Time to Go (24 page)

But her clothes bunched up in back. It reminds him of his father when he wheeled him through Central Park. He lived with his folks then and wheeled his father almost every mild Saturday and Sunday through various parts of the park. Sometimes across it—they lived in the West Seventies—to the Metropolitan Museum and once to the Whitney. His father didn't like the paintings there but did the elevator—”Nice and big,” his hands and expression said, “—never saw such a big elevator in my life.” “It's for the paintings,” he told him. “Oh,” his father's expression said, impressed. And the Jewish Museum, but it was closed because it was Saturday. “Should've known,” he probably told him because he really should have known, and if he did say something like that, his father probably raised his shoulders signifying “No big deal.” And the Guggenheim—maybe on that same day because the two museums are so close—but his father got scared at the top of the ramp where the elevator let them off, gestured that Will might look too intently at one of the paintings and forget the chair he was holding and it could roll out of control, so they took the next elevator down, looked at some prints on the ground floor and left. “You want to try to get our admission price back?” his father gestured, and Will either shook his head or said no.

But his daughter's cap from behind. His father wore what he called a fishing cap, though he never fished in his life. “I eat fish, I don't fish,” he used to say when he could still speak. Beige, perforated, a long peak, when the cap wore out he always bought the same exact kind. There was a store near his office that had been selling that cap for forty years. When his father had to give up his office because of his illness, Will went downtown to buy him that cap. So both sports caps for nonparticipants in those sports and both to keep out the sun. Their hair's similar also. Very fine and thin and light. His father had little hair—he was bald on top—but the sparse side hair was almost white by this time. His daughter is blonde and doesn't have much hair either. She's not bald—just that it's thin and fine and only grown two to three inches. It's also the way she's slumped. She's in the sitting rather than the reclining position of the stroller—a Maclaren Buggy, English, very sturdy and safe. Except when he hung the canvas bag filled with groceries on the handles, which the Maclaren instructions advised not to—the stroller isn't built to support such a weight on the handles; it falls backwards. It fell over twice with her in it. Once she hit the back of her head on the sidewalk. There was no bump or bruise but he was scared that day that she might have been hurt worse than she seemed. She cried for several minutes, didn't smile for an hour. He observed her carefully the whole day for signs of a concussion. At night he got up several times to make sure she was all right. He does that occasionally—every second to third night—but that night did it every couple of hours. Touched her temples, felt her forehead and hands for warmth, held his hand an inch over the back of her head to feel the body heat, listened for breathing and movement. He told his wife about the accident. Not the first one, since their daughter wasn't hurt. But he did the second time so she wouldn't put anything heavy on the handles. He should have figured that out after the first fall, but he didn't. Also told her so she'd observe their daughter for any signs of illness. His wife said she'd never hang anything heavy on the handles. “The instructions said specifically not to. It can't support too much extra weight there. I asked you to read the instructions when we bought it.” He didn't and still hasn't, not that he knows where they are now, though she might. She puts lots of things like that away, also the cartons that things like strollers come in, in case they have to be sent or brought back. When they lived in her apartment in New York they didn't have the room to. But he knows how to open and close the stroller in seconds, and what else could go wrong with it?

But she's in the sitting position. Canvas bag with her things and his book hanging on one of the handles. Seated like his father in the wheelchair, which only had one position. So both vehicles have handles he holds. And because she is in that position—less comfortable, it seems, and not as easy for her to be in as the reclining position—she has to use her backbone more to sit up—she slumps over a little to the side. As his father slipped to the side in his wheelchair. But he was always to one side or the other in the chair, never straight up for more than a few seconds. He didn't have the strength to sit up. And both strapped in at the waist, she with a seatbelt that's part of the stroller, his father with a thick terrycloth bathrobe belt that Will tied around him and the back of the chair. He'd press his father's hand and say “Squeeze hard as you can,” just to see what his father's strength was that day, and his father would usually give a little squeeze to almost none, then a look which said “Well, what can I do? Not the grip I had when I was pulling teeth all day.” Never a look though of “Boy, life is hell. Don't ever grow old. Kill yourself or have someone do it for you if you ever get as sick as I. Plan for it ahead of time, in fact. Even put away over the years a lethal dose of sleeping pills for that day.”

His father liked the park better than the museums. Museums he tolerated because Will wanted some variety in these outings. But his father liked most of all to face the sun and just sit in his chair overlooking a big field or meadow, with Will on a bench beside him, and read the
Times
, which will put on his lap and turned the pages for him, or watch people playing and going by. If he made in his pants Will wanted to get him home fast as he could. That happened just about every time they went to the park. Sometimes when they passed a park restroom will said “Do you think you have to make one or two?” and his father usually nodded. “Which one?” and his father usually put his hand over his crotch. Will then wheeled him into the restroom and helped him urinate into the plastic urinal he brought along in a shopping bag with other things, which he then emptied into the toilet. Or stood him up, walked him into the stall and sat him on the toilet if it was clean. If it wasn't he held him in a squatting position just above the seat. Then he wiped him, pulled up his pants and opened the stall door if there was one and sat him back into the chair. It wasn't easy. Sometimes his father had already made by the time he got his zipper open or pants down. He never went out of his way to be near a park restroom. He knew where they all were in the park area they went to, so he could have easily directed them past one every time. Sometimes he thought men coming into the restroom would think they were perverts and he'd have to explain. He got angry at his father sometimes—usually late at night when his father was in bed—and shouted things like “I can't clean up your crap again—it's just not in me—can't you hold it in till I get you on the toilet?” and then felt very bad over it and apologized. After the apology, his father usually nodded but never smiled. “Never again will I yell at him for anything,” he always told himself after, but a month or so later he shouted at or scolded his father for the same thing. But he thinks he did all right by his father then. He exercised him, fed and dressed him, was mostly soft-spoken and patient to him, helped give him showers and baths, injected him, massaged his feet and hands, shaved him and cut his hair, installed an intercom system between their bedrooms and any time at night his father seemed to need him—heavy breathing, groans—he was there in seconds. He did this for four years but his mother did three-quarters of the work.

That was his father those last years, now he's with his daughter.

With both of them he always carried a book to read in the park. And the shopping bag and now the canvas bag. She's so much easier to take care of than he was. Maybe cleaning up his father prepared him for cleaning up his daughter. Some men flinch at their child's feces, not so much the piss, but he went right at it from the start. And just taking care of him—feeding, washing, wheeling—might have been a preparation too. His brother said that when he had to change his daughters when they shit, he tied a handkerchief around his nose, dabbed it with after-shave lotion, put on disposable plastic gloves and held his breath throughout most of it, but he still gagged every time Will gagged the first few times with his father and a few times after when his bowel movements were especially messy or large, but his reaction to his daughter's excrement isn't much different if she pisses or shits. He checks her diapers every half an hour if she's awake and he's alone with her. If she's wet or has shit he tends to it methodically, even if he has to change her on a changing pad on top of a park bench; though her shit is more difficult to take care of, as he has to shake and rub it off the diaper in a flushing toilet bowl and then squeeze the diaper with the same hand so it doesn't drip.

He kneels in front of her and checks her diaper. “You dry, honey, you dry,” in the black dialect he often affects when he tells her this. She's looking at his hand inside her diaper and then turns her head back to the workers and machines doing street repairs. “Ah my little chee-choo,” and kisses the top of her head and smooths back her hair. Her eyes look up at him, blink from sun. She twists around as if she's going to suddenly get cranky, which she does sometimes when the sun's in her eyes or he's wheeling her and stops awhile.

He gets behind the stroller and wheels her. He feels sad again because of the way she looks from behind. Humpbacked, strapped in—he should have pulled down the bunched-up clothing underneath. He still could but she'll get cranky again if he stops and maybe cry. Get so cranky he might have to hold her the rest of the way to the mall and then inside. Maybe he didn't pull the clothing down because something in him is enjoying the sadness. And the baseball cap. He should have bought a sun bonnet instead. For one thing, it can be tied under her chin so she can't take it off. So far today she hasn't, but she likes to drop it on the ground and a few times he had to go a block back to find it. The cap looks like the kind a child wears who's recovering from a brain operation—that could also be the cause of sadness. They're almost at the mall. Skim milk, Similac, cottage cheese, yogurt, other things—some of them not food—he should have made a list as his wife said. But what he forgets today he'll get tomorrow when he wheels her there. He doesn't mind going to it. It's a cheerful enough place and designed with some expense involved and with a little style. Small, as malls go, with several services they use, since it's the closest shopping center or really shopping anything to their street. Dry cleaners-tailor where one can also get keys made. Stationer, classical record store, drugstore, twin movie theaters they've never gone to because they don't trust anyone to babysit yet and a restaurant they'll never go to because it's an all-you-can-eat place for $4.79. And an optician he did use when his daughter twisted is glasses' temples out of shape. She loves to grab glasses off of faces and has a grip that's not easy to break. But he's sad. The similarities, etcetera. Her back and his. His father was round-shouldered, probably from bending over patients for fifty years. And while he's thinking about which mall entrance to use, he starts to cry. He did all he possibly could for him but it wasn't enough. His penitent look whenever Will rushed out of the apartment shouting “I've got to take a walk around the block.” He takes out a handkerchief and wipes his eyes. And as long as it's out, leans over the stroller to see if he can do anything for his daughter with it and wipes the little drool at the side of her mouth. He couldn't have done more for him. It just wasn't possible at the time. Still, he did a lot. His daughter he does more for than he maybe should. Maybe it'd be better to let her be more independent—try things out more—than he does. But he loves holding her, doing all these things for her, feels awful and sometimes unreasonably irresponsible when she falls or pulls something down on herself and is hurt. He liked doing many things for his father also, and by doing them helping out his mother with him, but it was so much tougher.

He's all right now, not crying, eyes dried, and wheels her inside the mall to the photo shop. He says to the salesperson “Excuse me, but I think my prints are ready,” and holds out his stub. She looks at it, doesn't take it, says “Last name?” he says “Taub,” and she goes through a box of envelopes and pulls one out. She rings up $8.28 on the cash register, he gives her a ten and she gives him the envelope and change. The shop seems hot and he looks down. His daughter's sleeping. He wheels her into the public corridor where it's cooler, parks the stroller along a wall so nobody will run over it and takes the prints out of the envelope. His wife took them all. It's still too warm for his daughter and he very carefully, since she can use the nap, unzips her jogging jacket and takes off the cap. Two are of him holding her. He doesn't look good in photos anymore. He used to be considered good-looking, but he's got too jowly, put on too much weight, lost too much hair, even the neck flesh has loosened. He's going to tell his wife “No more photos of me in any pose.” She'll say something like “Not even with your daughter? She'll want them when she's older and your mother likes to get them now.” “I just don't want to be photographed. Pictures of people should be taken of the very interesting, pretty or young.” He doesn't necessarily believe that but if he has to he's going to say it. He doesn't like to look this old or bad. If he has to he's going to say that too.

The rest of the thirty or so photos are of his daughter alone, in the baseball cap with the peak snapped up, with the peak down but in back, reaching for the tail of one of the cats, three of her sleeping outside in the stroller with the baby blanket up to her neck, about ten of them with her grandmother—his wife's mother: grabbing for her glasses, snagging them, waving them in the air, hugging them to her chest, two of her sucking on one of the temples' ends, several with her grandmother trying to get the glasses back, one of her holding his daughter with one arm while lowering herself to pick the glasses off the ground, another of her putting them back on and his daughter reaching for them. There aren't any of his wife because her mother says she doesn't know how to take pictures and Will didn't go with them on that walk. He's not going to tell his wife that while he was wheeling his daughter to the mall he thought about his father—that it started when he looked down at her from behind. He doesn't think she'll like him comparing their daughter to his father. From everything she's heard about him, and most of these things were told by Will and his brother and mother and others in a flattering or at least nondisparaging way—”He had a good sense of humor though maybe he told the same joke or made the same sardonic riposte too many times”; “He didn't take guff from anyone unless there was some money to be made”; “He was a happy-go-lucky guy so long as things were going his way”; “People confided in him and came to him for advice, though a lot of it was on how to get away with something they didn't earn or deserve”; “He liked to pair off his unmarried patients, but got a little miffed if in the end there wasn't something like a new suit in it for him”; “He was a devoted son and brother”; “He was a diamond in the rough”; “His friends usually came before his family”; “He truly believed that it mostly wasn't what you know but who you know”; “He loved to beat the system, often just for the fun of it, and to pull the wool over what he thought were pompous people's eyes”; “Maybe because of the poor home and tough environment and times he came out of, but he was what you'd consider cheap, when it wasn't throwing around money for show, and also felt he had to keep working till he dropped, ten hours a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year”—she doesn't think he was a very tender, sensitive, scrupulous, well-meaning, fatherly man. But it'll be more the morbidness of the comparisons that'll annoy her. Healthy young child, sick old man. That he has to think morbidly. That these rather than healthier ideas come to him when he's wheeling their daughter. He still might tell her. At the dinner table tonight or after they shut the bedroom light and are about to fall asleep. During these times he often doesn't know what he's going to say to her. The dinner talk sometimes comes because he can't stand the silence there too long so he'll reflect on the interesting events that happened or sights he saw or thoughts that occurred to him that day. And in bed late at night because he's just too sleepy to restrain himself, so things he never thinks he'll tell her will suddenly pop out.