The Liars' Club: A Memoir (42 page)

I told him drinking was killing him. That I loved him and didn’t want him dead. I was neither less blunt nor more articulate than that.

After, I took a sip of beer. Neither of us spoke. My head bent down as if to catch a blow. But no barrage of denial or rage came flying at me. What I got was way worse. Daddy shrugged. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. His voice and gaze were steady enough
that I heard the declaration for non-negotiable fact, an opinion cut into the very grain of what he was.

I studied the kitchen floor, gold and ivory crosshatch like Italian tile. Lecia had paid her handyman to install it that very morning. She was prone to flashy presents. The new stove, microwave, and console TV that took up half the living room were from her. She’d even shelled out my graduate tuition first term, doubtless thinking it her duty. That lie of responsibility was part of the wedge that lay between us as sisters. I had a sudden urge to call her. Instead, I nodded at the linoleum. “You think the new floor’s nice?” I said.

“It don’t bother me,” Daddy said. The gray ash that had been growing off his Camel finally broke and fell on the new tile, where it lay like a caterpillar. He ground it with his shoe, the same type of heavy black work shoe he’d worn my whole life. I could practically turn blindfolded to the page in the Sears catalogue where a pair of them floated in the pale-blue ether among the tasseled loafers and Weejuns that never garnered so much as a glance from Daddy.

I knew where he got those shoes resoled, and how often, and could myself, with his shoeshine kit and a soft cloth, buff them to a mirror glaze. I’d done so under his close instruction for quarters as a kid. I knew his height and weight (six feet even, one hundred and sixty-five pounds), and how he liked his steak (burnt black, with salt and black pepper and Worcestershire). But for the life of me, the contents of his skull that afternoon were closed to me. He was unknown to me, and unknowable, though I sensed inside him during that time a darkness so large and terrible that perhaps his last gift to me was trying to shield me from it, and his last failure was that he couldn’t entirely do so.

“I’m going out to check on my truck,” he said, and drew up to full height before shoving through the glass. He walked on the path of square stones heading out to the garage. The white stones made a chessboard diagonal through the red gravel. Daddy was careful to set his black shoe dead center each one. I watched the
triangle of his khaki back grow smaller till he disappeared through the door.

By the time Daddy’s stroke slumped him onto the Legion bar a few weeks later, so his beer dregs rivered down the goldspeckled Formica, he was a gargoyle of himself. For nearly a decade he’d sat on that oxblood-covered bar stool as if skewered to earth by it. It was just one in a line of such stools, like dots in an ellipsis heading off toward oblivion, each occupied by a veteran of some other war.

At the hospital, I stepped on the black rubber pad that swung open the magic doors. The lobby was deserted. I’d volunteered as a candy striper in that hospital a few bleak Sundays during the oil boom. Back then, babies were getting born by the fistfuls, and old people were sicker than ever. You couldn’t find a seat in the lobby not crawled over by some saggy-diapered toddler.

Ten years later, the place was a wasteland. I passed rows of darkened Coke machines, empty nursing stations, vast wards with beds stripped to mattress ticking. A lone janitor outside intensive care was shoving one of those rotating waxers around with an attention I thought of as Zen-like.

Mother sat in a plastic peach-colored tub chair outside Daddy’s room boldly smoking a long brown More cigarette beside a No Smoking sign. “I told them to go ahead and arrest me,” she said. Lecia rolled her eyes at this. My sister was heading home to fix supper for her husband and four stepkids. She had car keys in her hand and a list of things I had to know. Daddy couldn’t talk, wasn’t continent, and might or might not understand what you said to him. “Maybe you can get him eating,” she said. “He’s pretty much turned up his nose at everything they’ve brought.”

People tend to say how small a sick man looks in a hospital bed. But Daddy looked bigger than ever, even in the oxygen tent. He’d stayed long-muscled and wiry from decades of climbing oil towers. His hospital gown’s thin blue cotton looked overdelicate on his raw-boned frame. Somebody had slicked back his hair with Brylcreem. The green oxygen-tank hissing made the only sound
in the room. The heart monitor sat squat and disconnected in the corner, its screen a muddy brown. But for the tube running from an upended bottle into the back of Daddy’s hand, he might have been carved of gray marble. He looked like a soapstone statue of my daddy sleeping, or like the elegant casket tops of pharaohs I’d pored over in the Egypt section of our encyclopedia as a kid.

I slid my hand under the tent plastic to take his large dry hand. His lips were flaky. His eyes were swollen to reptilian-looking slits. I lifted the tent plastic another notch and poked my head in. The air inside was thin and cool as mountain air. “Daddy?” I said.

The night nurse popped her head in the door and told me to get out from under there, I was killing him. She came over to fiddle with his feeding tube and feel his pulse.

The door had just hissed shut behind her when Daddy’s eyes opened a notch. He raised his arm up stiff the way a cartoon sleepwalker would. With one trembling finger, he poked the plastic oxygen tent as if to touch my face. Then his arm dropped heavy. “Looooo,” he said. The left side of his mouth was drawn down in a sharp parody of being sad. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I sounded cheerful enough to teach
Romper Room.
“Goddamn,” he said. Then, “Yamma.” I told him Mama was talking to the nurses. He used his good hand to feel down his bad arm like a blind man, exploring each finger. He pulled it across his middle as if to park it there. But the arm slid back to his side, dead as a fish.

I drew the supper tray over and lifted the plastic lid. “Presto,” I said. Did he want any of that? He wrinkled his nose. “Shit,” he said. He went back to studying his bad hand, like it held the answer to some question he couldn’t quite formulate.

I finally stuck a bendy straw in a carton of milk, and he sucked that down. Afterwards, I wiped his wet chin with my sleeve. “Ah looo,” he said. He stared at me steady, like a swami sending brain waves. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I held up a cup of orange juice covered with Saran Wrap, and he wrinkled his nose.

From curiosity, I pulled open the metal drawer of his bed table.
A single can of Lone Star rolled into view. I shut the drawer, and in that brief interval, Daddy’s eyes had closed. I sneaked under the oxygen tent to be sure. “Daddy?” I said. But he was like Brer Rabbit, just playing possum.

Mother let me drive home. Dr. Boudreaux had spent an hour going over Daddy’s condition with her and Lecia. He’d dismantled a plastic model of the brain for her. The report to me was way more concise: “His head’s all fucked up,” Mother said. There was something called an “immediate-recovery period” of a few weeks after a stroke, while brain swelling went down. In that time, Daddy could just snap out of it, start talking and walking like before. Or maybe he’d turn into one of those chicken-chested old men you see in rest-home hallways, tied to their chairs and listing for decades.

The Leechfield I drove home through that night had eroded into a ghost town. I’d somehow not noticed this before. Streetlights had been shot out in strings. Our car kept moving into black intervals of road, then bursting into light again. Lawns grew wild. For-sale signs stuttered by too fast to count. All the necessary stores were boarded up—pharmacy, cleaners, hardware. Gone was the jewelry store with its Ferris wheel of lockets and birthstone rings; gone the coffee shop. The fancy clothes store—where all the cheerleaders worked after high school—went bankrupt when the proprietor was arrested in a motel room with two such cheerleaders and a Ziploc baggie of cocaine.

I set down in my journal the businesses we passed that night: nail-sculpting salon, knickknack shop, trophy store, aerobic-dance studio, K-9 dog-training school. There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig’s mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starving To Death. Where the filling station used to stand was a parking lot lined with industrial ice machines. So driving by, I read
ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE
. You could also get chemotherapy in a modern cinderblock building, which didn’t surprise me since the town formed
one of the blackest squares on the world cancer map. (It’s still right up there with Bhopal and Chernobyl.)

Once we hit the hurricane fence that ran alongside the rubber factory, Mother started talking. Money was a problem, she said, being as they didn’t have any. She thought he’d bought some supplementary insurance. That reminded her to fish Daddy’s wallet from his jeans jacket in the backseat.

She unfolded the wings of it and started picking past onionskin gas receipts and ticket stubs. There was a cocktail napkin with the point spread from a baseball game on which the lights had long since gone dim. Strangest of all, she found two documents of mine—the one college report card where I pulled down straight A’s, and a Xerox of my first published poem. The poem was about Daddy’s sister. It had been unfolded so many times and smoothed across so many damp bar tops the parchment warped and buckled. The middle creases were cloudy with blurred ink. The notion of his toting that around nearly broke me in half crying, so Mother started bawling too.

We blubbered in a wild chorus behind bobbing headlights all the way home. Maybe all my snubbing kept me from seeing clear. Or maybe, as Mother always contended, I just drove too damn fast, for when the car finally surged in the garage, there was a dull thump under the rear axle, a hollow sound like a dropped cantaloupe.

I threw the car in park and crawled around in the exhaust fumes looking for what I’d hit. By the back tire on the shotgun side, there was a blood smear. It looked black as an inkblot in the red taillights. Of course, Bumper didn’t come when called. He was nowhere in evidence. Mother later believed she saw some animal’s white hindquarters slithering off into a field of saw grass and blackberries in back of the garage. But there were snakes galore in those weeds, Mother said. Maybe even nutria rats.

She found him bloody and panting shallow on the back porch at dawn. She wrapped him in a lemon-colored bath towel and fetched him to the animal hospital. We only had a hundred dollars
between us and planned to put him to sleep. But the vet offered to try some surgery for free. He put pins in the cat’s hips and wired his broken jaw shut. For years the doctor had heard outrageous tales in bars about this animal’s unlikely survival. The old cat might just make it.

One morning, an orderly with arms like a wrestler’s scooped Daddy up, bent his limbs around so he’d fit in a wheelchair, then rolled him from intensive care to a regular ward while I walked alongside. I carried a warm jar of piss that had a tube running out and leading under Daddy’s hospital gown. Mother brought his metal flip chart, where somebody official had declared Daddy’s condition “stable” in block letters.

After that, the men from the Liars’ Club came practically every night to shuffle at Daddy’s bedside. They came straight from work, unfed, but refusing to dip into any pizza box you tipped open or to take any wrapped sandwich you held out. They arrived alone or in awkward pairs, holding their silver hard hats at belt level, turning them around in their hands like so many prayer wheels.

Once, when Daddy had shit the bed, I found Ben and Shug talking about an upcoming Yankees game, talking volubly as if the room didn’t stink like a barnyard.

Ben cried that night in the hall. His big meaty hands covered his face. And after that, he only came late, when Daddy was dozing and Mother was gathering up the day’s magazines and leftover soda cans. Ben took his post in a precariously tipped tub
chair outside Daddy’s room nearly every night for hours at a pop “in case something happened.”

But nothing ever happened. Whatever vacuum the stroke had dug inside Daddy’s skull held its place. He was pitched way back behind flat-staring eyes, too deep for any mere human presence to register on him as much more than shadow. Some mornings if he’d slept straight through, he’d spark up when you came in. You could suddenly
see
him seeing you, almost feel him bearing toward you from where he lay, though the form of his body never altered one iota.

Such times, he might come into a word like “juice,” squawking it out in his new crow’s voice. Only a few such words ever got spoken, though, before his eyes fogged over again, and his head dropped back on the pillow.

On the anniversary of D-Day, Mother and I watched a TV special. The first young GIs scaling the wall on the French coast got picked off by German bullets like so many insects. Daddy had been an infantryman there. He’d waded out of a landing craft with his rifle held up out of the surf. The film footage must have overlaid with images fixed in his head, for watching he roused as if jolted up by stong current. He cried out, “That’s Omaha Beach!” with perfect clarity. He pointed at the screen and fought to rise to a full sit, but his own body pinned him down. Mother had to push the button to tilt the electric bed up. “That’s Normandy!” Daddy hollered. A while later, he started calling what first sounded like nonsense, then took on the cadence of the old Latin mass. But I finally figured he was saying names, surnames, in fact, the ones I’d seen scrawled in the ragged address book he carried all across Europe. He was still calling those names in a whisper when the light went out of him.

Mother tapped on the nursing station window, eager to announce Daddy’s miracle turnaround. But the night nurse just kept painting her nails with sheer lacquer. Whole chunks of brain function stayed intact after a stroke, she told us. Usually times that had a strong feeling attached, as D-Day would. That was also why Daddy could still cuss like a sailor. He’d stored words like “motherfucker”
in the region of the brain where a man’s most basic expressions—those rising out of rage or grief or stark fear—were kept.