Scream (3 page)

I am in the middle of the woods with my kid, who is applying to college, with this crazed old man who has drug dealers stopping by and can't stop smoking pot and talking about his guns. He's nuts and dangerous! It takes me a long time to put all this together. I am very slow to understand people. But I know I've got to get my family out of here.

“Just then,” Dad says, “the chief of police came in and said, ‘You can't sell that sawed-off shotgun! It doesn't work. It's illegal to sell a gun that doesn't work.' ”

What law is that? I thought you couldn't sell a sawed-off shotgun because having a sawed-off shotgun is illegal, whether it works or not.

There is something really wrong. I have brought my family here, and even though my father hasn't shot anybody before (as far as I know), that doesn't mean he might not feel the urge to shoot someone now. Or this “unreliable” drug dealer might come back and Dad might decide to shoot him, or the drug dealer might decide to shoot back and my family is caught in the crossfire. Or even worse, Dad might think he hears an intruder and shoot my kid. Later, after the shooting, he might tell the police, “I thought someone broke in, I forgot completely I had houseguests!” What are they going to do, put an eighty-three-year-old in jail?

This is actually a highly possible situation. You don't know my father.

I go downstairs. “Tim, we have got to get out of here. The guns, the guns, the guns, the drug dealer. You want to have your drug dealer come over while you have houseguests, including your granddaughter? Just say, ‘I left something at a friend's house and he's stopping by to drop it off.' You don't keep saying, ‘My drug dealer is coming! My drug dealer is coming!' And what if this dealer—a nurse at the hospital!—was in trouble with the police and turned in his clients and they came out here and took Willow?”

For once, Tim kind of agrees.

“I'm not kidding. I am afraid. We have to get out of here,” I say.

I would not put anything past Dad. No matter how much he asks, I can't find him a gallery! I am barely surviving; it's hard enough getting my books published. If you want a gallery you have to go and schmooze the right people. It was bad enough that my grandmother was always asking me to get her a show for her paintings. There are two parts to art: the work and the business side. You have to do both, right? Sigh. It doesn't matter. All I know is, at this point, what's Dad got to lose? His artworks—the sculptures, one of which, he will explain to you, represents two figures with their heads connected, having an orgasm, the free-form stained-glass lamps the size of dinosaurs, hanging from the ceiling—have never gotten any attention, and he's now in his eighties, so what's he got to lose?

But where are we going to go? It's the middle of the night . . . well, 11
P
.
M
., but there are no motels for miles—let alone one that will accept eight poodles. (I'm not saying I'm normal, either.)

“Okay, so what do you want to do?” Tim says. “I don't think your father is going to shoot us, but . . . I don't want to stay here, either.”

“We'll have to stay here overnight, but I'm afraid. Could you please go talk to my dad?”

Tim returns after some time. “Your father wants to see you. He wants to know what's going on.”

“No! I don't want to discuss this. Tell him he has to give you the gun he keeps under the bed and put it in the trunk of the car. Then I can sleep at least.”

Tim comes down with a couple of .22s and another gun. We go to the car together while he puts them in the trunk. “Where's the sawed-off shotgun, Tim?”

“Your dad says he doesn't have a sawed-off shotgun under the bed.”

Dad comes out. “What's going on?”

“Dad, I need you to give me your sawed-off shotgun from under the bed.”

“I don't have one under the bed.”

“Then where do you have it?”

“On top of the closet.”

“Give me the sawed-off shotgun, Dad!”

So I get some of the guns stashed away for the night. Probably not all.

In the morning we give the guns back and get ready to leave. That's when Dad's girlfriend arrives, as we're trying to rush off. “Oh, what a shame not to see you. Is there nothing we can do or say to get you to stay?” she says.

“My daughter's hysterical!” Dad says.

“No, I'm not hysterical,” I tell him.

“She is hysterical,” he tells the others. “I have always had guns. You knew. I had to get a gun, back when I was still in practice and a former patient began making threats. It was to protect myself.”

I could have reminded him, “Dad, she came to you for her sexual problems and you fucked her. And she was making suicidal threats, not threats against you.”

But he probably would have denied it, because smoking pot makes you forget things, and also because he's fucked so many of his female patients, he wouldn't have remembered which one it was.

“You would never be able to live out here,” he says. “Not two miles from here, a seventy-year-old man was shot and killed. You can't live here, not without a gun.”

SO, NATURALLY, DAD DISOWNS ME
. He decides to give his estate to the Audubon Society instead.

my mom

M
y mother is lying on her side with her diapers full of shit. She was a professor of English at Cornell University and an award-winning poet when she retired less than three years ago.

It is not possible she is going to read this—or, if she does, she is going to read the same line over and over again, like she did the other day from
The New Yorker
. “ ‘Manuel Uno is two years old and already five feet high at the withers.' ” She read it aloud. Then she laughed and said, “Who is Manuel Uno?” and read it over again. It was something about an aurochs, and she asked me, “What's an aurochs?” I explained that, according to the article she was reading to me, it was some type of primitive or prehistoric cow.

Then she read it out loud, again, laughed, and said, “What's an aurochs?”

After she took her first serious fall, I left my life in the city and came to her house in upstate New York to look after her. There was feces everywhere. It was on the floor and the walls and the refrigerator. I took her to a doctor. “My mom has had chronic diarrhea for many months,” I said.

“Have you given her Pepto-Bismol?” the doctor asked. “You can try it in tablet or liquid, available at your local drugstore.”

She kept falling. I got home health care. Things got worse. No doctors helped.

The home health aide quit. She put a big sign on the front door that stated: “I did not want to tell your mother, but I had to quit because there was FECES EVERYWHERE.”

My mom had gone out and read the sign. She was hysterical. “Why did she have to put that up?” she cried. The whole neighborhood saw it.

I put her in a nursing home.

My sister-in-law Veronica told everyone, “Tama thought it was ‘necessary' to put Phyllis in a nursing home.” She's married to my brother, Sam. They live in Alabama. She sits at home and watches talk shows and soap operas. He is a doctor. After work he does the shopping, cooking, and cleaning.

I didn't
think
it was necessary to put my mom in a home. It
was
necessary.

Now I go to her nursing home every day. There is a woman there who staggers around, holds back tears, and repeatedly asks, “Where is my daughter? Do you know where my daughter is?” No matter how many times you tell her, “Your daughter is at work, she will be here this evening,” she still asks. There is another woman who used to be a concert pianist. She wears a big bib, with pictures of kittens or puppies, tucked right up under her chin. She wanders around shouting, “When is dinner? I'm hungry!” They could have just finished eating, or it could be two in the afternoon, but still she is in a rage about having nothing to eat. At any time someone is going around with a tea trolley containing tiny gray muffins or canned diced peaches with whipped topping or Jell-O. They stuff her and stuff her, but the woman still yells for food.

At lunch the residents get milk that's pink. I hope it's strawberry flavored. Lunch is the big meal there. They have a cup of soup and then the main dish, chicken with mashed potatoes and a green vegetable—well, greenish. There are group meetings for the more functional residents where they're asked what they'd like to see on the menu. Of the ones who can articulate, some want roast beef and some want pizza.

Mary, one of the residents, spends mealtime diddling the sugar. She takes off the top of the container and might dump it on her food or in her glass of water, then stirs and stirs until the water is cloudy and adds some cream or mashed potatoes and takes a sip.

This is an upscale place, too. I don't mean it is super fancy, but it is expensive. It doesn't stink the way some old people's homes do, except in my mother's room, where it usually smells like shit because her diapers are full and she just goes in them all the time.

I am trapped.

a supermarket in ithaca

I
hated being in Mom's house when Mom was still living there. I hated living in upstate New York. I had to get out. My only escape was . . . the supermarket. That is what I did for fun. Not going out—to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, openings, premieres—because as far as I knew, there was nowhere worth going! I didn't have friends there and Mom panicked if I was away for more than a half hour, frantic, ready to call the police.

I would make up an excuse for something we needed, just to get away. But then I had to get in the car. I had to drive that 1995 Mazda, and every single time it smashed itself into the side of the garage. I have a driver's license but had lived in the city my whole life and never drove. There are subways in New York City that take you from point A to point B, more or less. There are taxis. There are buses. There's nowhere to park a car. Not driving is normal if you live in New York City.

When I first got upstate I just sat in the car in the garage shaking. I couldn't even start it. What if I did and it decided to go into the wall? (It did.) What if it decided to back up over a person? So far, no, but who knew what it was going to do?

When Mom drove, she always explained that it took two people to drive, and my job was to look right when we came to a stop sign, while she looked left. Then we discussed whether there was any oncoming traffic. The discussion took a long time. Then she had to check on my side, to make sure. I had a license but had always known I would never be able to drive. Now I was forced to.

The supermarket wasn't exactly a fun destination. It was just a place to go. Actually, that supermarket got me so agitated that I was ready to kill. There were signs like this one:

You don't have to put “cold cereal” and “hot cereal” on two separate lines! Just put “cereal”! Why do you have pancake syrup in this aisle? Why? It belongs in the baking goods aisle! And what is “diet”?

Presumably, the manager was severely mentally ill. I assumed he was male, because you didn't see many women working there except the registers or those little free-sample stands trying to get you to buy frozen strawberry Slurpees with agave sweetener made right there in a blender and served on a pita chip. Why couldn't I just feel sorry for the manager?

Because he listed “canned soup” and “soup cups” as different categories, that's why. Because his store had one aisle with “water,” another with “beverages,” and a third for “soda” (with “root beer” getting its own listing). Plus “juice” in one aisle, “boxed juice” in another.

Also, although there were dozens of brands of salsa in that supermarket, there was no hot salsa, only mild and medium. The manager must not have liked hot salsa—the only decent kind, in my opinion—and therefore assumed no one else liked it, either.

Aisle 12 had beer. But aisle 3 had “cold beer” and “imported beer.” Did a lot of customers come in and say, “Where can I find the cold beer that is not American?”

And to round out the beverages in aisle 3: INSECTICIDE. Not a winning combination. I couldn't believe there weren't other people staggering around mumbling and cursing like I was. Didn't anyone else want to demand to see this manager? Had no one registered a query or a complaint: Why was “Hispanic” in one aisle but “Mexican” in another?