The Last Cadillac (24 page)

“The kid's not bad,” Dad said. But he didn't have a mirror. His fluffy white hair had been tamed into dozens of little bun-knots. I wondered how on earth I'd ever get them out, if I ever got them out. I stepped closer to see that no permanent damage had been done. I'd stayed out on the dock way too long, and this was payment.

“Girl, how are we going to get those out?”

“Why?”

“Do you want your grandfather going around like that? He'll get arrested; they'll arrest me.” But I had to laugh. Dad's pink scalp gleamed through the bumps, which were pulled so tight it nearly gave him a facelift. I made a mental note to try this myself. “Dad, doesn't it bother you?”

“No, not really. It feels good.” He loved to have his hair washed because of the scalp massage. Little Sunshine was hairdresser for a day.

I put that on the list: Dad needs a haircut.

I left the two of them finishing their hairdressing session and turned to the business of getting dinner on the table. The noodles and hamburger were done, the lettuce was chilled, and I was just about to slice into a tomato when I heard a scream.

I dropped the tomato and raced to the living room. Little Sunshine had a pair of scissors in her hand and fluffs of white hair were piled up like feathers all around Dad's chair.

“Sunshine, it's a little uneven on this side, so I'll just take some off here,” she said. “At your ear.”

“Nooooooo.”

I could have heard the shrieking if I were standing in Tampa.

“Good lord,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I'm cutting his hair. Don't you think I can cut it better than Virginia?”

Virginia, formerly of Rhode Island, and owner of Cut And Color Without A Care Creations in the Sand Dollar Plaza was a buxom bleach-blond who wielded the scissors like a machete, and I reluctantly took Dad to her for a trim once a month. She fussed over him, and he adored it, even though he looked like a pruned poodle when he left there.
Every time, I sadly thought, It'll grow back. I loved my Dad's white hair that curled slightly at the neck, like it did when I was six and his hair was black. The Florida humidity gave it extra volume that he liked to tame by plopping a khaki hat on top of that cloud.

Little Sunshine had managed to get the knobs under control, unfortunately, by cutting some of them off. The haircut, though lopsided, wasn't much better than Virginia's, I had to admit. But enough was enough.

“Give her something. She needs something,” Dad said.

“I know what I'd like to give her,” I scolded, hands on my hips. My daughter opened and closed the scissors and nudged a pile of the white fluff with her toe.

Little Sunshine's playful nature was just short of some serious teasing. She put the scissors carefully on the table and flounced on to the couch. “Well, all right. Next time I'll get it wet and comb it first.”

“No, I don't think so. There isn't going to be a next time,” I said. “Look, I know you want to help, but this was not a good idea.”

She sat there with her arms crossed and her lip out. “Are you teasing Gampy?”

“Yes,” she said, and grinned. “But he said I could.”

“Could what? Tease him? Make him look like that?” We both looked at Dad, who looked back at us, all too calmly, I thought. He liked attention of any sort. He sat quietly with his hands folded, waiting to be rescued. It was a good thing he loved his khaki hat.

“You shouldn't get him upset,” I said. Her grin remained in place, but she wouldn't look at me. “Do you want him to get sick? He's old. We're all going to be old. How would you like someone to do that to you?”

She was thinking now.

“Do you want him to have another stroke?” That did it. The grin flopped, and a light went on behind those freckles.

“No!” She jumped up and threw her arms around her grandfather and kissed his cheek. “Gamps, I'm sorry if you don't like it.”

“I think Virginia's job is safe,” he said, looking up at me, patting Little Sunshine's arm. Then he chuckled.

Virginia had her work cut out for her the next day.

Carol Sebastian, my good, true Indiana friend, called me once every week or so to check on me. She told me to watch my health and eat regularly. She was all about eating, and that was how we forged our friendship, especially after my divorce. We'd been part-timers together at the
Calumet Press
where one of my duties was writing up restaurant reviews. Carol and I went out once a week to eat our way through a six-page menu under the ferns, in dark wood restaurants with stained glass windows and booths, which all had pretty much the same offering throughout our Northwest Indiana beat. We dipped into tomato sauce, and gravy, and chocolate sauce, and scarfed down burgers and chops and chicken of every sort. The food landscape was pretty boring, but we managed to spice it up with some laughs and a little gossip. We were a satisfying diversion for each other.

Carol was a real food pusher. “Eat, eat. Try the artichoke dip. It has mayo and Parmesan, and I think BACON. Divine,” she said. “Put something on those bones of yours.” We ate and ate, or at least she did. The food didn't interest me much. Nothing did right after the divorce, but Carol did
her best to try and snap me out of it. She wouldn't leave me alone, with her jokes and eating and everlasting goodwill until I came around, which I finally did, thanks in large part to Carol.

Carol was Irish and Serbian, tall, with short, wiry, dark gold hair, cut close to her head. When she called me up, I could picture her standing in her living room full of white and crystal lamps, jingling her bracelets, standing very straight while she walked briskly around the house with the phone.

“What are you doing with yourself? Where have you been?” she said.

“I live in Florida.”

“Very funny. I know that, but we haven't talked in a while. Are you OK?”

“Oh, I guess.”

“Tell me.”

Not many people wanted to hear it, but Carol did. She drew it out of me, drilling like a dentist without Novocain, but I felt better afterwards. I needed that, although I never thought so at the time.

“It's pretty crazy sometimes,” I said.

“Well, that doesn't surprise me with the set up you got yourself into.”

“I know.”

“You need to get some time for yourself, girl, and not be running a nursery and a nursing home at the same time,” she said. “What's that philandering ex-gigolo of a husband doing to help?” Carol was not a fan of the Ex. She had blistering words for any husband who played around, especially one who had kids at home.

“He calls. My son and daughter see him, either down here, or he flies them up there for a weekend. They're not
happy about the arrangement, but it works for now. I guess.”

“Oh, kid,” she said. “You know I love ya. How are you, and I mean
you
.”

I told her I was fine. But I was not fine about the insidious decline I saw in my father and the increasingly furious schedule. “It's been quite a year, and I think it's catching up with me.”

“Of course it is. And it can't go on forever, without stopping, without you taking some time for yourself. I know how you are,” she said. “That's why I'm calling. You need to hear it. You need to get someone in there to help you, every day, if necessary. He can afford it. Get out there for a weekend and go soak up some of that sun you're sitting in the middle of and probably haven't even seen, except to go to the grocery store, or to the doctor, or to drive the kids around.”

“Oh, Saints in Heaven.”

“No, I'm no saint. I'm your guardian angel. And if I have to come down there and perch on your shoulder, well, maybe I'll do it.”

“Alleluia.”

She was a friend, even when I didn't see her for months, or talk to her that often. This was how I treated my friends, and as a result, I didn't have many. But I had Carol, and she was right. I needed to ask for help, but I'd been reluctant to go out and get it.

I grabbed a glass of wine and went out to the patio. It was late afternoon when the craziness stopped for an hour or so.

Carol reminded me that I wasn't who I thought I was. I couldn't do it all. Draining the glass, I looked up through the branches of the mango tree. Puffs of clouds flew over. Not a single answer happened by, except to say that I knew going down this road alone, nothing would be solved.

“There's no future in it,” my grandmother had said. She'd meant gambling, and I'd gambled on The Adventure.

Finally, I really needed help on this one.

But I didn't want someone coming in and taking over. I really didn't want to share my space. It was already crowded. And I didn't want a chatty person around who might steal things, or abuse Dad. Maybe Dad wouldn't like him, or her. I was ready to defeat the idea even before we got started.

With some reluctance, I called the local HomeAid Agency that Dad's doctor recommended several times, and I at once ignored. Now, short of yelling, “Help!” into the phone, I first decided to describe the situation. The home health aide listened. That was surprising, and welcome, so I continued. I told her we needed a “self starter.” Even though I didn't know exactly what I meant by that, I knew I didn't want to lead someone by the hand through each day. We needed a helper with common sense, to get along and care for funny, sweet Dad, to do some cleaning and make a meal or two. To start, that's what it boiled down to, and then we would see how it all turned out. I told the aide at the agency that Dad was a big guy, so they had better send someone who was strong enough to hustle him in and out of the shower, up out of his chair to the walker, and God forbid, should he fall down, someone who could pick him up. So far, we had lucked out, except that I thought I might be working on a hernia as a result of all the necessary tugging and lifting to get Dad around.

The agency sent Marilyn, a trim grandmother just a shade under five feet tall with short blond hair. I saw her walking up the driveway, and I thought for a second she was selling
Girl Scout cookies. But then I saw her small face, like a walnut with a wide smile. She was bouncing along in her sturdy white shoes and carrying a large blue bag that read “Manatee HomeAid Agency.”

I began to form the polite words in my head to get rid of her, but then she was in the door, dropping her bag, and smiling up at me.

“Hi,” she said. Marilyn looked me straight in the eye and stuck out her hand. We bonded instantly. She had fingers like twigs, and then she flew past me across the living room and looked around. There was a bird-like quality about her, but she was all hawk, not sparrow, even for such a small woman. Dad was engrossed in an old World War II movie, guns blazing, Audie Murphy shouting in the background. He didn't even look up until I took the remote out of his hand and turned down the volume. Then he fixed his baby blues on me, then on Marilyn.

“Commander Nau,” he said, offering a hand toward her. He attempted to get out of his chair, but Marilyn gently pushed him back into it.

“Stay, Commando,” she said.

“That's Commander,” he said. “Forty years of active and reserve duty in the U.S. Navy.”

She nodded, and ignored the order. To Marilyn, he was always “Commando,” and Dad got used to it. Fast.

Marilyn was top gun, totally in command, and from 9:30a to 1:00p, four days a week, I turned Dad and the house over to her. She sang out—loudly—to him in the morning to get him up. He groaned, resisting the call, but then she went to work on him until he shined like a new recruit. Gradually, he went along with her instructions. But then he fully cooperated because she could get him to the
breakfast table in half the time, and he was a hungry man in the morning.

I couldn't have been happier. She gave him his “showa” (Marilyn was originally from Boston) and a “head wash.” She shaved him, helped him dress, and arranged his three-course breakfast, his vitamins, his ice water, his newspaper, his hat and jacket, which he needed for his trip to the patio to wait for Harvey the Egret. They rounded out their morning routine with an old movie, and Marilyn liked to watch old movies, too, fortunately. More importantly, she liked Dad and they got along fine together.

Marilyn smoked, so Dad had a smoking buddy, though I told her he was strictly rationed to two, maybe three, a day. She pushed that a little, and sometimes I turned my head when they were out on the patio chatting up a storm and creating little clouds from her Virginia Slims.

While Marilyn scuttled back and forth from the dishwasher to the washing machine, I went out to do errands, and when I came back I found that she had done as good a job as I could do, which was a total surprise. I wasn't used to delegating authority and I wasn't used to the help, so I didn't know it was possible for someone else to do loads of dishes and wash and remove all the remains and spots and spills and do it so efficiently. Marilyn took over the kitchen, laundry, and bathrooms with unerring aptitude. I didn't have to walk her through myriad details of running a household. She'd had plenty of practice, and we got the benefits of that practice.

I got so used to Marilyn and our routine that I quickly became covetous of her time when the agency called and wanted to add to her hours in other households, because the word about Marilyn had spread. Home care of the elderly was becoming big business, especially in Florida. I paid the
agency $14.25 an hour of which Marilyn received ten dollars. I wanted to pay her more, and keep her all to ourselves, but she had a contract and she didn't want to lose it. Marilyn went strictly by the book. So, we coasted along, and when she told me the agency asked her to work another weekend for someone else, or that she had worked twelve days straight, I shuddered to think she might burn out, or get on a plane back to Boston. But Marilyn seemed possessed of that common sense I saw in her from the start. After one particularly long stretch, she said, “I'm not working this weekend. If they want me to, I'll tell them to go shit in their hat.”