“How much of this is for us?” Tessie asks Oscar upon our return. Oscar can’t answer because I haven’t told him he’s made a movable feast we’ll be taking to Dad. I wish I had because once again, Oscar has set an exquisite table. I don’t want to upset his sensibilities, so I offer him the rest of the day off.
And he accepts. Having discovered last month that I possess the proper cooking utensils and a quality china service, Oscar is willing to leave without serving us or cleaning up. While I marvel at the turkey and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and gravy and the baby carrots that still have their tops attached and the apple pie Oscar must have brought with him, Tessie takes another shower. Oscar refuses the twenty I want to give him for his troubles.
“You don’t have to tip me,” he says. “I’m not the paperboy.”
I wait until he’s gone before I search for plastic containers to transport Oscar’s meal. I portion out what I think our father might be capable of eating, burp and seal the five lids, wedge the tubs inside an old sneaker box. It would make more sense for Tessie and me to eat before we go, strike while the gravy’s hot, but I’m anxious to play out this reunion. As reward for my patience and perseverence, I treat myself to a slice of still warm apple pie while Tessie makes two trips downstairs for God knows what.
“Ready?” she asks a good half hour after I’ve eaten the pie, as if I’m the one delaying our departure.
Tessie asks to drive without offering a reason, so we switch positions in the driveway. Instead of coming back to the garage to get me, Tessie waits for me in the street. I have to knock on the window to get her to unlock my door.
I’m barely strapped in when Tessie asks, “So Bain had a son? Was he married?” She looks at me trying not to laugh. “Of course not. What am I saying? Why spoil a perfect record? Did you ever meet her?”
“Just once.”
“What was she like?”
I check the back seat to make sure none of Dad’s containers have tipped over from the sharp turns Tessie seems to enjoy making. “She was, is, an actress. Why do you have to know about every woman you haven’t met?”
Tessie regards herself in the mirror. “What about his son? Did you ever meet him?”
I shake my head. “No one has.”
Perhaps it’s the holiday traffic, but everyone seems to be driving below the speed limit. If my sister weren’t tailgating whatever slowpoke happens to be in front of us, it would feel like a funeral procession. The barrenness of the leafless trees that snake the pallid blue sky like the veins on our father’s hands doesn’t help. Neither does the dingy three day snow cover. During this forty-minute drive, twice the normal time, I count sixteen of those front yard fake wells. The number of times Tessie changes stations in mid song is infinitesimal.
The crowd I expect to find at Dad’s nursing home isn’t there. We’re able to park right by the door, though not in the handicapped spot Tessie initially pulls into. “Prepare yourself,” I warn my sister who doubles the distance between us with each step.
Because she thinks she can locate him without direction, Tessie bounds off once we’re inside. I put the box of food down on the main counter and sign us both in. I nod perfunctorily at the nurses and orderlies I’ve seen before, thankful to have the box of food as a buffer between us, thankful, as well, for the aromas of Oscar’s magical meal that block out the smell of urine and body odors peculiar to the aged, one of the gauntlets I normally traverse.
The other one I can’t avoid. As if on cue, half a dozen patients in various stages of physical and mental decline pop out of doors or come to life as I walk down this hall. It’s always a funhouse and today an especially alarming one because the box I carry renders me incapable of brushing aside anyone who might lurch at me. I’ve come too far to spill this meal now. Today, though, no one seems curious of me or anxious for me to make myself accountable to them, not even the woman the attendants always leave in the last hallway folded in an X in her wheelchair. It’s as if these people who probably don’t remember their own names or if they’re wearing pants are painfully aware what day it is and that no loved one will be coming to see them.
Not that our father is capable of love these days or half the feelings that once comprised his emotional palette. He is, however, awake and propped up in bed.
“Hello, Neddie,” he says to me, his brother’s name. “Look who’s here. Mary’s come to take me home.” He beams brightly at Tessie, who is holding one of his hands.
“Hello, Pop,” I say. “Happy Thanksgiving.” I scan the room for a surface large enough to hold the box. This room always strikes me as smaller than the time before. Early on, I asked the manager to place him in a larger room and learned there were none, that most of their guests find space disorienting. That’s what we are, both residents and visitors, here in this home. Here on this earth. Guests. Here because of someone else.
“Neddie, did you bring me the paper?”
“No, Pop, they didn’t print one today because of the holiday.” I’ve learned not to correct any mistake my father makes because it will only reoccur. I’ve also learned anything I say will suffice. My father no longer possesses an attention span, which makes all truth and logic arbitrary. At first, it bothered me to fib; now, it’s our normal discourse. The preferred one because Dad seems to find more comfort in the lies I tell and the lies he tells himself. It’s like talking to a dog, the tone of what I say our only shared truth.
“Pop, would you like some dinner?” Tessie asks, as if it were her idea. “We brought you a wonderful dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Tessie’s here, Pop,” I say, more for her sake. “She came all the way from Boston to spend Thanksgiving with you.”
“We helped the Indians grow corn by planting fish in with the kernels,” Dad tells us.
I swing the hinged table over his bed, urge him to sit up. He glares at the table that he regards as a restraint, not an aid. “We brought you Thanksgiving dinner,” I tell him. “But you need to sit up to eat it.” I look at Tessie for help, but she is more content to stroke his hand, wallow in her sadness, than do something useful. I raise our father by his wispy armpits, fearful of poking a hole clear through his cobweb skin. “Better?” I ask.
“It’s time to go home,” Dad tells Tessie.
I uncap all the tubs but the one holding the apple pie. I’d love for Tessie to locate a plate but settle for having her remove her hand from his to get a set of plasticware they stock in his bedside table drawer along with his sippy cup.
“This turkey looks good,” I tell him. “Let me cut some up for you.”
Dad eyes the tubs of food before him. “A chicken in every pot,” he says.
It doesn’t matter how small I make the pieces. Dad seems disinclined to want to chew anything. The mashed potatoes he willingly accepts and the gravy he embraces, at one point putting his sippy straw to it to drink until his earthworm straw clogs. But even the sweet potatoes made mushy by their steamy ride inside their container he is reluctant to eat.
“Everything all right?” asks a male orderly whose curiosity about the food, I’m guessing, is the sole reason for poking his head in.
“Yes,” Tessie says.
“No,” I tell him. “We need a blender. Or a food processor. Is it possible to get one from the kitchen?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the orderly says.
I take the gravy-clogged straw from my father’s frail hand, give it to Tessie to run under a faucet.
“Where?”
“Wherever,” I tell her. “It’s just a faucet.” To Dad: “Tessie’s washing your straw. She’ll be back in a second.” I hope.
“I need to wash the car,” Dad tells me. “I didn’t mean to run over your bike.” And damn if the blind squirrel hasn’t found a nut. I’d forgotten all about Tessie’s bicycle.
But Tessie hasn’t. In the doorway, she pauses, holding the pristine straw like a wand that has cast the wrong spell. Privately, we recall our father once again backing out of our driveway without looking—or listening, it seemed, to learn if any impediment stood between him and the street, and the two sounds of crushed metal as the rear then the front tire ran over the new Schwinn Tessie had carelessly laid down in the driveway in her haste to get money from someone before the ice cream truck vanished. It was her first big gift that Tessie had convinced our parents she was worthy of after months of avowing responsibility for it. And now, less than a month later, it lay mashed, unrepairable, useless driveway art.
Father almost drove away without noticing the rubble. He would have save for Tessie’s shrieking and Mother’s shouting soon after. All this I watched from the sanctuary of my upstairs bedroom window, thankful it wasn’t me my mother was scolding. That it wasn’t me my father slapped after Tessie, enraged, took a futile swing at our mother. For days afterward, Tessie begged for another bike until Mother, her patience worn thin, ended Tessie’s restoration hope with what I thought was a well-deserved spanking. Until the day Tessie moved out, any time she requested something from my parents, the mangled bike was verbally waved in front of her as evidence of her irresponsibility. As often as not, it was enough to make her stop asking. That it would have been prudent for Dad to check first the driveway both his children were fond of playing in, that he and Mom should be forever thankful it was just a bike and not their daughter, were never at issue. Never mentioned, not even by Tessie.
Who returns to the present when Evan, the orderly, taps her shoulder so he might pass by with, indeed, an old blender he has located.
“I probably shouldn’t be doing this,” he says. “I know I need to return this soon, so have at.” There’s no hand holding for Tessie now, nothing in this room that can possibly compete for her attention with whatever looms outside Dad’s window. Even the whirring of the blender as I feed into it the turkey, then the gravy to facilitate the cutting, then for the heck of it, the sweet potatoes and carrots, tops and all, everything but the pie, fails to gain her interest. I add some of Dad’s sippy water to thin things out, pour half the mixture into his cup, reapply the lid and straw that goes through it, hand the cup to my dad who eagerly drinks down this holiday sludge. When he empties the cup, making that sucking sound that still doesn’t interest my sister, I refill his cup. “Happy Thanksgiving, Pop,” I whisper in his ear. After he drains this half of his dinner, I take the blender with me to the men’s room where I clean it with Boraxo. I leave the blender in the middle of Dad’s floor for Evan to conspicuously find, hope that Evan finds Oscar’s twenty just as easily. Tessie, when I tap her shoulder, flinches. She files out of Dad’s room, stopping only to kick the blender that I have to reassemble.
Michael Darcher 