Milk (23 page)

“She wanted you to go to Westridge, she felt the public schools were, well, deficient. But I defied her wishes there, I felt public schools were fine, that you would be happier …”

“Did you sit around in advance of her death, her suicide, and discuss which school I would go to
after
she died?”

“She felt it important that I know. She told me in the hospital. Afterwards.”

“After what?”

“One of her—one of her—attempts.”

“Once she made this clear to you, the matter of my schooling, did you exit the room so that she could get started on the next attempt?” I slam my hands against the steering wheel. “God! I'm sorry, Dad. I don't mean that, I know it's painful for you, too.”

“Oh, no,” he demurs, staring at the map on the dashboard. But his hands clamp down on his knees, his fingers twitching.

“Yes, painful, Dad. The whole rest of your life, being accountable for this. Having to explain it to your children.” Although Corb required no explanation, that was his role. And this was mine: to know, demand to know, and now I would have to explain it to my children too. My child. Someday. I take a deep breath, ready, finally, to ask one of the questions I've wondered all my life. “Did she leave a note, Dad?”

“A what?”

“A suicide note.”

“I never found one.”

Almost a comfort, then, my mother's death certificate resting in my pocket, this last part of her. I've touched it so much over the past months that one of its corners is bent, soft, torn. I slip it out of my pocket. “How about this, Dad?”

“What do you have there?”

“Her death certificate. I got it when I sent away for her hospital records.” I say this almost gleefully, as though I've found something deliberately hidden from me, a game, Hot and Cold, you're hot, you're burning up; you're cold, you're freezing.

“You could've asked me,” he says shortly. “I would've made copies and sent those things on to you. Saved you the trouble.”

“You have these already?”

He nods. “In the safe at my office.”

“Didn't you think I might like to see them?”

“I didn't want to hurt you, you've been hurt enough—” There's a wetness in the corner of his eye: a tear? He doesn't wipe it and continues to talk to me. “All right, ask me. Ask me your questions.”

“Did you love her?”

“Deeply. Less so at the end, she wasn't herself anymore.”

“What was she like?”

“A picky housekeeper, too picky, overall too worried about the details in life, which, when you get to be my age, you'll see don't matter. She was tense, she was unhappy. I wish I had made her happier.”

“Dad, that's not why she—”

“But had she been happier with me—”

“You couldn't have saved her, Dad. I don't know this, I just
feel …
Dad, there were other forces. Her drinking, her drug use, her childhood.” He looks at me intently. We know next to nothing about her childhood, either of us, and Aunt Lyla won't talk. “You did the best you could under the circumstances,” I say.

“Not enough,” he says.

That he blames himself is not surprising, but that he blames himself so bitterly—this is news to me. I lean over to hug him and he meets me halfway. “You can hardly move, you're so pregnant—” He fumbles. “I remember your mother.”

“What?” I leap on it, as I always do, any detail.

“Your mother was huge.”

With me in particular? With Corb? My mother huge with child. I move my tongue around my mouth, tasting this. It tastes like something frozen solid, preserved for all time. Ice. I want to ask my father about Charlotte, but I can't. Can't even say her name.

“What did my mother like to do?” I ask.

“She enjoyed reading, she enjoyed playing bridge. For a while she knitted but she gave that up. Too frustrating.”

“What were her favorite subjects in school?”

“Oh,” he says, as if trying to recall. After all, he didn't know her then. “She was an excellent student, the president of the women at Stanford, graduated magna cum laude. But you know that. She was good in all her subjects, English, Math, History.”

Your Dead Mother, like all the other dead mothers, beautiful, intelligent, and oh yes, she loved you.

“What was her last day like? Her last week?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary really. She seemed happy.”

But just five minutes ago he said she wasn't happy.

“You had no idea?” I say.

“None.”

Only that she attempted it before, I think. Twice.
(To my mother, wherever you are, in the heavens, in the constellations Corb and I named last night, or are you in a darker place, a place not lit by stars: What were you like at the dinner table? Did you unfold your napkin, take small bites? Tell me about the everyday things, cooking, dishes, laundry, gardening … the things you did with us, Corb and me. Did you take us to the playground? On errands? To the market?

Tell me about a normal day. Was there a normal day?

What did you talk about?

What did your voice sound like?

How did you look at me across the room? With amusement, anger? Or did you look right through me?

What was it like for you in the hospital? Did you eat the food? What did you wear? Your own clothes or a hospital gown? What did you feel when they set the mouthpiece in wrong that time, your teeth nearly shattered in bolts of current transporting you up, up, you might have flown off that table had you not been strapped to it. What did you think about in the hospital? Charlotte. You grieved over Charlotte. Did you miss me too?

Do you miss me now?)

My father's voice. “I have something to talk to you about, too, Theo.”

“What?”

My father is reaching into his briefcase. Oh no. His last will and testament again, or worse, his Living Will, but no, it's a brochure. A color photo of a resort on the front, in Pasadena, it would appear. There is Orange Grove Boulevard, there are magnolia trees, the San Gabriel mountains in the background. “The Grove,” the brochure says, “The Fine Art of Retirement Living.”

“I've researched all the places in this area,” Dad is saying, “and—”

“When?” I say. Quickly I'm figuring out his age. Seventy-three, seventy-four. No, almost seventy-five. “But,” I say, “aren't you a little young yet?”

“I've already done it. Made the arrangements. You have to buy into these places, you see. I'm putting my house up for sale.”

His house. I've never thought of it as his but Dorinne's. He brought little of his own to this house and, knowing him, he will leave the house, more than twenty years later, with nothing, a small suitcase and a bill of sale.

“When?” I say.

“The house goes on the market next week.”

“So soon?” Although I've never liked that house, I'm sad. I flip through the brochure, reading the language, examining it for signs of a cult, a place that would steal my father's money or his soul. “Gracious living in a country estate setting,” “Studio, One-and Two-Bedroom Suites,” “Elegant Dining,” “Security,” “Independence,” “Deep pile carpeting for your comfort and quietness,” “Ample parking,” “Chauffeur and housekeeping services,” “On-site health services,” “Assisted living and skilled nursing also available on campus.”

Campus. Like a college.

“I guess I was expecting you to move into a townhouse first, Dad, or an apartment. This just seems so—” Final is the word that comes to mind. Final exit, death. “Does Corb know?”

“I sat down with him and Diane this weekend while you and the boys were at the museum.”

“Corb and Diane already know?” All this weekend and nobody said anything to me, when all along there I was with my mother's death certificate in my pocket, her hospital records in my bags, just in case her name should come up—when it's my father I should be concerned about. “Do they approve?” I ask him.

“Yes. Do you?”

I feel myself wilting in the desert heat.

“Do you?” he persists.

He's asking for my blessing, just as so many times I've asked for his. “Dad, won't you please change your mind?”

“No.”

“But why now? You're so healthy, well, there's the other cataract, but you've already been through that, it's no big deal.”

“I'm waiting to have the operation,” he says, “until I'm settled in at the new place. Then I can get help if I need it—”

“I'll help you!”

“You can help, if you want, but this way it won't be all on your shoulders.”

“Like your other cataract operation was
such
an ordeal.”

“You've got the baby to think about now, Theo. And then, as I get older, other things will crop up. There's my hypertension, for example, or maybe I'd have a heart attack. Then what?”

“It's not like you're about to keel over!” I say. “My God, you can swim farther than Corb.” Over the weekend Corb had told me about swimming with Dad recently at the Valley Hunt Club, struggling to keep up. Our father could swim a mile, seventy-two laps; Corb had to quit halfway through.

“I can swim at The Grove too, Theo. There's an Olympic-sized pool. It's not a nursing home.”

“It's just not
your
home,” I say. From what I read in the brochure, it's a “facility with nursing home capability.” Meaning there's a wing of the place reserved for those who have lost the battle with aging.

The Grove is where my father will die someday, and then I'll be all alone.

“Well,” he says, “shouldn't we be getting on?”

He means the car. Get the car off the shoulder of the road, drive back to Pasadena. My father, always eager for the next destination.

T
WENTY
-T
WO

It's dark in the cavern that is the warehouse at Pink's Transfer Moving and Storage, although it's morning, baking hot and smoggy already. A green truck with pink lettering (“Those Who Think Call Pink”) backs into the warehouse. I ask somebody who walks by what time it is.

He takes one look at me and whistles. “You sure you got time to wait, lady? Want me to call a doctor?”

“Very funny.”

“Five after nine,” he says.

I pace back and forth among the pallets, waiting for ours to be brought forth by a forklift.

“We might as well get started,” I say to one of the men milling around. Thirty dollars per man per hour, although I can charge it to Dad. His treat since he's not coming to help me; he's getting over a cold and we both agreed it would be better if he stayed at The Grove today.

“Let's start,” I say. A man wrenches open the first wooden pallet, now in the driveway of Pink's, while I hold my breath—as though we're about to exhume a body.

Things are stacked, covered with sheets, encased in plywood and cardboard boxes.

“Anything you'd like to see first?” he asks, prying open another pallet, then another.

“Bring it all out,” I say. “I need to see everything.”

He calls to several men to help him and they load out the big items—our old dining room table and chairs, couches, chests, bureaus; I recognize my old vanity. Sell it, I think. But what if I'm having a daughter?

“Do you have the schedule?” I ask the guy.

“Oh yeah.” Carefully he sets down some nesting end tables, from our old living room, disappears into the front office, and returns with a thick stack of paper. “Here you go.” He wipes his nose, waiting for me to say something.

It's bewildering, the number of items, the number of pages. Household Goods Descriptive Inventory, at the top of each page. I pick one at random:

The numbers and letters are codes for condition at origin, all explained at the top of the sheet; there must be thirty different codes. The four-drawer chest, for example, is scratched, gouged, chipped and cracked on top (#10); the front of it (#4) is scratched, rubbed, gouged, and so on.

There are more codes: bent, broken, burned, faded, loose, marred, mildewed, moth-eaten, rusted, soiled, torn, badly worn, cracked.

“Just like me.” Bewildered, I sit on one of our old dining room chairs, propping my feet up on another chair to ease my back. I close my eyes for a second.

“Want me to open these boxes?” A man, in a white shirt with PINKS on the front and back, is poised and ready with a utility knife.

“Okay,” I say, heaving myself up and out of the chair, toward the front office where I hope to borrow the phone.

I call Corb on his cellular. “Corb, get over here right now. You're late!”

“Theo,” he says. “I made a slight miscalculation. I'm really sorry.”

“You're not coming?”

“The boys have a game, you know, the fast pitch league.”

“Can't Diane take them?”

“I'm one of the coaches, remember?”

“What am I going to do?” I wail.

“If you can't decide, just put it all back into storage, like we said.”

I call Gregg, waking him. “But how am I going to know what you might like?” I say. “Wouldn't you like a say in how we furnish our house?”

He mumbles something noncommittal. Gregg doesn't notice such things, domestic details. That will be my job, once we're living together. “But Gregg,” I say.