Until the Real Thing Comes Along (19 page)

“Yeah. I told you all the charming things about Bob. His Marilyn Monroe wig. His Kewpie-doll collection. I didn’t tell you he’s the nineteenth person I’ve helped die. I didn’t tell you about how it felt to drag him out of bed and put him on the commode and feel his head leaning into my stomach while he wept. I didn’t tell you about how it feels to change sheets that are just … reeking, and then immediately change them again. I watched him lose his vision, he screamed the night it was finally gone, he just shook and screamed. Patty, do you know how many memorial services I’ve gone to? At first, I always felt so moved. Now it’s like some horrible rou
tine
that just keeps going on and on and on. I’ve lost so many of my friends, Jesus, when I think of how many … I dream about them, once I dreamed there was a party and they were all there and I woke up sobbing, I missed them all so much. It got so that I was lying in bed at night, almost
every night, thinking it’s not fair, why don’t I have it, I should have it, too. And then the phone would ring and it was the next new diagnosis. I just wanted
out
of that! At any cost. I was willing to try
any
thing to … just … you know, live some normal
life
, and it’s true, I do want children. And I was just so tired of that phone and those apartments full of medical equipment and bottles of pills and the shades pulled all day, and then the dividing up of someone’s stuff—here, you take his CDs, you get his Armanis, you take the fucking Weber grill! I’m a young man and all I was talking about was dying and dying and dying!”

He starts crying, silently, but I can feel the bed shake. “Ethan,” I say, and I put my arms around him. “Ethan.”

“You can’t know,” he says. “It was such a relief to just think about
life
for a change! I just wanted so much to have a piece of a happy life. I’m sorry. I know I’ve hurt you, and I swear, Patty, I never meant to.”

“I know, Ethan.”

“I do love you.”

“I know that, too. You sleep, now, all right?”

“Patty? If you need me to go, I’ll—”

“No. It’s hard, Ethan, that’s all. You just have to let me be crabby sometimes, it’s hard to love you and not make love to you.”

“I could try. We could.” He kisses my forehead, my cheek, and I stop him.

“I think that might only be worse. We’ll just keep what we have, all right?”

“Do let’s keep it, though.”

I nod, nod, nod.

•    •    •

A week later, we go to the doctor’s office and hear that everything is proceeding nicely, that I should probably deliver close to my due date, in three weeks. We bring some groceries home and put them away and when we decide to go to a movie and get back in the car, it won’t start. And because I am tired and vaguely sad I am awful and I yell at Ethan for not knowing anything about cars.

“I do know something,” he says. “It’s the battery. We need a new battery.”

“Well, I’d like to know how we’re going to get to a store to get a battery without a car! And what if I go into labor right now!”

He says nothing. He crosses the road and stands there hitchhiking. Two hours later, a late model Mercedes pulls up in the driveway. I see Ethan emerge from the passenger side, carrying a battery and an armful of freesia. The driver, an older woman, toots the horn at him and waves when she leaves. Massachusetts license plates. I open the door, watch Ethan climb the steps up toward me.

“Who was that?” I ask.

“She picked me up hitchhiking,” Ethan says. “Nan, her name was. I didn’t have a
car
,” he reminds me.

I put the flowers in water, set them in the middle of the kitchen table, and burst into tears.

He crosses the room, holds me. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what you want; I’ll do it if I can.”

“You can’t do it.”

“But I’ll do anything else, Patty.”

“Yeah. I know.” I look around the living room, let out a shuddering sigh. “I want to go home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You want to come?”

“Yes.”

“I think maybe I’ll live alone again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I thought everything might change here, too.”

He lets go of me, looks down into my face.

“Don’t say anything,” I say. “I know.”

“I just wish you would be happy about the baby.”

“I’ll be happy about the baby when it gets here. If it gets here—it might not get here. I might be like this for the rest of my life.”

“It will be here in less than a month, Patty. Think of that! We can leave in a week, all right? I’ll give them a week’s notice, and we’ll drive back.”

“Maybe the leaves will be starting to turn.”

“Yes. Here, too.”

“Not the same.”

“You’re right. Listen, let’s go to the movie. I’ll put the battery in.”

I nod, feel relief filling my throat. When the phone rings, I answer it mindlessly.

“Honey?” my father says.

“What happened?” It is his voice that makes me say this, which is not his voice. I see Ethan step forward, his face full of questions. I hold up my hand.
Later
.

“Now, it’s not an emergency,” my father says.

“What happened?”

“Well, it’s just that … your mother … She has Alzheimer’s disease, Patty.”

I laugh. “No, she doesn’t.”

“Well. Yes, she does.”

“I … When did you find out?”

“A while ago. Now, we didn’t want to tell you, but things have really—”

“What do you mean you didn’t want to tell me?”

“Your mother was very firm on this point, Patty. She wanted you to get through this pregnancy without—”

“I’m coming home. Right now.”

“Well, don’t—”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Listen to me. It’s not an emergency. You be careful.”

“I’ll be careful. I want to come home. I was coming home anyway. I’m coming home.”

“Oh, honey. Hey. Don’t cry. We’re all going to get through this.”

I hang up the phone, turn to Ethan.

“Get in the car,” he says. “You can tell me on the way.”

I throw some things into a suitcase, say nothing while I’m packing except “I knew it.” And realize that I did, too; of course I did.

M
y sisters and my brother are home, sitting at the dining-room table and having dinner when I walk in.

“Look
at you!” my mother says, and embraces me. I am so sorry I left at all; my regret makes me dizzy.

“You just missed a couple of months,” I say. And do not cry. And do not cry.

She squeezes me tighter, says quietly, “I’m all right. I’m all
right.”

I go around the table, hugging everyone, and then remember Ethan, who stands now in the corner of the room, unsure as to what he should do.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Ethan?” my mother asks. She is like a Tupperware hostess: serenely surreal.

He looks at me. “I think … why don’t I come back another time?”

I nod, grateful.

He smiles, waves a general good-bye, and is gone.

I sit at the table, take a bite off Johnny’s plate while I’m waiting
for my own. “It’s good,” I say. Turkey. Green beans. Stuffing. She’s made it a million times, I know her recipe for everything. “So. We need to talk, huh?”

“Not tonight, Patty,” my mother says. “Okay? We decided we’d have a nice dinner, all of us together, and talk in the morning.”

“That’s fine,” I say. I look at my sister Donna, whose eyes are full of tears. “New ’do, huh?”

Her hand goes to the back of her neck. “I hate it. She used the
shaver
.”

“You’ve got to keep your eye on them every minute,” I say. And then, to my sister Phyllis, “How are you?”

She nods, starts to speak, then just nods again.

It is the oddest dinner, the gentlest thing. Truly. It is so gentle. We might be underwater, the way everything is so wavy and muffled.

Later, after everyone has gone to bed, I lie awake on the sofa bed in my father’s den. It feels so natural, so right, to have everyone back together under one roof again—no spouses, no children, just us. I remember the comforting clutter that used to be in this house: baseball gloves, schoolbooks, someone’s jacket forever on some chair. The phone rang and rang and rang; voices shouted up the stairs, answers came ringing down. The upstairs bathroom mirror was continually fogged. I recall so many Christmases, all of us in our robes, and I smile, remembering the year Phyllis wanted to wear a lit Advent wreath and singed her hair, the year our dog ate the gift cheese and threw up all over the sofa while we were at midnight mass. I think of how loud dinners used to be,
with competitive stories, laughter, occasional fights—often over who got the last of something. My mother laid out snacks for us every day after school; I wonder if anyone does that anymore. We got peanut-butter cookies, we got oranges slices in pretty arrangements; we got cocoa piled high with marshmallows.

I realize I am hungry. I hate when ordinary needs intrude on a melancholy reverie, but there you are, that’s a body for you.

I put on my robe, head for the kitchen. I’ll have a turkey sandwich, heavy mayo, what’s the difference when you’re as huge as I am. I turn on the light, see my father at the kitchen table. “Oh!” he says.

“Hey, Dad.” I sit opposite him.

“Nice robe,” he says. “Pretty.”

“Ethan got it.”

“That right?”

“Yeah, he outfitted me and the baby like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Well, that’s nice.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing down here, sitting in the dark?”

“Nothing. Can’t see to do anything.”

I smile, then say, “Could you … talk to me a little bit about things now? Just a little.”

“Yeah, sure, honey.” He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands together. “I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me, too.”

A long pause, and then, “Well, we think this first started happening maybe six, eight months ago.” He looks up at me and on
his face is a terrible vulnerability, as though what he is about to reveal now is suddenly arbitrary, and it is up to me to make fact or fiction of it. For the first time in my life, I see the boy in him.

“Uh-huh,” I say, gently. He has to finish. I need to know it all.

“She … well, you know, she had those mood changes. And she does get a little confused. It’s just … starting to happen more often. Not all the time, though!”

“No.”

“And, uh … Well, she started … She …” He pushes back away from the table. “Could you …? I’ll be right back. Okay?”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. I’ll be right back.” He goes into the little downstairs bathroom, closes the door quietly.

I sit for a minute, then go to stand outside the bathroom door. Inside, I hear him quietly retching. I remember that his mother did this when his father died—she vomited over and over. She was lying on the sofa in a darkened living room, her yellow scrub bucket by her side, the afghan over her, though it was a hot summer day. She lay quietly, like a dead person herself, except to rise up now and then and hang over the bucket. I remember thinking, Well, that’s good, that’s a way to get the grief out. Now I understand the absurdity of that hopeful notion. I hear my father flush the toilet, turn on the tap. I think he may be looking at the image of himself in the mirror and seeing Miss Marilyn White, his pink-cheeked bride, twenty years old and saying
I do
with her mouth, with her eyes, with the slight slanting of her body toward his, the oblique line of love. She is brushing her auburn, then graying hair; smiling at him in her vanity mirror. She is scraping out a
striped mixing bowl, patting down pincurls, opening her own mouth when she feeds their baby applesauce. She is turning up the radio and singing along with her favorite song, clapping her hands over her mouth when she sees the kitchen he remodeled for her, shielding her eyes against the setting sun last summer, when she came out into the backyard wearing her new sleeveless yellow dress and no shoes—earthily beautiful and plainly his. I’m sure that’s what he’s seeing. And seeing. And seeing. I pull my robe tighter around me, go back to the kitchen table, and wait for him.

In the morning, I go to the window and look out into the backyard. My mother is sitting in a lawn chair, her head thrown back, letting the sun fall on her face. It must be chilly; she has a sweater clutched around her. I look at my watch: 7:40.

I go into my parents’ room. Empty, the bed neatly made, framed pictures on the dresser speckled by dust that nearly glitters in the strong morning light. I get a pair of my father’s warmest socks, put his robe and slippers on, join my mother in the backyard.

“Say, there’s an attractive outfit,” she says.

“It’s warm,” I say. And then, “It’s
cold
!”

“Well, it’s early.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“He went to the bakery. You want some coffee?”

“No thanks, Mom. I can’t—”

“Oh! Yes, I remember. I remember that.”

“Okay.”

“You look wonderful, honey.”

“I hate being pregnant.”

She laughs.

“I do! I thought it would be so wonderful but it’s just a pain in the ass.”

“Don’t use that language in front of me.”

“Sorry. But it is.”

“Well,” she says. “Just
wait
.”

I look at her. “What do you mean?”

“Pain in the ass?” she says. “You want to know about pain in the ass?” She laughs again. Well.
She’s
certainly in a good mood.

“It’s not pain in the ass you have when you deliver,” I say, looking down.

“I hated being pregnant, too,” my mother says, suddenly.

I look up. “You
did
?”

“Yes. Does that surprise you?”

“Well … 
yes
. You never said anything.”

“Wasn’t worth it. I said it to your father, he knew. But there was no reason to tell all of you. Anyway, I loved children, I just hated the pregnancies.”

“God!” I say. “God!”

“Are we praying, Patty?”

“Ma. I just … I wish I’d known that. It would have made me feel so much less guilty.”

“Oh, don’t feel guilty.” Her voice is bitter now. “It’s such a waste of time.” She looks around the yard, at the fading garden, at the trees just starting to turn. Together, we listen to the staccato message of a woodpecker, and together we smile at it.