‘Hello, daughter!’ Jack said, in his usual affectionate but ironic tone. She was his only daughter – set against his five sons (if you counted Louise’s boys and his son with Colette, and he did). Right now, he loved having a daughter so much, he used the word with gusto. The boys were so much less…well, satisfying. He found their lack of achievement humiliating, and their overachievement threatening. A daughter could be flirted with, and flirting was Jack’s hobby.
‘Yes, yes,’ he was saying to Elisabeth. ‘No, the doctor said I’m plant now.’
‘What? I did not. I said I’m fine now. Why would I say I was a plant?’
‘No, it was not another heart attack, it was another stroke. A mini-stroke. A micro-mini. An episode is what he actually called it. Ep. I. Sode. Like The Simpsons. Don’t worry.’
The sheer effort of speaking clearly was making him sweat, making his chest hurt, and also there was a strange new sensation in his left buttock. Not quite pain, but distracting. Irritating!
‘No, the hospital was not a pleasant place. What? No, I checked myself out yesterday. Called a taxi.’
‘What?’ The novelty of a daughter was starting to wear off again. The boys were never this nosey. In fact, it was quite appealing, the way they mostly just ignored him.
‘Your mother is fine.’
‘Fine, I said! Aren’t you, Milly?’
‘Oh, she’s not here now. Creepy how she just disappears.’
‘Yes, yes. We are both taking all the right pills.’
‘Yes, we did. Thank you very much, daughter. Clever idea, having the days of the week on each little pill compartment.’
‘Yeah, yeah. No, I am not being sarcastic. I haven’t thrown it away! Going to start using it next week.’
Who did she think she was, Florence friggin Nightingale? Then, because this kind of thinking always led to remorse:
‘Listen, honey, why don’t you come for dinner soon? Bring the kids. Bring your grandkids! Tell your brothers. Tell everyone, I’ll barbecue.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Too soon! The floors needed to be mopped and the bathroom fumigated. ‘Tomorrow’s not good. Can you come later in the week? Friday maybe?’
‘Because I’m busy tomorrow, that’s why.’
‘Busy doing stuff.’
‘Stuff, I said! You think you’re the only one with a life? I have a life, okay?’
‘No. Not just solitaire on the computer. Yeah. Friday it is, then. Goodbye, Elisabeth. Goodbye! Goodbye!’
He hung up with a mixture of anxiety and irritation and something else he could never put a name to, but made his throat feel funny. Damn her! Just his luck to have a conscientious daughter. Strange how he was afraid of his kids finding his house in a mess. When did that switch round? But then they had the power to pull the plug. No one ever told him how just plain humiliating it was when you got near death. Just when you could least deal with it, there it was, slap bang on your doorstep. Like a continual day of being caught shoplifting condoms, of losing erections, of wet farting on a first date. No two ways about it, getting this old was basically one helluva hangover without the memory of a fabulous night before. His incompetent scatterbrained daughter telling him what to do was the final blow.
He was jealous of his neighbour and old friend Ernie, who was the same age. None of his kids gave a damn. And his wife, Bernice, still cooked great dinners every damn night. And still drove. Probably still gave him blow jobs. He bet she never asked Ernie what day it was, or demanded he buy Tena Pull Ups at Walmart, that cavernous hell. But then he remembered a conversation from last week, or last year – it was hard to tell – and Ernie had said, ‘You always think my marriage is perfect. That we never fight. Are you insane?’
‘Elisabeth! Get down from that table right now!’ Milly suddenly barked to her four-year-old daughter, who for a moment was visible, in those soft pink Oshkosh dungarees she’d loved so much about sixty years ago. Then, because her shout had dispelled the child, Milly smiled goofily, embarrassed.
‘Jack? Jack?’ Hoping he hadn’t heard her crazy shout. ‘Good,’ she said aloud to the empty room. He must be in his office still. ‘That man is so deaf!’ And then she giggled, because what had just happened struck her as hilarious. She made herself laugh again! What excellent company she was. She giggled on and off for a good five minutes, because even the fact of her laughter struck her as funny now. The way it hiccupped a bit, just like her grandmother’s.
No two ways about it: Milly was a bit dippy. Even she knew it. There’d been no dramatic dip into dippyness, no particular day or event that led her family to frown and say: Oh no! Milly is off her head! But here it was now, craziness as solid a part of herself as her cocked left eyebrow and her yellowing toenails. Her mind was like a weather report. Cloudy intervals, with occasional clear warm afternoons. Now and then green clouds with polar bears riding them.
Still, the bigger truth was that, crippled or not, senile or not, Milly remained the guardian of this house. Punctual and reliable in the extreme. Morning and night: unlocking and locking doors, opening and closing each venetian blind. The bed sheets were only changed by her, and only she knew when it was time to buy more toilet paper. She was pretty certain they had never run out of milk. She’d been the guardian of this house for over fifty years. It had been a new house then, so if the house had a consciousness (and in her opinion it did), it belonged utterly to Milly. No other mistress haunting the corridors. It would obey no other queen. If you could marry houses, Milly would have divorced Jack years ago.
Jack turned on his computer and began a game of solitaire. Milly walked down the long hall to the bathroom. A journey of seven minutes, but her bowels were her friend, so actual toilet time was a fraction of her husband’s. Then she returned to her chair in the living room. A three-point turn in order to drop her bottom on the seat. Her kids wanted her to get a wheelchair. What did they know? In this respect, they were the enemy and she ignored them. Heaven’s sake, it was only those old broken bones. She spent the rest of the afternoon keeping Jack on her radar by noise and intuition. Garage? Bathroom? In some floozy’s kitchen drinking gin? No, no, that had only been a short phase, long gone. Jack was a faithful man, a good man, with a bit of mid-life nonsense on his CV. Now…had he eaten his fruit, taken his vitamins, put on clean socks?
The dogs were also on her radar – she kept glancing down to the places where they used to sleep, and where their food dishes had been. She did this in the same reflex way she’d checked her babies were breathing, and later, that they were still in the yard, or still in their rooms. For years after the youngest left home, she’d kept waking at night and panicking, till she remembered their new addresses and phone numbers safely stored in her address book. A radar out of range of its objects, she couldn’t stop reaching out for her children in a visceral way, every minute of the day as if one of her organs – her heart? her thorax? – had developed searching tendrils. Darn those kids! They’d better be wearing sun cream today, look at that sun!
Milly kept her family safe. That was her job, and she could not stop doing it for love or money. This memory problem was a mere hiccup, an annoying blip. Like her vision dimming, but never badly enough to incapacitate. Like the way her left leg had slowly ceased to obey, but still let her get around on her own. She said no to taking her own limitations seriously. That way lay defeat, and she certainly didn’t want pity. No, no, no. She was still needed, so tethered herself relentlessly to her charges. Or charge.
‘Jack!’
‘Jack!’
‘Jack!’
‘What is it?’ Angrily. The computer was winning.
‘I have four thirty. What do you make it?’
‘Jesus, Milly.’
‘I said, I have…’
‘Four thirty. Four thirty, okay!’
‘It’s four thirty already?’
The days flew by so quickly, so painlessly. She really didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Getting old was a breeze. After checking her watch once more, and telling herself she’d rise in thirty minutes to close the blinds, she sat in her window seat and re-entered her dreams. And what did she dream about for the next half hour? It was a patchwork of things around her and things that had happened – the gulls crying, the smell of eucalyptus, the classical FM radio music, all the birthday parties she’d ever given for her children, the cupcakes she’d made for PTA sales, the Halloween costumes she’d sewed, the trips to San Francisco for the sales, the way chocolate milkshakes tasted at Courthouse Creamery, the way the waitress used to give them the silver shaker with the remainder of the shake to pour out themselves. The coffees another waitress used to bring herself and Harold, even though they hated coffee. The splinters in her bottom from the deck that scary morning, with Jeff looming over her and Mister Rogers on the television. The taste of Jack’s skin after a sail. (A small smile at this.) Harold’s nose in profile, like a Roman. Her hand briefly in his, in the dark theatre. Then up popped that favourite pair of cream gloves she’d worn to church all the time, and where had the left one gone? Under a pew? And her wedding ring too, where had that got to? Thick gold band, with rubies inset. Oh, her throat swelled, remembering these lost loved items. Her children, her babies – she missed them too. Darling Charlie sliced into her chest, cold in his crib with the decals of Bambi. Then she kissed his forehead, bowed away from him and thought about the way her children were all so different. Like Jack, she included Louise’s boys as her own children, and as an afterthought, darn Colette’s son too. She spent whole minutes just contemplating their very different hair colours. A sudden memory of Sam in his senior prom suit, face freshly scrubbed with dabs of Clearasil on his forehead and nose. Oh, how those flesh-tinted dabs had torn at her! And that hat she’d bought Elisabeth once, to wear to Easter Sunday Mass. White straw, and it had gone so well with her pink seersucker dress, hadn’t she been a picture? Her heart swelled with pride now. Satisfaction for a day well executed. And wasn’t that exactly how it had been, for all those years? Her moody children, her wayward husband – just normal people, all of them – with her on the podium waving a baton, conducting their lives into some semblance of order and safety and…attractive appearance. Oh, the thrill on the rare days when they all seemed to obey!
Even now, in her daydreams, she wanted to photograph those moments. To run and find her camera, but by the time she was ready the moment had passed. The ice cream had melted, the arguing had recommenced, the cloud moved over the sun.
