Life Drawing (14 page)

At some point that morning, Owen leaned in to say he was taking the women into town for lunch, asking if I wanted to come along; and I said no, but thanked him and told him to have fun. I didn’t add that I’d had enough for a twenty-four-hour period of watching Alison worship Nora and Nora worship Owen, but I had.

By the time they came back, though I heard the car and then voices, it all seemed distant again. This was the power I had discovered as a motherless child, and could still access—sometimes. The power to make the unreal real, and make the real world go away.

But then in the late afternoon, while my focus was set entirely
on the diamond-shaped leaded glass windows on either side of our front door, reality asserted itself. The phone. My father, out of control again. He had broken a mug and used it to threaten a nurse. There were going to have to be some changes after all. Could I be there the next morning for a consult?

It wasn’t a question. I would go.

O
wen would go too. That also wasn’t a question. For a moment, I’d thought he wouldn’t offer, that the lure of an admiring young acolyte would keep him home, but I had underestimated him. There wasn’t a breath of distance between us as we sat at our sorrowful dinner and talked through the coming process. Winnowing, winnowing. When we’d first moved my father, we’d winnowed the old house into his new efficiency apartment; and now we would winnow again. But even the winnowing had been winnowed. It wouldn’t be a big job this time. No kitchen for him—too dangerous to have breakables that could be hurled, knives, even forks. And barred windows from now on too. Winnowed windows. Winnowed windows for my winnowing widower father. As I fell asleep my mind was filled with such phrases, nonsense, surrendering to the nonsensical nature of life.

W
e met the doctor at eight in the family conference room, furnished like a mid-level hotel, decorated with posters of worse-than-mediocre art, pointless, meaningless washes of pastels, framed in gold. We sat at a lacquered mahogany table that shone in ways that struck me, ever obsessive about shine, about shadow, as artificial in some way. The doctor was a youngster, an unfamiliar face who must have started there over the summer, almost Owen’s height with coarse red hair through which he ran his enormous hand at regular intervals. He looked nervous and not up to
the job of telling us what he had to tell us—even though we already knew what he would say and he knew that we knew. A necessary relocation. A different protocol. There was a three-strikes policy, he said. I pointed out that there had only been two strikes.

“It’s possible no one told you about the first, in case it was a one-time event.”

I wondered if the young nurse, Lydia, guilty still about provoking his flood of tears, had spared me a report.

Inexperienced and filled with more rules than wisdom, the doctor then went into unnecessary detail about the policy itself—about how sometimes it turned out that the nature of a single episode might be enough to trigger a change and in other cases the three-strikes policy could be suspended and on and on, as Owen and I raised our eyebrows at one another and widened our eyes but managed somehow not to be rude while we brought the conversation back to my father and his care.

“Has he been told what’s going on?” I asked.

No. He hadn’t. They always preferred to have family there to help explain it all to the patient. “Though in my experience,” the doctor said, the notion of experience hanging around him like a too-large overcoat, “that can actually sometimes make things worse.”

“How reassuring,” I muttered to Owen as we trailed down the hall.

M
y father had always had a temper, but of a quiet, steady kind. It was part of what made him so effective as a teacher, I thought, that he knew when to be angry and allowed himself to be, but not in a dramatic way. And certainly not with any threat of violence. Clarity. That was one of his defining qualities. He would never yell and scream but he didn’t buy the idea of calling anger by euphemistic names. When Owen and I were still in Philadelphia,
surrounded by young families, we would hear the same parental spiel over and over:
I’m not angry, I’m just upset; I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated; I’m not angry, I was just worried about where you were
.

“I am furious at you both,” my father would say if Charlotte and I came home late. And it meant a week of grounding or extra chores or both; and it also meant a day or so of palpable, lingering anger, detectable in a lack of interest in whatever we had to say, the failure to involve us in deciding what dinner would be for a while. We were ignored as he went into the backyard, lit a cigarette, and sat by himself, or disappeared into his bedroom—a couple of pull-ups on his way.

But what I saw in his eyes the day we walked into his little apartment was something new. A wild animal had slipped beneath his skin.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

“Hi, Sam,” Owen said.

He didn’t know us. And he didn’t like us. I looked at the doctor for guidance and was surprised to find a transformed man. In this setting, he exuded authority. Later, in the car, I would tell Owen that should I ever be in a demented, disoriented rage,
that
was the doctor I wanted him to phone. He called my father Mr. Edelman, which alone seemed to soothe him—in a way that neither “Dad” nor his first name had. Here was a young fellow calling him Mr. Edelman. Could he feel himself becoming the teacher again?

“It seems like you’ve been having a tough time, Mr. Edelman.”

“This black woman …” My father gestured toward the door. I felt the blood rise to my cheeks. “She won’t let me go out.”

“Yes. That’s right. Those are my orders. I asked the nurses to make sure you stay put. We don’t allow our patients to do anything unsafe.”

“Ha!” My father looked at me. “Any time a Jew is locked up, you want to watch for that. Any time they start talking about their orders …”

“Your daughter …,” the doctor began; and my father frowned.

“That’s me,” I said. “Augusta.”

He shrugged a little, made a face, not arguing the point but not entirely accepting it either. “And this?” he asked, with a shift in gaze.

“My husband. Owen. You like him.”

He looked doubtful.

“You used to like him. I promise.”

The doctor cleared his throat. “We have to make a few changes, Mr. Edelman. Starting with your room. We’re moving you to a different part of the facility. You’ll have some of the same nurses there with you, at least for a while, so it won’t be all new.”

“And I can visit you much more. If you want.”

“In general, you’ll be getting a more steady level of care …”

The unfamiliar rage in my father’s eyes had been replaced by a look I did recognize: utter bewilderment, filmed over with an attempt to hide it. He nodded, as if comprehending, while clearly not comprehending. The doctor explained that though he would be moving that day, we’d have a little while to move his belongings. “Your daughter will make sure you have the things that matter most to you.”

“And the rest, I’ll keep just at my house,” I said—for all the world as though the second half of the sentence were: … 
so someday you can have it all back
.

W
hen we emerged from the home, the sky had opened up, a perfect rumbling thunderstorm. We were drenched as we ran to the car. Owen drove, and any possible conversation was lost to the attention he had to pay as the windshield wipers struggled against the deluge.

Jan would be back from Nova Scotia in three days and the place had agreed to let us wait to clean everything out together. I had picked half a dozen items to go with him, transition objects,
like little children use. I wavered over my own painting as if it were some sort of symbolically important decision, and then put it with the other things on his bed. That painting. A picture of me, Charlotte, and Jan in our teen years, all looking like he had told us to stand up straight and think about brussels sprouts. That was my one smile as I packed: that this sourpuss lineup was his favorite shot of us. I tried to include a porcelain figurine of a dog that had belonged to his mother, but was told that nothing that could be thrown, broken, or in any way rendered sharp could go with him, so I wrapped it in a washcloth and put it in my own bag.

When we got home, I ran through the rain, but got soaked again anyway. Upstairs, I stripped everything off, put on a bathrobe, lay down in bed and soon fell asleep—as though the events of the day were like a fever that had left me weak. I woke to find Owen sitting beside me. “I didn’t think you’d want to sleep all afternoon and then be up all night.” His hand was on my shoulder. I turned over, away from him, knowing he would rub my back.

“I feel like someone dropped an anvil on me,” I said. “Me and Wile E. Coyote.”

“Life dropped an anvil on you.”

As he kneaded my shoulder, I closed my eyes. “It’ll be better when Jan gets home. She’s so competent. She makes everything feel manageable.”

Neither of us spoke for a minute or so and then he said, “We’ve been invited for dinner—by the neighbors. The daughter leaves tomorrow. But only if you’re up to it. I told Alison I wasn’t sure, that you might just want to hunker down tonight.”

“That actually sounds fine,” I said. “I can’t just lie here in the dark all night.”

“You can do anything you want.”

I stretched out some more, arching my back. “Right there,” I said. “Right next to my spine. That’s what I want.”

A
t Alison’s we ate in the living room, Owen and I on her couch, each of the others on a chair. She’d made chili and rice. It was all very simple and should also have been comforting. But the shift in dynamics since our dinner just two nights before unnerved me. During the day when I’d absented myself working, and maybe also during my sleeping hours that afternoon, Owen and Nora had moved well beyond the polite talk of strangers. Somehow. It was as though a thin pane of glass had shattered between them—but stayed intact just enough to keep me on the other side.

Alison was solicitous, offering every imaginable kind of help. She would drive me to visit my father. She would make us dinners. She would be a shoulder. “You deserve some coddling right now,” she said.

“What Gus really needs,” Owen said, “is to get back into her work. Gus is always at her happiest there.”

“It’s true,” I said, though vaguely irritated at the claim.

“Well then, I can also leave you alone to work. Whatever you need. This is such a difficult thing to go through.”

And so the evening wore on, worries about me alternating with more talk about the sorts of jobs Nora should be looking for back in Boston. She thought maybe something to do with early education
—those jobs are still pretty available
—though she really wanted to work in publishing, at least for a while. Owen, a whiskey or two in, proclaimed that that would be soul-destroying, unless she could find a small press filled with people who did it just for the love. She asked what he thought about people applying right after college for graduate programs. He said he thought it was a shame that she couldn’t just take some time to write
before all the vultures set in
. Alison thought she should consider whether she really wanted to be around little kids and their germs all the time.… And then someone would ask me how I was doing; and I would say fine, and that it was so interesting to watch someone
teetering on the cusp of adulthood; or something equally inane. And as an hour passed, then another, I felt as though I were being aged, rapidly, like the beautiful princess in the fairy tale who is suddenly revealed to be an old crone, every aspect of me having to do with repair, while across the table from me sat the embodiment of potential.

Yet I didn’t hate Nora that night. Even if I envied her youth and her devoted mother and the amount of attention she seemed to accept without noticing. I felt I owed it to Alison and even to myself to get past all that. Yes, she was self-absorbed, but now that she had relaxed, it seemed less as though that was the result of ego and was instead entirely appropriate for a young woman excited about her life and also excited to have met someone to idolize. She was a bit short on boundaries, but to be otherwise at twenty-two might have been off-putting in its own way. For all her elegance and beauty, she clearly didn’t have her life figured out at all, and even the drunken barn episode, I decided, could be folded into this larger picture, as a typical overstep of youth. I noted that she stood to help her mother, clearing plates, wrapping food, slicing the pound cake, brewing the coffee. Alison had joked about her being well brought up and I’d had my doubts; but in some ways she clearly had been.

O
n the walk home, I said something nice about Nora to Owen, and he made a sound, an
umhmm
or a
yep
, which seemed a little distant, as though his mind was elsewhere. And then he put his hand on my back and said, “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a very long day.”

L
ater, as I lay awake, sleep playing hard to get, it occurred to me to wonder if there had been anything in that sound he made, the
umhmm
or
yep
, to which I should have been attentive, whether in its indecipherable, preoccupied quality, there lay a clue to something worrisome. I had spent so long fearing that a young woman, adoring and beautiful, would make easy any need the universe might feel to even scores. And now one had shown up as if sent from central casting. But she would be leaving in the morning, I knew. And my tired mind longed to be at peace. So I shook the worry off.