Every Day (25 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” Eliot says, laughing.

“Men,” I cluck. “Hello!” I shout from the doorway.

“I’m Ruth,” Mrs. Aidinoff says and holds out her hand in the same graceful, pitying way that Alex did last night.

“This is my dad,” Alex says, one arm around the tall man.

“Seth,” he says pleasantly.

“We just love your boy,” his wife says. “He’s so polite, such a gentleman.”

I try to hide my dismay in disclaimers, but it doesn’t work.

“Really!” she assures me. “But all children are different at home!”

We’re joined by Fowler and Isaac, still ushering, as if he’s been hired as an attendant.

“Hi, everyone,” Isaac says. “I’d like you to meet my dad.”

Fowler lifts a hand in greeting. There’s no question that arm control is now a thing of the past.

“Good to meet you.”

“Spitting image,” Seth remarks.

“Jim, this is Alex,” Isaac says.

“A pleasure,” Fowler says. Alex approaches Fowler, on this our sacred ground, and rests her hand on top of his.

“Isaac says you make movies,” she says. “I’d really like to see some.”

Jane, who’s been spying from the side, grimaces and trods off to join her abandoned father at the grill. Even in the
grave, I believe, Fowler will possess a magnetism. Something on the tombstone, or in the landscape where it stands, that lush, foreign landscape, will work as an invitation and a warm welcome, will draw the women to him.

•   •   •

Isaac and I sit in bumper-to-bumper on Broadway, after dropping Fowler home.

“This sucks.”

I try to defend my choice of this route over the clogged parkway. He says we should have taken the Deegan.

“There was a game,” I remind him. Yankee Stadium will be emptying in a few minutes.

“How’d it go today? Before the game?”

“God, Mom, give it a rest.”

He’s right, so I give it a rest, and we listen to the glum traffic reports and inch along in the dark.

“Just tell me one thing,” Isaac says finally. “Tell me what you did that made him leave.”

Ever the hero, Fowler.

“I had you.”

Isaac guffaws, unbelieving. “Had to be something worse than that, Mom.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I say firmly. “He just didn’t want to deal.”

Isaac looks straight at me. “As long as I live, I’ll never believe that.”

I get us over into the passing lane, not that any passing is possible. “And I’ll never believe that while you sit there listing my crimes, you manage to forget that I was the one who
didn
’
t
leave.”

chapter eleven

Fall is always a hard season, asking for so much smoothing over, assurance, happiness through change. We do our errands for fall clothes, our back-to-school cut-rate shopping at the stationer’s, our preschool trips to the school for signups, book purchases, and scheduling. I’ve put Daisy in nursery school two mornings a week; even Daisy requires a shoe box full of supplies in the event of rain or a cold snap. Simon faces a load of work, as early fall is the panic season in the schools, when none of the scheduling software behaves as promised by the manufacturers, and he makes double overtime, by his own standards, to troubleshoot. Isaac has remained silent on the subject of Alex, packed off to Brandeis three weeks ago, focusing instead on private weekly visits with Fowler. I don’t know what they do other than eat dinner, which I supply in a picnic basket, and when I drop Isaac at the apartment, I’m not permitted to go in and say hello. Jane, in heaven because she and Adrienne have been assigned to the same lunch period, is my slightest worry.

I see Fowler on Wednesdays, when Daisy and I come in
to help with the shopping and the work for his class. He can’t stop thanking me and boasting about his son as we have our lunch in the living room.

I drive and work. I wait for a signal to stop and rest from one of them, one of my boys or one of my girls, but they are content to have me on the periphery making sure things go smoothly and working quietly on this book about mythical women who actually lived, these prolix angels who did not believe in the public worth of their words, words that are now cause for Barry’s delighted surprise. I work early in the morning and late at night.

“You’re burning the candle,” Simon tells me, day after day. “You need sleep. It’s going to catch up with you.”

“I’ve never been a good sleeper.”

It’s Simon’s way, this concern over sleep, of letting me know I’ve brought enough to this household. We speak only of the details now, not of the disease or the person it has afflicted or the inevitable outcome.

Until one night in late September when Isaac comes out of Fowler’s building to the car, where I’m waiting with coffee and reading, and he is crying.

“You should go in there, Mom,” he says. He draws his forearm across his face.

I expect to find Fowler compromised in some specific new way that can’t be helped by our summer attempts to rig his apartment with mechanical aids. He is in front of the TV; the remote rests on the arm of the wheelchair, and his fingers dance over the buttons. Images flash and vanish, flash and vanish. The sound is off. Fowler glares at the set, his chin low, supported by his sloping chest. For all his original height, he looks tiny this way, further diminished by the trance the rapid channel fire has him under.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“I’m watching television,” he says neutrally.

I snatch the remote from him and shut off the set. “How
dare
you?”

He presses a button on the chair and spins to face me. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve got a crying boy outside in my car who could be home studying now but has chosen instead to bring you dinner. Maybe you could have saved this performance for later, after he’s left.” My voice is a contained scream.

“Maybe these efforts are a little wasted on me now,” he says. He’s so slumped in his chair I can’t help thinking it’s intentional, a posture meant to inspire pity.

I wait a beat, to head off a furious outburst.

“That may be. But I’d prefer that you take that up with me privately. Isaac’s a child, and he doesn’t know from his own wasted efforts yet. You’re the
last
person on earth who should be informing him about same.”

“Spare me the random insult, Leigh.”

“No. You spare
me
. Don’t allow Isaac to feel that his efforts in your direction are wasted. He’s never put himself so far into an effort before, and considering what you dealt him, I think it’s pretty extraordinary.”

I pick up the picnic basket and slam out of the apartment. On the ride home I ask Isaac, through rage, “How long was he doing that?”

“The whole time I was there.”

“The whole hour and a half I was outside in the car? Why didn’t you come out sooner?”

“I thought he’d stop. Then I thought he was going crazy.”

“He just sat there like that for an hour and a half? Did he say anything at all?”

“He said he can’t lift his head. I said we should take a walk and he just laughed. He said why go for a walk if all he can see is his lap.”

I keep talking, but I’m running out of schemes. I’m running
out of ways to look at this thing and reasons for dragging my husband and children through it with me.

•   •   •

I’m back at Fowler’s the next day, after a midnight call, in apology and admission of the need for more help. It’s late morning, and again he hasn’t eaten. His teeth and hair want brushing, but somehow he’s dressed himself and begun reading the student manuscripts that have accumulated over the first month of the course. The pages he’s read lie at his feet in the nightmarish arrangement some of the Hastings teachers got us to imagine when they described their methods of evaluation. “Whatever lands on the top stair gets the A.”

“Which means,” Pam said, “that I have a chance of passing.”

“How are they?”

“Pretty demonic. Such attractive people, and all of them with murder and sexual abuse on the brain. At least they’ve steered clear of terminal illness.”

“I called Sherman, and he says he’s got a neck brace and head support that we can attach to the chair. I thought we’d go get it and then I could take you to lunch.”

I’m crouching, picking up the pages, and ordering them, sparing myself the actual reading. This way he can see me and not be reduced to talking to my feet. Daisy’s glued to
Barney.

“You’re going to need a sweater. And a comb.” I find a navy pullover in his bottom drawer and bring out the comb and toothbrush and a cup of water.

First we do hair. I draw the comb through, without incident.

“Later you’ll give me the honor of washing this.”

“Heaven.”

Then we do teeth. I scrape around, remembering, in horror, Dr. Peterson’s drilling. He drains the cup and spits back into it, disgusted. “I’m impossible. How can you bear me?”

“Good question.”

I put the sweater over his head, smooth his long arms through it, stay with my hands on his chest, my head resting next to his. “It’ll be good, to get the brace. Looking at the ground all day sucks.”

“I love your optimism, Jolly Hockey-Sticks.”

I ask about the bathroom, but he says he can manage on his own. “Thanks to our elaborate rest room rigging.”

“It’ll save you, that humor.”

“So I’ve heard. Say, did you read about the guy who was afraid to laugh because he might literally laugh his own head off?”

“It was one of the first articles Eliot found for me.”

“You’ve done good work.”

“Meaning.”

“You’ve always managed to surround yourself with decent people. How have you done that?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not by being decent myself!”

He smiles into his lap, then motors into the bathroom. On screen the big purple dinosaur is gathering children under his short arms and mouthing the words to the famous song that Daisy has memorized and that cynics like Isaac and Jane ape.
Won’t you say you love me too?
Barney and his entourage wonder. Jane and Isaac have made up violent replacement lyrics, and we’ve laughed and laughed. But here we are, as odd an assortment of creatures as that on the set, trying to gather our spirits into one common effort. Who are we to deny Barney?

•   •   •

I try to take comfort later from the letters of Hadewijch:
Try and remain inwardly detached in all that happens to you; when you are troubled and when you enjoy peace of mind.
She was a Beguine; she chose to give up material wealth in service to communal peace. Of my situation she may have said that to react personally to hardship is to behave selfishly, to ignore
the divine. But I am not a religious woman—how could I be?—and tonight the words of my wise women don’t comfort me. I look past them at the specifics: at my dutiful, aloof husband, at my distressed son, defiant daughter, wondering parents, and at my baby, forgiveness incarnate. Then at Fowler, who cannot continue on his own, no matter what his mind has made up.

I join Simon at the dining room table, where he’s doing his accounts.

“Today I got Fowler a neck brace and head support. I’m not sure he can manage much more by himself.”

“Of course he can’t.” Simon records some numbers on a slip of paper, accounts he’ll enter into his computer later.

“I may have to stay there.”

Simon puts the pen down. “We spoke about that.”

“Yes, but under the circumstances,” I begin.

“There are no circumstances that dictate your living with him. Bring him here if you have to. We’ll set him up on the porch. We know it can’t be forever.”

“That’s insane. That’s a totally bizarre idea.”

“Leigh, we’re not dealing with ideas here. A lot of this, for me anyway, has become a matter of function.”

“So you’re telling me it’s okay to bring him here.”

“I’m telling you that is the only way for you to continue to help him and stay married to me. You are
my
family, not his. You live with
me,
and when he dies you stay with
me
. Wherever your mind is most of the time, your body lives here. There’s no other way I can look at any of this and stomach it.”

“Fowler says that I’m a lucky woman.”

“He was probably referring to your good fortune in having known
him.
”

We stop at this. The past tense, creeping into his speech like that, stops us.

“Talk to the children,” he says. “And it may be time to
reintroduce yourself to those enormously helpful parents of his who seem to think nothing of luxuriating in Southern splendor while their son fades out in a cold climate.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do. I keep praying that will be enough.”

He takes his bath and goes to bed, and I look over his books. He’s been making money. I spend it on bridge tolls and take-out for Fowler, on books, clothes, and sundries for the children, groceries for the household, and Simon rakes it in, privately, seeing that there’s enough for me to spend. Hadewijch writes:
When Love first spoke to me of love—How I laughed at her in return!
There’s a love of happening, of connection, of image, of learning that Simon is asking me to notice and heed instead of the love of Fowler, the love of myself with Fowler. He is giving me what I’ve been asking from him since Fowler came back, what I’d begun to doubt: a request that I stay. An unabashed statement of need.