SIX
“Allison?”
“Yes, Mom?” I called toward the car’s speakers as I steered, one-handed, into the parking lot of BouncyTime, where the birthday party for a classmate of Ellie’s named (I was almost positive) Jayden was starting in ten minutes. It was a miserable April day, gray-skied and windy, with a dispirited rain slopping down.
“Are you almost here?” she asked in a quivering voice.
Dave sat next to me, stiff and silent as one of those inflatable man-shaped balloons that drivers in California buy so they can use the high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. It had been several weeks since his birthday dinner, but we hadn’t talked about anything more substantive than whether we were running out of milk or if I’d remembered to make the car insurance payment. I took my pills, he, presumably, found comfort in conversation with L. McIntyre, and we tried to be polite to each other, especially in front of our daughter. Said daughter was in the backseat, chatting with her friend Hank.
“If you are going to put something in your nose,” I heard Ellie announce, “it should not be a Barbie shoe.”
“Okay,” Hank snuffled. Hank was a pale and narrow-faced little boy with a ring of whitish crust around his eyes and mouth. He was going on six, the same as my daughter, but thanks to his allergies to eggs, wheat, dairy, shellfish, and pet dander, he was the size of a three-year-old and he sniffled nonstop.
How did Ellie even know what a Barbie doll was? I wondered as I maneuvered into a parking spot between a Jaguar and a minivan. I wasn’t sure, but I bet that I had Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, to thank. Doreen scoffed at my “notions,” as she called them, about organic food, gender-neutral toys, and limiting Eloise’s TV time. Doreen was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, with the same fair complexion that her sons had inherited and the same cropped dark hair, although I suspected she dyed it. Doreen had raised three boys and had been waiting for years to have a girl child to dote upon. Whenever Doreen got my daughter alone, she’d let her gorge on ice cream and candy. They would stay up all night in Doreen’s silk-sheeted king-sized bed, playing Casino and watching Gilligan’s Island and God only knew what else. “Lighten up,” Doreen would tell me, sometimes with a good-natured (but still painful) sock on the shoulder, when I politely reminded her that Ellie did better when she kept to her bedtime schedule, or mentioned that Dave and I gave her an allowance for doing her chores, and that when she slipped our daughter twenty bucks it tended to undermine our authority. “Calm down, or you’re going to make yourself crazy!”
I knew that my mother-in-law meant well. She’d never talked about whether she’d missed the job she gave up once her sons were born, but I wondered if she had, and if she saw how I had struggled, first as a full-time stay-at-home mother and now as a stay-at-home mom with a part-time (inching ever closer to full-time) job. I could have asked, but the truth was, things hadn’t been great between us since I learned that she’d read my birth plan out loud to her book club. In retrospect, the plan might have been a little excessive—it was eight pages long and spelled out everything from the music I wanted to how I didn’t want any external interventions, including an epidural, and had gone on, at length, about the necessity for a “peaceful birthing environment”—but that did not mean I wanted the six members of Words and Wine laughing at me over copies of Sue Monk Kidd’s latest.
In the backseat, Ellie was regaling Hank with the story of the dead squirrel she’d seen at the corner of South Street during one of our visits to the city. “Its middle was all crumpled, and there was BLOOD on its BOTTOM,” she said, as Hank mouth-breathed in horror.
“Hey, El, I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” I said.
Ellie paused, gnawing at her lower lip. Then she turned to Hank and said, in such a perfect lady-at-a-cocktail-party tone that both Dave and I smiled, “And what are your plans for the weekend?”
I put the car in park and waited until Hank said, “I don’t know.”
“?‘Plans for the weekend’ just means what you are going to do,” Ellie explained. “Like, you could say, ‘Watch Sam & Cat,’ or maybe ‘Put all your nail polishes into teams.’?”
“I don’t have nail polishes,” Hank said wistfully.
The phone rang again. I ignored it, thinking that at least, unlike my mother, Doreen didn’t need instructions for the most basic tasks—calling the oil company to have the tank refilled, remembering to change the car’s windshield wipers instead of just, as she’d once done, buying a new car. If my father had still been himself, I would have asked how he dealt with her, even though I suspected the answer probably involved sex.
If I’d had time I would have helped more, but in the six weeks since the Journal story had run, traffic to Ladiesroom.com had increased by more than two hundred percent, and Sarah had started hinting that I should think about writing not just five times a week but every day. I’d also gotten a few queries from other outlets—some websites, two in-print magazines, and a cable TV shout-show—asking if I’d want to write or blog or dispense online or on-the-air commentary. So far, I’d turned them all down, but I suspected that if Sarah learned about the offers she’d encourage me to take them, knowing it would only help build Ladiesroom’s brand.
Ideally, Dave would have taken over Ellie duties a few nights a week, and maybe even spared an hour each week for counseling, but Dave, bless his heart, had declined both of those requests and instead signed up for another marathon. I’d tried not to read too deeply into the symbolism, about how he’d be spending hours each week literally running away from his wife and his daughter, and I’d assiduously avoided Googling L. McIntyre’s name to see if she, too, would be participating in the race, thus avoiding the need to imagine the two of them logging training runs along the Schuylkill, trotting side by side along the tree-canopied paths of the Wissahickon. Instead of complaining, I’d bumped my housekeeper up to two days a week, hired a backup sitter who could work nights and weekends, and enrolled Ellie in after-school activities every day but Thursday—tumbling, swimming, Clay Club, even a class on “iPad mastery.” It was heartbreaking, but the more she was out of the house, the more smoothly things ran inside of it. She’d even found a new best friend. Hank did most of the same activities she did—his mom was a urologist who worked full-time. Ellie had all but adopted Hank, who was even more sensitive and high-strung than she was, and appointed herself as his unofficial advisor and life coach.
“If you need to go to the potty, just ask me,” I heard her saying as she unhitched herself from her booster seat, then reached over to help Hank with his buckles. “I’ve been to probably a billion parties here before.”
I helped Ellie out of the car, handed Dave the birthday boy’s gift, and then stood with him in the parking lot, feeling as if we’d been shoved onstage without a script. Normally, we would have kissed before I drove away—just a little peck, a quick brush, enough for me to get a whiff of his scent, which I still found intoxicating, and then we’d separate. Instead, Dave gave me a half wave and a “See ya” before shepherding the kids through the front doors. Part of me wanted to run after him and hug him, taking strength from even an instant of physical connection. Another part of me felt like giving him the finger. Since the birthday-night fight, Dave had barely touched me, and he’d continued to spend his nights in the guest bedroom. I imagined him under the covers, curled on his side with that goddamned BlackBerry pressed against his ear, talking to his work wife, L. McIntyre, while his real wife was alone in bed down the hall, staring up into the darkness, sometimes crying, until the narcotics allowed her to fall asleep.
I sat behind the wheel as the doors closed behind Dave and Hank and Ellie, feeling hollow underneath the euphoria the pills guaranteed. At least I still had that—a guaranteed pick-me-up at the start of the day; a comfort at the end. With a pill or two (or three, or four) coursing through my bloodstream, I felt calm, energetic, in control, as if I could manage work and being a good mother and a good daughter, keeping the house running and the refrigerator stocked and even performing the occasional stint as a chaperone during a Stonefield trip to the Art Museum.
The bad news was that Dr. Andi was being far stingier with the Oxy handouts than she’d been with the Vicodin. “You want to be careful with this stuff,” she’d said the first time I called for a refill. “It’s seriously addictive.”
“Oh, I will be,” I promised. I could keep that promise easily because, during one of my daily rounds of the gossip websites that I wasted too much time on, I’d come across a story I at first assumed had to be fake. “Introducing Penny Lane: the Top Secret Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug You Want.” No way, I’d thought, but the story at least made the site sound legitimate as it described a kind of Amazon.com for illegal substances. You had to use anonymizing software to get to the site, and use encryption to register. Once you’d cleared those hurdles, you could, allegedly, order anything you wanted—anything from pot to Viagra to painkillers to heroin. You’d send the vendors your real name and address—encrypted, of course—and payment via a new kind of online-only currency, and the vendors would send you the goods.
I figured it had to be a scam . . . but what did I have to lose? Other than some money. And my freedom, I assumed, if you could be jailed for trying to buy prescription drugs on the Internet, but that was a risk I decided I was willing to take. I spent about ten seconds wondering if anyone would recognize my name, then decided that the overlap between illegal drug dealers and Ladiesroom.com readers was probably tiny. Downloading the software took less than a minute; learning how to use it took maybe five minutes more. The hard part was figuring out how to trade dollars for the e-coins the site used instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register the bank account I’d established for my own personal use, an account at a different bank from the one Dave and I used. I’d then had to register with yet another website to send my e-currency to my account at Penny Lane. Once I’d picked a screen name (“HarleyQueen,” a play on the name of one of the sexy lady villains in Batman) and loaded a thousand dollars’ worth of cash into my account, I started wandering through the virtual aisles, amazed at what was for sale. Hallucinogens. Amphetamines. Dissociatives, whatever they were. Viagra and Cialis, Ecstasy and Special K and crystal meth. I’d clicked on “Opiods,” and there was everything—your Percocet, your Vicodin, your Tylenol with codeine. With my mouth open in disbelief, I put twenty OxyContin pills into my cart, then browsed around, pricing Vicodin from India and wondering, again, whether this could possibly be legitimate.
I figured that I’d be sent fakes, if the vendors bothered sending anything at all. Then the first delivery arrived. The pills were in a tiny plastic bag that had been encased in a layer of bubble wrap and folded and tucked into an Altoids tin. They looked exactly like the ones I’d been prescribed and, according to Pillfinder.com, they appeared to be exactly what I’d paid for. Cautiously, I slipped one underneath my tongue, waiting for the familiar bitterness. It arrived right on schedule, but, still, I was seized with dread. What if it was a clever fake? What if I’d taken poison? What if Ellie came home and found me convulsing on the kitchen floor? But ten minutes later I was dreamy-eyed and practically floating around the kitchen. Since then, my use had ramped up slightly (or maybe “considerably” would be more accurate) . . . but if I could get as many pills as I wanted whenever I wanted them, if I could afford my vices, and if the whole transaction felt as risky as ordering a bra from Victoria’s Secret, what did it matter?
At a stoplight, I punched in my mother’s number. “Daddy just woke up,” she said. “He thinks he needs to get dressed to go to the airport. I’ve been telling him and telling him . . .”
“Okay, Mom.”
“. . . but he won’t listen. I didn’t get any sleep last night. He kept shaking me, or turning on his phone and shining it in my eyes. At three a.m. he started packing his suitcase . . .”
“I’m ten minutes away,” I said, mentally canceling the pit stop I’d planned at Starbucks (or, if I was being honest, at McDonald’s). I’d spent so much time trying to coax a few bites of cereal into Eloise’s mouth that I hadn’t had time for my own breakfast. I deserved a hash brown. Hash brown, singular, I told myself, and definitely no sausage biscuit.
“Ronnie!” I could hear my dad yelling. “Where’s the cab?”
“Put him on the phone with me,” I told her, figuring it couldn’t hurt.
A minute later, my father was growling “Who’s this?” into my ear.
“Daddy, it’s Allison. Mom says you need a ride?” I hadn’t been sure whether it was a good idea to play along with someone suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia—which my mother, God love her, pronounced dee-men-she-ah—but Dad’s doctor said it was all right to indulge him up to a point. “A therapeutic lie” was what he’d called it. Translation: whatever worked.
“Allison,” said my father. I held my breath. Last Saturday, when I’d sent Eloise to Hank’s house for a playdate and invited my parents over for brunch, he’d known who I was, but sometimes he thought I was his sister and called me Joyce. I knew that the day was coming when he wouldn’t know me at all, but I prayed it hadn’t come yet, not so much for my sake, but for my mother’s.
My parents had met when my mom was eighteen-year-old Ronnie Feldman, with an adorable pout and soft brown eyes, a cute little figure and shiny black hair, and my dad was twenty-eight, a college graduate who’d served for two years as an information officer in the army, stationed in Korea, and was finishing up his MBA at Penn. She’d been a CIT at the summer camp he’d attended, and he was back for a ten-year reunion . She was still in high school, still riding her ten-speed with a wire basket embellished with plastic flowers between the handlebars and buying her clothes in the children’s department. Little Ronnie, who’d dotted the “i” of her name with a heart, who’d never lived on her own, never paid a bill, and never held a job outside of being a not-quite counselor at Camp Wah-Na-Wee-Naw in the Poconos; Little Ronnie with her tanned legs and pert chin and the ponytail she tied in red-and-white ribbons—camp colors, of course—had married him two summers later, going straight from her parents’ house to the apartment my dad had rented, where she played house until I came along and it stopped being a game. There had always been a man to take care of her, first her own father, then mine. My mother never had any reasons to master the fundamentals of adulthood—balancing a checkbook, registering a car, buying a house. My dad had taken care of everything. Pretty Little Head, or PLH, was what Dave and I called my mom in happier times, when we’d still had a private language of jokes with each other, as in “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing.”
“Are you all packed?” my father asked.
So he thought I was coming on this imaginary trip. “All packed and ready to go.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said, his voice thick, the way it got after he’d had the second of his two pre-dinner martinis. “I hope you’ll have fun in college. Blow off some steam! Put down the paints and go to some parties! Meet some nice boys! College isn’t just for book learning, you know.”
So he thought he was taking me to college. At a red light, I took a deep breath, remembering that trip, how we’d stopped for milkshakes and he’d given me a pained and heartbreakingly sweet speech about how college boys would want certain things, and how, at parties, I shouldn’t ever put my drink down lest some knave try to “slip me a mickey,” and how I should be careful about what I wore. “I know that’s not a very modern thing to say,” my dad had told me, and I’d been so embarrassed when he used the phrase “it’s just their nature” that I’d spent the next ten minutes hiding in the bathroom.
I stepped on the gas and tried not to think about what it would be like when the time came to drive him to an assisted-living facility, or a nursing home, or whatever he’d end up requiring. No milkshakes; no speeches about how he should avoid the divorcées with hungry eyes; no joking or resigned tenderness about how this was just what happened: little birds left the nest. It was all wrong, I thought, remembering how impressive my dad had looked offering my new roommate his hand, and how he’d helped me make my bed. I cleared my throat so he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was crying. “I’m just grabbing some coffee, and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Sounds good, princess.” He sounded jovial, hearty, so completely himself. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he’d just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We’d have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.
“Why don’t you watch CNBC?” I said, forcing cheeriness into my voice. “Check your stocks. Let Mom take a shower. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” His love of CNBC was one of the things he’d retained, even as he slipped further and further down the rabbit hole. In my parents’ house, the television in the den was always on, at a volume just slightly less than deafening, tuned to the financial news so my dad could keep an eye on his portfolio, which was, in fact, being managed by his former protégé, a man named Don Ettlinger, who worked in Center City and who remembered me from when I was a girl.
“Okay, then. I’ll see you when I see you.” There was a thumping sound as he set the phone down—sometimes he’d get confused, then angry, when he went to hang up the phone and discovered that cell phones had no cradles, just chargers. I clenched my hands on the steering wheel. When I was fourteen, after my complexion had calmed down and the rest of my features had caught up with my nose, a boy asked me out to a movie. His mother drove us there. We spent the next two hours palm to sticky palm, eyes on the screen, each, undoubtedly, waiting for the other to make a move. My father picked us up and drove us home. In the kitchen, where my mother had left a plate of cookies, he’d looked sternly down at all five feet three inches of Marc Schwartzbaum. “You two are behaving yourself, correct?” he asked, in a voice that seemed deeper than usual, and Marc, gulping, had bobbed a nervous nod.
“Excellent,” Dad said. “Because I’ll be watching.” With that, according to the plan I’d begged my parents to approve, Marc and I went down to our finished basement, where there was a wide-screen TV, a Ping-Pong table, and an air hockey game where the puck glowed in the dark, requiring that the lights be turned off. I’d flicked the switches and plugged in the machine, and after a few minutes, Marc and I had retired to the couch for what I even then recognized was inept and unsatisfying fumbling when, suddenly, my father’s voice came booming out of the ceiling, sounding, for all the world, like God. “I’LL BE WATCHING,” he intoned. Marc, shrieking like a girl, sprang into the air, hit his back on the arm of the couch, and tumbled to the floor in a groaning, tumescent heap. I started laughing, and every time I came close to collecting myself to the point where I’d be able to comfort my paramour, I’d hear my dad’s voice again, coming through the house-wide speaker system he’d installed last year so my mother could hear James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkle wherever she went. “I’LL BE WATCHING.” Marc had never asked me out again. I didn’t mind. It had been worth it.
? ? ?
In the driveway of the modern four-bedroom house in Cherry Hill where I’d grown up—a model of late-eighties chic, all angled hardwood and glass—I sat for a moment, taking deep breaths. I pictured a deserted beach, with white sand and lace-edged waves lapping at the shore. That was good. Then I slipped my hand into my purse and curled my fingers around the Altoids tin that contained ten magical blue pills. That was even better. I put one in my mouth and stepped out of the car.
The instant my feet touched the driveway the front door popped open. My mom opened her mouth, undoubtedly prepared to launch into her catalog of woe, and then shut it, slowly, as she considered my outfit. “You know,” she said, “in my day you’d have to put on your face to even open your front door to get the paper.”
“Aren’t I lucky that times have changed,” I said lightly, wishing I’d taken two pills. I looked down at myself: black leggings, a gray-and-black wool tunic that could have benefitted from a trip to the dry cleaner’s, black patent-leather clogs. No makeup, true, and my hair was in an untidy bun, but it at least had been recently washed. My mother, meanwhile, had lost her bounce, the ponytailed girlishness that had kept my father in thrall for all those years. Her skin, normally tanned and glowing, had a crepey, wrinkled pallor, suggesting that she’d been spending most of her waking hours indoors. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her ring, a rock the size of a marble that my father had purchased (at her insistence, I suspected) for their thirtieth anniversary, hung loosely from her finger. She was, as always, tiny. Never in her life had she topped a hundred pounds—“except,” she liked to say, in a just-short-of-accusatory tone, “when I was pregnant with you.” She had on the same Four Seasons bathrobe she’d been wearing last Saturday, only there was a stain I hoped was ketchup on one sleeve, and a smear of something yellow on the lapel. Her trembling hands were pressed together—my mother’s hands had shaken for as long as I could remember. I think I’d been told it was related somehow to the Accident. When I hugged her, I breathed in her familiar scent, something fruity and sweet with top notes of Giorgio and Listerine. Her tiny feet were bare, with chipped coral polish on the toenails and purple veins circling her ankles. In the morning sun, I could see the outline of her skull through her thinning hair.
“Sidney!” she yelled, over the sound of financial news. “I’M GOING TO TAKE A SHOWER!”
My father called back something I couldn’t hear. My mother walked up the stairs, head bent, moving slowly, as if every step hurt. I draped my coat over a chair at the breakfast bar. I guessed Brenda, the last cleaning lady the agency sent, hadn’t worked out any better than Maria, or Dot, or Phyllis, or whoever had preceded Phyllis. When my dad had gotten his diagnosis, I’d offered to pay for a cleaning lady–slash–helper to come five days a week. But Blanca, who’d worked for my parents forever, coming every Tuesday and Thursday to wash the floors, vacuum the carpets, run a load of laundry, and wipe down the countertops with bleach, had other families to tend to and couldn’t quit on them. I’d found an agency and explained what I needed—someone to do the housework, to help with the laundry, to take my mother to the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s and to run whatever other errands she might have, someone with a decent personality and a driver’s license. The agency had sent over an entire football team’s worth of women, but my mom had a complaint about each one of them. Maria the First had insisted on being paid in cash, not by check, and my mother refused to “make a special trip to the bank, just for her.” The second Maria drove a Dodge that was missing one of its front hubcaps. Exit Maria the Second. “There’s no way,” my mother had sniffed, “that I’m driving around in that . . . vehicle.” Dot had either refused to iron the sheets or done it badly. Phyllis, my mom claimed, had stolen a pair of Judith Leiber earrings right out of her jewelry box. (My suspicion was that if I looked hard enough, I’d find those earrings somewhere—my mother was a notorious loser of things, from keys to credit cards to jewelry—but it was easier to call the agency again than to have the fight.)
That morning, the kitchen table was covered with salad-bar take-out containers, a glass with an orange juice puddle coagulating at the bottom, a collection of prescription bottles, and crumpled sections of the newspaper. I started to straighten the mess, then gave up and went to the den to find my father.
He was sitting on the couch in a crisp white shirt with monogrammed cuffs, suspenders, and pin-striped navy pants. His suit jacket, still on its hanger, was waiting on the doorknob. I swallowed hard. He looked just the way he had the morning he’d driven me to Lancaster for college, the way he’d looked every morning of my girlhood, when he’d slipped into my bedroom, smelling of Old Spice and the grapefruit he ate for breakfast. “With your shield or on it,” he would say, which is what Spartan fathers would say to their sons before sending them off to war.
Maybe he’d have been a little gentler, more inclined to treat me like a little girl instead of a son or a successor, if I’d looked more like my mom . . . but I’d inherited my face and figure from my dad’s mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall, especially for a woman back then, and busty. I’d learned to modulate my voice (Grandma Sadie’s honk could silence an entire supermarket), and, after an embarrassingly minor amount of begging, I’d gotten my nose done the summer between high school and college. (My father had said, “You look fine!” My mom had asked if I wanted to get a breast reduction, too.)
My mother was Sadie’s opposite, tiny and soft-voiced and sweet. Unlike my grandma, who drove the car and signed the checks and made all of her household’s big decisions, my mother was utterly dependent on my dad. He hired Blanca so she wouldn’t have to clean; he hired a car service so she wouldn’t have to drive after the Accident. When they entertained more than one other couple, he’d hire a catering company to cook and clean. If it had been possible to pay someone to go through pregnancy and labor for her, so she wouldn’t have to suffer even an instant of pain, he would have done that, too.
Until now, she had drifted through life like a queen who had only a few ceremonial duties to discharge. She didn’t work, or take care of me or the house. What she did was amuse my dad. She would gossip and dance and play card games and tennis and golf; she’d listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and use her long, painted fingernails to scratch at the back of his neck. Her biggest fear, voiced daily, was that she would outlive him and be left all alone in a world she couldn’t begin to handle, so it wasn’t surprising that she became a world-class hypochondriac by proxy. If my father sniffled, she’d schedule a doctor’s appointment to make sure it wasn’t pneumonia. If he had indigestion, she’d want him to go to the emergency room to make sure it really was the tomato sauce and not his heart. She’d stand by the front door in the morning, refusing to let him leave until he’d put sunscreen on his hands, face, and bald spot (his own father had died of melanoma), and in the evening she’d bring him a glass of red wine (okayed because of the healthful tannins). Instead of nuts, he’d take his drink with a little green glass dish filled with vitamins, supplements, fish-oil capsules—whatever she’d read about in Prevention or Reader’s Digest that week.
We would have dinner, the two of them would retire to the den, and I’d go to my bedroom and shut the door, doing my homework or listening to music or drawing in my sketchbook.
I wasn’t the most popular girl in my school, but I wasn’t a total embarrassment either. In high school, I was moderately popular, with a circle of reliable friends and, from the time I was sixteen on, a boyfriend, or at least someone to make out with at the movies. I worked hard on my looks, keeping a food journal all the way through college that recounted everything that went into my mouth and every minute of exercise I’d done. (Recently I’d found stacks of notebooks in my childhood room’s desk drawers describing cottage-cheese lunches and apple-and-peanut-butter snacks. Why had I saved them? Had I imagined wanting to reread them someday?)
In the den, my father was bent over, pulling on his white orthopedic walking shoes, the ones that closed with Velcro straps. I turned away, my chest aching. My father had always been fastidious about his clothing. He’d loved his heavy silk ties from Hermès, the navy blue and charcoal gray Hickey Freeman suits he wore to work. Once a year, he and I would make a trip to Boyd’s, an old-fashioned clothing store on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the clerks would greet my father by name. I’d sit on a velvet love seat with a cup of hot chocolate and an almond biscotti from the store’s café, and watch as my father and Charles, the salesman who always helped him, discussed summer-weight wool and American versus European cuts and whether he was getting a lot of use out of the sports jacket he’d bought the year before. My dad would ask about Charles’s sons; Charles would ask me about school and sports and if I had a boyfriend. Then my dad would disappear into the changing room with one suit over his arm and two or three more hanging from a hook on the door, and he’d emerge, with the pants bagging around his ankles, for more discussion with Charles, before turning to me.
“What do you think, Allie-cat? How’s the old man look?”
I would narrow my eyes and nibble my cookie. “I like the gray suit the best,” I would say. Or, “I bet that navy pinstripe would look nice with the silver tie I got you for Father’s Day.”
“She’s got quite an eye,” Charles would say—the same every year.
“She’s an artist,” my dad would say, his tone managing to convey both pride and skepticism.
Eventually, a tailor would be summoned, and my dad would stand in front of the three-way mirror while the stooped old man with a mouthful of pins and a nub of chalk between his fingers marked and pinned. Then my father would change back into his weekend wear—khakis and leather boat shoes and a collared shirt—and he would take me out to a dim sum lunch. We’d order thin-skinned soup dumplings, filled with rich golden broth and pork studded with ginger, and scallion pancakes, crispy around the edges, meltingly soft in the middle, fluffy white pork buns and cups of jasmine tea, and then we’d walk to the Reading Terminal for a Bassetts ice-cream cone for dessert.
My father got up. Ignoring the gray nylon Windbreaker my mother had left hanging over one of the kitchen chairs—an old man’s jacket, if ever there was one—he took his trench coat off the hanger in the closet, put it on, and followed me out the door.
“Remember when we used to go to Boyd’s for your suits?” I said as I pulled into the street.
“I’m not brain-dead,” he said, staring out his window. “Of course I remember.”
“Do you think Charles still works there?” In all the years we’d shopped at Boyd’s, Charles, a handsome, bald African-American man who always matched his pocket square to his tie, had never seemed to age.
“I have no idea,” said my father. “I haven’t needed a new suit just lately, you know.”
We rode toward Philadelphia listening to NPR, not talking. My plan was to get him lunch at Honey’s Sit ’n Eat, a Jewish soul-food diner where they served waffles and fried chicken and all kinds of sandwiches. “Where’s your girl?” asked my father, as we pulled off the highway at South Street. I tried to remember whether he’d called Ellie “your girl” before, or if this was new and meant he’d forgotten her name.
“She’s with Dave at a birthday party.” Although Dave was never around as much as I’d hoped he would be, when he was with Ellie, he was a wonderful dad. The two of them adored each other, in exactly the way I’d always hoped my dad would adore me. Ellie would slip her little hand sweetly in his, beaming up at him, or pat the pockets of his jacket, searching for treats, when he came home from the Examiner. “Hello, princess,” he would say, and hoist her in his arms, tossing her once, twice, three times gently up toward the ceiling as she shrieked in delight.
I found a parking spot on the street, fed the meter, and followed my father into the restaurant, where we were seated at a table overlooking South Street: the fancy gym, the fancier pet shop, the moms piloting oversized strollers, hooded and tented against the rain.
“I love the fried chicken. And the brisket’s great. Or if you want breakfast, they serve all their egg dishes with potato latkes . . .” I was chattering, I realized, the same way I did with Ellie, trying to keep the conversational ball in the air without any help from my partner.
My father shrugged, then stared down at the menu. Was he depressed? It wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case . . . but could he take antidepressants, with the Aricept for his dementia and the other meds he took for his blood pressure? Was there even a point in treating depression in someone who was losing touch with reality?
By the time the waitress had filled us in on the specials and we’d placed our orders—a brisket club sandwich for my father, a grilled cheese with bacon and avocado for me—I was exhausted.
“Tell me the story of the night I was born.” Asking someone with memory loss to tell you a story, to remember something on cue, was risky . . . but this was one of my father’s favorites, one I’d heard him tell dozens of times, including but not limited to each of my birthdays. Maybe he would talk for a while, and I could sit quietly, catching my breath, maybe sneaking a pill in the ladies’ room before we left.
He took a bite of his sandwich, dabbed at his lips, and began the way he always did: “It was a dark and stormy night.” I smiled as he went on. “It was three days after your mother’s due date. We lived on the fourth floor of an old Victorian at Thirty-Eighth and Clark. I was a starving graduate student, and she was . . .” He paused, his eyes losing focus, his features softening, his face flushed, looking younger than he had in years, more like the father I remembered, as I mouthed the next five words along with him. “Your mother was so pretty.” We smiled at each other, then he continued. “When she started having contractions, we weren’t worried. First babies can take a while, and we were maybe ten blocks from the hospital. Her bag was packed, and I’d memorized the numbers for two different cab companies. She had one contraction and then, ten minutes later, another one. Then one more five minutes after that, then one two minutes after that . . .” He used his hands as he told the story—how my mother’s labor progressed faster than they had expected, how by the time they got down to the street to wait for the cab, rain was lashing the streets and the wind was bending the trees practically in half, and the mayor and the governor were on the radio, telling people to stay inside, to stay home unless they absolutely had to leave. “I was ninety percent sure you were going to be born in the back of a taxicab,” my father said.
He got every detail, every nuance of the story right—the way the cab smelled of incense and curry, the driver’s unflappable calm, how he’d left my mother’s little plaid suitcase on the sidewalk in front of our house in his haste to get my mom in the cab, and how one of the neighbors had retrieved it when the rain stopped, dried each item of clothing, and brought it over the next day.
“Did you want more kids?” I asked him. All these years of wondering, and I’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask. He waited until the waiter had cleared our plates and taken our orders for two cups of coffee and one slice of buttermilk chocolate cake, and patted his lips with his napkin again before saying, “It wasn’t meant to be. We had you, and then your mother had her trouble . . .”
“What trouble?” I asked, half my mind on his answer, the other half on my sandwich. He probably meant the Accident. That was the only trouble I’d ever heard about.
He pushed the salt and pepper shakers across the table like chess pieces and did not answer.
“Was I a hard baby?” I asked. Had I been like Ellie, shrieky and picky and inclined toward misery? Again, no answer from Dad. I knew, of course, how overwhelming a baby could be, and I suspected that in addition to feeling like a newborn’s demands were more than she could handle, my mother had also felt isolated. It couldn’t have been easy, I thought, and pictured Little Ronnie, her flawless skin suddenly mottled with stretch marks, her beauty sleep disrupted, all alone in the apartment and, eventually, in the big house my father had bought her. Who had she gone to with her questions and concerns? I’d had friends, a pricy lactation consultant, and the leader of the playgroup I attended, who had a degree in early childhood development. I’d had Janet, and my own mom, and even the Indomitable Doreen. My mother had no one. Her own mother had died before I was born, and as a teenage bride and young mother, she hadn’t yet formed bonds with the types of women I’d come to know. She had only my father . . . and that might have been lonely.
I pictured her now, back in Cherry Hill. Was she trying to clean up the mess in the kitchen? Was she paging through old photo albums, the way she had the last time I’d spent the day with her, looking at pictures of cousins I couldn’t remember and uncles I’d never met? Was she remembering my father, dashing and young and invulnerable, and wishing that she’d been the one to get sick instead of him?
“Excuse me,” I said. The bathroom at Honey’s had a rustic wooden bench to set a purse or a diaper bag on. The walls were hung with framed magazine ads from the 1920s advertising nerve tonics and hair-restoring creams, and a mirror in a flaking gold frame.
I looked at my reflection. My face looked thinner, and the circles under my eyes seemed to have deepened over the past few weeks. I’d lost a few more pounds—with the pills, I’d found myself occasionally sleeping through meals—but I didn’t look fit or healthy, just weary and depleted. Even on my best days, I was no Little Ronnie, with her bright eyes and long, thick hair, the kind of girl a man would want to tuck in his pocket and keep safe forever.
Turning away from the mirror, I reached into my purse. I crunched up two pills, washed them down with a scoop of water from the sink, and walked back to the table. I’d had an idea of how to give my mother some extra time, and make the day go by. “Hey,” I said to my father, “do you want to go see Ellie?”
? ? ?
As soon as I walked into BouncyTime, I knew that bringing my dad there had been a mistake. Raucous music boomed from overhead speakers. The singer fought against the roar of the blowers that kept the climbing and bouncing structures inflated. Kids dashed around the room, screaming, racing up the giant slide, hurling inflatable beach balls at one another’s heads, or shooting foam missiles out of air cannons. A clutch of mothers stood in a circle, in the Haverford uniform of 7 For All Mankind jeans and a cashmere crewneck, or Lululemon yoga pants and a breathable wicking top in a complementary color. Along the wall, a smaller group of dads had gathered, heads down, tapping away at their screens, looking up occasionally to cries of “Daddy, look at me!” or, more often, “Daddy, take a video!” I found Dave with two other men, one a lawyer, one who ran a dental insurance business.
“Hey,” said the lawyer. “It’s the Sexy Mama from the Wall Street Journal.”
“That’s me,” I said, pasting a look of fake cheer on my face. “Have you guys met my dad?” I let Dave handle the introductions while I looked around for Ellie. She wasn’t in the bouncy castle with the girls, or waiting in line for the air cannons with the boys. Eventually I found Hank, sitting glumly on one of the benches with an ice pack clutched to his forehead. He pointed out Ellie huddled against a wall, with her skirt smoothed over her lap, playing with what appeared to be the iPod I’d lost the week before.
I walked over, trying not to look angry. “Ellie, is that my iPod?”
She looked up. “You’re not supposedta BE HERE!”
“Well, hello to you, too.” I sat down on the floor beside her and held out my hand. “You know the rules. You don’t just take other people’s things. You need to ask first.” She threw the iPod at me. It hit me just above my left eyebrow and fell to the floor.
“Ellie! What was that for?”
“Jade and Summer and Willow all have THEIR OWN iPODS!” She widened her eyes into a look suggesting she could barely bring herself to contemplate such unfairness.
“Ellie, we do not throw things,” I said, struggling not to yell. Ellie ignored me.
“And they’re the new touch ones, not STUPID TINY BABY ONES like YOU HAVE!”
“We don’t throw,” I repeated. “And you shouldn’t have taken Mommy’s things without permission.”
Ellie stuck out her lower lip. “I didn’t even WANT TO COME to this STUPID BABY PARTY! Why can’t everyone just LEAVE ME ALONE!”
I sighed as she started to cry. Maybe—probably—this place was just too bright and noisy for Eloise. As if to confirm my thought, she leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I taked your thing and threw it at your head.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Just next time, ask first.”
At the sound of sniffling, I looked up to see Hank. “Will you do the slide?” he asked.
Ellie shook her head. “Too scary,” she proclaimed.
“What if we went down together?” I asked. “You could sit on my lap.”
Ellie narrowed her eyes, judging the steep angle of the slide, watching the kids zip down, hands raised, mouths open, squealing with glee. Most slid on their own, but a few made the descent seated on parents’ laps.
“You want to try it?”
She sighed, as though she was granting me an enormous favor. “Oooh-kay.”
“How about you, Hank?”
He shook his head. “I’m allergic to burlap.”
But of course. I got to my feet—not half as gracefully as one of the yoga moms would have managed—and held out my hand. Ellie and I were walking toward the line at the back of the slide when Dave intercepted us.
“Hey, Al. You want to check on your dad?”
“What’s wrong?” I peered toward the benches where I’d left him, and saw him sitting there, staring into space the same way he stared at CNBC.
“He seems kind of uncomfortable.”
I gave him a patient, beatific Mary Poppins kind of smile, and hoped I didn’t look drugged. “Ellie and I are going to try the slide. Just sit with him. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“I don’t wanna,” Ellie said as soon as she realized she’d have to climb a ladder built into the back of the slide to get to the top.
“Honey, I’ll be right here. Just put your hands like this . . .” I bent down and lifted, putting her feet on the bottom rung and her hands on the one above it. “Now just take a step . . .”
“I don’t WANT TO DO THIS. I’m SCARED!”
“Hurry up!” shouted the little boy—Hayden? Holden?—behind us. I scooped Ellie into one arm and hauled us both up the ladder.
“Come on! You’ll love it! I used to love slides when I was a little girl!”
“I WILL NOT LOVE SLIDES!” said Ellie, but she let me carry her to the top of the slide. Red-faced, panting, with sweat dribbling down my back, I grabbed a sack, marveling at the lack of progress—in these days of satellite radios and wireless Internet, why were kids still sliding on actual burlap sacks? I hoisted Ellie in my arms and got us in position.
“One . . . two . . . three!”
I kicked off with my heels. I could hear my daughter screaming—from fear or delight, I wasn’t sure. Nor was there time to figure it out, because the instant we got to the bottom of the slide, someone grabbed my shoulders and started shaking me.
“What are you doing with my daughter?”
I tried to wriggle away, but my father’s hands were clamped down tight, his fingers curling into the flesh of my upper arms. His shirt was untucked, his tie had been yanked askew, and the Velcro closure of one of his shoes had come undone and was flapping.
“How could you be so irresponsible?” he asked.
“Dad. Dad! It’s me, Allison!”
“You put her down right this minute, Ronnie! Don’t you ever, ever do that again!”
Oh, God. Eloise was wailing as another mother-child duo came hurtling down the slide and slammed into my back, knocking Ellie out of my arms and onto the floor . . . where, unsurprisingly, she started to scream.
“Ohmygod, I’m so sorry!” said the mother.
“How could you be so irresponsible!” my father was shouting.
“Ellie’s mommy is in trou-ble,” sang the little boy as I finally managed to wrench myself free. Ellie, weeping, limped dramatically over to Dave. Everyone in the place was staring at us, moms and dads and kids.
“Um, ma’am? Excuse me?” A teenage girl in a BouncyTime T-shirt tapped my shoulder. “You can’t stay here. There are other people waiting to use the slide.”
“Believe me, I am trying to leave,” I told her. I took my father by the elbow and steered him away from the slide and over to the metal bench against the wall.
“Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and calm as, beside me, Dave attempted to soothe Ellie. “Listen to me. I’m your daughter. I’m Allison. That was Ellie, your granddaughter, and she’s fine . . . that slide was perfectly safe . . .”
“Why was Grandpa YELLING at me?” Ellie wailed. She lifted the hem of her skirt and blotted her tears.
“Ew, gross!” a little boy said. My eyes followed his pointing finger. Oh, God.
“I think your dad had an accident,” Dave said. His voice was quiet, but not quiet enough. I figured Ellie would be revolted, but instead she slipped her hand into my father’s hand and pulled him toward the door.
“Don’t worry, Pop-Pop,” she stage-whispered. “Sometimes that happens to me, too.”
? ? ?
Ellie and Dave arranged to ride home with Hank’s mother. I got my dad back into the car, slipping a towel from the trunk onto his seat, and concentrated on getting him back home as fast as I could.
“Dad, are you okay?” I asked. “Do you need anything?”
He didn’t answer . . . he just lifted his chin and turned his face away from me. As soon as we were moving I rolled down my window, holding my breath and hoping he wouldn’t notice. When I heard what sounded like a choked sob from the passenger seat, I kept both hands on the wheel and my eyes straight ahead. Get through this, I told myself. Get through this, and there will be happy pills at the end.
We arrived to find my mother asleep on the couch, curled up in her housecoat with her bare feet tucked around each other, the same way Ellie arranged her feet when she slept. “Do you want me to . . .” I asked my dad, then let my voice trail off and cut my eyes toward the stairs. My father ignored me, pressing his lips together as he made his way past me. I waited until I heard the water running in the bathroom before I let myself collapse at the kitchen table. The room was still a mess, the sink piled with dirty dishes, the counters greasy and streaked, the flowers I’d brought the previous weekend dying in a vase of scummy water. I emptied the vase, loaded the dishwasher, sprayed and wiped down the counters, and took out the trash. I pulled a package of turkey thighs past their expiration date out of the refrigerator, along with a bag of softened zucchini and three dessicated lemons, and threw them all away. I dumped sour milk down the drain, wiped off the refrigerator shelves, and boiled water for a pot of tea, which I placed on a tray with a napkin and a plate of cookies.
I knocked on the bedroom door. “Dad?” No answer. I eased the door open. He was curled on his side, his fist propped underneath his chin, mouth open, sleeping. With his forehead smooth and his eyes closed he looked like a little boy, a boy who’d played until he was exhausted and had fallen asleep on his parents’ bed. I set down the tray, then picked up my dad’s wet pants using my thumb and forefinger and carried them to the washing machine, which was already full of damp, moldy-smelling clothes. I ran the machine again, adding more detergent. Then I slipped back into my parents’ bedroom. Half-empty water glasses, crumpled tissues, and discarded newspapers covered the bedside tables. Dirty clothes were heaped on the floor; magazines and newspapers were stacked in the corners. I stepped over a tangle of ties and a dozen discarded shoes and opened the bathroom door. The room was still steamy from the shower. Wet towels were piled in the tub, and a few more lined the floor. Hot water was pouring into the sink, and my father’s razor rested against an uncapped bottle of shaving cream. I turned off the water, capped the cream, and opened the medicine chest. My hands moved expertly over the bottles, fingertips just brushing the tops long enough to distinguish between over-the-counter and prescription stuff. I pulled down propranolol, diltiazem, and various other medications for high blood pressure and diabetes before I got to the good stuff. Vicodin 325/10. “Take as needed for pain.” Tramadol. And—bingo—OxyContin. Without pausing, without thinking, I uncapped the bottles and emptied half of each one into my hands.
What are you doing? a part of my brain cried as I crunched three of the pills, then bent down to gather the dirty towels, pick up the soap off the shower floor, pull a wad of hair out of the drain, and sweep discarded Q-tips and Kleenexes into the wastebasket. You’re stealing medicine from your father, your sick father. Have you really sunk so low?
It appeared that I had. I need this, I told myself as I moved through the bedroom, gathering armloads of clothing and piling them into garbage bags, and then loading the bags into the trunk of my car to take home to wash and fold. I need this.