palm-tree haircut, I’m managing. —With what ease does this butch dude move today!
Kneeling, my handsaw moving, I marvel how his early squelching hid from me my own deep carpenter’s capacity. Dad’s present weakness, ruined lungs, might afford me one moment of shamed glee. Surely forgivable. But, instead of giving me some heady rush: “I told you so”—there comes a brown and melancholy seepage, not pity but some real sympathy—unpredicted and the more powerful for that. How much friends’ suffering has already taught me. I have already seen what everybody must endure. The Sewer, he called it. In a way, my dad was too correct. And what’s Florida? A drainage canal? Can I swim yet? My way of keeping up?—A dog paddle with intervals of deadman’s float.
I so want to say to him, “Poor thing. You could have had it all. What held you back from the enjoyment? From cooking, tussling, joking, playing with your healthy kids. You skipped the fun parts, Dad! Why?”
But behind me, now, my driver of hard bargains actually says, “Good.” I cannot tell you how I’ll treasure that. I cannot tell you why my father and so many other dads found it so compromising to send one word of praise toward kids so fully starved for it.
He keeps coaching. My dying father indicates just one more pesky frond. “And snag that one, too. As long as I’m at …”
“As long as you’re at it? …” I cannot help myself. Some whipped childish part of me wants to yell, “That’s really the story of your whole sad life, isn’t it? Putting your pronoun first, the chore second and we, your supporting actors and feeble worker bees, clear off your chart …”
Instead, half jovial, I risk: “Err-ahhh, Dad? Can’t it at least be, ‘As long as we’re at it?’ Maybe one ‘We’ at least the once?—Hunh, Pop?”
He blinks. His lipless mouth, more old-ladyish since the dentures went in, purses its irritation. I have again become his overschooled pedantic grammarian, his hair-splitting hysteric. Not incidentally, the family faggot.
“‘We,’ then. Happy?” His voice all edgy. “‘We’ should take off those next three fronds. And this time, maybe you, if I’m allowed that as your father, maybe you will trim clear to the exact bases of those stems? Because, I thought I asked you to do that earlier. Because you’re not keeping them cut close enough against the trunk. Please, if you’re not hurrying off to make another important career phone call to New York, make sure your trimming … becomes … somewhat … more uniform.” He gasps.
“Somevat more uni-form. Yezz, zir.” I svitch to mock-German-military, recalling Robbie’s Svedish. He snorts to prove I am not even worth getting upset about. A gnat. I hear another cough fomenting in him. Let it. Let it brew and spill. There’s some pleasure in this altered balance of authority.
“Dad, sir?” Using a brain surgeon’s precision, I sever one frond’s inner edge. “Dad, why do you think, for you, it’s always … so hard for you to …”
I am about to finally ask the question. One that, bullied daily, we all have wondered all these years.
“Because my lungs are giving out, is why. That’s why it’s hard, that’s the reason … everything’s so….”
“Hard,” I provide, now I hear him start to gasp.
I feel I’m taking advantage of him. My mother, parting Venetian blinds, keeps peering out, worried for him, feeling excluded the way she does if the two of us ever get five sentences together unmonitored.
“Hate having to ask anybody for anything. Always have, son. Provide, provide, do it your own self. They taught us … that.”
“Aha,” I say. And a son finishes his work for the son’s dad.
Retired
om stands at the screen door saying the phone is for me, “Long distance!” As if I’d get a local one. I take it in the guest room, dim because they’ve stuck green filters over windowglass. “He’s way worse.” The voice quavers.
First I literally don’t know who this is, and which “he”? Then, I remember my life.
Knowing it’s Angie about Robert, I feel such unlikely disloyal gratitude for amnesia in Florida! During one brief span of hard labor, Dad driving me, I’ve slipped up briefly: I have been living only in the present.
“I would say he’s worse from missing you, but Robert’s past that now … he’s drift, all drift now. The nurses try but nobody has your touch, babette. How’re the folks?”
I open my mouth but hear a tapping on the window opposite our wall of family pix. I see one huge beak, a white bird. Its shape is repeated in the glass of every family photo. Is this The Stork? Has Dad called it to return me for exchange? The creature stands man-tall and is peering in at me. First I’m sure I’m having an acid flashback and say to Angie, “You’re not going to believe this …”
“Wanna bet?” New York City answers.
“Mom?” I call.
She hollers right in, our psychic tie almost too healthy, “It’s a sandhill crane, son. They see their own reflections in the Mylar your dad had put on the windows. They come every afternoon at four. That’s when the Albertsons feed them the garlic croutons. You really aren’t supposed to. The birds get used to treats and when we snowbirds leave, cranes starve. They’re considered ‘endangered,’ I think.”
“Oh,” I call.
“For the want of a crouton …” I tell Angie.
“Are you drunk? ‘Be inebriated, dearest ones,’ as says the monk. That how you’re dealing with all that down there? Look, you’ll still be back tomorrow night, right? Because I have a meeting with that boy curator from the Berlin show. He’s brought me the final model of the exhibit, last chance for us to shift a painting. Robert or no Robert, I cannot cancel on this guy again. Verboten.”
“Roger, over and out. Oh, and my father lost the car? And I just pruned a palm-tree solo? And there is a bird as tall as one of Robbie’s runway models tapping on the window right this second.”
“No shit? Whatever. No matter how dried out and weird your parents are, we all still love you to pieces. It’s killing us you’re gone.”
I find myself gulping. How does it come so easily to some folks and cause others such pain. To do it, just to even say that, Love, aloud. I sit on my bed watching a five-foot crane groom itself with amorous honking sounds. Its yellow eyes very observant yet truly stupid. It keeps admiring its own image. Only it could find itself attractive. You can tell it is a male one. I think of beautiful friends. Somehow, I’m turned on. To prove I still can, I undo workpants, I jerk off.
Let tropical Nature take lessons. Yeah! like … dis.
Tempus Fugit: The Battering
ow, blue evening of this same long orangeish day—his chores done, if imperfectly—my father is stretched out on the adjacent lounge chair. Using both pink hands, he clutches his big black and silver TV remote. Resting on his slight paunch, it looks like both a beak and baby rattle. Across the screen, The Tampa News at Seven Wrap-up struts its usual woes, bombings, child murders, and comic relief (but involving only baby dolphins). Dad now lightly snores. He is shrinking just as I seem to be filling out to my full mature size (and, truth be told, beyond that some. Do I care?).
We’ve had quite a day, yardwork, then later a quick mall car trip. I volunteered to stay with our Buick. That drew odd yet differing looks from both parents. I waved them back toward me. Each was carrying four prescriptions in brown paper sacks I recall from penny-candy days.
At the Cineplex, we choos
e a costume movie. In the credits, I recognize Ed’s name: Period Drapery Consultant. I tell my folks I know him. My best friends have been celebrities for months, and here I’m dropping some old trick’s name to impress my parents. Pitiful.
Bound home, we’re duty-bound to visit all four couples that consider themselves my folks’ best friends. The four conversations, four homes, four sets of attractive couples Dentu-Creme-ad-handsome, seem nearly interchangeable. The Ambersons, the Bermans, the Mangums, the Albertsons. Two of the women are named June, two of the men are Rays. Is such sameness what they all wanted all along? It seems they sacrificed everything to become, and then remain, this alike. Allowing, of course, for minor market fluctuations. An unlucky lucky generation. I think of my little Circle, how we pride ourselves mainly on differences: “Our Night Person,” “Our Farmboy Jewelry Collector.”
I admit to wondering why my folks didn’t invite all their pals over for a single conversation. But, hey: Florida is where, when you go there, they get to show you off.
I leave tomorrow, Christmas. The perfect travel day, everybody else is there already. I’ll be back in New York in time to celebrate whatever of it Robert notices this year. Angie says she’s phoned his parents. They must see him once more. I’d best be there to greet them, make things easier.
Snoring, Dad is zonked. I did his work but wound up feeling strong; he, just from watching me, grew quite bushed. TV’s customary babble cannot block true sounds. Under usual snoring—heedless, animal, selfish-sounding, the grunty essence of the unapologetically male—I hear a newer rasp, a whorl, the sudden hole.
This is a noise I know too well from all the days I’ve spent beside all those beds of all those boys I’ve loved, kids slipping off into a learnable habit called un-breathing.
Plays Well With Others Page 32