Hanging Up

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“Look, my father’s been nuts before. He’s been mixed up about who he is and where he is. If you adjust his lithium and whatever else he’s on, he’ll come right back.”

She shakes her head.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?” I say this bravely. It makes me nervous to confront any doctor, even this soda-pop version. I don’t say, “I want to speak to someone over you—the doctor in charge,” but I try to imagine I am Georgia, who inspires fear. Who can make salesgirls scurry in all directions.

Dr. Kelly stiffens. “I know your father’s case.”

“Fine.” I cave in that quickly. And now her voice is sterner. Meaner. I owe this to you, Georgia. “Look,” I say, smiling, trying to win her back. “My sister’s concerned that we know everything, that’s all, that no stone is left unturned.”

“Your father has the dwindles.”

“The dwindles?”

She nods.

“You mean he’s dwindling?”

“Exactly.” She acts proud of me—I have caught on to an extremely difficult concept.

“Are you sure it isn’t Alzheimer’s?”

“Well, we can’t be sure of that until after he’s dead and we do an autopsy, but this severe dementia and loss of motor skills came on fairly rapidly. I think”—she says “I think” as if she were drawing on years of experience—“it’s just the dwindles.”

“How long do you live with the dwindles?” It sounds as if I’m asking, How long will he live? But maybe I am really asking, How long will I have to live with his dwindles?

“A year or two.”

“Why does he keep bringing up my son? He says I put him here because of Jesse.”

“Could he be referring to something in the past, some event?”

I don’t have to think about this. “Yes.”

“He’s perseverating.”

Perseverating? I insult her and she pays me back by using an SAT word. Who knows what this means? I don’t bother to ask. She shuffles the pages together and slides them back in the file.

“Oh, Dr. Kelly?”

“Yes?”

“The other day, I couldn’t remember why I went upstairs. Is that normal?”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“Yes.”

I go to my father’s room. He’s leaning over trying to reach his shoe, which is untied. He doesn’t have the dexterity to tie his shoe even if he could reach it, and he can’t walk anymore, so it doesn’t matter whether his shoes are tied. He is no longer able to trip on his laces.

I stand in the doorway, watching coolly, like a plant manager assessing some employee’s capability. You’re not going to live two more years. Not one more year. I don’t believe it. He looks up.

“Dad, come on, let’s do something. Let’s go find company.”

I push him out the door and down the hall. The last time I pushed someone along like this it was Jesse in a stroller.

A man walks toward us in a lively way, on the balls of his feet. He has a healthy head of white hair and a trim body. He resembles an aging, weathered camp counselor, someone who might lead us all in jumping jacks. “I bet you don’t recognize me,” he says to my father.

“Sure I do.” My father puts out his hand.

The bouncy man grasps it. “Great to see you again. I’ve been traveling.”

“Me too,” says my father.

“The Orient, Baghdad, Taiwan. But you know, I was thinking”—the man turns his head to one side, then the other, like a bird on a branch deciding which way to fly—“it’s great to see you.”

“Me too.” My father is smiling and so is the man, as their conversation goes ’round and ’round, a horse on a racetrack with no finish line.

“Would you like to get by?” I pull the wheelchair to the side.

“I’m going in there.” The man points to the dining room door. “Would you open it?”

I try. It’s locked, so I knock. Doris peeks out. “Excuse me,” I say.

She opens it further, spots the bouncy man behind me, and slams it closed. “Wait here,” I say to my dad, as if he could go somewhere.

I run to the cage. “That man”—I point—“wants to go into the dining room, but Doris slammed the door in his face.”

The nurse leans close to the grate and whispers. “He gets into everything.”

“Oh,” I say, as if it makes perfect sense. Who would want that? “Well, we’ll see you later,” I tell the bouncy man, who may have lost his mind but who does not have the dwindles. His family will expire from exasperation long before he dies.

“I have no idea who he was,” says my father. Was. That’s the correct tense. He was someone else once. My dad was too, I guess. I’m not sure.

I wheel him into the TV room. Old people sit and stare at a television, which is showing a weather report of conditions at nearby beaches.

“I hope you aren’t jealous of your sister,” he says suddenly, very loudly.

“Of course I’m not,” I reply, noticing that several old people have turned to look. People who are otherwise not interested in anything. I smile at them to show that this conversation is harmless.

“She’s a big success.” He booms it.

I don’t answer. Maybe this train of thought will go away.

“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie.” He’s chanting and happy. He’s ten and on the jungle gym, hanging upside down and swinging. “She’s Georgia, the magazine,” he chants. “We named her and then they named a magazine after her. Who ever thought when we gave her that name it would end up a magazine? Wasn’t that brilliant? I’d like some applause.”

Several demented people clap.

“This is her sister.” He has swung to the top of the jungle gym and is shouting to the entire playground. I smile, nodding at everyone. My father turns his head toward me sharply. “What’s your name?”

“He’s always been like that,” says Joe, who is packing.

“True.”

“But now he’s senile. If you could see his brain, I’m sure it would look like Swiss cheese.” He smiles, pleased at the notion of my father’s brain with gigantic holes in it. “Of course, it’s the holes that make Swiss cheese interesting. Although Swiss cheese can never really be interesting. Like your father.”

Joe does three half-hour shows a week for National Public Radio. What that means to me, married to him, is that at any moment some idea takes hold, like this mini-essay on Swiss cheese, and then he’s no longer talking to me but experimenting with an idea that, in some form or another, may end up on the air. His show, USA from Here, features oddballs. Joe spins their lives into tales.

He loves it. He was spinning tales before he was on the radio. He grew up in New Hampshire, in a small town, a place where it was safe to be curious. His parents still live there contentedly, in an 1846 white clapboard house with vines of roses encircling the windows and a weathervane standing at the peak of its shingled roof. Joe could always tell which way the wind was blowing.

With the confidence of the truly secure, Joe does not pay tremendous attention to how or what he packs—except for his tape recorder, which is always carefully snapped into its leather case and stashed in the small zippered pouch on his hanging bag. Clothes are selected almost at random: the first shirt his hand touches in the drawer, the pair of pants nearest the closet door. Our bathroom is full of duplicates and triplicates of things Joe forgot and had to buy on the road.

“My father’s interesting,” I protest.

“You’re praising your father? He’s not dead yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, when Nixon died, they turned him into a hero. Revisionist history. But your father’s not dead.”

“He’s dying.”

“He’s not dying and he’s not interesting.” Joe talks to me as if he were correcting my wrong answer to a test question. “Mainly he’s trouble.”

“You pack like a complete slob.” I say this with a smile that I tack on after I hear myself speak. It doesn’t fool Joe.

“What is this about?”

“You always get there and don’t have what you need, that’s all.”

“So I buy it. Or don’t.”

“Right. Forget it.” I go look in the mirror. Is this new haircut weird, or is it my imagination? My hair is short around my ears, then takes a two-inch drop in the back. It looks like upstairs, downstairs. “If my father is senile, why does he know how to upset me? Do people always get senile in character?”

“Ask Jesse. That sounds like something he’d have an opinion on.” Joe zips his bag, folds it in two, and starts buckling the sides.

“Why? Because you don’t want to talk to me?”

He stops buckling and stands up straight. He pushes his glasses back on his nose. It’s a remarkably aggressive gesture for being so simple. Casual, affable Joe is deceptive this way. He uses his index finger and pushes the glasses back firmly, and it is now immensely clear that he’s looking at me piercingly, and not just with two eyes but with four. “That is not what I mean, Eve. The reason you should ask Jesse is, he has an opinion on everything. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your sense of humor?”