To fill the quiet in the car I’d talk about the price of beef cattle, the straw someone had dropped over to our barn, who’d been into the diner. I took him to the diner for lunch one day, and all the guys at the counter crowded around our booth, the big booth we weren’t supposed to give to anything less than a party of four but Dee had put us right there as soon as we came in, me holding the door, my father holding up the people coming in behind us. “Bottle,” my father said, leaning across the table surface toward me. “Bottle bottle.”
“We’ll both have iced tea,” I said. “With some straws.”
“What’s he saying, Mimi?” said Mr. Jansson, which was the kind of question that made me tired and angry at the same time. He’s saying “bottle,” which makes no sense, which is the way he is now. Instead I said, “He’s still working on his speech, Mr. Jansson. It takes a while.”
“Bottle,” my father whispered.
I ordered chocolate pudding for both of us because my father couldn’t chew and swallow real food anymore. No hot dogs, no pork chops, no ham and egg on a bun with a piece of American cheese melted on top. There’s not a lot of food for grown-ups that doesn’t have some heft to it except for pudding and soup, and because the one corner of his mouth still hung low the soup was a disaster. The pudding wasn’t a whole lot better, and after he knocked over his tea and leaned his elbow in the wet spot I took him home. There were chocolate blotches on one shoulder of his shirt, and a wet area on the front of his pants that made me shiver, looking at it, until I realized it was tea. My mother helped him get dressed in the morning, thank goodness, and I figured it wasn’t going to kill him to have some iced tea on his fly until it dried there. After I helped him out of the truck in our driveway, I took his hand in mine, and he whispered something.
“What, Pop?” I said.
“Bottle,” he said, and as I turned toward the house he moved away from it, down the path to Ruth’s place. The truth was that since he had gotten home that was where he seemed most settled, sitting in Ruth’s front room in front of the television. No ramp, no hospital bed. She’d moved the furniture around so that there were two chairs side by side, with a little end table in between. Ruth would talk nonstop the way she always did, going on about nothing, Bob Barker’s female assistants, the evening gowns on a masked-ball episode of The Guiding Light, who should get picked on The Dating Game. My father seemed to recognize some of the people—Mary Tyler Moore, Merv Griffin. Sometimes my mother came to get him for dinner and he would pull away and she’d leave him until it got dark and she wanted to go to sleep. A couple of times I noticed she let my father stay there, sleeping in the chair in Ruth’s living room. I would look in the screen door after I was done with the cows and the culverts in the morning, and he’d be asleep, his head thrown back, his mouth open, an old afghan tucked around him even in the heat. Ruth would be sitting at the dining room table with a cup of tea and a copy of Life magazine. She’d put her finger to her lips, and I’d go into our kitchen and make myself a second cup of coffee, and put my head down on my arms and cry.
“We need to talk,” I said to my mother one day at the end of July. We were never in the same place at the same time. When she was at work, I was at home, and when she was at home I was at work or in an empty house somewhere with Steven. I noticed that there were two times when my father and my brother Tommy weren’t going round and round in my head. One was when I was asleep, and the other was when I was having sex. I had a lot of sex that summer. “Babe babe babe,” Steven would repeat over and over, and I would close my eyes so that he wouldn’t sound like a sex version of my father, repeating the same stupid word over and over.
“I have to go grocery shopping, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “I had to throw half those casseroles out and now there’s barely anything to eat in this house.”
“I’ll go with you once we talk.”
“I don’t want you leaving the two of them over there all on their own.”
“Mom,” I said, loud, and she put both her hands down on the kitchen counter and dropped her head. Then she hammered on the counter with her palms, one two three, hard hard hard.
“I talked to Mrs. Farrell the other day,” I said. “It’s all taken care of.” She beat on the counter again.
“I wanted better for you,” she said, and her voice sounded like she was trying not to cry. She never cried, either. I don’t even think she cried in my father’s hospital room, or maybe she did when she was alone, when there was no one to see, like that thing about a tree falling in the forest. If Miriam Miller cried and there was no one to see it, were there really any tears?
“It’s not the end of the world. I’ll go to the community college for a year or two until he gets better. Mrs. Farrell says she already talked to one of the deans at State and they can just hold my admission for a year. She talked to him about what courses I can take at the community college so I won’t get behind.”
My mother shook her head back and forth, but she still wouldn’t turn to look at me. “Mom, I can’t go away right now. It’s just a fact. I have to be here. You can’t leave the two of them alone all day. When Dad was here to look after Ruth it was one thing—”
“Oh, to hell with Ruth. To hell with Ruth. I’m not having her ruin your life, too.”
“Nobody’s life is getting ruined,” I said, strong and even, like I really believed it. “I’ll take classes and in between I’ll look in on the both of them. I’ll take him to his appointments and he’ll get stronger and then we can make other arrangements.”
I’ll remember the quiet in that kitchen for the rest of my life. It felt like it went on and on, filling the room from floor to ceiling, almost like it was a gas or a fog or something. It had weight and mass.
“I have to get to the supermarket,” my mother said wearily.
“Get a lot of tomato soup,” I said. “It goes down easy and he seems to like it.”
“Callie’s bringing Clifton over to see him later.”
“Get Clifton some Fudgsicles.”
“Maybe he can spend the night. Your father seems to like that.” We used the word seem all the time because we couldn’t really tell what was going on inside his addled brain. Bat. Bottle. Shit. Who knew what he thought when his grandson showed up and yelled “Gramps!” Maybe he didn’t even know what that meant, or who that was.
My mother took her purse from next to the phone and fished out her car keys. As she left she put her hand on my shoulder and I felt a shaking go through her and into me. Then she was gone to town.
Callie said Clifton had gotten sad and quiet, but I couldn’t see it. I was worried that this new Gramps, the one with the draggy leg and sandbag arm and funny mouth, the one who couldn’t talk and sometimes cried, would freak him out, but Clifton seemed to like him just fine. I guess that made sense. My father had turned into a giant toddler. Maybe Clifton, who I thought ought to be in nursery school with other kids, believed he was finally with someone his own age. Sometimes he would climb into my father’s lap and try to lift the low loose corner of his lip, and it always made my father laugh a little, a deep heh-heh laugh that almost sounded like his old one. Sometimes the two of them would sit out on the steps of Ruth’s house and eat Fudgsicles. Clifton would count cars on the road, which was easy because there weren’t many, and my father would turn the Fudgsicle stick around and around in his hands as though he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with it. His workbench in the barn was the saddest thing you ever saw. It was so clean and tidy, but with a faint smell of motor oil and mildew, so that it seemed like whoever once used the tools on the pegboard hadn’t used them for years. The ghost of the old Bud Miller was nowhere to be found there.
When Clifton stayed at our house he would take that picture of Tommy in his dress uniform from the bureau and kiss it before he got under the covers. He thought Tommy was still away in the service, and none of us told him different. “God bless Daddy,” he said when he said his prayers, “and make
him come home to Clifton soon.” That’s when he looked sad to me, not when he was with my father.
If a prisoner at the state penitentiary doesn’t want to have visitors, even if the visitors have driven two hours and emptied their pockets and filled out a form and gone through all the rigamarole you have to go through to sit on the other side of what looks like glass in the movies but is really plastic, then he doesn’t have to come out. The guard comes back and says, “I told him you were here but he wants to stay in his cell.”
My mother tried. My brother Ed tried. Steven tried, or at least he came with me, and he said to the guard, “Go back and tell him his sister will wait in the car and it will just be me.” Nothing.
Steven and I went to the trailer Tom had been renting, and that was when I finally cried over him, my big brother in jail and his sad, nasty little life for anyone to see in a shoe box of white vinyl siding with one cracked concrete step to the front door. Inside there were some jeans and T-shirts in old plastic milk crates, a drawer full of rolling papers and condoms, and nothing in the refrigerator, which was one of those half-size dorm room numbers, except beer, a lemon that had dried out to a yellow marble, and a half of a ham sandwich that wasn’t even wrapped in paper and that smelled like rot. “There aren’t any drugs here,” I said, and Steven looked at me like I was crazy. “He flushed his stash as soon as he saw the red lights outside,” he said. “The staties are so damn dumb that they let you know they’re coming.”
The guy who owned the trailer, who owned the one next door, too, wanted us to take Tom’s stuff, but except for the picture of Clifton stuck in the edge of the mirror in the medicine cabinet, we pitched it all. I almost left the picture, too. It was maybe two years old, Clifton as a toddler. There were a dozen prescription bottles, but they were all empty. I looked at the labels. “All the others are happy pills or chill pills, except that one,” Steven said, pointing. “That one revs you up.”
“You seem to know a whole lot about all this stuff.”
“Guys in construction don’t live such clean lives,” he said.
Even Callie got in her little junker, which was ten thousand miles away from rattling to a stop forever, and drove up and tried to get Tommy to see her, although she just did it for my mother. But she wouldn’t bring Clifton along. “It’s okay that he thinks Tom is back in Vietnam,” she said.
“I almost wish he was,” I said.
Callie was dropping Clifton at the house a lot more, and I’m sure part of it was to make my mother happy because it was pretty much the only thing that did. But I knew there was another reason, too. I’d been helping Mrs. Venti out at the steak house when she had to go to the hospital in Philadelphia to have some female surgery that turned out to be, far as I could tell, something that made her face look really tight and not at all younger. One night I was seating people and there was Callie with a man in a jacket and tie who looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t tell from where. “Mimi!” she said, as though I was the last person in the world she’d ever find with a wine list and a menu under her arm, but I just said quietly, “Good evening,” and led the two of them to a table as far away from the podium as I could. Callie had on a blue dress and heels, and she was carrying one of those little purses that doesn’t hold anything except a lipstick and some tissues. She was wearing makeup, too, and she looked so pretty, like a twenty-one-year-old girl whose only care was what to wear to a restaurant dinner, which she’d never gotten to be. Or maybe was getting to be now, every once in a while.
“Please don’t say anything to your mom,” she said the next time she dropped Clifton by, making him blow his nose into a tissue before she let him loose. “It’s not a big deal.”
“I think your date thought it was a pretty big deal,” I said, remembering how the man had pulled out her chair and then settled himself, leaning across the table so that when I glanced over I was worried the votive candle was going to set his shirt on fire. Halfway through their dinner I’d realized I knew his face from the community college, that he had some kind of suit-and-tie job there, although I wasn’t sure which one. I didn’t spend enough time there to find out. I had four courses and they were harder than I’d expected, especially the history seminar on America between the world wars. Trig was fine, but there was an intro statistics course Mrs. Farrell had insisted I take that was kicking my butt, and the bio had a lab that required me to stick around the building, which was one of those pale cinder-block boxes from the 1960s that looked like a middle school only more so. It was strange that I’d gone from the Miller’s Valley high school, a serious red-brick building that looked like it belonged on some Ivy League campus—it actually had ivy, although they were always tearing it off so it wouldn’t mess up the pointing—to a place that looked like a municipal building and had actually been built by the same people who built the municipal building, probably from the same set of plans.
A girl from my high school class named Laura was my lab partner. “I thought you were going to State,” she said the first day. We hadn’t really known one another in high school because she was prealgebra when I was algebra, geometry when I was precalculus, so our class schedules were out of sync all the way along. It was funny, how that kind of thing could make all the difference in who you knew, and who you just knew by sight.
“Next year, I guess,” I’d said. “My dad is sick.”
“Me, too,” she said. “My mom.”
She was a good lab partner, careful and hardworking. I was afraid in the beginning that she might try to let me carry her, which had happened sometimes in high school, but she put in half the work for sure. We would have been friends if I’d had time for friends, but I didn’t. School and the farm, the farm and school, and Steven when I could, which he said wasn’t half enough. My mother wanted to sell the beef cattle, but I thought that might level my father, and he was leveled plenty. So I kept on doing what I needed to do every morning and evening in the half-light of the barn. Cows are companionable animals to cry around. Dogs notice and they run over and try to lick your face and cheer you up. But when there’s no hope of cheering up, give me a couple of cows any day.
I have clear memories from that time, but they’re not the ones you’d think. They’re never the ones you think. When I walked across the stage at graduation, that’s a blur. Even that morning when I found Tommy under the tractor isn’t real sharp in my mind. My mother said she could barely remember her wedding day, she was so jittery.
No, it’s strange little moments that live inside you and keep peeking out the windows that open suddenly in your mind. One morning outside the barn my boot got stuck in a suck hole made of water, mud, straw, gravel, and hay, with maybe some cowpat thrown in. It was like quicksand, and I pulled and pulled and pulled back until I came loose with a wet sucking sound and fell on my butt with my bare foot in the air, the boot and even my sock still in that hole. I can still see my toes, white and a little wrinkled from the humidity in my boots, and I can still feel the water soaking into the seat of my jeans and the empty feeling I had inside that was just plain hopelessness.
I guess there are times in your life that tell you what you’re made of, the weeks after you bring a colicky baby home from the hospital, the year when you lose your job and the number in your checking account just gets smaller and smaller until it looks like it’s going to wink out like daylight on a January afternoon. This was my time. There were record rains, and the two sump pumps we had now because one just wasn’t enough went day and night, a chunk-a-chunk noise from the basement, and one morning I woke up because the sound had changed and I thought, Thank God, because it meant sunshine. But what it really meant was that one of the pumps had failed. You’d think that the saddest day would be the one when I found my father all folded up outside Ruth’s house, but instead it was the one when I had to hire a guy to come and fix that pump. “My father’s sick,” I said, “otherwise he would do it.”
“It’s an antique,” said the guy. “I’m not sure I ca
n even get parts for something this old.” My father used to make the replacement parts for sump pumps himself, which was something I just took for granted until I figured out how remarkable it was in the basement that morning, tapping my foot because I was afraid I was going to be late for class.
“We need to buy a new sump pump,” I’d said to my mother, and she passed over the coffee can from the summer’s corn. It had a couple hundred dollars in it, in singles, mainly. The price had gone up since I’d been a kid selling corn with Donald and LaRhonda, but the same card table was there, with the coffee can on top of a sheet of loose-leaf that said 10¢ AN EAR. People pulled up, filled a bag, and left the money in the can. I imagined someday Clifton would sit there and sort out thirteen-ear dozens for people he’d known his whole life. I’d figured out a long time ago that it had been busywork for me as a kid, but busywork seemed like most of my life now.
The weeks went by, each day the same as the one before it, and my father didn’t get any better at all, although he seemed a little happier when Clifton came by. Ruth tolerated Clifton better now that my mother had stopped talking about moving Ruth out and moving her grandson in, now that my father was spending so much time at Ruth’s house. He sat in front of the television, and he ate soup and pudding and ice cream, and his nice flat stomach went all slack and soft. “Bell,” he said some days. “Wall,” he said on others. “Me!” he shouted when we were out in the truck. “Me!” It was like when Clifton was small: I couldn’t tell whether he was using what he could of my name, or trying to tell us that he was still there, that Buddy Miller was still inside there somewhere, lousy balance, no words, but still there.
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