He comes out of the bathroom and starts toward the dining room.
“Dad, why don’t you get dressed first? It’ll be a while yet before the eggs are ready.”
He looks at me bare-eyed.
“Where are your glasses, Dad?”
“I couldn’t find them, Johnny.”
I go back to the bedroom with him and they’re where he’d put them, on the bedside table, before he went to sleep. I should be glad he took them off, I guess. There’s a creamy haze on them, rim to rim. I take them to the bathroom and wash the lenses in warm water. I’m careless with glasses myself, but when things start to blur, I usually wipe the damned things off anyway.
He stands beside the bed and fits them carefully several times over his ears. He’s always claimed glasses hurt his nose and ears, so he’s continually changing frames, from rimless to metal to plastic and back. He didn’t start wearing glasses until he was over fifty and has never adapted.
The coffee’s getting cold. I know he’s waiting for me to find his clothes. I see yesterday’s clothes on the floor beside the bed where he dropped them. I pick these up and spread them on the bed.
“Here, Dad. You can wear the clothes you wore yesterday. They’re not dirty.”
He looks at me closely, tilts his head.
“I never wear the same clothes two days in a row, Johnny. Your mother would kill me.”
He’s not complaining, only stating a fact. To be honest, I’m not a clean-underwear-every-day man myself.
I search around and find some underwear. Dad wears Dacron boxer shorts and the kind of undershirts they had before T-shirts were invented. These look like tops of old-fashioned bathing suits or jogger shirts; shoulder straps and big holes you stick your arms through. Pinned to the inside of his old undershirt is a scapular of The Sacred Heart. Dad slips on the new undershirt and feels around with his hand.
“Where’s my scapular, John?”
It’s as if he thinks he has a scapular built in on each undershirt. I unpin the old one and give it to him. He has one hell of a time pinning it on; you can tell he’s never done it before. He’s pinning it with concentration, bunching the underwear shirt into a ball, pinning, then smoothing out wrinkles. He pats the scapular three or four times and smiles. He’s proud he didn’t pin it to his skin, I guess. I give him a shirt and a pair of trousers from the closet; I put out clean socks.
“Look, Dad, you have to learn where all these things are. Mother’s sick and can’t do this anymore.”
He smiles a wide, eager smile.
“You’re right there, Johnny. I’m going to learn all these things. You’ll see.”
I go back to the kitchen and warm up the coffee. I cook some eggs. The pills are beside his plate. I wait and it takes forever for him to come out of the bedroom. What can be taking him so long?
I lean close against Milly and wash her teats clean with warm water. The udder is heavy, the milk vein swollen. The fresh water steams from the turgid pink teats into the dim, new dawn light. I push the bucket in place, squat on the stool and start the singing rhythm of milk on metal. My fingers warm with every rolling squeeze.
When Dad comes out, I serve the eggs with hash browns. Dad sits and looks at them as if they’re strange outer-space food.
“Isn’t there any bearclaw?”
“Sure, but let’s have some eggs first, then you can finish off the bearclaw.”
“Johnny, I never eat so much in the morning.”
“Try it this one time, Dad. It’ll give you a good start. Coffee and a roll isn’t enough, even with all the vitamin pills.”
Hell, he ought to have some breakfast; at least orange juice, and an egg.
He eats nimbly, not breaking the yolk till the white is eaten, then finishes by wiping his mouth with the napkin. He wipes as if he’s going to wear off his lips. And this must be a cloth napkin; cloth with every meal and clean. Joan reminded me but it’s something I remember.
Dad sits back and drinks his cup of cooled-off coffee.
“Right now, Johnny, Mother usually turns on the record player and we listen to music.”
The player is there beside the table. It’s an old-fashioned, wood-cabinet Magnavox. There’s a sliding lid on top over the turntable. I find the right dials and turn it on. There’s a record already in place. I close the lid. Covered, it looks like a dish cabinet; the front is a woven, metallized cloth with jig-sawed wooden curlicues.
Bing Crosby comes on singing “I Wonder What’s Become of Sally.” It’s a deep, wooden tone, blurry but nice. All the new stereo and high-fidelity sets are very clear, very precise, but I hear that gray, smoked, transparent plastic in the music. It’s so incredibly accurate, transistor-perfect. This murky, dark, wood sound of old Bing is comforting. I’m sure any serious stereo addict would curl up and die but it sounds OK to me. I sit and sip coffee with Dad.
When the record’s finished, I clear the dishes. I start running hot water into the sink. Dad’s followed me into the kitchen. He leans over my shoulder as I squeeze soap into the hot water. I scrape plates and slip them into the suds.
“You know, John, I think I could do that.”
“Sure, Dad, nothing to it. You put hot water with soap on one side and rinse water on the other. You scrub the dishes on the hot, sudsy side, run them through the rinse and stack them in the dish rack.”
He’s watching and following through with me. He insists I leave the kitchen and he’ll finish; his first housework, breakfast dishes for two.
I start sweeping. There’s a vacuum cleaner but I prefer sweeping. I find a broom in the heater closet, and begin on the back bedroom. Mother’s an everyday-vacuum person. The rugs are going to have a slight change in treatment.
I sweep everything into piles. When I have enough to make a pile, I concentrate it, then move on. This is a four-pile house. Our apartment in Paris is a three-pile place, the boat a two-piler. The mill’s a one-piler, or I can make it two, depending on how dirty things are. Everything gets dirtier down there but it’s earth dirt, not soot or grime the way it is in Paris. The dirt here is between the two, but definitely four piles.
I look for Dad, expecting to find him out in the garden or greenhouse. But he’s still in the kitchen washing dishes, with intense, inner concentration. I wonder where his mind is.
Down by the well, a small bird flits its tail and takes off with a dropping upturn as I lean, lowering my pail into the water.
I sneak up and watch. He’s taking each dish and examining it minutely for dirt, then washing off a spot at a time. If he had a micrometer, a centrifuge and a sterilizer he’d be happier. He’s scraping away as if he’s trying to rub off the flower pattern. When he’s satisfied they’re clean, he dips them in and out of the rinse water at least ten times.
The thing is, he’s getting a kick out of it, water play. He’s enjoying washing dishes, playing with hot and cold water.
Dad can get super perfectionist over almost anything. I know I’ll go crazy if I watch too long. This has always been one of Mom’s laments. There’s a lot of her in me, and I don’t want to believe it.
Her claim is she needs to do everything herself because Dad drives her crazy making mountains out of molehills. It could be he still knows something about joy, while Mom and I are only getting through things. I back out of the kitchen.
Sometimes Mother calls Dad “Kid Kilowatt.” That’s one of her favorite titles. Another is “Mr. Fixit.” He’s also “Jack-of-all-trades.”
Finally, Dad thinks the dishes are done. They’re clean enough for a TV ad but it hasn’t occurred to him that other things are usually classified under wash the dishes. These are the small, important jobs marking the difference between someone who’s been around a kitchen and someone who hasn’t. I’ve watched this with our children growing up and with various friends who’ve passed through our lives.
They say they’ll “do” the dishes and that’s it. They “do” the dishes. Everything else is left. They might not ev
en wash the pots. They definitely will not wipe off the stove or clean the sink, wipe off the surfaces of tables, cabinets. They won’t put things away; butter, salt, pepper, spices, cutting boards. One young woman left the dirty water in our sink. She was twenty-five years old and wanted desperately to get married. After this scene I had trouble working up much sympathy; my own old-maidness got in the way.
So I explain things to Dad. He follows everything I do, shaking his head in amazement.
“Where did you learn all this, Johnny? In the army?”
Anything I know Dad can’t account for, I learned in the army.
“Yeah, maybe, Dad.”
Sometimes now, I think of those poor officers and noncoms trying to keep things running with a mob of eighteen-and nineteen-year-old males. I go crazy with just one or two around the house. All the sweeping, bed-making, the KP we complained about, was only normal housekeeping.
Now, don’t get me wrong, cleanliness may be next to godliness but it doesn’t mean much to me, and Vron is as casual about dirt as I am.
But my mother is something else again. She’s the cleaning maniac. Dirt is the devil! She used to take a toothbrush, reserved for this, and clean out the cracks in our hardwood floors. According to her, they harbored (that’s the word) dirt and germs. In Philadelphia, we had a house with hardwood floors in every room except the kitchen and cellar. Once a month, Mother would scrape out the germ-harboring dirt. She’d keep it in a pile for us to admire when we came home, to see what we’d “tracked in.”
Mom’s also a window nut. The windows are washed once a week, whether they need it or not. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to come within a foot of any window. If there were some danger I might breathe on a window or touch it, she’d panic. The slightest smudge and she’d be at it with Windex, a piece of newspaper and a soft rag.
One of my great pleasures now is leaning against a window, pushing my nose close and making lip marks. I love to write on damp windows and draw pictures. All our kids are window smudgers and finger painters. Sometimes it gets hard to see out our windows.
Still, even now, when I go close to a window, there’s a mother-barrier I need to crash. These little things clutter the soul.
With the kitchen done, Dad and I sit down in the living room. He gets up to turn on the television but I ask him not to. In this house, if you sit in the living room, you turn on the TV the way you lock the door when you go to the bathroom.
I’m not sure how to approach this; we’ve been carefully avoiding the subject all morning.
“Look, Dad, you should know that Mother’s really sick.”
He tenses. I watch his eyes. He’s looking at me and it’s pitiful; he’s preparing himself for the worst.
“Is she still alive, Johnny?”
“Sure she’s alive, Dad, but she’s had a heart attack, not a really serious one, but bad enough. Her heart’s never going to be the same. For instance, she can never work as hard as she used to.”
He’s nodding his head. I can tell he’s not getting the message.
“I always tell her she works too hard, Johnny. She works too hard.”
“You’re right, Dad, and you’ll need to take on a lot of the work around here. I’ll teach you to do most of the light housework. Joan will come and do the heavy cleaning, washing, shopping, things like that, but the everyday stuff, cooking, picking up, simple housecleaning, you’ll have to take over.”
He’s listening now, listening but still not comprehending.
“Then, Dad, you’ll need to take care of Mother. You know how she is, she’ll kill herself if we’re not careful. You’ve got to watch over her.”
He’s still nodding, not looking at me, looking down at the floor.
“Yes, I can do that. You tell me what to do and how to do it, then I’ll do it, all right.”
“First we’ll go see Mother this morning. Remember she’s sick, she doesn’t look so hot. The main thing is not to make her excited or worried. We need to convince her we’re getting along OK ourselves.”
I look at him carefully. He’s hanging on to every word. I’m the captain giving orders.
“You know, Dad, Mother’s convinced nobody can take care of you except her. We have to prove you can do it yourself.”
Now he’s shaking his head back and forth, a slow no, holding in one of his fake laughs with his hand over his mouth.
“That’s right, Johnny; that’s right; we’ll fool her.”
Oh boy!
Then I realize Dad’s dressed but he hasn’t washed. His pattern is broken or something, because normally he’s a very fastidious person. I imagine Mom would say, “Now you go wash up, Jack,” and he’d wash himself. Then probably she’d say, “Now get yourself dressed.” I haven’t been giving the right signals.
So I tell him to get undressed again, go in and wash. After that, we’ll put on some good clothes and go to the hospital.
“We’ll try to look nice because Mother likes to see you dressed up, Dad.”
This means Mother’s idea of dressed up, a cross between George Raft and John Boles. He wears a hat with a wide brim, a wide-lapel suit. This is all coming back in style now, so Mom’ll need to work out a new outfit; maybe thin ties, button-down collars, narrow lapels. Or maybe that’ll be my old-man costume.
But I know the drill. He’ll wear a striped tie, with tie clasp; a gold wristwatch; clean fingernails; flat-surfaced, shined, leather-soled shoes.
I find everything and lay it out on the bed. What a crappy job I’m doing. Here I’ve gotten him dressed, and now less than two hours later, I have him undressed again. It’s like playing paper dolls.
Dad asks if he should take a bath.
“Usually, Johnny, I only take a bath once a week; an old man like me doesn’t get very dirty.”
“You just wash your face and hands, Dad; clean your fingernails and brush your teeth; that’ll be enough.”
I’m not going to wash and dress him. I’m not going to hold up each arm and rub soap in his armpits. Ha! Little do I know what I’ll be doing.
I’m having a hard time adapting. Dad has always been a very capable person. I don’t think it’s senility, either. He’s become lethargic, inertial, inept. It’s fairly good survival technique; if someone else will do for you, let them. But he’s lost the knack of doing for himself. He’s debilitated.
Painfully, slowly, he washes and gets dressed. When he comes out, his necktie is crooked but I restrain myself. I roll out the car. He insists I warm it for five minutes before we take off. I have a strong respect for Dad’s feelings here.
It’s a whole story about Dad and driving. He’d driven from the time he was sixteen till he was seventy. He’s never had an accident or an insurance claim. Most years he averaged over fifteen thousand miles a year, right up till he retired.
Then, when he went to get his driver’s license renewed on his seventieth birthday, he panicked. He’d passed the written without any trouble, but, because of his age, they wanted him to do a road test. When he heard that, he turned in his driving license to the DMV examiner and quit.
Now, this didn’t make sense because he’d driven over for the test. He was driving almost every day. He’d lost his nerve, that’s all. He was overwhelmingly nervous and frightened.
In any competitive-comparative society there are hundreds of losers for every winner. Somewhere in Dad’s life, deep back, he developed a dichotomy between bosses and workers. He considers himself a worker.
One of the things Dad feels about me is I’m a boss. I can’t convince him how ridiculous this is. I don’t have anybody working for me and abhor the idea.
“No, Johnny, bosses are bosses, workers are workers, and you’re a boss. You have all the ways of a boss.”
Anyway, Dad sees this guy working for the DMV, just doing his job, as a boss. He freezes, turns in his driver’s license and hasn’t driven since.
Also, he’s convinced he couldn’t’ve passed the test; he’s sure he’s not good
enough anymore; there are too many things he doesn’t notice, things that could cause accidents.
“John, when you’re a good driver, you know when you aren’t a good driver anymore.”
Mother’s another whole story. She didn’t drive till she was in her late thirties, although Dad tried to teach her from the time they were married. He’d built his own car from discarded parts when he was seventeen. That was some automobile; it didn’t even have a windshield. I’ve heard stories and seen one photograph of it. My Aunt Trude said her father, my grandfather, absolutely forbade any of Dad’s sisters to ride in it with him.
When we were kids, the standard thing on a Sunday afternoon was taking Mom out for a driving lesson. At that time we had a 1929 Ford. Dad’d bought a wreck for fifteen dollars and fixed it up. Fifteen dollars then was a week’s wages working for the WPA. As a child, I got the idea driving a car had to be one of the hardest things for a human to learn.
Dad would keep saying, “Now take it easy, Bess, relax, it’ll be all right.” Joan and I would be in the back seat scared, cringing, peeking, giggling. Mom’s best trick was jamming the car into reverse while going forward. There would be a grinding, growling sound from the transmission and we’d be slammed against the front seat. Mother’s tough on any automobile; people, too.
Mom’s so hypernervous she can’t put her mind and body together. She’d have wild crying fits and call Dad cruel. Several times she jumped out of the car. Dad would drive beside her, coaxing her back in, and she’d walk along ignoring him, crying.
In California, Mom finally passed her test. The guy who passed her made a big mistake. She’s a menace on the roads. Is it possible to have too fast reactions? She’s too imaginative, at least to be driving a car. She’s constantly twisting this way and that on the steering wheel so the car weaves down the road. Under her hands, a car takes on a mind of its own, a mind totally in opposition to hers. Mom also talks to cars and conducts a running commentary on any driver within crashing distance.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, she can’t maintain concentration on the road. She’s had a series of minor accidents and totaled one car. It’s a working miracle she’s never killed anyone or seriously hurt herself.