A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (16 page)

Two weeks. Three weeks. And then we separated, figuring one-on-one was easier, surer mathematics. She wanted to go north where Bill Barnes was fly-fishing for the summer. Walking away from me on Market Street, my cousin Maize was both my inspiration and the saddest thing I knew. Hot blood in cold veins—I love her still. She took me down with her for one long, dark month. That was several years ago, but something was planted.

In the years since Maize, I have tried to see things right, but there is never a clear, clean line between what is mine and what belongs to others. In New Ulm, Texas, I spent three weeks in jail, and later—alone, dried out—I borrowed a man and his car in the Carrabassett Valley.

N
etta Cartwright believes these are the things that will bring her husband Franklin back from the dead: thick Velveeta sandwiches, fresh air, plenty of talk and music. She throws the windows open, though it is October in Boise and the smoke-filled breeze whips the lacy curtains, makes them dance in the near-cold. Netta works the radio dial the way other retired women learn to spin the Bingo basket up at St. Mark's on Thursdays—90 percent wrist, 10 percent luck. She turns up the radio's volume when something good comes in: Johnny Paycheck or “The Wabash Cannon-ball.” She taps her foot and tries to find the music's rhythm and then tries to pass it on to Franklin.

“You hear that, honey?” she yells, her foot cracking thunder, louder than the radio now.

Carlene, Netta and Franklin's eldest daughter, watches her mother and shakes her head, amazement and disgust and weariness all rolling up into one big ball. “How can you be sixty-three and not know
anything?” she asks Netta. Carlene is sorting through a bowl of butter mints, picking out the pinks and slowly eating them.

Netta is too busy to answer or to even listen. She must concentrate on the slippery rhythm, pick it up, then get it all the way down to her foot.

Just an arm's length away from the women, Franklin lies on a bed near the living room window, and in the strictest sense he isn't dead, of course, but he's close enough: low vitals, a complete loss of hair, a mouth that won't form a single word. The left side of his body is soft and slack, useless as a flat tire. Netta has been known to walk right over and smack that arm or give a half-soft karate chop to the withered leg, hoping for even the slightest reaction. She'd appreciate a blink or even a nod from Franklin—thank you—but he just lies there, silent, not even a half-light shining from his old, whiskered face.

Carlene finishes a mint and says to Netta, “There's got to be a special place in hell for you.” She moves next to her father, or someone that used to be her father, and lightly strokes his arm: his knuckles, his knobby wrist, then the big, bare root of his elbow.

“Don't get him too comfortable, now,” Netta says. “He's just about ready for his bath.”

Carlene offers to take a turn cleaning him up, but Netta, as always, says no. To be honest, she doesn't trust Carlene with people. Dogs—yes. People—no. Netta considers her granddaughter Mandy a prime example of how Carlene can take a good person and screw her up, turn her inside out. During all the time that Mandy was growing up, she chewed her fingernails until they had to be iodined and taped; she ate her own long, brown hair; she would sit in front of the TV with her knees up in front of her and suck on them like a child trying to consume herself. Later, on Mandy's small body, the scaly patches of eczema bloomed.

Carlene won't admit to being a poor mother, but Netta thinks she has gotten the message, because after Mandy, Carlene doesn't have any more children; she turns to raising Australian Blue Heelers.
They're a breed that cozies up to Carlene. They lick her face when she bends down to them. They bark and yelp for her when she crosses the yard. Her brown station wagon is scattered with dog kibble, and it doesn't even bother her; she just brushes the driver's seat clean and drives away.

When Netta comes back to the room carrying a big spaghetti pot filled with warm—bordering on hot—water, Carlene quickly steps aside like a pedestrian moving out of heavy traffic. Netta has generously added some of her Peaches and Cream bubble bath to the water, and a small eruption of sweet bubbles glides down the side of the pan and plops onto Franklin's sheet, but Franklin doesn't complain. He hasn't complained about anything in over four months, hasn't fed himself, hasn't been able to stand and take the short stroll down the hall to the bathroom, hasn't even been able to hold his own pruned-up pecker to pee since they put the catheter in.

Months ago, the doctors advised Netta to find a good nursing facility, but all their words were like Chinese to her. She brought him home from the hospital and started at the beginning with him. “Your name is Franklin. You're seventy-two years old. That's the TV the kids gave us a couple of Christmases ago. We can't get channel nine because the damn antenna's no good.”

For once, Carlene and Netta agree on something: no hospitals, no old folks' home. Carlene's suggestion is to put Franklin in the living room, right by the window so that he can see out and—she doesn't tell her mother this part—so that he can gently make his escape from Boise and what must be to him a pretty dreary world.

Carlene believes these are the things that will push her father into the next best world: absolute quiet, smoldering pine incense, warmth and coaxing and a big window through which his soul can slip away. She pulls up a folding chair, sits next to his big bald head, and whispers to him: “Look out there and let go, Pop. It's time to let go.”

The first time Netta overhears her whispering those things to Franklin she walks up and kicks Carlene's chair, would kick Carlene
in that little, skinny, two-bit butt of hers, but she can't get her leg up high enough. “Don't you dare,” she hisses at Carlene.

Carlene turns on her mother. “Well look at you, all dressed up like the damn Red Cross! Making him hang on so you won't have to be alone.”

Carlene and Netta would gladly part company. They have managed to live as adults in the same city for the past twenty-two years, sidestepping each other except for Christmas and birthdays, but in their plan to bring Franklin home they suddenly need each other. Carlene comes over and spends the days with her father. Netta takes evenings and nights.

Both women are silent as Netta pulls the sheets back and prepares to wash Franklin. It's always a shock—that first, biting look at him: a scarecrow in T-shirt and socks; a pale, bony joke gone bad. Franklin, a licensed electrician for almost forty years, used to have a bumper sticker on his white Ford truck.
Electricians don't grow old. Their wiring just goes bad
. Carlene says that for her that's almost the worst part—the blank, dragged-out look on her father's face.

“It takes time to get well,” Netta says, mostly to herself and to the walls. She looks for hope in the smallest of her husband's gestures: a hiccup, a sudden, uncontrolled blinking of the eye. She knows the stories of people who have come crashing up out of comas, big and sleepy as bears at the end of eternal winters.

She begins scrubbing Franklin's feet, starting on his soles, rubbing in much the same way as she cleans her kitchen linoleum. Carlene half expects to see her lather up a Brillo pad.

“Be a little gentle, will you?” Carlene tells her.

“He likes it,” Netta says. “He likes the stimulation. It's good for him.”

Carlene has to go out and sit in her station wagon to cool down—Netta makes her that mad. She leans her head tiredly against the driver's window. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply the earthy, tranquilizing smell of her dogs.

Netta is preparing for Halloween, which is in four days. She puts her chubby hand, with four fingers up, in front of Franklin's face. “Four days,” she says to him, loud and slowly. “One, two, three, four,” she counts, making each finger bob. She gathers brown, crinkly leaves and randomly sprinkles them like fairy dust over the living room end tables. She sets a big, uncarved pumpkin on top of the TV so that the rabbit ears stick up behind it. She rolls Franklin temporarily away from the picture window while she decorates it with packaged cobwebs, then pushes him back in place.

She is surprised at how Franklin fits in with the holiday decor. Paper-skinned and mummy-like, he lies in front of the webbed window, already fitting in, contributing his best to Halloween. Netta can see that. She can see him struggling to come back, to move, to talk again so that they can have those crazy morning conversations that make him laugh and shake his head and threaten to go see if his old girlfriend, Danielle Berry, will take him in. Netta thinks, hell, if it would make him recover any faster, she'd double-time Danielle right over to his bedside, tie her there, feed both of them mashed potatoes and the baby-soft food of recovery.

Carlene can feel Halloween out there, the air thin and solemn, but unlike Netta she just can't get the heart for it. Nothing out of the ordinary decorates her living room. Drake and Faye, her two favorite Blue Heelers, snooze at the end of the Herculon couch, though they aren't really festive in any way, except for their braided brown and orange collars perhaps. Drake's eyes are closed but they twitch, indicating—somewhere—the murky dreams of a dog.

Even though Carlene and her husband Ham have been invited to a costume party, Carlene decides that she won't be anything this year. Last year she was a Viking, and Ham hung a potato six inches off his belt and told everyone he was a dictator. This year Ham has gone down to a local playhouse and rented a King Neptune outfit. For days
he has carried his mock trident around the house, goosing Carlene with it, trying to get her in the mood.

“Can't you see I've got other things to think about?” she tells Ham, who, as Neptune, is only momentarily put off.

The fact is, she cannot get her father to let go, despite the incense she burns, despite the calming voice she uses to tell him that everything is okay here, that all of his work is finished, that he can stop holding on. She waits, of course, until Netta has left the house for the morning.

She rummages in Netta's haphazard filing drawer and finally fishes out what she's after. She carries a green vinyl packet marked Riverside Memorial Garden back to her father's bedside. She opens it to a page with a photograph of marble statuary, shows it to him, and reminds her father that everything has been taken care of. It takes Carlene a few minutes to find it on the down-to-scale map, but she finally pinpoints plot 124D, puts her finger on it, and shows her father. “Kinda on the hillside,” she tells him, “looking down over the river. Remember? It's real nice. You helped pick it out a long time ago.” Carlene hopes that this will be one more string cut for the old man who seems not her father, but only a man using her father's name.

She gets down at bed level and looks right into his face, but it's like peering into a cavern. He looks back at her with the blank, rheumy eyes of sheep or cows, and suddenly she wants it done, she wants to take a kitchen towel and shoo his soul right out the window. “Go on. Bye-bye. Vamoose.” She imagines a white steamy haze scooting out the window, then rising higher and higher above the yard, a gauzy hand waving back at her. She knows that absolute relief could come for her in a moment that quick.

Midmorning, Carlene feeds her father applesauce, which is pure torture for her—feeding a man she once thought put the stars in the sky. He would lead her out into the darkness when she was young and they would lean against the house and look up. Holding his cigarette, he would extend his arm up into the blackness until the faraway,
orangy end of his Viceroy seemed to burn a star into place. “There. Another one for you,” he would say, a sudden twinkling appearing way out there, and even when she was older—a woman lying in Ham's arms, a mother fixing endless baby bottles—the stars, in some sense, were still from her father.

When Netta arrives home for lunch, she wrinkles up her nose, wants to know what that smell is. “Kinda like Pine Sol,” she says, looking behind the couch, then lifting the throw pillows.

“It's nothing, Mom. Nothing,” Carlene says, knowing that Netta in no way could understand how pine eases and lifts a person from this life.

Netta has enrolled in a morning crafts class at the Y, and Carlene asks her how it was.

“I left at the break,” she tells Carlene. “Making grapes out of colored pipe cleaners is not a craft. Here,” she says, bends and takes some books from her tote bag. “This is what I did.”

She has checked books out of the library.
The All New Book of Muscle Recovery. Better in 30 Days. The Home Care Manual
. The lending period is three weeks, and Netta intends to memorize it all.

Carlene can feel the determined heat rising off her mother. She notices a thin line of perspiration on Netta's upper lip. Under the sleeves of her mother's cotton dress, there are the delicate beginnings of sweat rings. If Netta were not so dominating and petty, Carlene believes, she could feel halfway sorry for her.