Crossroads (30 page)

We walked out to the backyard, where Dad was sitting at the picnic table and Eddie was getting the barbecue going. “The bees are so big out here,” Dad said, “they don't sting you; they bump into you.” Zap and I sat down with Dad as he proceeded to tell us how they were going to get to the Everglades. He was very proud of himself. He'd called the Triple-A and gotten all the maps. They had their reservations. “Three days, three nights, straight to Florida. We're staying in Holiday Inns all the way. One in Louisville, one in Atlanta, one in Gainesville. The Holiday Inns are right on the highway. That way we never have to leave the road.”

Zap smiled at Brenda, who was snapping pictures of all the kids on their swings. “They've got these cute little country inns down in the South,” I mentioned to Dad. “There's this book called
Country Inns in America
. You could stay in those kinds of places too . . .”

“What for? I don't want to stay in country inns. Stay in Holiday Inns and you know just what you're getting. You make one phone call and it's all taken care of.”

“Come on,” Zap said. “Let's get in Brenda's pictures.” Brenda was taking pictures now of everyone with Help, Renee's dog. Why would anyone name a dog Help, Dad always wanted to know. But Renee thought it was funny. She loved it when he ran away and she could walk around the neighborhood, yelling, “Help! Help!” But Dad didn't think it was funny at all. “Just wait until something's wrong and you walk around yelling Help. Remember the little boy who cried wolf.”

Eddie put a small steak and a chicken leg on Dad's plate when we sat down for our barbecue, but Dad said it was too much and Eddie took the chicken away. “You know,” Mom said, “there are more carcinogens in a barbecued steak than in five packs of cigarettes.” Renee frowned, knowing Dad would probably not eat after that comment. He looked at his steak and said it was tough anyway. The cat walked across the picnic table and lay down somewhere between the cole slaw and the potato salad, and when Eddie shooed her away, she knocked over Sam's lemonade.

Otherwise, the barbecue was uneventful until later, when Dad spotted a paper clip and cookie crumbs on the living room floor. “Marge,” he called, holding up the paper clip, “look at this.” He showed her the paper clip, somehow fallen and tucked into the thick carpeting, waiting there like some mine at the depths of the ocean since World War II to put out the eye of one of his grandchildren. On closer inspection, he found other things. Among them, a needle.

“Oh, dear,” Renee, the placid mother, chirped. “Someone must have gotten into the sewing kit.”

“Well, your housekeeper doesn't come until Tuesday,” Dad said, “so why don't we vacuum?”

“Dad,” Renee protested, “you're our guest. I'll vacuum later.”

But he already had found the electric broom. “No problem. This little broom will do just fine.” My father ran the electric broom in even, linear strokes across the orangish rug while
Mom stood nearby, scanning the carpet, as if they were both archeologists on some dig in a remote land. “Lotsa dirt here,” Dad shouted into the kitchen, where we were now doing the dishes. “You better get a new girl. I bet she hasn't done this rug in a year.”

Renee shook her head from the kitchen, as if she couldn't understand a word her Polish housekeepers were saying in the other room. Zap gave Brenda a knowing wink. But my reaction was different. I have come home from the wars and someone is exploding cherry bombs in the next room. I have spent months trying to comprehend the mistakes I made in love, and in the next room my parents are bent over a carpet, looking for paper clips.

But isn't this where longing and love began for me? In the dark coupling of this odd couple, brought together by the prediction of Gypsies, now hunched over a Model A Electrolux electric broom, vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpet in an attempt to ward off the death and destruction that lurks everywhere? I watch as the vacuum swallows hair, fur, dust kitties, crumbs, filth, rot, decay, an apple core, a dried cat turd, a semen trace, a hairpin, the deadly needle, sucking all of it into its unsuspecting canal.

As I dry Renee's earthenware china with a clammy dishtowel, it is more than I dare imagine. But somehow we are born, made. It happened, I want to shout to them over the noise of the vacuum. I am certain it happened. I have a brother and a sister and I am flesh and blood. So what was it? The stork leaving a little package at the door? Or maybe, as Zap liked to think, you did it three times and were very lucky. But what if that's not the way it was at all? What if those two people, now bending over the vacuum, trying to figure out how to open the bag because it's clogged, what if they were as filled with desire as the rest of us? What if, deep down, somewhere, they'd been as crazy as we?

My father, trying to change the bag, flicked the wrong
switch, and all the dirt he had just vacuumed fell in a large pile onto his feet. He shouted at us, “Help. Do something.” For a moment Renee thought he was calling the dog but then she saw that the vacuum had unloaded itself on our father's feet. “Oh, oh,” she said. “Zap, you'd better do something.” But the three of us were already laughing out of control. Renee buried her face in a dishcloth and Zap motioned Brenda to take a picture.

“How do you fix this goddamn thing?” Dad called from the other room. Zap somehow managed to get the vacuum back together and Dad tried to get it to work again so that he could vacuum up the pile he'd vacuumed a little while ago. Mom tried to take it from him. “Here,” she said. “You'll just hurt your back.”

“What's the matter?” he retorted. “You don't think I can vacuum a goddamn rug?”

What if the vacuum turned on them, I wondered. What if it turned around and sucked them up, as if they were dust, hair? Would that free us of the past? And so what if we were free of the past? It wouldn't solve anything; it wouldn't erase the mistakes.

“Dad,” I finally said, “why don't you just relax? We'll clean up that mess later.”

That was when his face changed. It has perhaps been one of the worst parts of my life to watch my father's face turn from confusion to rage. “Relax, all right, you want me to relax. Nobody wants help around here, it's O.K. by me.”

“We just want to have a good time today, all right?”

“Oh, and I'm ruining it, is that it?” I knew I'd said the wrong thing the minute the words were out of my mouth. “It's all my fault, is that it? It's my fault the bag opened on the floor, it's my fault someone left a needle on the floor. Believe me, if someone didn't worry about all those details, you kids wouldn't be in such good shape today.”

I was twisting the dishtowel in my hands. “Why don't you take it easy. It's really not such a big deal.”

Telling him what he felt was a big deal wasn't such a big deal was about the worst thing you could say. It was like telling a hypochondriac that he has hay fever and not pneumonia. It makes the hypochondriac know, if he thinks about it, that he is acting in an unreasonable way. That was when my father turned on me. He tossed down the electric broom. “All right, if you don't think it's such a big deal, if you have to decide what's important and what's not important for the rest of us, then why don't you take care of things around here? You know how to do everything . . .”

I raised my hands, imploring him. “Why don't you cool it? We're trying to have a nice day.”

His face reddened; his eyes were filled with a terrible rage. “And I'm ruining it, right, daughter? I'm the one who always ruins it. Well, don't worry. I won't be around much longer to ruin it for you.”

I threw down the dishtowel. “Oh, give me a break, will you?”

Renee and Zap and Brenda had long ago ceased drying the dishes and were staring straight ahead of them. I stood, glaring at my father. Eddie walked in, with Help bounding behind him. “Well, the fire's out.” He beamed.

“No, it's not,” Renee whispered.

“Dear,” our mother cut in, “why don't we just forget it? Let's go outside with the kids while it's still light.”

“I'll forget it. I'll forget it, all right.” And then, turning to me, “You can do whatever you want, daughter. Go ahead. You can divorce me if you want to.”

“I'm not married to you,” I shouted back.

“And with your rotten disposition, you're not going to be married to anyone for a long time!” he shouted back at me.

That was when my brother intervened. He walked across
the living room in long strides and stood, his arms folded, in front of our father. Zap raised a finger and pointed it somewhere at our father's chest. “You will never”—he spoke firmly—“you will never yell at her like that again. Do you understand?” Zap stood his ground, finger raised.

And then a strange thing happened. Our father backed down. “All right, all right,” he mumbled. And he walked outside.

The fight ended as all our fights end, in front of the television. Mom wanted to watch an ABC News special, but I knew they'd decided to stay a little later in order for us to make our peace. The television was to our family what the confessional was to the Catholic. The place where we were always somehow absolved. During a commercial, everyone left the room, leaving me alone with my father. Before they came back, he said to me, “Doesn't love mean never having to say you're sorry?”

Ah, my father, quoting Erich Segal to me. “O.K.,” I said, “so I won't say I'm sorry.”

“We're like two turtles, snapping at one another,” he went on. “Well, I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too.”

“Let's go for a walk,” he said. It was a warm summer night and we walked out along the street. As we strolled, my father did an unheard-of thing. He started to talk about himself. “Listen,” he began, “I want you to listen to what I have to say. I want to tell you about this dream I had the other night. I know a lot has happened to you this year. We haven't talked about it very much, but I know a lot has happened. But I want you to know something: you always have your family. Family is important. And we're here for you. I don't want you to forget that.”

I told him I hadn't forgotten. “But I think if you're angry I got divorced, you should yell at me about that. Not about some vacuum cleaner.”

He shook his head. “I'm not angry that you got divorced. I'm concerned about you.”

I sighed. “You have a funny way of showing it sometimes.”

“Listen, I want to tell you this dream. First I have to explain something. Seventy-two years ago my father bought a dry goods store in Nashville. He put every penny he had into that store, which was very stupid, because the bank wouldn't give him a loan to buy dry goods. He didn't leave any capital in the bank and he went bankrupt. But that's not the dream. The dream isn't about being poor or about the dry goods store. It's about the night before we moved to Nashville. That night we went to stay in the house of an aunt and uncle of mine. She was very fat and he was very skinny, like a toothpick. I don't remember where anyone else slept, but that night I had to sleep between my fat aunt and my skinny uncle. Well, my aunt put this comforter over me that must have weighed a ton and I was stuck there, all night, wedged between them with the comforter on top of me, and I thought I'd choke. And so seventy-two years later, I dream about the night before we moved to Nashville when I slept all wedged in with a comforter on top of me.”

He paused, looking back at Renee's house, and sighed. “I don't know what the dream means. Maybe it means I feel trapped. Maybe it means I want to be a little boy again. But I'm an old man and if you'd asked me about the night before we moved to Nashville, I wouldn't have remembered it, but now I remember it as if it were just yesterday. I guess that's why I lose my temper. It's all there. My life lives inside of me,” my father said. “And everyone I've known and everything I've done, it's all there. I'm an old man now and I know that.”

T
HE SUMMER WORE ON
in an endless torpor, a kind of limbo of barbecues, Clarice's memos on office efficiency, various children asleep in my bed, an alligator in a washbasin out back. Our parents phoned every Sunday from the Everglades to tell us about the flock of flamingos they saw, about the house with the kidney-shaped pool they wanted to buy. And then one day two packages arrived, containing a baby orange tree and an alligator, both of which had managed somehow to make it, alive, to Downers Grove, Illinois, though the alligator would long outlast the orange tree. The alligator, in fact, grew at a startling pace and was soon relegated to a washbasin beside the garage, from which he escaped one August night and was never seen again.

I entered a new state of calm. I went to see
Minor Setbacks
more times than I'd seen
Casablanca
, until I was finally certain I was purged and Sean was a mere mistake I'd made on the rebound. I watched him drift into the past, watched him become a memory, as far away from me as the night my father slept between his aunt and uncle under a comforter. And when
I was fairly sure I was free and immune, I heard from him.

I walked into the office one morning and Clarice handed me a pile of tedious correspondence, bills, specifications, and a letter from Sean. I opened the letter last. It was postmarked Hollywood and dated a few days before and it was written by hand. He wrote that we had gotten our signals crossed, mostly because of his sublessee, who had not forwarded mail or given him messages and he finally had to tell her to leave. My letter care of Four Tracks had got to him at last. He had been on location in Glacier National Park, working on a new film with Hansom, and was about to co-author Hansom's next film. He had hardly been back to New York at all since we'd separated.

And then came his apology: “I want to tell you how sorry I am about the way I behaved. My reasons for leaving you in San Francisco, well, they're a little complicated, but it boils down to the fact that I was sure you were going to leave me. And I guess there's another reason that is just as important. It wasn't because you spent a night with Mark that I was so hurt. It was because you kept throwing up these walls, these huge barriers, and I just wasn't strong enough to break through. But I want you to know that I think I've understood more than you think I understood. In my way I really care for you and I'm going to try to see you soon.”