Читать книгу Hanging Up - Delia Ephron, Delia Ephron - Страница 8

At six a.m., the phone rings. “He’s dead,” I say to Joe, and grab the receiver. “Hello.”

“Is this the beautiful, wonderful daughter of Lou Mozell?”

“Hi, Dad. Are you all right?”

“Why’d you lock me in the pen? ’Cause of Jesse?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Go to hell.” He hangs up.

I feel dizzy from the jolt—first to the body, then to the brain. Joe puts out his arm for me to snuggle into. I shake my head.

“He’s been in that geriatric/psychiatric ward a week and he’s definitely not better. I wish they would slap some handcuffs on him. At least then he couldn’t phone.”

“How about a straitjacket?” suggests Joe.

“Right.” I throw off the covers and get up. I jerk open the closet and look for my robe.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Joe pats the bedside table, hunting around for his glasses. He puts them on and watches me from the bed.

I go into the bathroom. Why am I in here? “What am I looking for?” I yell to Joe.

“Your bathrobe.”

“Right.” I take it off the hook and go back into the bedroom. “I hope this memory thing my father has isn’t catching.”

The phone rings again. Joe reaches for it, but I get there first. “It’s my father,” I say nobly.

He removes the receiver from my hand. “Hello.” There’s a long pause. I try to read Joe’s eyes, which seem faintly amused. “He’s calling collect now,” he tells me, covering the receiver. “Yes, I’ll accept the charges. Hello, Lou.” Another pause. “No, of course Jesse isn’t mad at you.” He hangs up.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. He’s not my father.” Joe turns over to sleep some more. The phone rings again. He groans and picks it up. “Yes. I’ll accept.… You’re not in jail and Jesse isn’t mad at you.” Blunt this time. He hangs up. “Shit. What a way to get up in the morning.”

This is something Alexander Graham Bell never anticipated. I believe I read somewhere that he grew to hate his own invention, but I don’t think it was because he had a senile parent phoning him ten times a day. I’m sure he didn’t know that people who couldn’t recognize their own pants would remember their children’s phone numbers—could actually recall a seven-digit number plus an area code. I hate Alexander Graham Bell. Of course, right now I hate everyone.

“I think we should buy telephone stock,” I say later, at breakfast, while I am pacing back and forth, eating granola. “Not now, but when we baby boomers hit eighty.”

Joe doesn’t look up. He’s reading his newspapers from all over the country—the San Jose Mercury News, the Waco Tribune, the Boulder Daily Camera—to find stories for his radio show.

“Jesse, when I’m eighty, be sure to buy telephone stock.”

Jesse doesn’t look up either. He’s reading the back of the milk carton.

“Do I have to visit him today?” I wonder aloud.

Joe does not ask who “him” is. “No,” he says.

“But I haven’t seen him since I checked him in. Jesse, you’ll be happy to know that this morning your grandfather remembered your name. It was a miracle.”

“That could not be considered a miracle, Mom. That is simply a scientific inevitability.” Jesse’s mouth develops a little sneer. “When the brain deteriorates—and your dad is like wacko—the frontal lobe damage causes a person to remember things they forgot and forget things they know.”

I don’t respond, and I deem this an extraordinary feat. “That reminds me, I have to phone that man you had the car accident with. I’ve already tried him twice, and he hasn’t called back.”

“So forget about it.”

“You should probably do this yourself. You know, I really am busy.”

“If you think you’re busy, you should try high school.” Jesse continues to eat as he carries his cereal bowl to the sink. “I’ll be back late. Ifer and I are going to a séance. You know, Mom, all doors are entrances. Think about it.” He puts his bowl in the sink. “Bye.”

I pour another cup of coffee, even though after two cups my whole body rattles from the caffeine. I allow myself to sit. For a moment it’s completely quiet. Not even a breeze; nothing to ruffle anything. Stop, right now. Stop, with this feeling in this room: Joe at the table reading his papers, the smell of coffee, the warm cup in my hands, two sips before the jitters.

“Joe, when are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be home in about a week.”

“I wish you weren’t going.”

Joe pays no attention to this, which I resent and admire. “Aren’t you late?” he asks pointedly.

I start my general pre-departure routine. Finding my purse, going through my briefcase, checking for pens, Filofax, a legal pad. “Have you seen my sunglasses?” I run upstairs. Search the night table, the bureau, the bathroom, stop at the mirror. Oh God, is that my face?

This is not the first time this has happened. Not the first time, since I turned forty, that I have passed a mirror and stopped short, startled by my own reflection.

These sideways unexpected encounters are the most jarring, these candid glimpses when I have not taken time to prepare my face to be seen and my brain to see it. All I notice are the lines around my eyes. Are these new? The creases running south from the edge of my nose. Definitely deeper. My mouth, of which I am extremely fond, have been ever since a girl in my bunkhouse at Camp Tocaloma told me it was rosebud-shaped, my mouth is starting to turn down. I need a vacation. No. This is just me. Me at forty-four.

I look the way I always have, but the face of the future is threatening to take over. I have two faces in one, a nonreturnable bargain.

One day, when Joe and I passed an old couple walking arm in arm, I warned him, “Soon we’ll be them.” “I hope so,” he replied. He was admiring their coziness, but that’s not what I meant.

The first time I “got” death, I was eight years old and standing in my elementary school playground, waiting in line for my turn at handball. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” The kid in front turned to me, announced this, and then rubbed his fist around in his eye. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Every time I went to sleep I would count frantically, lie in my bed going from one to a hundred as fast as I could, so I wouldn’t think about it, and eventually I succeeded. I didn’t think about it for years. But when I started being surprised by my reflection, the thought came back, and lately every morning I wake up with that little boy’s face staring into mine: “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Also, for the past year I have changed my hairstyle every two months. Somehow this seems connected.

Why am I here? “Joe,” I yell, “do you know why I came upstairs?”

“No,” he shouts back.

“Oh, I remember. My sunglasses.” I find them on my desk, next to Dr. Omar Kunundar’s phone number. Good grief, I almost left without taking care of this. I sit down at my desk and dial. I hear the voice of a very businesslike woman.

“Hello, this is the office of Dr. Kunundar. If you are having an emergency, please press one and leave a message. If this is a nonemergency medical call, press two and leave a message. For other business, press three. Thank you.”

I press three. “Hello, this is Eve Mozell again. A week ago, my son Jesse opened his car door into Dr. Kunundar’s car. I would like to discuss the accident as soon as possible and would really appreciate it if the doctor could give me a call at 555–4603.”

These words don’t convey how charming I am on an answering machine. I am sincere and warm, polite but inviting. It’s all in my voice, and it’s one reason I’m good at my job: I do special events. People hire me to throw fund-raisers or convention parties. I am a great planner, great at anticipating what might go wrong so it doesn’t. No Surprises is the name of my company. I do most of the planning on the phone, so I end up leaving many messages for people, like about whether we want a pasta station or a roast beef station, or about this adorable mariachi band I have located. I have “phone talent.” I easily become buddies with people over the phone.

So why haven’t I heard from the doctor after I’ve left several messages, even if he’s out of town? I assume it’s because he hasn’t heard my voice. Because this nasty nurse, obviously she’s nasty, has been screening his calls.

I phone my assistant.

“Hi, Kim, I’m running a little late. Any messages?”

She gives me the number for Madge Turner, who is on the board of several medical associations in southern California and who hires me frequently to do their special events. I am planning one for her now. “Hello, Madge, this is Eve Mozell.”

“Hello, Eve, how are you?”

I consider answering truthfully, spilling out my general state of anxiety. “Fine, I’m fine, thank you. How was the cruise?”

“It was very relaxing.”

I like talking to Madge because she always says the most obvious thing. If she were on Family Feud—“One hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board”—Madge’s answer would always be the top one. (Why do people take cruises? Number-one response: To relax.)

“That’s nice, I’m glad to hear it.”

“The food was delicious. They had canapés with salmon and caviar every evening before dinner. Do you think we could have salmon and caviar?”

“I think so. I’ll price it out.”

“I ate way too much.” (What do people regret about cruises? Number-one response: Ate too much.)

“I was talking to the people at the Biltmore—”

“Eve.” She cuts me off. I hear nervousness.

“Yes.”

“Could we change the location? Wait, don’t say no. I know the invitations have gone out.”

“The party is only a month away.”

“I know, I know, but if you send me the RSVP list, I’ll take care of mailing the location change. I’ll organize a little group to make follow-up calls, I promise you. And I’ll get us out of our obligation to the Biltmore. You know, the Biltmore’s downtown and I hate downtown. Besides, I had the most brilliant idea and I had it right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Well, great, what is it?”

“We should have our party at the Nixon Library.”

I don’t say, You’re kidding. I don’t say, In all the time we’ve worked together, I’ve never known you were a Republican. Part of my job is restraint, being careful where I put my foot. I try to be chummy, never frank. “They do parties there?” is all I say, mildly.

“Oh yes, it’s quite wonderful. It’s not really a library, it’s a museum. There are fountains and a reflecting pond. And they have the place he was born right on the premises in case people get bored and want to take a little walk. I have the name of a woman there.”

I write it down, get off with Madge, then phone Kim and ask her to set up an appointment for me with the woman at the library and to send the RSVP list to Madge immediately. I come banging down the stairs. “I’m going,” I call out. But I can’t leave without complaining. I detour into the breakfast room. “You know this party for four hundred fifty ear, nose, and throat doctors? Well, Madge Turner is changing the location to the Nixon Library.”

After a long beat, Joe looks up from his paper. “Who goes to that place? Probably the most white-bread group in the country.”

“I suppose you think it would be interesting to talk to them.”

He laughs. “‘What Nixon means to me.’ I bet you’ll have a great time.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll see you later.”

At five o’clock, I visit my father. I call Joe and tell him he does not have to come too. “I should hope not,” he says.

There’s one thing I like about doing something the second time, even when it’s unpleasant: I like knowing the ropes. The elevator is to the left, past the admissions office. Seventh floor, I don’t have to check the listing. After I ring the doorbell, I have to state my name in the intercom, my business (visiting my father), and the door will be unlocked from the inside. I will store this knowledge. It will comfort me. Maybe I can pass it on to someone. Maybe my friend Adrienne will have to commit her mother.

Also, the sights and sounds that I closed out the first time, that even scared me, become curiosities. Then familiar, even familial. I like this process.

The first thing I see is a woman sitting in a wheelchair facing the phone booth. She has the receiver in her hand. She has pulled it as far out of the booth as it will reach so she can talk. And she is screaming, “Come and get me.”

Her hair is white, there isn’t much of it, and it’s pulled back by a child’s barrette. She is little and her chin is pointed. I wonder who is on the other end of the phone. I wonder whose number she doesn’t forget.

I go past her to the cage. “I’m looking for my father, Lou Mozell.”

“Just in time,” says the nurse.

“For what?”

She leans forward so her mouth is almost against the grate, and whispers. “They get difficult now. We call it sun-downing.”

I nod in understanding. She points to the left. “His room is the third. Doris will show you.”

Doris, who has frizzy hair the color of straw and two very fat cheeks that scarcely leave room for her mouth, which runs like a straight road between them, comes out of the cage. I follow her down the hall. “So he’s being difficult?”

“He wants to leave.”

“Well, that’s understandable.” I state this loyally, in a tone that says, For God’s sake, what would you expect? Then I hear him.

“Goddamnit, you bitches, get in here.” He is shouting loud enough to be heard over the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

He sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, stranded—a passenger in a car that broke down on its way to nowhere. His pants aren’t fastened at the top, and there’s a rope around his waist holding them up. “Could you buy him some suspenders?” Doris asks.

“What’s wrong with his belt?”

“It doesn’t seem to work on all his pants.” She bends until her face is level with his. “Your daughter’s here.”

“I’m not blind,” says my father.

I sit down on the bed. “So how are you?”

“I’m hungry.” His face wrinkles up tight, as if someone took a screwdriver, put it in the center, and twisted it.

“I think you’re having dinner soon.”

“Order room service.”

I say as patiently as possible, “Dad, this isn’t a hotel.”

There is a pause. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s a hospital. They’re going to fix your medications.”

He thinks about this for a bit. “They don’t take Georgia’s magazine here,” he says petulantly.

“I’m not surprised.”

“What kind of a hotel doesn’t get Georgia?”

“Hotels don’t subscribe to Georgia. Anyway, this is a hospital and hospitals never subscribe to Georgia.” I am very bad at being patient.

“You put me here because of Jesse, didn’t you?”

“No. Listen, do you want some company? Do you want to go sit with the other—” I am about to say inmates, I realize, so I stop the sentence there.

“Sure, kiddo, let’s go for a walk.”

My father stands up and pitches forward, crashing onto the floor. It’s sort of beautiful—he’s straight all the way, as if he’s tracing the quadrant of a circle. The sound when he hits is a gigantic squish, air being punched out of a cushion.

“Help, help!” I shout. Is this it? Is he dead?

I am flat against the wall staring down when Doris runs in. My father lies there like a permanent fixture.

“Jocko!” Doris’s voice is so commanding she could be summoning troops. “Fortunately your father’s fat,” she says to me. “They fall better if they’re fat.”

I nod as though I agree or understand or know something. Then Jocko appears. He is as big as a Bekins van. His head is shaved except for some hair on top that sprouts like a plant. The sight of him probably has sent many old people who are mentally on the edge right over.

He wraps his arms around and under my dad, and pulls him up stomach first. “We really need a crane for these situations,” Doris confides as Jocko pushes my father onto his knees. Then he lifts him from behind and puts him back in his chair. My father is conscious but silent. He looks quite puzzled.

“He fell over,” I tell Dr. Kelly. We are in an empty patient room a day later, having our official end-of-first-week consultation. Dr. Kelly is wearing high-top sneakers with her medical whites. “Why can’t he stand up anymore?”

“It’s part of his dementia.” She opens his file and spreads the pages on the bed. “All your father’s tests are normal. His EEG, his EKG, blood work. We did a CAT scan this morning.” She mentions a few more workups. I lose track, and I know I should take notes, because Georgia is going to quiz me later.

“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?”