"How"s it going?"
"Can"t complain."
"Okay. Good. Everything good with Beate?" What did I think? She would rob him and he would know and report it to me, in due time? She would, at not quite five feet tall and as big around, and sixty-five if she was a day, hurt him or seduce him?
"It"s okay." Sometimes he would tell me that Beate listened to the radio too loud or used too much ammonia on the kitchen floor or he"d found the lamb a little tough, and I would mention these things to her very delicately and she"d say, "I take care of it." No complaint was ever repeated. Andy referred to her as Mother Beate and he made a lot of jokes about the number of old men she had buried and their grateful children. ("That"s how she got that Porsche and that house in Cap-Ferrat," he said. "G.o.d bless her.") After about a year with Beate: "Alvin," I said.
"Alison. Alibaloo."
"Dad? Are you all right?"
"Never better. Bea-how am I?"
I heard Beate talking in the background and my father chuckled and he said, "There you go. I"m-how old am I, Bea?-there you go, I"m eighty-eight and holding my own. No pun intended."
Beate got on the phone and told me that her own mother was dying in Poland and she had to fly home.
"Just for a week. I be back for Mr. Lovald. I go on a Sat.u.r.day, I be back on a Sunday."
I asked if Beate had any thoughts about who would keep my father company, make his meals, drive him on his errands, do his laundry. "Forget the laundry," I said. "It can pile up for a week. Who will do the other things," I asked Beate, and there was a long, flat Polish silence.
"Fine," I said. "I"ll be there Sat.u.r.day and we can do the ... handoff."
Beate understood well enough what I meant and her voice brightened as we went back to her plans, which included dry-cleaning her raincoat, buying a pair of good boots, laying in a supply of frozen lamb chops and clean boxers for my father for a week, and bringing peanut b.u.t.ter to Ruda Slaska.
"Janek will take me to airport," she said. "Newark."
My cab pulled up in front of the house at four o"clock. Beate showed me the eggs, the sliced American cheese, the rye bread, and the fourteen frozen lamb chops. She handed me the keys. She gestured toward my parents" bedroom.
"He naps," she said. "I see him Sunday. Seven days." She held up seven fingers and then she picked up her suitcase and waved good-bye. As she stepped onto the porch, a car appeared, and my guess was that her cousin had parked up the street and was just waiting for my cab to leave.
Beate was out the door, and it would be just me and Alvin for the next seven days, unless I killed him, in which case I would spend at least half the week in jail. The house looked, somehow, more like my childhood home than it had for the last twenty years. Beate had found my mother"s old spring slipcovers and covered the cigar-burned navy couch with pink and yellow chintz and she"d even found the yellow chintz pillows and the yellow-and-white-striped slipcover that went on my father"s armchair. It was all aggressively and hopelessly cheerful, and I expected my mother to walk out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a clean ap.r.o.n, and saying either, "Who wants quiche?" which was a good day or, "There"s no reason to upset him," which was not.
"Bea? Bea?" My father was yelling, pretty loudly.
I opened the door a crack. I had no wish to be in my parents" bedroom with my father, where he still slept on his side of the bed and where there was still, on my mother"s nightstand, a box of tissues and a paperback.
"It"s me, Dad. It"s Alison. Beate"ll be back in a week. I"m here in the meantime."
"What?" he said and he sat up, patting his nightstand all over for his gla.s.ses, which were lying on the floor. I handed him his gla.s.ses.
"Thank you. You"re a good kid," he said.
His hair was going in four different directions and there were little scabs on his chest and the backs of his hands. He scratched a scab until it bled and he pressed his bleeding wrist against the sheet.
"Where"s Bea?"
"She"s gone to see her mother. In Poland. Her mother"s not well," I said, and I was trying not to yell because I knew that yelling did not help people understand you better.
"That"s a shame," he said. "My mother died when I was nineteen and my father, I don"t think he got over it. He became an old man overnight. You know what I mean?" I did know what he meant, of course, but since I had never heard my father mention his mother or his father or the emotional state of any living being, I was speechless.
"An old man overnight, Alison," he said.
"I know what you mean," I said. "You want some lunch?"
I made two grilled cheese sandwiches and I wondered whether I should offer my father a beer, since on one hand, I had no idea who he was and in his altered state, alcohol might be bad for him, and on the other hand, what the h.e.l.l. My father and I had our sandwiches. ("Burn it," he said. "That"s what they used to say in the diner. Put a farmer on the raft and burn it." "What diner?" I said, and my father said, not unkindly, "Well, you"re no Julia Child.") And we drank our beers.
"Salud, amor, y dinero," he said and clinked my bottle. "Is everybody okay?"
"Sure," I said. I didn"t know who everybody was. He called Andy Fatso, he called Michael The Faigele, he called Jay Babe, the Blue Ox, and my mother had been dead for two years.
"I"ll take a grilled cheese sandwich," he said.
"Another? Okay." Was this good? It could be good, an appet.i.te for life or something like that, or it could be that he didn"t know if he"d eaten or not.
"Can"t I get some lunch?" he said, and I made the sandwich, which he nibbled and then he said, "I"m gonna take a little nap." He stood up and waited for me to stand up.
I walked him to the bedroom and to his bed and he used my arm to swing himself into bed.
"Good kid," he said, patting my face.
I called Jay and he said, "You are too Julia Child," and we exchanged I love yous and he said, "Hurry home," and I said I would.
I called my brother and told him that he might not want to miss the Second Coming of Alvin Lowald, in which our father had been s.n.a.t.c.hed by pod people who"d sent us a nice old man who thanked me and called me a good kid.
"Is this permanent?" Andy asked.
"I don"t know. Maybe he"ll be back to normal tomorrow."
"Great. Back to the crypt. Does it seem like he"s dying-is this pre-death niceness?"
I swore to him that our father did not seem to be dying, that he had done a good job on one and a half grilled cheese sandwiches and all of a Heineken and was now snoring loudly in his bed. Andy swore back that he would get on the redeye Thursday night, as soon as they were done casting a police drama in which none of the criminals or women could be more than five feet five, which was the height of this particular TV detective.
"Does he know you?" Andy said.
"I don"t know. He looks glad to see me, so no. But he called me Alison, so yes."
"See you Friday, unless he completely recovers, in which case you won"t see me at all."
"You better get me those earrings," I said, and we hung up. I read my father"s magazines until I fell asleep.
In my dream, it is pouring rain and I am driving our old Dodge Dart. My father"s standing patiently on the steps of the old library, without a coat or an umbrella. He gets into the car and I have to help him with his seat belt. He clasps his wet hands in his lap. I want to drive him to his new apartment in the a.s.sisted living place, but he doesn"t know the address and neither do I.
I"ll just pop out here for directions, Daddy, I say, hoping that the two women I see standing under the green awning of a pretty restaurant will be knowledgeable and helpful and guide us to the a.s.sisted living place. They"re not and they don"t. One of the women says, Is that your father in the car? And I say, yes, that"s why we"re looking for his apartment, and she says she certainly never drove her father all over kingdom come in a G.o.dd.a.m.ned monsoon without even an address, and the other one says, What a harebrained scheme, and they sound, together, exactly like my father, as I"ve known him. I get back into the car and my father looks at me with hope and just a little anxiety.
Is everybody okay? he says.
Yes, we are, I say, and I just start driving in the pouring rain, hoping that one of us will see something familiar.
My father yelled, "Bea, Bea," and I woke up and ran down the hall. I turned on the overhead light and handed my father his gla.s.ses as I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Oh," he said, and he clutched my hand. Any fool could see that he knew it was me. "You"re here."
"I"m here. You probably had a bad dream," I said.
"Could be." He"d already lost interest. "That"s a pretty necklace," he said. "Was it your mother"s?"
"No. I don"t have any of Mom"s jewelry."
"That"s a shame," he said. "I would think you"d have kept a few of her things, to remind you."
I nodded.
"Well, we were a lucky family," he said. "All around us those years, kids were doing drugs, getting in trouble. People were divorcing, right and left. I always used to say, you know, at parties or things, "This is my original wife." We were lucky."
I nodded again and took such a deep breath I felt my ribs separating from my sternum.
My father lay back down and I patted his hand. I smoothed the sheet.
"I"m going to turn out the light. I"ll see you in the morning."
I got to the door and turned off the light.
My father said, "Is everybody okay?"
PERMAFROST.
Terrible is terrible, Frances thought. There"s no comparing one bad thing to another. Whatever it is-hands blown off in Angolan minefields, children in Chern.o.byl with tumors like softb.a.l.l.s, a car accident right around the corner-there"s no measuring suffering. Mrs. Shenker disagreed. At night, while her daughter, Beth, was knocked out by morphine, Mrs. Shenker sat in the solarium, the waiting room for the adolescent-medicine unit. She sat back in a recliner and read aloud from her stack of printouts about the flesh-eating bacteria that had attacked Beth nine days ago.
"Listen to this one," she said to Frances. "And hold on to your hat. "I was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis after a vacation in the Bahamas. We still don"t know what caused it. Even though I"ve had approximately thirty-four operations and three skin grafts on my legs and groin and continue to have some trouble with my lungs and kidneys, I consider myself lucky. My wife and I have run into some financial difficulties and I am unable to drive but we count our blessings every day." Can you f.u.c.king believe this? Well, you probably can-you"re a social worker."
Frances could believe it. Frances"s father raised Frances and her sister, Sherri, on stories of polar expeditions that began with terrible errors in judgment and ended with men weeping over frozen corpses, with people suffering horribly and still thanking G.o.d for not having killed them outright when they got on the ship. When Sherri was eighteen and Frances was eleven, Sherri said, "I want to experience Jesus" love and I want to help other young people know that they are not doomed." "Doomed to what?" Mr. Cairn had said, but he said it to the front hall because Sherri had already run out the door, and it was no different, really, than a girl going off to be a Deadhead or driving to Los Angeles with some bada.s.s to become a p.o.r.n star. When people in the neighborhood asked where Sherri was, Mr. Cairn said, "We lost her," and n.o.body pressed him and they certainly didn"t know he meant she"d gone to join the Exodus Ministry in Indianapolis. Sherri sent a Christmas card every year, and other than that, it was just Frances and her father, the storyteller.
S.S. TERRA NOVA.
"This one"s a day brightener," Mrs. Shenker said. "This guy"s an amputee himself, and a world-cla.s.s athlete ..." Mrs. Shenker skimmed ahead a few lines. "Well, not a world-cla.s.s athlete, clearly. But athletic, and he"s invented these special responsive feet that give energy back to the leg, so you don"t just walk around, clump, clump, clump, and there"s a special suction cup so the whole leg just goes on-" She makes a sharp, sucking sound.
Mr. Shenker stood up. "I"m going to take a little walk," he said. Mrs. Shenker and Frances saw him through the gla.s.s block wall of the solarium, chatting with Theresa the charge nurse and, like magic, two more nurses showed up and they pa.s.sed a box of doughnuts around and Theresa disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, carrying real coffee cups and giving one to Mr. Shenker. Mrs. Shenker had the solarium and the doctors and Mr. Shenker had the nurses. Frances had b.u.mped into him a couple of times when he was walking out of an empty exam room, straightening his tie, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a nurse come out and lock the door behind her. The nurses looked transformed; they looked as if they had been handed something immensely valuable and fragile, whose care could not be entrusted to ordinary women. Mr. Shenker looked as he always did, handsome and doomed.
Frances said to Mrs. Shenker, "I have a few patients to check on. Do you want to sit with Beth?"
"Isn"t she napping?"
Frances admitted that Beth probably was napping. (Although napping was not the right word; Beth Shenker was on enough methadone to anesthetize a three-hundred-pound man and the only thing that woke her for the first eight days was a gnawing pain of the kind you get with pancreatic cancer. On the bright side, while almost no one survives pancreatic cancer, Frances thought that Beth Shenker, like most necrotizing-fasciitis victims, would survive into old age.) Mrs. Shenker said, "All right, it"s almost time for Judge Judy. I"ll go watch that with Beth. Tell Mr. Shenker where I am, when you see him."
Beth was dreaming. She was five, jumping up and down on her new big-girl bed in the middle of the night, clean sheets under her soft, pretty feet, the cool air tickling her soles as she jumped higher and higher, and in the dream, her little feet lit up the dark room like fireflies.
Lorraine Shenker smoothed Beth"s sheet over the metal hoop that protected her legs and straightened out Beth"s IV line and kept her eyes on Judge Judy, who was looking over her bifocals to tell a fat nineteen-year-old African American mother of twins that she deserved to lose custody of her children. The way Judge Judy waved her hand dismissively and then slipped off the bifocals to award damages to the girl"s attractive, well-dressed brother, whose car the young mother had totaled while he looked after those twins, was wonderful. It would be nice if there were a Dr. Judy, handing down diagnoses and reversing the decisions of other, dumber doctors. Dr. Judy would have taken one look at Beth and said, firmly, This young lady is not going to have a gross and permanent disability. Case dismissed.
Frances walked past Beth"s room, reading over Beth"s chart, and by the time she got to the nurses" desk, Nathan Silverman was taking the cruller she wanted. Nathan Silverman was Beth"s surgeon, and he"d done a great job and he told everyone he"d done a great job, and Frances thought, Narcissistic grandiosity with excellent fine-motor skills, and thinking that made her smile warmly whenever she ran into him.
Dr. Silverman smiled back, yellow pieces of cruller flying everywhere, and Frances said, "Hey, Dr. Silverman," and put her hand on her second choice, a chocolate doughnut. Her fingers sank deep into the chocolate icing. Dr. Silverman brushed the crumbs from his tie and stretched his arms over his head. Finally, he said, "Is Maria Lopez around?"
Frances said, "I"m not sure. Maybe it"s her break," and she picked up a napkin with her free hand.
She didn"t say, If you get a move on, you can probably catch up with Maria Lopez when she comes out of Exam Room #2, right after Mr. Shenker.
"I just thought Maria might be chatting with Beth," Dr. Silver-man said. "You know, cheering her up."
"Could be," Frances said.
Maria Lopez was the pinup girl of the adolescent-medicine unit. She liked to slip off her white clogs and ma.s.sage her lovely calves at the end of her shift and give everyone a good look at her rhinestone-studded toe ring.
What kind of grown woman wears a toe ring? Frances thought.
Dr. Silverman said only, "Let"s get Beth thinking about recovery. She"s just a kid, Frances."
Frances thought about Beth"s recovery all the time. Beth was thirteen, and although she could wear long sleeves to hide the river of scars that would always run up her right forearm and she could wear turtlenecks to hide the thick red web spread across her collarbone, she would always have a stump at the end of her left leg, and if Frances Cairn had had to contemplate all that at thirteen, she"s pretty sure she would have flipped open her laptop as soon as she was conscious and Googled the most effective form of suicide.
S.S. ENDURANCE.
Dear Beth, I hope your recovery is continuing to progress. As I hope you know, everyone at the hospital was impressed with your fort.i.tude.
Frances crossed out "fort.i.tude" and wrote "strength of character" and went back to "fort.i.tude," which sounded sort of magnificent, even if Beth was unlikely to know what fort.i.tude meant. Frances had never seen Beth read anything. Frances was with her every day for almost a month, holding her hands while Beth screamed as her arms and legs were debrided and bringing endless cups of juice and endless bags of ice chips. Frances watched Beth come out of two comas, and each time, she was the person who comforted Beth after Mrs. Shenker and Dr. Silverman had to tell Beth what day it was and how long her coma had lasted and then finally told Beth that she had only one foot. Frances did everything she could to bond with Beth and the Shenker family; at Beth"s discharge, she walked the Shenkers to the lobby, she gave Beth a care package from the staff (lip balm and Lifesavers, a photo of Beth and the floor staff, a pink T-shirt that said NO LIMITS!, and a little stuffed penguin with a red-and-white Red Cross scarf around its neck). Between the multiple surgeries and the painkillers and the life ahead, Beth was hardly speaking when she left, and when Frances promised to visit Beth at home, Beth nodded, with her eyes closed, and the Shenkers drove off.
Dear Beth, I"ve been meaning to visit for the past three weeks but things have been really hectic at the hospital. Remember your old room 13a, the nicest private room? A new patient is in there. T-- has two broken legs-nothing compared to you, I know-and sadly, his father is facing charges for having thrown him off the roof of their apartment building. T--s mother doesn"t speak English and we have not yet found an Eritrean interpreter but Dr. Silverman-I know you remember him-seems to think that if I act out each of his phrases carefully, T--s mother will understand what"s going on....
Frances"s handwriting hadn"t changed since the sixth grade. It was the round, hopeful handwriting of girls who wrote things like: So glad we sat together in Econ! You rock. Let"s B BFF. You are so awesome. Don"t ever stop being who U R! over the pictures of CLa.s.s CUT-UPS and the YOUTH EFFECTIVENESS SEMINAR; things that she, Frances, had never actually written to anyone. Frances"s friends were the disfigured and the disabled, one way or another, and Beth Shenker would have been one of the pretty, giggling girls who looked right through them as they limped and staggered down the hall.
Dear Beth, I"ve spoken to your parents several times and told them of my plan to visit you. They couldn"t care less, so I am coming this Sat.u.r.day morning, with cider and doughnuts. Just like old times ...
Kentucky Fried Chicken. ("Terrible stuff," Mr. Cairn said. "Awful," Frances said, and she pa.s.sed the cole slaw and the biscuits they loved, a triple order every time, and the creamed spinach. It was a relief to eat hot food that neither of them had to cook, and they had done this every Friday night since Frances moved out to go to social-work school.) "I"m raking tomorrow," Mr. Cairn said. "Want to help out your old man?"
"I can"t. I"m following up with a patient. The girl who contracted necrotizing fasciitis."
Mr. Cairn loved to hear about the dreadful things that befell Frances"s people and to hear about the things that she did to help them bear their various crosses. He might have gone into social work himself, instead of hardware, if anyone had encouraged him. Mr. Cairn shook his head sympathetically. "I can"t imagine." He finished his second biscuit. "The one with one foot and the father who"s a ladies" man?" and Frances nodded. One night, instead of going back to her apartment after work, she"d driven over to watch Law & Order with her father, and she told him all about flesh-eating bacteria and the Shenkers.
"Is this an all-day visit?" Mr. Cairn said. "Because I don"t like the sound of this household."
"I won"t be there for more than an hour."