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“It doesn’t mean anything. Aroo.” I marched over to the TV and turned it on.
“Aroo.” Maddy pulled the blankets out from under herself and tucked her feet in. “Aroo, aroo, aroo.” She snuggled down and put her head on the pillow.
I got into her bed, although we had never slept in the same bed before. “Move over.” I kicked her.
“Aroo.” She kicked me back.
We left the TV on all night.
In the morning we tried to put the bed back exactly as we’d found it. The sheets were barely rumpled. We had each slept in one position, or else it seemed that way, but we folded and smoothed the pillows so they were again shaped like Tootsie Rolls, and tucked the spread over them, working together, feeling very competent, a team.
“When they find out where we were, they’ll feel awful,” I told Maddy on the way home. “If they’re mad, I’m leaving forever.” I slammed my hand against the front door, pushing it in, and moved aggressively ahead of her. She trailed a car’s length behind as we hunted around, finally locating our parents in the kitchen. My father said, “Hi, you hungry?” My mother glanced over from where she was squeezing oranges for juice, and kept squeezing.
A year and a half later, when I left for college, my parents came to the airport and we all pretended to be a family. Mom bought me magazines and Dad stood at the departure gate with his arm around her. The plane was announced and Maddy jumped on me, piggy-back.
She was thirteen now, taller than I was, and long and gangly. Her legs went on forever, and disappeared into her baggy shorts like firehouse poles that go right through the ceiling. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. “Maddy, let go.” It was like being locked in a vise.
“Aroo,” she squeaked.
Not fair. I shook her loose. “Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. I’ll miss you.” Big lie. I got in line and didn’t look back.
During my first two years of college, my mother never phoned. But my father did. There was a pay phone in my dorm that served the entire floor. It was in a wooden booth with glass doors and a seat inside, and I spent more time in that booth talking to my father than the girl next door to me spent gabbing with her fiancé. I began to anticipate my father’s calls. “For Eve,” whoever answered would shout. I approached the phone with trepidation, picking up the receiver and listening to see whether the call was long-distance. You could hear long-distance then. It was an empty sound, like air in a tunnel. If that sound was there, I knew who it probably was.
“Hello. Just checking in,” he’d say.
“What’s new?” I’d say.
“We had a fight last night. Your mother’s driving me crazy.”
I called Georgia to complain. “Do you believe they’re still at it?”
“Refresh my memory,” said Georgia, who was now in New York City, working as a girl Friday at Mademoiselle magazine.
“What?”
“Mom had one affair, right?”
“As far as we know.”
“Well, I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s hardly a big deal.”
“Maybe she can’t get over him, Georgia.”
“Over that lab rat? Over a man who smells of formaldehyde? I don’t think so. Anyway, doesn’t our father start the fights?”
“Not exactly. She drinks, which provokes him. Besides, it’s all her fault for having an affair in the first place.”
“Eve, there are hundreds of people in the country right now having open marriages, swinging, the works, and he is carrying on about one petite affair. You know, when Richard and I get married—”
“Who’s Richard?”
“You’ll love him. If he talks. But he doesn’t talk that much in public.”
“Where does he talk?”
“At work—he’s a lawyer. Or with me.”
“Is this serious, or is it like that engagement you had in college? Mom predicted it wouldn’t last.”
“This is serious. We’re eloping next summer. I can’t have our parents at the wedding. Who knows what they’ll do.”
I spent the summer when Georgia eloped as a camp counselor in Maine. No sooner had I dumped my luggage back in my dorm room than the pay phone rang. I picked it up.
“She won’t go to school,” my father said. This was new: He didn’t say hello. He left the front off the conversation.
“What? She’s dropping out? Put her on, Dad.”
“Not Maddy, your mother. She says she doesn’t give a shit about Sydney Carton. She’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of scotch.” He hung up.
This was also new: No good-bye. He left the end off the conversation.
The next day, I answered again. And again I heard long-distance. Then crying. Well, not crying, sniffling. Very large sniffles.
“Dad, what is it, what happened?” I closed the phone booth door.
Still nothing but major intakes of breath.
“Are you all right?” I started breathing heavily too, inadvertently, in unison. I could see Joanne, the girl with the fiancé, coming down the hall to use the phone. Minutes went by. She stared at me so I couldn’t help but notice that she was waiting.
“Dad?”
No answer.
Joanne used her diamond ring to knock on the door. I twisted in my seat so I wouldn’t have to see her.
“She’s gone,” my dad said finally.
“Mom’s gone?”
“Yeah.”
Fine, I thought. Great, she’s gone. Thank God. No more drinking, no more fights. “Dad, don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be back.”
“She ran off with that redwood.”
“What?”
He hung up.
She ran off with that redwood. She ran off with that redwood. His words played over and over in my brain. Joanne rapped her rock against the glass again and glared at me. She ran off with that redwood. I stuck my tongue out at Joanne and yanked open the door.
I didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I couldn’t focus on anything. I had invented a system, five minutes of study, five minutes of daydreaming, which allowed me to relive necking each weekend with my boyfriend, Mark. But as I sat at my desk trying to study, then trying to think about Mark, my mind kept veering off to Mom and Tom Winston. Had she pined for him for five years, or had she been seeing him secretly the whole time? Did they meet at exits off the freeway all along the route from Westwood to Big Bear, or did they have a favorite rendezvous, a favorite room? Did he pin her on the bed the way he pinned those little frogs when he cut them open?
“It’s for you,” Joanne yelled. “Telephone.”
Maybe it’s Mom. Maybe she’s calling so I’ll know where she is.
I took the receiver and, holding it away from my head, stood outside the booth and listened. There it was again, but dimly, the long-distance sound, plus noise, horns, traffic. “Hello?”
“Evie?”
I slammed the phone against my ear. “Maddy, where are you?”
“In Malibu. In a parking lot. Guess what? I’m moving in with Isaac.”
“What do you mean? You can’t move in with Isaac. You’re only fifteen. What about school?”
“I don’t have to live at home to go to school. God, I knew you’d say that.” Her words turned into a wail. “Just leave me alone, all right? You don’t have to live with a drunk.”
“But I thought Mom moved out. Dad called last night. He said she left.”
Now she was crying. Gulping sobs. Big fat teenage tears. “Not Mom, dummy. Dad. Look, I’ll be at Isaac’s. He doesn’t have a phone. Bye.”
Dad? What was she talking about?
Two (#uf27aafa2-544c-5332-9ecd-2087dd168095)
The door is unlocked from the inside, an orderly opens it, and Angie wheels my father in. This place is not old, really, just battered. The painted plaster walls have scrape marks on them, probably from wheelchairs. The wooden trim around the doorways and windows, that homey touch signifying extra care and concern, is gouged, and the walnut stain is scratched and thin. “UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric”—the words are discreetly printed on a rectangular plastic plaque next to the door, which the orderly relocks after us.
The wheelchair squeaks on the linoleum as we go down the hall. We pass first an old-fashioned telephone booth built into the wall—it is nearly identical to the one in my college dorm years ago—then a room filled with rows of chairs. Assorted chairs in assorted colors, but mostly they have metal legs and metal arms, with cushioned vinyl seats and vinyl pads on the armrests. Old people are sitting in some of them. They are facing a television set, which is on. Straight ahead is something I will begin to call the cage. It’s an office that has a small opening fitted with a protective grate, like the kind in front of bank teller windows in dangerous neighborhoods. The nurses hang out here. There is glass on the sides so they can see out into the patient rooms that surround them.
My father twists around to look at Angie. It’s a strain for him to turn because he’s so fat. He takes up all the space in the chair, and when he turns, his shirt strains, almost to popping open. “What’s Claire doing here?” he growls.
“I’m not Claire, I’m Angie.”
“You know Angie,” I say. “She works at the Home, where you live. She’s helping me bring you here.”
Angie wheels him into a dining room. An older man in glasses and a woman, both in medical whites, come into the room, closing the door behind us.
The woman introduces herself. “I’m Dr. Kelly,” she says. She looks like a high school cheerleader. That young and wholesome. “This is Rob Bateson.”
“I’m the social worker,” he says cheerfully. “Why don’t we sit down?” He gestures toward the nearest Formica table.
Angie wheels my father to the table and then stands back, waiting for the rest of us.
“I’ll sit next to my father,” I announce. This is an unnecessary statement. In the almost twenty-five years since my mother left, my sisters and I have taken turns calling the doctor about him, putting him in loony bins, drying him out, buying him clothes. And when more than one of us are present, we even take turns sitting next to him. But today, at UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric, my father’s final incarceration, there is no one here but me.
I hear a squeal as Dr. Kelly jumps, throws my father a dirty look, then catches herself. She smooths the back of her pants, where he obviously has just pinched, then takes a chair, sits, and smiles calmly.
I’ll be out of here in a half-hour, I comfort myself. This is a trick my son has taught me, the way he gets through classes he hates.
They start asking my father questions. Your name? “Lou Mozell.” Age? “Thirty-nine,” he says.
“Eighty-one,” I say, smiling.
Where were you born? “The Bronx.” College?
“Harvard,” says my father. “I graduated with honors.” They write all this down dutifully.
“What month is it?” My father has no idea. “What day of the week?” He looks up at the ceiling, studying it as if there were something to see.
“Look,” I say, “this is ridiculous. My father lives in a Home. Every day is the same. How does he know whether it’s Monday or Wednesday? And this is Los Angeles. The sky’s always blue. Even I don’t know what month it is half the time.”
“These questions have been tested,” Dr. Kelly says, an edge to her voice.
“Well, they don’t make any sense.”
Meanwhile my father is refusing to say anything.
“Will you write your name, Mr. Mozell?” She offers a pen and her clipboard.
He obliges.
“Would you write a sentence?”
He does that too. She shows me the clipboard.
He has written, “It’s too late.”
Oh, wow. I actually have this dumb high school reaction. Oh, wow. Heavy. And in my mind, I am already on the phone to my sisters.” ‘It’s too late.’ That’s what he wrote. Do you believe that?”
“Why don’t we show you to your room,” Dr. Kelly says to my father.
“Are you leaving me here?” he asks me. His hands, which have been lying listlessly in his lap, fly up and seize the arms of his wheelchair.
“You’re going to stay here for a week or two.” Maybe more, I don’t say. “You’re having memory problems, Dad. They’ll run some tests.”
“You bitch. You and Claire. You put me here before. You’re in cahoots.” My father flings a backslap at me but misses by a mile.
“That’s not Claire, that’s Angie, and you’ve never been here before.” I say this quietly, but I can feel my face flush.
Angie springs up. “I’ll take him.” She spins the wheelchair around. “I’m taking you to your room, Mr. Mozell,” she declares, as Rob Bateson jumps to open the door for them. “Bitch,” my father shouts as she steers him out, and Bateson closes the door behind them.
There is silence. A moment of respect for the departed.
“My father didn’t go to Harvard.”
Dr. Kelly laughs, then immediately crosses out the entry on her form. “Where did he go?”
