Lit (10 page)

W
hen two hearts beat as one, there are in-laws to bond with, or, in my family’s case, outlaws. But for our first years Warren and I never go to Texas, not once. (Later, I’ll resent this like hell, but I don’t recall arguing about it much.) Daddy’s dying in the house I grew up in, while Mother begrudgingly nurses him. Yet Warren’s sense of duty to his own family is a virtue I so hope will tether him to me that I try to take on his obligation as my own. Plus if I didn’t go with him, we’d wind up with separate holidays, and I have some daytime soap-opera notion of what it means to be wifely. Besides, Lecia and Mother visit us a few times per year in the way Warren’s far-flung siblings never would, and I fly home to see Daddy plenty alone.

Yet for every conceivable holiday—from Easter lamb to Christmas ham—our tin-can car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn’t meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me
of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it’s all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can’t recount one damn thing we did.

The estate sits spitting distance from New York, and those first years, I show up with clippings of art I want to look at or friends’ bands I plan to hear. We never—not once—go into the city. One doesn’t venture outside estate walls. Even the clawed furniture seems dug in to the deep nap of ancient rugs.

But that doesn’t explain the lethargy that overcomes me there, the anesthetic effect of luxury. Instead of jogging, we read by the pool or walk down to feed carrots to the donkeys. The paper is meticulously studied, also
The New Yorker
. I sometimes poke around the attic or unused bedrooms, opening the ancient chests of drawers to catch whiffs of cedar or lavender sachet.

It’s a readerly tribe, and I can slouch in a leather chair drinking with a book in my lap for hours as well they can—my one affinity. But no sense of connection ever evolves into closeness. Outside each other’s company, Warren’s parents refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread, so I’d never presume first names.

Only once does Mr. Whitbread ring our house. It’s Warren’s birthday, and I answer as Mr. Whitbread says,
This is
—long pause as he contemplates what to call himself, uncomfortable saying either Dev Whitbread or Mr. Whitbread—
Warren Whitbread’s father
.

I put down the phone and announce to Warren, Your father’s on the phone.

What does he want? Warren says, not even rising from his desk.

I suppose to tell you happy birthday.

The light reflecting on Warren’s glasses transforms his eyes into white rectangles as he says, Ask him if it’s important.

On our regular visits to the big house, I’m all too eager to inject myself into the clever table conversations, which cover history and
great novels, sport and politics—all with an ease I struggle to keep up with.

But smart as the conversation is, it has a strangely repetitive quality. You never know anybody better—the talk never deepens, but neither does it show the slightest strain, and I’m nothing if not strained to the gills virtually every second. You enter that place and live suspended in amber like characters in a Victorian novel.

How’re your parents, Mary, I’m asked. How’s your father? And I say the same and that it’s sad, and everyone agrees, and then the character of my pretzeled daddy is dismissed like a servant whose health has been respectfully inquired after.

For four long years, Warren never meets the dying man whose care, or lack of it, occupies my thoughts waking and sleeping without relent. Dreams of Daddy haunt me. In one, I scoop his scrawny frame into my arms like he’s a baby, and his limbs begin to snap off as if they were a leper’s as I fight not to drop him.

In fairness to Warren, I often have to fly down expensively at the last minute for some bedside death watch Daddy winds up surviving. Or maybe I’ve struck some unconscious deal to shield him from the cesspool of my birth, or I’m eager to win some blessing from the Whitbreads that they’re no doubt not even interested enough to withhold.

So the day I move Daddy out of our childhood home, I’ve flown in alone. Lecia has a meeting in Houston that day for her insurance business, and Mother hides sobbing in the garage.

There’s a big financial argument for keeping Daddy home, of course. But the florid bedsores in his heels have begun to fester beyond what I can stand thinking about. The only day nurse we can afford is the kindly but sometimes stuporific Harold. At night Mother fails to turn Daddy often enough to keep the sores at bay.

So I arrive alone alongside Daddy’s home hospital bed. There’s the bleach from the sheets and the air tinny with iodine. Under the air
conditioner grind, his breathing is labored. Honeysuckle vines cling to the window screen, and a chameleon hangs by its claws.

My hand grasps the aluminum bar Daddy’s hand holds on to. He is clinging hard, and the bewilderment in his face tells me that all the explaining I’ve done about the move has rolled through his head like tumbleweed. I say, You’re going for a simple hip surgery, then in a few days, Lecia will ride with you to a facility where nurses can take better care of you than Mother.

Yamma?

Mama’s heart medication has been doubled, Daddy.

A dozen times I’ve been over this, but for the first time, his expression goes quizzical, his head cants.

Yamma? he says.

Mama’s not here, I say.

Yamma, he says, and a silly grin splays across his face, and he lets go the bed bar like a man relinquishing his hold on a life rope. Then he grabs my hand through the bars.

Garfield, he says. He says this word a lot. Mother and Harold take it as a reference to the orange rascal of a cartoon cat from the funnies. Daddy has an orange cat coffee mug he can’t drink out of, and a plastic figurine that nonstop bares his teeth in a snide grin.

Garfield, Daddy says.

Maybe this is the day I figure out that Daddy never gave a shit about an orange effing feline in the funnies, which he used to flip past on his way to the scores. Garfield’s the name of our own street. What dimwits we are. How often did he tell me I couldn’t leave home by saying, You’re staying right here at 4901 Garfield.

Garfield, he says. Which means Home. Safe. Stay. How little we ever wanted, the creatures in my family, and how hard we struggled in one another’s company not to get it.

Looooo, he says, which means both
hello
and
I love you
.

I love you back, I say. I love you more cause you’re bigger.

But in my mind are other sentences, which I’ve spoken to enough
licensed professionals by now that I can let them stream through me without a scalding lava burn.
I love you harder cause I need you more, you leathery old galoot. Did my absence hurt you into this? How dare you cease to daddy me so soon….

And when the ambulance driver shows up with his stretcher, he and the attendant have to pry Daddy’s large-knuckled hands off the silver bars of that bed. Daddy’s eyes lock on mine. He says one word to me, and it must meander through his skull a long time, searching through the ruined brain to find the perfect monosyllabic curse.

Bad, he says to me. They’ve taken his teeth out, and tears river down the crow’s feet of his tough Indian face. Bad bad bad.

I talk to the ambulance driver. I look through Daddy’s wallet for his social security card, which I can’t find. What I do find is my first college report card—straight A’s for the only time since grade school. Also, there’s the copy of the first poem I published at age nineteen, with the stains of many beers where it had been spread across the damp surface of many bars, a page smoothed out for men no doubt too bleary to read it.

We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We’re like totem animals in each other’s foreign cosmologies—like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I’ve turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved. Age about twelve, I’d ceased to shoot pool and scale fish, stopped tuning in to the Friday night fights after Ali and Liston, nor did I follow the Yankees with the intensity Daddy thought their due.

My very last visit when Daddy was still upright and continent and unparalyzed, he’d squired me to a New Year’s dance at the American Legion club, a place so skeevy neither Mother nor Lecia ever—to my knowledge—set shoe leather in the joint. I dressed for the occasion as I might have for Sunday school or a job interview. Daddy steered me by my elbow through the threshold onto the sloping floor of scarred sky-blue linoleum, inside the boxy paneled walls with imitation knot
holes that could—with sufficient liquor—make you feel stared at by all the veterans who’d drunk themselves into early graves in that place.

Folding chairs were drawn around small tables whose treacherous wobbles required matchbooks, and the matchbooks advertised kits you could write away for so as to finish high school and become an artist or beautician or drill press operator. The women’s room had the shocking dead-meat smell of a butcher shop and a mirror whose crack left it in the shape of Louisiana.

And since January first was Daddy’s birthday, he’d joked that the party was for him. One after another, I’d danced with the men he’d worked on oil towers with and caught bass with, guys who’d built the garage studio for my mother one blistering summer. Two elementally nicknamed Red and Blue, men monosyllabic in every way. One named Buck, one Bubba, one Sweet. Not one didn’t have a union card in his wallet, and their faces were weathered as dried fruit. Your daddy’s so proud of you, how smart you are and your writing and all. The Texas two-step we did, the cotton-eyed Joe, swing dancing I could barely keep up with.

At the end of the night, the ladies’ room sink was plugged up with puke, and two disputes had been taken outside—one over a pool game, one over Lord knows what. By the time Daddy grabbed my hand for the last dance, the floor had begun a slow tilt-a-whirl around us. His squinting bloodshot eyes stared over my shoulder as he glided me around to
The Tennessee Waltz
. We listed through the song. I don’t remember midnight.

At the truck, I yelled myself hoarse trying to get his keys away from him.

A passing cowboy said, Dang, Pete, give the girl your keys.

And Daddy said, Mind your own business before I stomp a mud-hole in your ass.

And I remember the fog we drove in, how it billowed up over the road from the bayou on either side till the road narrowed to smoke.
The biker bars I’d been in, skinny-dipping drunk in a lake miles wide, hitchhiking: Never had I felt closer to death than with that old man feeling his drunk path on and off the road shoulder through that smoky miasma.

The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the place he’s dying in, which is—in turn—a place dying in me. My life with Warren somehow excludes my daddy. The me Daddy knew doesn’t exist in Warren’s house, which is maybe why my husband didn’t come down on this mission—
down
being the operative word. Where I came from is a comedown.

Daddy’s last upright public appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him—he’d left me? I never could decide—more than a decade before.

The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away.

I
don’t drink every day, but I find myself unpredictably blotto at inopportune times.

Like the night before my thirtieth birthday: I lie fully dressed—albeit shoeless—in a charcoal business suit in the bathtub of a Silicon Valley motel, sipping whiskey from one of those minibar bottles that makes you pucker your lips into a doll’s pinhole mouth. On the shag rug, the legal pad with notes for my all day corporate presentation tomorrow holds a single x and y axis drawn into an L-shaped graph. To say I’m ill prepared understates the problem. My sole plan is to: (1) stride into the boardroom; (2) smile like a monkey as I briskly shake hands. Then I imagine a diaphanous veil falling across the rest of my presentation.

I lie in the cold bath as in a tomb. From the outer hallway comes a
ruckus that works on my brain like an eggbeater. Much of the Loyola men’s basketball team is running hither and yon, playing some game with a tennis ball. Every now and then they hurl the ball against my hollow-core door. This is not an accident.

Earlier tonight, with rabid expression and possibly some spit spray, I told the team they had to keep it down or I’d call the front desk. They froze and stared as if some bog creature had reared up from the mud. The instant I closed the door, the game resumed at full decibel level.

The rusty old clerk who came to rescue me had a dowager’s hump that kept him bent over at ninety degrees. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the ballplayers arrayed behind as he said, We’re full tonight. I can’t move your room. Then he turned on his heel and hightailed it through the gauntlet of giants back to the elevator, which two looming guys were holding open.

Against the hotel door, the tennis ball occasionally whams, shaking the door earthquakelike on its hinges. If they could bust in, they’d throw me on a bonfire and torch me, I know it.

They must sense the pitiful failure I’m mired in: turning thirty, far from home and family, making it up as I go. Worst of all, I’ve failed to publish a book, which means my ancient fantasy of being a writer has abraded off like the name on a wind-worn tombstone.

I unscrew the tiny bottle of vodka’s red lid and suck a few drops. Every asshole I know has published a book. Over six years, I’ve collected rejections for my manuscript, sometimes the occasional nice note for second place. So a sheaf of dog-eared pages curling at the edges lies on my desk like drying roadkill, though every dang poem in it has come out in some literary mag, which is—as Warren points out—not nothing.

But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving
mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go
psss psss psss
like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit.

By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens
pretentious
on page bottom.

The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation.

Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to.

Bam bam bam
. The door rattles. I holler out, You grisly fuckers! If I had a firearm, I’d hunt each of you down like the dogs you are.

Now I’ve taken up a weensy bottle of Scotch, J&B in the green bottle. What moron designed these bottles so small? And why a minibar when a maxibar is clearly what’s called for?

Today on the phone, the big-deal consultant who got me into this business said, Your having to give this presentation in my stead is a little like going to work in the hospital as a janitor and winding up performing brain surgery.

Don’t remind me, I said.

Think about it, he mused. Your whole business career has derived from a series of flukes….

While he talked, I stretched the phone cord and dexterously slipped the small fridge key into its slot. I said, Aren’t you supposed to be finding flights?

My travel agent’s going to ring the other line, he said.

He was a captain of industry, this guy. Once the thirtysomething president of my old company’s e-mail subsidiary, he’d left to consult for big bucks, promising me enough subcontracting work in ghostwriting and market research to hang out my own consulting shingle. I could double my salary while freeing up intervals for poetry.

On the phone to me, he said, You can write the next great business best seller. First there was
In Search of Excellence
, Mary Karr brings us
In Search of Incompetence
.

He was rich enough to be jovial about this, but I knew if I screwed up the presentation and lost this client’s fat retainer, I’d be dead, for without this expert’s benevolent referrals, I had zero credential.

Can you help me with my notes? I said.

But through the phone’s overseas hiss, I heard another phone start ringing, and he said, Maybe this other flight came through—

Then the dial tone went retreating across the Asian oceans, and I resisted the impulse to pound the phone receiver on the first solid surface.

Toward dawn in the hotel room, I pick up the legal pad and try to envision my solo presentation. Standing at the grease board, I’ll draw a horizontal line—an X axis—saying, This line represents your spending. It goes from spending zero on the left to shelling out shitloads of money on the right. My vertical Y axis measures returns on that money—from getting back zero at the bottom to making zillions at the top. I’m gonna tell the president of Company X and his minions that they need to spend as little as possible while making shitloads in return. The question is, how to stretch this expensive advice into a nine-hour meeting?

I never have to find out. The next morning Mr. Consultant skids into the boardroom sideways from a flight I never knew he got on. He
takes the laser pointer from my hand, and I sit sweatily at the conference table. Other than taking notes, I’m free of the babble floating over us. Free, that’s how being a poet looks to me, like freedom from the grind among pencil-necked office guys in clip-on ties.

Sitting there, I fantasize about the birthday dinner my grad school guru planned in San Francisco before I catch the red-eye back. He’ll talk about translating the great Polish Nobel dude and about the ballads of Wordsworth and about his own drunk mother whose loony-bin demise he managed to live through. He knows the botanical names of plants and how to do carpentry work. In my mind, I picture his curious, becalmed expression the way certain saffron-robed acolytes do Buddha. His very stare will rebaptize me a writer, despite my business suit.

But he doesn’t make it. (Later, I’ll find out his bloody divorce had just started.)

On the verge of missing my flight, I lug my garment bag back to the rental car and weave drunkenly through the fog to the airport, where I toss down enough cocktails to note how costly my rising tolerance is. Eventually, I call Warren from the pay phone. The phone rings and rings, and I hear my own voice on the machine, and I say, Pick up, pick up.

He listens patiently, for he is both patient and a listener. And he reminds me his book isn’t in print yet, either. It’s the work that counts. I feel my mouth slurring words as I ask him to pick me up at the airport in the morning for my birthday—the only present I want.

I thought you wanted that party we’re having, he says, with your sister coming for a week.

This party—our first—was long negotiated. He’s noting the traffic to and from the airport, the hours of writing he’ll lose. Should I offer to cancel the party in order to be picked up? When he hangs up, I feel confident that I’ll see him at the gate.

Having touched down in Boston at dawn, I wander through the airport with an inner plunging sense—no sign of Warren. When the
magic doors glide open on the empty taxi stand, I feel the regressed terror of a kid lost in the glass cubicles of a department store because her manic mother has just wandered off—maybe on purpose, maybe not. (Crazy to admit this, but true.)

How do you get past it, I ask my shrink, when you never got that sense of acceptance and security as a kid?

You’ve got to nurture yourself through those instants, he says, recognize the source of the misery as out of kilter with the stimulus. Realize you’re not lost. You’re an adult. Warren didn’t hurt you on purpose. You were perfectly capable of getting yourself home.

Nuture myself. Now, there’s an idea I can glom on to. I say, Like I could have a drink when I got home?

If that calms you, he says. One drink.

Just what I hoped he’d say.