Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (22 page)

He catches me glaring at him in the mirror.

“I’d be happy to drive, Matt,” he says, “if that’s what’s got you upset.”

In the past year, he had torn his bumper off on a large rock in his condo subdivision, and then, shortly after he got new sunglasses and couldn’t see, paradoxically, “because of the glare,” he rear-ended a stopped car at forty miles per hour on Coffee Road. He’d had other accidents too, which he never told us about. All we know is that his car is as often as not in the body shop. Because of Grandpa’s macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma, we had hoped he would simply fail his license renewal test. But he passed. He doesn’t have to get another vision test for seven years. Until he’s nearly ninety.

“That’s fine,” I say. “I like to drive.”

Crawling through traffic, up the coast of Wisconsin toward the Door County peninsula, feels like a long, elaborate walking of the plank. We’re just north of Grafton now, the town where I spent my kindergarten and preschool years, about thirty miles north of Milwaukee. We still have a long drive ahead, and apparently nobody is going to reminisce with me.

Not too far from here, when I was a young boy, I fell out of my mom’s VW van. Grandpa was driving. He was helping us move from an apartment on the north side of Milwaukee to a house in Grafton. We rolled up to a stop sign on a country road and the next thing I knew, I was on the pavement. The van had not quite stopped. My mom and grandma were driving behind us. Mom says it still wakes her up sometimes.

“I said I’d be happy to drive, Matt,” Grandpa says.

“Thanks,” I say, “Grandpa.”

We all know, Grandpa included, that this is his fault. He and he alone is the occasion for our anger and unhappiness. Most semi-sentient creatures would understand when they are profoundly not wanted. Not my grandfather. He has never had a problem with enemies. It’s friends and family he has never known what to do with.

“I am a licensed driver in the great state of Wisconsin,” he says. “Maybe if you didn’t make me move up here from Illinois you wouldn’t have this problem. No way I would have passed their vision test.”

“We didn’t make you move to Wisconsin, Dad,” my mom says. “And, Christ, that was two years ago. Mom was sick and you didn’t want to pay for a full-time nurse and I couldn’t quit my job and move down there and you didn’t exactly have lots of friends to help out—”

“I know, I know.” My grandfather laughs. “Jesus Christ.”

He’s jolly with meanness. It seems as though it’s the last sure impact he can have on us. Tonya and her daughter can stroke his ego and God knows what else and let him pretend he’s their sweet sugar daddy. My mom and I are bound to him in ways that remind me of Cronus, the Greek god who ate his children to prevent them from overthrowing him.

We’re going about a hundred miles an hour before I realize it. I slow down to eighty. “How about some music?” I say, turning on the stereo.

“Good idea,” my mom says. “I’ve got that new Alan Jackson album.”

“One of Tonya’s favorites,” Grandpa says.

My mom turns off the stereo.

It’s dark by the time we reach Door County. The drive takes about four hours, and most of it is on the freeway, but the last hour is on Highway 57 or 42, depending on whether you want to travel up the Green Bay or the Lake Michigan side. The peninsula itself is about eighty miles long. At its base, it’s probably thirty miles wide, but it narrows as it moves north, so by the time you reach Valmy or Jacksonport, it’s only about ten miles from shore to shore. We’re not going that far, however. Cherry Hills is our destination. It’s just a few miles outside Sturgeon Bay, right in the middle of Door County.

When we arrive, however, the resort looks deserted. There are no lights on in the dining room, and the main door to the reception area is locked.

My mom and I peer through the glass door, our hands cupped around our eyes. Grandpa teeters up and says, “What are you waiting for?”

“It’s locked, Dad,” my mom says.

“It’s locked?” he says.

“Locked,” I say. “As in not unlocked.”

He’s a little winded from the walk from the car. It’s clear he has not fully recovered from his stroke—or, for that matter, his age. He just turned eighty-two. It is not nothing that he’s outlived his wife by a year. No matter how complicated their life together must have been behind closed doors, she’s still gone and he’s still left, more or less alone, to deal with the fact that death came for the one we all thought should live forever.

“Well, did you make a reservation?” he says.

Try as I might to have pity for him, I don’t. There’s an after-hours phone number on the door, and I dial it on my cell phone and walk away. I realize simultaneously that this is what I do. To both of them, my mom and grandpa. They get worked up and I walk away. I am not proud, but neither am I turning around. Sometimes, I tell myself, I get to be the son and grandson before I have to be the man.

My mom and Bob used to own a condo in Sister Bay, right behind Al Johnson’s restaurant—the one with the grass roof and the goats on it, across the street from the marina. When I was in college, I went up every chance I could. I liked going there alone, to read, write, and take pictures with my old manual Nikon FM2. After Christmas of my junior year, I went by myself for a day and a night. I read
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and was convinced I was reading my own autobiography. I didn’t realize at the time that this made me a first-class wanker. I guess I still haven’t. I’d rather read
Dubliners
than anything I’ve ever written or plan on writing. Even “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” whatever the hell that’s about, but mostly “Araby,” “The Sisters,” and “The Dead.” Oh, that perpetually soggy, dying Michael Fury and that never fully alive Gabriel. If only somebody could have gotten them together for Nora’s sake. The day after I finished
Portrait,
I walked around in the clear bright cold air, taking pictures of coiled rope and a dead fish frozen on a pier that would be locked in ice for the next four months, hoping that if I put the image first, the meaning would follow. It was one of the coldest and best days of my life, not that I have the slightest clue what that fish meant.

At Cherry Hills, Grandpa and mom and I finally get our keys and go to our rooms to settle in, have a little nap and/or a cocktail before dinner. Mom and I are going to share a room and Grandpa is going to stay in the adjoining room. Under different circumstances—such as “normal” circumstances—it would have been more natural for me to stay with Grandpa. But it wasn’t even a question. In fact, he said so himself: “Can’t hardly sleep through the night. No sense in having us both be up all hours.”

As soon as the door is shut between our rooms, I go to get ice, come back, and mix a gimlet for my mom and a Scotch for myself—the last of Gram’s once-formidable stash. We’re just getting ready to toast our “vacation” when Grandpa knocks. He decided that he can’t sleep at night because he takes too many naps during the day, so maybe he had better stay up and have a cocktail with us. Afterward, we can all go to dinner and then he’ll turn in early. I mix him a vodka on the rocks, and we sit on the beds facing different directions, not talking, not toasting to anything.

“Well, this is fun,” he says.

“Yes, Dad, it sure was nice that you could come,” my mom says.

He sighs, rattles the ice in his glass, and makes a big show of slugging back the rest of his vodka.

“I’m on vacation,” he says. “May as well have another.”

This is never a good idea. But seeing as how his favorite target, Bob, isn’t here, maybe it’ll help bring us all a little closer to wherever it is we need to be.

Grandpa’s phone rings, and this time he manages to retrieve it from his pocket while it’s still ringing. “Excuse me,” he says. He goes into his room and announces officiously: “
Bob Tucker!
”

He doesn’t manage to shut the door all the way behind him. “Just fine, fine,” he says. He’s talking higher, wimpier. “And how are
you?
I wish to Christ I could be there with you guys.”

I get up and close the door, a little louder than I mean to.

“Makes me sick,” my mom says.

I refill our drinks and we stare at the dark patio window as the sunset is replaced by our reflections.

“You know,” she says, “fuck it.” I’m shocked, but only as shocked as I can be given the circumstances. “If he wants to make her a part of this trip by being a sullen sonofabitch and always screwing around with his phone, fine.”

Anything will be better than how things are going, I think. I wonder what she has in mind.

On the way to dinner, my mom says, “So, Dad, how’s Tonya?”

I’m driving. We’re headed north, practically to the tip of the thumb, as they call it, to a new restaurant in Ellison Bay.

“I didn’t think you cared,” he says.

“Well, I don’t,” my mom says, “but if you’re going to be with us and always playing with your phone, pining away for her, you may as well talk about it.”

This is as close as my mother has ever come to sarcasm.

“Well, fine,” Grandpa says. “To tell you the truth, I miss the hell out of her and I wish I was with her.”

The countryside we pass through is black. There is no traffic, no streetlights, no moon.

“Then why aren’t you?” my mom says. “It’s not like you’re blessing us with your cheery mood and pleasant conversation.”

I can feel my pulse behind my eyes. I know if I say anything we’ll all blow up. I wring the steering wheel and try not to think about what would happen if I jerked it hard and took us into a steep ditch. I know just the place, a couple of miles south of Fish Creek. I can do something about all this, I realize. Dark, I admit. But some volition’s better than nothing sometimes.

“I was supposed to be with her this weekend,” my grandpa says. “We were supposed to go to the Dells together with her kids. To that place we used to take you, Matt—the one with the water slides and the fake ark?—Noah’s?—but something came up, and Tim, her ex-husband who’s now her boyfriend again, insisted on being a part of it, and normally I wouldn’t mind, but I just didn’t feel like that would have been worth it. I mean, Tim and I get along fine, but, I don’t know, I feel like he’s trying to come between me and Tonya.”

“Tim is—” I say. I can barely believe we’re having this conversation. “—he’s coming between you and Tonya?”

We pass through Egg Harbor and by the Alpine golf resort. I’ve been there a dozen times at least. I remember once we had Fairway with us and the German innkeeper sized him up like a schnitzel. “Hello, little doggie. Vhat is your name? Fairvay? Vhat a pretty name. Vhat a pretty little plump doggie you are.”

“They have a very casual relationship,” my grandfather continues. “An ‘open relationship.’ It’s very European. I don’t expect you to understand.”

Never in my life have I needed a drink and a cigarette more than right now. I haven’t had a smoke all day, and despite the fact that I’ve already had more Scotch than I should have, I feel altogether too sober to be hearing what I’m hearing. I force myself to stay between the ditches.

“Doesn’t that give you a hint that maybe you shouldn’t be a part of her life?” my mom says. She’s staring straight ahead, as though if she turns around and looks at Grandpa in the back seat, she might find that he’s totally naked.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. He is beginning to cry. “I just love her too damned much.” He slumps forward and his sobs rock my seat.

We pass by the Beowulf lodge, between Fish Creek and Sister Bay. One summer, I remember, I practically lived there when my mom opened a business called Inkadinkadoo, which sold personalized stationery and rubber stamps. We would go up for long weekends so she could work, and I would spend half the day in the shop, playing with the rubber sheets of names with which she made the stamps, and try to come up with unique ways to blend inks into dark and strange rainbows. There were never any customers—her shop was across the street from the beach and behind the Confectionery, a great candy shop with wood casks overflowing with taffy and hard candy—and I would play with every stamp and come up with ways of telling stories, taking the pointer-finger stamp and making him go to the beach with the parasol stamp and the smiley-face sun stamp.

I wish the Confectionery were open tonight. We could use some hard candy. Gram always had some in her purse, and now I’m beginning to understand why. If you have to bite down hard on some kind of bit, might as well be a flavor of your choosing.

We pull up to the restaurant in silence.

“Dad,” my mom says, helping him out of the car. It is neither a question nor a comment. It’s something she can’t do anything about.

Inside, we order a round of drinks as though our cocktails are our names and we’re introducing ourselves to the waitress.

The restaurant is dark and woodsy with heavy beamed ceilings, and it feels as if we are the only people in the place. The menu has lots of interesting local fare that I don’t dare try, given the lack of business this early in the season. Rainbow trout, walleyed pike, wild pheasant. We all order the filet mignon instead.

“Don’t you want the prime rib, Patti?” my grandfather asks. He always makes a big show of insisting that my mom get prime rib.

“I don’t really feel like it tonight, Dad,” she says.

“Don’t feel like prime rib?” He’s never heard anything so preposterous.

We’re sitting at a square table, with my mom and grandfather facing each other, me facing the seat where Gram should be. The seat Grandpa wants Tonya to be in. That’s the issue, I realize. I knew we’d been living in the Year of the Empty Seat, but it didn’t occur to me until just now that the problem wasn’t the vacancy but whom we each wanted to fill the void.

“Did you get those steaks I sent you, Matt?” he asks.

I tell him yes and that I thought I had thanked him.

“What about the Bubba Burgers?”

I swirl the ice around my glass. He’s still there when I look up.

“Thanks for the Bubba Burgers too,” I say.