Authors: Jill McCorkle
“Sounds like me,” Sid said that night when they were lying
there in the dark. “I’ll follow you anywhere.”
Now, as Sid dozes
, she goes and pulls out the envelope of information about family intervention. She never should have told Sally that she had concerns, never should have mentioned that there were times when she watched Sid pull out of the driveway only to catch herself imagining that this could be the last time she ever saw him.
“Why do you think that?” Sally asked, suddenly attentive and leaning forward in her chair. Up until that minute, Marilyn had felt invisible while Sally rattled on and on about drapes and chairs and her book group and Rusty’s accolades. “Was he visibly drunk? Why do you let him drive when he’s that way?”
“He’s never visibly drunk,” Marilyn said then, knowing that she had made a terrible mistake. They were at the mall, one of those forced outings that Sally had read was important. Probably an article Rusty read first called something like: “Spend Time with Your Parents So You Won’t Feel Guilty When You Slap Them in a Urine-Smelling Old Folks’ Home.” Rusty’s parents are already in such a place; they share a room and eat three meals on room trays while they watch television all day. Rusty says they’re ecstatic. They have so much to tell that they are living for the next time Rusty and Sally and the kids come to visit.
“I pray to God I never have to rely on such,” Sid said when she relayed this bit of conversation. She didn’t tell him the other
parts of the conversation at the mall, how even when she tried to turn the topic to shoes and how it seemed to her that either shoes had gotten smaller or girls had gotten bigger (nine was the average size for most of her willowy eighth-grade girls), Sally bit into the subject like a pit bull.
“How much does he drink in a day?” Sally asked. “You must know. I mean
you
are the one who takes out the garbage and does the shopping.”
“He helps me.”
“A fifth?”
“Sid loves to go to the Harris Teeter. They have a book section and everything.”
“Rusty has seen this coming for years.” Sally leaned forward and gripped Marilyn’s arm. Sally’s hands were perfectly manicured with pale pink nails and a great big diamond. “He asked me if Dad had a problem before we ever got married.” She gripped tighter. “Do you know that? That’s a dozen years.”
“I wonder if the Oriental folks have caused this change in the shoe sizes?” Marilyn pulled away and glanced over at Lady Foot Locker as if to make a point. She knows that “Oriental” is not the thing to say. She knows to say “Asian,” and though Sally thinks that she and Rusty are the ones who teach her all of these things, the truth is that she learned it all from her students. She knew to say Hispanic and then Latino, probably before Rusty did, because she sometimes watches the MTV channel so that she’s up on
what is happening in the world and thus in the lives of children at the junior high. Shocking things, yes, but also important. Sid has always believed that it is better to be educated even if what is true makes you uncomfortable or depressed. Truth is, she can understand why some of these youngsters want to say motherfucker this and that all the time. Where
are
their mommas after all; and where are their daddies? Rusty needs to watch MTV. He needs to watch that and
Survivor
and all the other reality shows. He’s got children, and unless he completely rubs off on them, they will be normal enough to want to know what’s happening out there in the world.
“Asian,” Sally whispered. “You really need to just throw out that word
Oriental
unless you’re talking about lamps and carpets. I know what you’re doing, too.”
“What about
queer
? I hear that word is okay again.”
“You have to deal with Dad’s problem,” Sally said.
“I hear that even the homosapiens use that word, but it might be the kind of thing that only one who is a member can use, kind of like —”
“Will you stop it?” Sally interrupted and banged her hand on the table.
“Like the
n
word,” Marilyn said. “The black children in my class used it but it would have been terrible for somebody else to.”
Sally didn’t even enunciate “African American” the way she usually does. “This doesn’t work anymore!” Sally’s face reddened,
her voice a harsh whisper. “So cut the Gracie Allen routine.”
“I loved Gracie, so did Sid. What a woman.” Marilyn rummaged her purse for a tissue or a stick of gum, anything so as not to have to look at Sally. Sally looks so much like Sid they could be in a genetics textbook: those pouty lips and hard blue eyes, prominent cheekbones and dark curly hair. Sid always told people his mother was a Cherokee and his father a Jew, which made him a Cherojew, which Marilyn said sounded like TheraFlu, which they both like even when they don’t have colds, so he went with Jewokee instead. Marilyn’s ancestors were all Irish so she and Sid called their children the Jewokirish. Sid said that the only thing that could save the world would be when everybody was so mixed up with this blood and that that nobody could pronounce the resulting tribe name. It would have to be a symbol like the name of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, which was something she had just learned and had to explain to Sid. She doubts that Sally and Rusty even know who Prince is, or Nelly for that matter. Nelly is the reason all the kids are wearing Band-Aids on their faces, which is great for those just learning to shave.
“Remember that whole routine Dad and I made up about ancestry?” Marilyn asked. She was able to look up now, Sally’s hands squeezing her own, Rusty’s hands on her shoulders. If she had had an ounce of energy left in her body, she would have run into Lord and Taylor and gotten lost in the mirrored cosmetic section.
“The fact that you brought all this up is a cry for help whether
you admit it or not,” Sally said. “And we are here, Mother. We are here for you.”
She wanted to ask why “Mother” —what happened to Mom and Mama and Mommy —but she couldn’t say a word.
There are some nights when Sid is dozing there that she feels frightened. She puts her hand on his chest to feel his heart. She puts her cheek close to his mouth to feel the breath. She did the same to Sally and Tom when they were children, especially with Tom, who came first. She was up and down all night long in those first weeks making sure that he was breathing, still amazed that this perfect little creature belonged to them. Sometimes Sid would wake and do it for her, even though his work as a grocery distributor in those days caused him to get up at five a.m. The times he went to check, he would return to their tiny bedroom and lunge toward her with a perfect Dr. Frankenstein imitation: “He’s alive!” followed by maniacal laughter. In those days she joined him for a drink just as the sun was setting. It was their favorite time of day and they both always resisted the need to flip on a light and return to life. The ritual continued for years and does to this day. When the children were older they would make jokes about their parents, who were always “in the dark,” and yet those pauses, the punctuation marks of a marriage, could tell their whole history spoken and unspoken.
. . .
The literature says
that an intervention is the most loving and powerful thing a loved one can do. That some family members might be apprehensive. Tom was apprehensive at first but he always has been; Tom is the noncombative child. He’s an orthopedist living in Denver. Skiing is great for his health and his business. And his love life. He met the new wife when she fractured her ankle. Her marriage was already fractured, his broken, much to the disappointment of Marilyn and Sid, who found the first wife to be the most loving and open-minded of the whole bunch. The new wife, Sid says, is too young to have any opinions you give a damn about. In private they call her Snow Bunny.
Tom was apprehensive until the night he called after the hour she had told everyone was acceptable. “Don’t call after nine unless it’s an emergency,” she had told them. “We like to watch our shows without interruption.” But that night, while Sid dozed and the made-for-TV movie she had looked forward to ended up (as her students would say) sucking, she went to run a deep hot bath, and that’s where she was, incapable of getting to the phone fast enough.
“Let the machine get it, honey,” she called as she dashed with just a towel wrapped around her dripping body, but she wasn’t fast enough. She could hear the slur in Sid’s speech. He could not say
slalom
to save his soul, and instead of letting the moment pass, he kept trying and trying, “What the shit is wrong with my tongue, Tom? Did I have a goddamn stroke? Sllllmmmm —sla, sla —”
Marilyn ran and picked up the extension. “Honey, Daddy has taken some decongestants, bless his heart, full of a terrible cold. Go on back to sleep now, Sid, I’ve got it.”
“I haven’t got a goddamned cold. Your mother’s a kook!” He laughed and waved to where she stood in the kitchen, a puddle of suds and water at her feet. “She’s a good-looking naked kook. I see her bony ass right now.”
“Hang up, Tommy,” she said. “I’ll call you right back from the other phone. Daddy is right in the middle of his program.”
“Yeah right,” Tom said.
By the time she got Sid settled down, dried herself off and put on her robe, Tom’s line was busy, and she knew before even dialing Sally that hers would be busy, too. It was a full hour later, Sid fast asleep in the bed they had owned for thirty-five years, when she finally got through, and then it was to a more serious Tom than she had heard in years. Not since he left the first wife and signed off on the lives of her grandchildren in a way that prevented her from seeing them more than once a year if she was lucky. She could get mad at him for
that
. So could Sid.
“We’re not talking about my life right now,” he said. “I’ve given Dad the benefit of the doubt for years, but Sally and Rusty are right.”
“Rusty! You’re the one who said he was full of it,” she screamed. “And now you’re on his side?”
“I’m on your side, Mom, your side.”
She let her end fall silent and concentrated on Sid’s breath. He’s alive.
Sid likes to drive
and Marilyn has always felt secure with him there behind the wheel. Every family vacation, every weekend gathering. He was always voted the best driver of the bunch, even when a whole group had gathered down at the beach for a summer cookout, where both men and women drank too much. Sid mostly drank beer in those days; he kept an old Pepsi-Cola cooler he once won throwing baseballs at tin cans at the county fair iced down with Falstaff and Schlitz. They still have that cooler. It’s out in the garage on the top shelf, long ago replaced with little red-and-white Playmates. Tom gave Sid his first Playmate, which has remained a family joke until this day. And Marilyn drank then. She liked the taste of beer but not the bloat. She loved to water-ski and they took turns behind a friend’s powerboat. The men made jokes when the women dove in to cool off. They claimed that warm spots emerged wherever the women had been and that if they couldn’t hold their beer any better than that, they should switch to girl drinks. And so they did. A little wine or a mai tai, vodka martinis. Sid had a book that told him how to make everything, and Marilyn enjoyed buying little colored toothpicks and umbrellas to dress things up when it was their turn to host. She loved rubbing her body with baby oil and iodine and letting the warmth of the sun and salty air
soak in while the radio played and the other women talked. They all smoked cigarettes then. They all had little leather cases with fancy lighters tucked inside.
Whenever Marilyn sees the Pepsi cooler she is reminded of those days. Just married. No worries about skin cancer or lung cancer. No one had varicose veins. No one talked about cholesterol. None of their friends were addicted to anything other than the sun and the desire to get up on one ski —to slalom. The summer she was pregnant with Tom —compliments of a few too many mai tais, Sid told the group —she sat on the dock and sipped her ginger ale. The motion of the boat made her queasy, as did anything that had to do with poultry. “It ain’t the size of the ship but the motion of the ocean,” Sid was fond of saying in those days, and she laughed every time. Every time he said it, she complimented his liner and the power of his steam. They batted words like
throttle
and
wake
back and forth like a birdie until finally, at the end of the afternoon, she’d go over and whisper, “Ready to dock?”
Her love for Sid then was overwhelming. His hair was thick and he tanned a deep smooth olive without any coaxing. He was everything she had ever wanted, and she told him this those summer days as they sat through the twilight time. She didn’t tell him how sometimes she craved the vodka tonics she had missed. Even though many of her friends continued drinking and smoking through their pregnancies, she would allow herself only one glass of wine with dinner. When she bragged about this during
Sally’s first pregnancy, she expected to be congratulated for her modest intake, but Sally was horrified. “My God, Mother,” she said. “Tom is lucky there’s not something bad wrong with him!”
Tom set the date
for the intervention. As hard as it was for Rusty to relinquish his power even for a minute as leader of the posse, it made perfect sense given that Tom had to take time off from his practice and fly all the way from Denver. The snow bunny was coming, too, even though she really didn’t know Sid at all. Sometimes over the past five years, Marilyn had called up the first wife just to hear her voice, or even better the voice of one or more of her grandchildren on the answering machine. Now there was a man’s name included in the list of who wasn’t home. She and Sid would hold the receiver between them, both with watering eyes, when they heard the voices they barely recognized. They didn’t know about *69 until a few months ago when Margot, the oldest child, named for Sid’s mother, called back. “Who is this?” she asked. She was growing up in Minnesota and now had an accent that Marilyn only knew from Betty White’s character on
The Golden Girls
.