Authors: Ann Packer
As we continue arranging chairs, I keep an eye on him, half for damage control and half to monitor his mood. The bride and groom were banned from the proceedings, and at noon the rest of us—assorted relatives and friends, my brother’s troop of graduate students—are offered a break and a snack and are instructed that this setup help is the only gift we are allowed to give the couple. “A little late telling us,” my father says, but under his breath, and I’m grateful he didn’t say it louder. I’m even more grateful that no massages were suggested, partner or otherwise.
I’m recruited to help with flowers, and I join a group stuffing blossoms into every size, shape, and color of vase imaginable. My mother will like the unfussy, inclusive mandate of this wedding, the leggy perennials, the homey appetizers I saw in the community center fridge. Her flight is due to land at three-forty, which is cutting it close even for her. Surprisingly, she will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast as my father and I, a mark of resignation, or maybe indifference.
I’m putting a bunch of white roses into a glass jug when my father comes over and says he’s not well and needs to rest.
“So sit down,” I say.
He looks at the ceiling, as if there might be someone up there to recognize my boorish insensitivity. “I have to
lie down
. Right now.”
“
Right
now?”
“I’m telling you, I’m not well.”
He looks fine, but I know better than to argue. I make our apologies to Cressida’s parents and lead the way to the car. Other people throw parties; my father throws emergencies. It’s been like this forever. When I was a kid I thought the difference between my father and other parents was that my father was more fun. It took me years to see it clearly. My father was a rabble-rouser. He was fun like a cyclone.
Peter found the B&B, which is on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood and looks very much like an ordinary Berkeley house: painted a bold burnt orange, its front yard landscaped with birch trees and a slate pathway. Inside, the owners’ private area is to the right; the breakfast room is straight ahead, already set for tomorrow with a basket of tea bags on the communal table and more of the stiff beige napkins we used this morning (made of bamboo, we were told); and to the left are the guest quarters, down a hallway that is still hung with photographs of the teenagers who once occupied these rooms.
The whole drive from the community center my father complained and sighed, insisting he really didn’t know what was wrong, only that something was, but by the time we reach his room he’s feeling “a little bit better,” and I leave him. There are two more rooms, a very small one next to my father’s and a larger one at the end of the hallway, and the proprietor insisted I take the larger one since I’m staying three nights and “the other lady” is staying only one. This means that tonight my parents will go to bed with only a thin wall between them, closer than they’ve slept in decades.
I’m more tired than I realized, and when I add up the transcontinental flight yesterday, the incredibly late night given that we were on eastern time, and the work of schlepping chairs all morning, I think it’s no wonder he wanted to lie down—I do, too. I close the blinds and take off my shoes and stretch out on the bed. There’s a separate guesthouse in the backyard, occupied this weekend by a couple from Melbourne, and I hear their voices and the occasional splash as they soak in the hot tub.
I’m just drifting off when my cell phone buzzes with a text.
Viens
, my father has written, as if the French will somehow mask the imperiousness.
I find him not lying down or even sitting but pacing between bed and window. “What’s wrong?”
“This Clytemnestra. Do you suppose she thinks we’re rich?”
“Uch, Daniel,” I say. “I was lying down.”
“You’re so blasé. My son is getting married.”
“And?”
“And I don’t want him to get hurt again.”
This is an allusion to Peter’s romantic history, with its long fallow periods and terrible ecstasies, though it is of course an allusion to my father’s, as well. Last night, staring across the picnic table at Peter, I caught a glimpse of the boy he was at thirteen, when his family fell apart, and I thought it made sense, how late he was marrying: he’d waited till he was older than our father was at the time his marriage ended. What this means, though, is that he’s old enough to be Cressida’s father, and I worry about the strains of gratitude in his voice when he talks about her.
“Also,” my father says, “it makes me feel old.”
“This is a
happy
thing,” I tell him. “You should feel young—most people are a lot younger when their children marry. You were only fifty-whatever when I got married.”
“And look how that turned out.”
“You know, you can think stuff like that and choose not to say it.”
“I was heartbroken about your marriage.”
“As opposed to my divorce.”
“That’s not fair,” he cries, but he’s smiling now, a coy, aren’t-I-a-naughty-boy smile. The truth is he has never been a fan of anyone I’ve dated.
Now he says, “You didn’t take me seriously this morning about my health,” a classic kvetcher’s bait and switch. I don’t respond and he says, “Are you saying you did?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“I noticed!”
“What does the doctor think?”
“I haven’t been,” he says. “She’ll order a scan, I’ll be like one of those suitcases at the airport.”
I say she might ask a question or two first, but he ignores me, looking off into the distance and caressing his chin. He says, “Have you ever thought about this? They have CAT scans and PET scans, but CAT scans aren’t a kind of PET scan—there’s a taxonomy problem. CAT scans should be a kind of PET scan, and there should be other PET scans, too—DOG scans, which would be, you know, Diagnostic Oldfart Geriatricography. And RABBIT scans, Retired Alterkoker Bladder …”
I let myself drift as he continues. I think of this sort of thing as The Daddy Show, and long ago, when I was a little girl, I enjoyed it. In fact, there was a time when he staged a literal show every night before I went to bed, and it was the highlight of my day. Once I was under the covers but still sitting propped against my pillows, he put on finger puppets—a felt Daddy-O-MacDaddy on his left forefinger, a felt Sasha-the-Pasha on his right—and the two of them bopped through literature and history as narrated by my father, joining in the Norman Conquest, acting out parts of
Twelfth Night
, never an idle evening until I was ten or eleven and began making excuses about being tired or having homework. After that, he retired the puppets, but to this day he has not stopped performing.
“Did you see that
New Yorker
cartoon,” he is saying, “with the rabbits in the living room, sitting with their legs crossed holding martini glasses? I thought of a
much
better caption than the one they had. It should have said—”
“If you think you’re sick,” I say, “you need to go to the doctor.”
“But I’m scared.”
He looks scared, and I give him what I hope will seem like a sympathetic smile. I
am
sympathetic—somewhat, and more for the hypochondria than for whatever ails him—but the algebra of our relationship means it’s hard for me to offer compassion when that’s so clearly what he wants.
“Seriously,” he says. “It’s time I told you this. I’m scared, but it’s not death I’m scared of, it’s dying. It’s pain. Will you promise me no pain? I’m not asking you to do me in, just a very fast morphine drip.”
“Dan, you’re way ahead of yourself.”
He looks down his giant, beaky nose at me. “Excuse me for having the bad manners to tell my daughter how I feel.” He glares, and I can’t decide what to say next. If I were he, I’d try to bump him out of it with a family joke—his joke, which is itself a reaction to his mother, the legendary Moomie Horowitz (as if there could be two Moomies, but that is what we called her), who was one of the great complainers of all time. If dissatisfaction was a virtue in our family, endless talking about it was to take unforgivable advantage of one’s good fortune, and whenever my brother or I whined or moaned about something, my father would tell us: Beware the family curse. Beware the Horowitz horror!
We face each other, I perched on the bed, he on the chair. He is, in fact, getting on: his bright blue eyes are hazed by cataract clouds, and his hair, once as red and curly as mine, is beige and cut so short that it clings to his scalp in tiny disheveled patches, looking like nothing so much as a helmet of brown rice. He will fall ill someday, whether he’s ill now or not, and someday he will be gone. I have imagined the time after, with its cavern of sadness, and I know that even his most irritating foibles will acquire, in recollection, a kind of charm, and that grief will have its way with me time and again.
I say, “I’m sorry you’re scared.”
He shrugs, and I go to the window and watch the Australians in the hot tub, their bodies so submerged I can’t tell whether they’ve taken the clothing option or not. They are talking and smiling, and at one point the husband puts his hand flat on top of the wife’s head, an oddly tender gesture. They look to be in their sixties; at breakfast this morning they said they’d both just retired and were taking their first ever trip away from Australia.
A mile from here, my brother is alone in his apartment—doing what, I don’t know. How do you spend your wedding day if you are one of the sweetest and most solitary people on the planet? He is a man so overwhelmed by his own heart that he arranged a sabbatical the last time he fell in love, an entire year away, effectively guaranteeing that his beloved would meet someone else during his absence and move on. It’s extraordinary to me that he is getting married.
“Maybe if you went to the doctor with me,” my father says, and I turn and tell him I’d be happy to—which I’d have said five hours ago if he’d only asked. I suggest we both lie down for a while, and when he agrees I return to my room.
The next thing I know, I’m waking in a strange bed to the sounds of my mother on the other side of the wall. I hear the zip of her suitcase, the slide and clatter of plastic hangers moving along a bar. If my father is awake, he can hear this, too. I last saw her about eighteen months ago, when I drove from Western Massachusetts, where I live, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where she’d just finished remodeling her cottage. On that particular trip I didn’t stop in Hartford to see my father—I visit at least once a month, often more—but even so I felt what I always feel, that in the most literal of ways, as in all others, he is between us.
I wash my face before I go knock on her door. We chat for a few minutes, exchanging travel stories, marveling at the weather. She tells me I look great, and I tell her she looks great, which she does, in her proudly unkempt way: her nearly white hair hangs past her shoulders, thick and flyaway; and she’s unapologetically frumpy in a mid-calf calico skirt and running shoes. She gave up vanity the way other people give up sugar, and her arms and hips and stomach are as soft and plump as bread dough.
“Fat, anyway,” she says cheerfully. “I hope I won’t embarrass Peter.”
“He can’t wait to see you,” I say, which is surely true, though not something he said to me.
“Where’s Dan?”
I point at the wall dividing her room from my father’s. “He’s a little under the weather,” I say in a low voice.
Her face betrays nothing, neither concern nor skepticism; for thirty-five years she has been the very embodiment of the correct way to behave with your children after a divorce. In my twenties, I tried to get her to open up: “It’s been ten years,” I said. “I’m an adult, we can talk.” This was just after my divorce, and I guess I wanted to dish with her, but she wouldn’t budge.
“What’s Cressida like?” she says now, backing up and sitting on the bed. She puts her hands together and holds them between her knees, a gesture I’ve known forever.
I fill my mother in about Cressida and her family and then move on to last night’s party, leaning a little harder than I should on how welcoming everyone was and how much fun we all had. “They’re big hikers,” I say. “After the thing tomorrow they’re going to take us on a hike.” This, too, is unkind: I happen to know that my mother is on an early flight—booked, she claims, before she knew there would be a brunch.
She smiles, ignoring or maybe not even noticing what I’ve really said. She tells me that last time she was here she and Peter spent a glorious afternoon at Mount Tam. “It was fantastic,” she says. “I still remember the view.”
From my father’s room comes a loud cough, a cough that could have been produced for one reason only, to remind us of his existence. I don’t think he can hear what we’re saying, just the sound of it, but I have no doubt he’s using every gram of concentration to determine from our pauses and cadences how we are getting along. With him, I generally pretend that my mother and I are closer than in fact we are, whereas with her I pretend that he and I are not as close as we are, or rather that we have one of those healthy parent-child relationships characterized by mutual affection and respect, not mutual suspicion and resentment. I think I’ve done a better job convincing him than her.
“So,” she says, glancing at her watch, “we’ve got half an hour?”
I look at my watch and say, “Wow, that’s right.”
And here is more pretending: we are both acutely aware of the time, the strain, the welcome need to part so we can dress.
At 5:35 I leave my room and go to the front hall, where I told both my parents I would meet them. I made sure to say we would all three be meeting—no surprises—but even so I’ve been careful to arrive first. While I wait, the Australians appear in matching blue sweatshirts, each with the word “VICTORY” in giant letters across the front. “We’re going to a baseball game,” the husband says, rhyming “game” with “lime.” “In our team colors.” “Our football team,” the wife says, and then together they say, “Soccer, that is.” They laugh and she says, “Have a lovely time at your brother’s wedding. September’s the best time to get married in Australia—it’s our spring, you know.”