Hard Mouth

by Amanda Goldblatt

  “Keeping body and soul together,” he said, so predictably that I mouthed along with. I knew he was no longer trying. He was in fact courting deviation. I let him do and say what he wanted without protest. It was not kid-gloves so much as a lumpish attempt at beneficence.

  Occasionally there was less clarity; Pop would drop one line of talk and divert to something else, or silence. He’d ask a vague question, then drift during requests for further detail. It was like walking into an empty building, where you’d expected to meet someone.

  Meanwhile, Ma seemed to have achieved her most high maternity, sans neurosis, sans frizzle: no try, all do. The house was neat, the surfaces markless. Ma washed produce three times and stuck to organic. The meals were nutritious, smelling thickly of protein. Pop ate less than he would have liked to, and I ate as much as I could, and Ma preferred snacks to meals but yet she piled all of our plates.

  Carmen the hospice nurse came three times a week and, later, five. She wore bright scrubs and most days, an amethyst pendant. She was highly trained and quiet, or, merely low speaking and professionally calm; she’d been there all along. When she talked we didn’t have to and we liked her for it. She liked us because we never interfered with her plans of care. She talked to the doctors, and administered meds when working. From her we learned to try and be simultaneously honest and gentle. Belatedly we learned to nest. We made popsicles. We bought soft blankets. We settled in.

  For now Pop was alive. This was the headline. Now I felt—if not ready, then closer to. I would perform my duties when needed. I lived there in the home alongside my parents. I waited to see if either would address me regarding my absence. Once, weeks in, Pop cleared his throat during the interstitial musical swell of an also-ran flick about mixed-up wartime lovers, and said, “We’re glad you’re back.”

  What choice did Ma and Pop have but to forgive me my disappearance, now that I was back and behaving? Ma was grateful that Pop would see me, his only child, prior to his expiration. Pop was grateful I was around for Ma. I was transistor and diversion both. With my decaying dad, I made jokes about other people’s bucket lists: around-the-world trips and cruises and skydiving and the opera. “I’m afraid my tux is at the drycleaner’s.” Pop looked at me like I was his reflection, then laughed.

  Meanwhile I wondered if Gene would ever come back. I’d wake in the night beneath the comforters in the orderly one-door room of my childhood, and stare hard into the dark. Sometimes I’d whisper: “Who eats floating fish but flies?” No one took the bait. Not one bite. For this I thanked myself.

  We made it through the winter, in the hummy buzz of neighborly visits and holiday television specials. We watched movies. We played cards: war, hearts, gin. Was there ever a waiting room more comfortable than life. We leased a wheelchair for Pop, and sometimes wheeled him around in it.

  ONE DAY IN May Carmen was off. The house squeaked with disinfectant. Our rooms were shot through with new spring light. I hardly recognized us. Ma had been working three or four days a week, but she was off too. On the way to see if Pop needed anything I walked by Ma, who was standing on a kitchen chair in the front room. She brandished an extended-handle duster, yielding cobwebs. “You and he should go to the botanical gardens,” she said from above. “He’d really like that.” The gardens weren’t very far away, an unexpectedly pretty spread back beyond an elementary school and a small housing development. They’d taken me often as a child but I’d stopped thinking of the place some time ago.

  “Don’t you want to come, too?” I called up.

  “Nah.” Her syllable spread elliptical. I wondered if the doctor had said something more precise about expectancy. Previously he had said he did not want to say, that any approximation over or under three months would be a blind bet. Now it’d been nine months, gestational in number and palliative in nature, since Pop had followed through on his decision not to pursue treatment. What I did during those months is now a smear of glasses of water and laundry soap and newspapers and errands to one strip mall or another. Soon I’d start thinking about a new job, about making contributions to the family bank and bills.

  “Fine,” I said. “If he wants to go we’ll go.”

  From her perch she said I should invite Ken if I wanted. “He can help with moving Dan from the car to the wheelchair and stuff.”

  I said Ken was at work, which was or wasn’t so. He’d been showing up for family dinners only, no extracurricular pal time. “I can do it,” I said, and passed her by, on to the room where Pop still kept himself most hours.

  Inside he was standing on his own power by the side of the bed. The room was no sibling of its former state. There was almost nothing in it: a clean white room with a mechanized bed. Beside it, a comfortable chair where Ma often slept. No coin bowls. A small plastic tub in an appealing blue, containing nausea and sleeping pills. Along a shelf, military lines of Pedialyte bottles and a row of lotion-added tissue boxes. The spring light was here too: Pop had raised the blinds unevenly. They came at a slight down angle from one corner of the frame.

  Pop’s muscles were wasting; his bones were heavy. He stood now with one hand against the wall. “Denise, good morning!” Because I had already done the traitorous thing, and been forgiven, I could look him in the eye. For in his body’s translucence, his eyes were more vivid. I smiled at him now, and meant it. This is no sap song. This is just a daughter doing her best to be un-evil to a father who could no longer stand so great. We contort endlessly, within the confines of family. I asked if he felt like going to the botanical gardens.

  “Yes!” Pop said, as if charmed. “I think I forgot they existed.” I said I had too.

  Soon I put the wheelchair in the back of my parents’ sedan. Then I helped Pop down the steps. It was hard to be slow beside him, when my muscles wanted to work. This was a most loving endurance of slowness, I said to myself. This slowness keening into stillness. Ma stood in the doorway and waved goodbye.

  AT THE GARDENS I helped Pop into his chair and we moved through the greenhouse, its sticky fragrant air, past banana trees and orchids and birds-of-paradise and the cloudy tank of piranhas.

  Then out to the British rose garden with its rows of American Beauties and Golden Celebrations, the Damasks and the Sunsprites, alive with the heavy zooms of beetles, the leaves perforated in misregistered patterns. Pop didn’t wear his sunglasses; he let the sun project.

  We moved up the long, shallow hill past the lilacs with their bunched, boasting blooms and their sweet shoppe scent. The beauty here was not everything but it was one delight left available. I tried to remember this. We ringed the lake, cross-stitched with acid green algae. Fat-bottomed geese waddled like drunk mascots. “They’re not nice,” Pop said as we passed them. “Steer clear.” So I did, down the path that led us into a thin woods.

  “Promise me—” said Pop as we moved through the trees, but didn’t finish. As of late he had said this often. I understood this as a habit of control, or its appearance. We came upon a large stump that had been cut into a kind of chair or throne, by the removal of a chunk of it. The remaining surface was smooth with skin oil and use.

  As a child I’d sat there calmly. Royalty had then meant for me: security, plus power, plus self-satisfaction. In the throne I’d felt this, wanted Pop to feel this too. It was a poor equation, but I beckoned. “After all,” I said, “you’re a king among men.” Then I winked.

  Pop shrugged and said OK. I helped him, one hand at the hip and the other at the shoulder, from the path, across the mulchy forest floor, up the little hillock to the throne. No one in our family believed in any idea of heaven or reincarnation. Life was a 1 or 0 proposition. You had it but you didn’t get to keep having it. The smell of the forest was not different from the smell of the mountain. I believed I could smell its colors, its bright budding greens and its brownly decaying shadows. I kept thinking the phrase: I’m ready enough. Though I didn’t mean it.

  I had a feeling we were then supposed to say important things. We
didn’t. Rather we stayed there in silence. A body beside a body, though I felt nearly alone. A wind riffled the vegetation and the geese honked overhead and the leaves waved and in all of this we were unmoving. Pop cleared his throat and asked what was next. I suggested ice cream, thought of poodles. Pop apologized that he didn’t feel like it. I said, “Then let’s go home.”

  On we went, through the forest, up past the side of the rose garden and the back of the greenhouse and into the lot and into the car. We revved up and down the neighborhood roads and the four-laners, past the churches and strip malls and dry cleaners and gas stations; on, to our smooth little road and our driveway and our house, which was ours wholly only as long as we were able to possess things, that is, as long as we were solvent and alive.

  WHEN WE GOT home there was a strange car in the drive. I parked on the street and popped the trunk. We’d become used to pilgrim acquaintances dropping by to say hi and bye, before. I wondered who it’d be this time. Getting out, I wrested the chair from the trunk to the ground, unfolded it. There were strangers walking toward the stoop, a couple. I helped Pop out of the car and into the chair. We approached; they turned.

  Their veins showed through their thinning skin. They were breeching elderly, had mobile mouths on the vivacious edge of grins. Today their age and disposition were ostentatious.

  “We were passing by,” the man hollered out at us, “and we thought we’d come visit you.”

  “Oh yes,” Pop said like a confused host. We were working toward them, toward the stoop, and we got there by and by.

  “We don’t live in town anymore,” the man explained. “But we were back through visiting and then we were driving past your house and I said to her, I said, ‘Why not stop by and say hello to the finest real estate agent in town?’” The four of us approximated cordial guffaws.

  “You sold our house and then we had to leave!” the woman said. It was meant as a joke but I could hear in it a real accusation.

  At a low volume Pop said: “You bet I did!” And then: “It was my pleasure.” He said he didn’t do that kind of work anymore.

  “D’ya miss it?” the man asked. He descended the stoop, his wife behind him, and shook Pop’s hand in turn. This man was a villain for reminding Pop of his losses. These people were monsters, I felt. I imagined that I could hear their teeth shifting in their mouths.

  To change the subject I began to ask them where they lived now but Pop interrupted, answering: “You give people an opportunity, selling their house, let them choose something else.”

  “And let’s not forget about the American dream,” the woman said pridefully. She wore a visor low on her forehead, and progressive lenses that obscured her eyes.

  “I would never,” Pop said, solemn and on the unfamiliar rim of sarcasm. He half-smiled at me only. Here I saw his real human consciousness knocking thinly and dearly at his fading body’s door. It sent a sparring shock into my heart. I set my jaw.

  The old couple made moves down the drive. “Well we just wanted to say hello.”

  “Hello!” Pop said, overbright.

  They nodded at us. Soon they were getting into their car, chatting low to one another. One of the man’s sentences was picked up at the wind and thrown at us: “Gosh, he looks terrible!”

  I was ready to fight them. But I turned to Pop and he was laughing. “I do!” he said. “I do look terrible!” His humor nipped at me. I helped him from the chair and up the stoop. Ma came out to help.

  Let him have anything he needs, I thought to myself as I waited, hands braced, for Pop to get to the door on his own power. I blamed myself for everything but had no strength to right it. From then on I would extend to myself a nihilistic benevolence, experiment with radical blamelessness, and sometimes sleep well.

  THAT NIGHT I drove to see Ken’s new one-bedroom in Eastern Market, a gentrifying neighborhood where you could walk for a coffee or a drink or a bite. What a novelty after so many years in the suburbs. The apartment was fine: new appliances, wall-to-wall carpet, white walls. “Yeah,” I said.

  We sat down on the sectional, which was also new, and nubby. I told him about the couple. He shrugged. “Isn’t it nice that people care?” He knew that it wasn’t.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not nice.”

  Then later, while we flipped channels, he said: “I’ll get over this. Don’t worry. I love you.”

  And I said back: “Is there any more beer?”

  There was more beer, and we tipped it down our gullets, swallowing noisily. The walls of the apartment were undecorated. I put my head on Ken’s chest and he laid his hand on the side of my face. Sirens and headlights flashed through the windows onto the back wall. There was a commercial for detergent. There was a commercial for soda. My ear against his sternum, I could hear his heart beating: a pleasant hassle. There was a commercial for cat food. I woke in the middle of the night and exited, like I always did. I checked the knob to make sure the front door locked on its own.

  BEFORE POP DIED, on a spring Sunday afternoon, there were plates of broiled chicken breasts, steamed string beans, and oven-baked potatoes addressed with butter. Ma had transcended, or that was the word I thought, each time I looked at her in her well-moisturized face. I wondered whether my absence had goosed this new decorum. We ate the chicken in a meditative manner, grinding the strings of meat between our molars, letting the butter lubricate the potatoes’ dry starch. I admired our dinner, chewed around my empty socket. I was, in some way, at peace. Or I thought I was; I thought again: I’m ready enough. The mantric lie, smooth as injected plastic, would take lifetimes to decompose.

  After this meditative supper, and after some light stretching, Pop wanted to go out. “I’m going for a drive,” he told us. I woke from a nap on the front room couch at this announcement, let my vision focus to his features: smiling and gracefully gaunt, looking like history. As he jangled his keys, I roused myself upward and joined Ma, who had come in from the kitchen, coffee in hand. With hydraulic elegance she let the mug down on the counter. It made no noise. What I’m saying is that she’d found a new couth. Pop said again how he wanted to go out, and alone.

  He wanted to see the earth and the neighborhood and to bask in the season. He hoped he would see more lilacs. He wanted to see the houses and the people in houses, the people living their lives. He wore a polo shirt and a sweater and a barn coat, for he was always cold in those last days. He wore his woolen slippers and adjusted the belt on his oldest jeans and stood in front of us like a hero departing for a long and resolving journey. Then, he wanted a hug.

  What can I say but that we had a family hug, the three of us embraced into one object of genetic matter, of organic matter, degrading into one another as all families do, provided they are proximate or as claustrophobically nuclear as we.

  Pop left the house, walking slowly. He did not want the chair. I napped. Ma straightened objects in the home.

  POP GOT IN the car, and spent extra time simply sitting in it, feeling the old-friend leather of the driver’s seat, tracing an index along the wheel. He was disinvested in earthly things by now, he thought, but still found very much to be beautiful—pleasurable, even—and opened the windows to let the air in.

  He pulled out of the driveway carefully, looking both ways, checking his mirrors twice and then a third time. There was a minibus stopped up the block and he waited as it discharged passengers. There was a brood of children and the children were all acting caricatures of emotion: one ecstatic, another in theatrical head-down sadness. He felt okay. It was slightly shocking to feel okay. Nearly neutral, at peace. Or, he wouldn’t call it peace; the vein of fear in him was too wide. What he’d once felt was anger, but he no longer let that through the door.

  When the bus continued on, so did he. For a while he was behind it, watching the children return to their houses, doors pressing in to their privacies. The lilacs were indeed there in clusters and heavenly, sending their almost-rot scent through the open windows and prompting Pop to
sigh.

  He made a left on the next street and saw a woman walking a very old dog, and he wondered why they had never gotten one. Perhaps, after he was gone, his wife would get some mutt. For Ma, for Marilyn he wished this, and for me, his daughter? Likely some kind of settlement, a smoothness and responsibility to my days, to come before the consent of my own expiration. The evening light was pink, and every piece of siding reflected this tone. So much of this pink, this interior color. In it, Pop felt expansive.

  He directed the car, then, down a narrow, unpaved cut-through, which ran along a small creek. He wanted to look at the wildflowers that grew by the water, and to sit on the bank or imagine doing so, imagine feeling the wet softness of the ground through the seat of his pants. The creek’s bluff shore was six feet high. The family had, only once or twice, picnicked here. He regretted that it had not been more. Then he let go of that.

  He shifted to park and sat calmly in the car, by the creek. He looked at the skin-thin petals of the blooms, and did something close to meditating—breathing slowly while smelling the mineral and the mud and the vegetal green, for quite some time, and then longer.

  Grinning with this, his mind carbonated with old joy and new delicacy, Pop set his foot on the pedal and started the engine and put it in gear. He was very far from his body, somehow, and the distance was only increasing. He was, what, a dry leaf on a true and relentless wind. The vibration of the car, and the stream trickle, and kids somewhere shouting, and music from a stereo somewhere in the middle distance—

  The car lurched and pitched down the little bluff, into the shallow water, and lastly as the car began to roll he realized he was going the wrong way, quickly, only it was the right way, as any way would have been. The car rolled until it was upside down.

  Sometimes when I think of how Pop said bye I think that it was overly convenient, that it was a merciful gesture I did not earn or deserve in any fashion. But then there’s this: he was still dead. His consciousness was over. We all live knowing of this regular and unavoidable loss.