Dad has shut himself in his office. He won’t answer Theo’s phone calls.
I slide him tortillas. He writes LEAVE ME ALONE on one in ballpoint pen and pushes it back out the door.
May 1
Still nothing from Dad. Theo comes by, and we camp together outside the door.
“I’m sorry, Howard,” Theo shouts at the door. “We shouldn’t have lied.”
We stay camped outside the office for hours. We play a few games of chess.
Finally a note emerges from underneath the door: ABOUT TO PEE IN JAR. PLEASE GO AWAY.
We consider staying. We leave.
May 2
I haven’t seen a single bird enjoying the food mix, but somehow, the seed supply in the feeder is diminishing. All this time, I’ve been wondering how it was possible, but now I’m watching: a squirrel, indulging. And still Dad won’t speak to me.
May 3
Today, we notice a tall stack of frames Dad’s put outside his office door. His teaching awards.
Mom collects them, puts them away. “We’ll put them back up when he feels better,” she says.
May 4
Dad’s emerged from the office but is still not a fan of me. He speaks only with my mother, and in a dramatic whisper, so I can’t hear.
To me, he doesn’t say more than a few words—the occasional question. “Where’s the coffee?” That sort of thing.
May 7
The fish are getting fatter. The fish, in fact, are obese.
Today I see why: I watch Dad feed the fish, sit down, and, minutes later, rise to feed them again.
May 11
I remember reading that there was a time Auguste was eating cauliflower and pork, and Alzheimer asked her what she was eating, and she said, “Spinach.”
That’s something like what happened today, which was that today I made pork chops and potatoes, and Dad said, “I don’t want this,” and I said, “This is exactly what you asked for,” because it was exactly what he had asked for, I’d even gone out to the store to get the pork and the potatoes specifically because he’d asked for them, and then I had looked up a recipe for pork chops and the best way to do them. I’d put them in a brine and cooked them with apples and balsamic vinegar.
“I don’t want tomatoes,” he said.
“There aren’t any tomatoes in there,” I said. I said it very calmly.
What happened next was that he shouted at me. He shouted that he wasn’t a child and he knew what tomatoes were and those were tomatoes, and that he was my father, and what was my problem, that I couldn’t show him some respect. My first instinct was to put the steak knife away because I had never seen him like this, and because I was frightened. I put it in my back pocket. He saw what I had done with the knife, seemed insulted that I thought he might be dangerous, and took his plate and threw it against the wall. It shattered, on cue.
I gathered the rest of the steak knives from the silverware drawer, hurried out of the house, and threw the knives away, still shaking. I took everything out to the curb. When I got back inside, Dad had retreated upstairs.
I swept up the plate pieces. The sweeping was calming and after I felt calm enough I made a plate for myself. I ate the potatoes with a soup spoon and a pork chop with one hand, as if it were a slice of pizza, in front of the television. Oprah was on but I kept the volume off, reading the closed captioning from time to time but mostly not. The show was about the secrets to long life and I just wasn’t in the mood. Everyone had his or her own secrets. For a 105-year-old secretary and housekeeper, it was not having sex. There was a man who swore by cold showers. I picked loose strands from the couch. I wondered: If I sat there all day, picking, would the couch unravel into nothing?
Suddenly Linus, like a mind reader, calls.
“I’m coming home,” Linus says, over the telephone. The spring semester is over; he’s working on his dissertation.
“I bought a ticket,” he says.
I want to ask why he’s buying tickets, if something had happened between him and Rita and she didn’t finagle him a free one, but I don’t.
May 13
At the airport, a woman holds her breasts with her hand as she races from the ticket counter to her departure gate. Someone tries to sell me flowers. I think about buying some mums for Linus, but then I spot my tall brother, a head or two above everyone else, green duffel slung over a shoulder.
And because a sandwich is the only thing anybody ever wants after a plane ride, even a short trip like Linus’s, we don’t drive straight home. We stop in downtown LA to get sandwiches at our favorite deli. We sit in a booth across from each other, with Linus’s duffel at our feet because he’s paranoid about leaving luggage in the car.
A man sitting a booth to our right might be John Travolta. He is with another man who is short, bald, and fat, but in a compact, somewhat attractive way. They are both eating salads.
Linus and I stare at the laminated menu even though we already know what we’re going to order. I want a Reuben with everything and the bread buttered on both sides. I want coleslaw. First we want to share a dish of pickled herring. Our order is so obvious to us, we almost forget to tell our waitress.
“How is he?” Linus says.
“Well,” I say. “He’s not so thrilled with me.”
Earlier in the day he had forgotten the word for pencil. He called a mechanical pencil a needle. Then we passed some evergreens and he called the needles pens.
The fat man is saying to John Travolta that his wife has been intractable, ever since their dog lingered by her breast.
“She heard that schnauzers can smell cancer,” the fat man says.
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” remarks John Travolta. He signals to the waitress and asks for a slice of cheesecake.
“You, too?” he asks the fat man.
“I’m going to weigh three hundred pounds,” the fat man chuckles, “but okay.”
I tell Linus about yesterday. Our father took too many fish oil capsules by mistake. First he threw up, then he had a nosebleed, and we used the entirety of a roll of paper towels to get all the vomit and blood. He was embarrassed. He made me promise not to tell my mother. I promised I wouldn’t, and after dinner, when she asked if anything exciting had happened, I didn’t let on that anything had.
Now he is at the door, awaiting our arrival.
“Hi, Dad,” Linus says, sounding wary.
“Son,” Dad says. He takes Linus’s bag with one hand and embraces him with his free arm, first trying to reach over Linus’s shoulder, ultimately wrapping the arm around Linus’s waist, on account of the height difference. We go inside and drink coffee Dad has brewed, like regular people with nothing the matter. At first, anyway.
When Dad asks how Rita is, Linus says he thinks she’s good.
“I mean, I think,” he adds.
“Things ‘weren’t really working’ for her,” Linus says, without intonation.
“I’m sorry,” our father says, really looking it. He touches Linus on the shoulder, and Linus flinches a little.