The River Queen (11 page)

“I don't think I'm very good at this,” I say.

“Naw, it's just that this wheel has a lot of play. You have to move it for an inch or two before it connects to the boat.”

“I can see that,” I say. But my steering feels like the nautical equivalent of a poorly dubbed film. One of those spaghetti westerns where the words coming out have no relation to the movement of lips. There's a delay between when I turn the wheel and when the boat actually moves. And I'm having trouble anticipating it as we edge closer to the riverbank.

“Point her straight,” Jerry says. “Look at your depth finder.” I look at the depth finder, which reads 5.5 feet. We have a draft of 3.5 feet and Jerry is happier with more river beneath us. “You're getting into the shallows. Keep her nose toward that red buoy ahead.”

It's been years since I've taken driver's ed, but I'm sure I couldn't learn to drive a car now. In fact I've been trying to learn to drive our stick shift that we acquired from a friend at a price we couldn't refuse. Last summer I managed to lock gears on the Long Island Expressway at sixty miles per hour as I shifted into fifth. I haven't gotten behind the wheel since, and anyway, my daughter won't let me. Nor will she ride with me. It was Larry who drove her all the way to college and me home.

Steering this boat might also fall under the “old dog, new tricks” category, I'm thinking, as Jerry reaches for the wheel and gives it a yank. “Keep your focus,” he snaps. I've definitely gone too close to shore. A glance at the depth indicator shows we're only in 5 feet of water. As I jerk her around, she pitches to an awkward angle, though hardly enough to capsize. Topside I hear Tom squeal, “Roller-coaster ride.”

“I'll take over,” Jerry says, his voice flat with what I can only interpret as disapproval.

“I was just trying to stay near the green buoy.”

“Yes, but we've got a wing dam there.” He points at a ripple that looks like all the rest of the river. Another one of those mirages I don't see. I'm a flop. I know I am as Jerry shouts up to Tom on the flybridge, “Tommysan, take her topside.”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

I'm feeling like the hometown team that just lost. There's a small public humiliation here. I also realize I'm hungry. Food will provide a change of subject. It's close to noon and, outside of coffee, I haven't eaten all day. “Lunch anyone?” I ask.

“Affirmative,” Jerry says as he scribbles in his log. I can only imagine what he's writing. “Girl can't steer.” “Female unreliable.” Words to that effect.

“Ah, well, shall I make something?”

“That'd be great.” It's clear he isn't offering to help. I have a sense that certain tasks on board are going to fall along gender lines and galley work will be mine. But I like to cook and pride myself on it. “Stick to what you know,” that voice in my head says. It is the way to a man's heart, after all.

I assess our larder, something there wasn't much reason to do before we had the gas and refrigerator hooked up, and make note of what we have. In the cubby above the sink I find two cans of Campbell's Chunky Chili With Beans—the Sizzlin' Steak version. Two cans of Chunky Chili No Beans—the Hold The Beans version. Two cans Chunky Chili With Beans—Tantalizin' Turkey. Two cans of cut spinach. One can of sliced beets. I make a silent vow. My mantra becomes this: I will never eat out of a can. I will hold on to whatever decency I can muster on this journey by not eating from cans.

I continue my inventory. Two boxes of Folgers “tea bags”—one caffeinated, one decaf, for me. Two jars of peanut butter. One jar of reduced fat Hellmann's, mustard, ketchup, salt, pepper, paper plates, paper towels, plastic knives and forks. A giant bag of Cheerios, Kellogg's Raisin Bran (for me). The fridge has eggs, cheese, some lunch meats, and dozens of cans of diet Dew, diet Coke, and vast quantities of beer. Above the fridge Tom has his stash of Wonder Bread, Chips Ahoy, which he eats by the fistful, and assorted Snickers, Milky Ways, and a two-pound box of malted milk balls, none of which I will get even a nibble of.

I open all the cupboards, looking for pots and pans. “They're inside the oven,” Jerry says without looking around. In the oven I find a small Teflon frying pan, a tiny pot for boiling water, and an omelette pan with a fifty-cent tag on it from Goodwill. These are my working utensils.

I have brought with me a few cans of tuna fish, a green apple, a package of smoked chicken, some cheese sticks. I cut up the chicken and make a small salad for myself with the green apple that's starting to go bad. I put it into a Tupperware bowl and give it a shake.

For the boys I make smoked chicken sandwiches on Wonder Bread with mustard and mayo. I put chips on paper plates and slip Tom's to him through the small window above the helm where he pilots on the flybridge. I cut a piece of Wisconsin cheddar and slip it to Samantha Jean, who rips it out of my hand.

Afterward I go up to collect the trash. “How was your sandwich?” I ask Tom.

“Too much mustard,” he says, shaking his head. “Don't give me any mustard next time.”

*   *   *

After lunch, I plant myself at my battered wooden table on the bow. An old loneliness settles in. I call Larry, but he's not home. I'm longing to talk to Kate. It's only her second week at college and I had promised myself I wouldn't phone her. I wanted to give her time. But now I want to hear her voice. I give a call and get her voice mail. Or rather I get the rap music of a group unknown to me. After a few choruses I hear my daughter's voice. “It's Kate. I'm not around…” Where is she? I wonder. At the library, studying. Or in her room. It is so odd that I do not know the books she is reading, the face of the girl she hangs out with down the hall. Does she see that it's me calling? Is she screening her calls?

I leave a brief message, then open my journal. I begin working on a painting of the riverbank, the islands ahead. I dab a little blue, wash in some green. Soon it starts to look like something. I create dark pines, the reflection in the water. I layer in more colors—some purple and red. I let them bleed and blend.

When I am satisfied, I reach for my glue. As I grasp it, the small painting blows away. Both Jerry and I see it go. It flies into the air and is about to sail into the river when it hits the gunwale and is pinned by the wind against the side.

“Thank you,
River Queen,
” Jerry says, heaving a big sigh.

I ask him why.

“Because any other boat and that'd blow away.… She's got good sides, this old boat.” Then he adds, “But next time put a book or something on top of it.”

I'm starting to see that things don't just fall on a boat. They fly, they skid. They soar and slide. They are carried by the wind. They disappear for good. If they are lightweight, like your letter home or your paintbrush, they will be gone in a heartbeat. Every object that isn't heavy must be weighted down. Each piece of paper has to have a book, a set of keys, a coffee mug sitting on it. Every coffee mug must have a lid.

To look at a map you have to remove whatever is holding it down. To read the poem you have just written you must take it out of the notebook where you've tucked it for safekeeping. Nearly empty drinking glasses will spill their remains, paper plates will hurl like Frisbees into space. The third rule of boating seems to be this: Anything that can fly away will. If something matters to you, hold on to it for dear life.

15

T
HE
M
ILWAUKEE
Heart Hospital sat in an industrial park parallel to the main highway that heads north to Green Bay. It was off a major road that felt more like a service road, surrounded by warehouses, towers for high-tension wires, some malls that sit far back from the road. We recognized it right away by the giant red heart that looms from its main wall.

It had taken us ten hours to get here, due to storms all across the Midwest—whirling, black thunderclouds. In the summer there are often these storms in Wisconsin—ones that can lead to tornados farther inland, away from the lake. The big, beating down, scary kind.

It was literally a dark and stormy night. The sky had a greenish glint, the kind no midwesterner wants to see because of what it might bring. The parking lot had five cars in it and the only sign of life was a flock of Canada geese that padded across the newly seeded lawn.

“What is this?” I asked my husband.
“The Twilight Zone?”
He shook his head.

“It's a hospital,” he replied.

“But there's no one here.” It was a brand-new thirty-bed hospital, state of the art, in the middle of nowhere, that had, it appeared, no patients except for my father. My father, Sol Henry Morris, was almost 102 years old. He was so old that when we had his prescriptions filled, the druggist had to call them in because the computer would default and think my father was only two. It seems that you cannot administer blood pressure medication to a two-year-old.

In his youth he used to walk miles every day and attributed much of his longevity to exercise and temperate habits. “Nothing in Excess” was his motto. We attributed it to his rotten disposition. (Articles have linked longevity to bad tempers.) Whatever the causes, my father was as old as a land tortoise. His age has always been a cause of both fascination and concern.

I suppose there are reasons why my father didn't marry until he was forty-four. Or my mother, for that matter, until she was thirty-four. He spoke with nostalgia for the friends, the speakeasies of old Chicago, and the girls of his youth. He admitted to me once that his bachelor days were better than his married days. I had the old photos to prove it.

For years my father joked about his age. As he got older and older, he looked twenty years younger than his chronological age. Once he repeated his motto “Nothing in Excess” to a group of aging widows as the secret to his longevity, but apparently they misunderstood and heard “No Sex.” When he saw their troubled faces, he corrected the error.

Whatever his secret, my father was very old. He remembered the invention of the automobile, the airplane, moving pictures. He saw one of the first automobiles rumble down a Chicago side street. He was a young man during the Jazz Age. He grew up between the wars. He was still in his twenties when the stock market crashed. He was too old to fight in World War II, though he tried to volunteer.

Doctors studied him. At ninety-five he had the physical stamina of someone seventy. Indeed, people took him for seventy. Until he was a hundred, he remained handsome and strong. He was the oldest patient his urologist or cardiologist or pulmonologist had ever had and keeping him alive became their private calling. To me my father simply seemed invincible.

But the day before my arrival in Milwaukee, my brother called to say, “If you want to see him, you'd better come now.” If my mother had called, I would have assumed it was a tactic to get me to come home. She has done such things before. But not John.

As we approached the hospital, fork lightning skirted close to the high-tension towers. The glass doors slid open, cool air blew our way. Before I could say a word, the elderly receptionist looked up. “Oh,” she said, “you're here to see Mr. Morris.” She knew who we were coming to see. How was this possible?

Except for the sounds of whirring machines, the hospital was eerily still. There were no voices, no footsteps, no one crying out in pain. In fact there was nothing. No signs of life. I held tightly to Larry's sleeve. We took the elevator and got off on the second floor and found ourselves in a circular corridor filled with empty hospital beds, empty rooms, waiting rooms, conference rooms, offices. Travel pictures of the Pyramids of Egypt and Mount Rushmore hung on the wall.

We followed the circle until we came to a corridor filled with light. In the first room lay an enormous woman with tubes coming out of everywhere, machines pumping away. At her bedside was a man, silently sobbing. In the next room lay a thin, young woman, also connected with tubes.

At the nurse's station two or three nurses and what I assumed were a few doctors were working. One of the doctors was talking on the phone. He rattled off organs: Kidneys, heart, liver. No one looked up at us. No one paid any attention to us at all. Across from the nurse's station a large man lay almost naked on a gurney. Tattoos covered his arms and chest. Snakes, women, a wolf. A rose bloomed on his chest.

In the next room I found my father. He was sitting up in bed, eating vanilla ice cream and watching television. On the screen in black-and-white a woman stood on a dock beside a swamp. A group of men who appeared to be scientists were with her. Beneath the dock a creature that looked like a man in an iguana suit swam, trying to grab the woman. Its claws reached out of the water toward her feet, but the woman, unaware, walked off the dock unharmed. And the creature disappeared back into the darkness from whence it came.

My father, engrossed in
Creature from the Black Lagoon,
didn't see us come in. Then he looked up. “Hi, kids,” he said, “thanks for dropping by.” He put down his dish. “Lousy ice cream,” he went on. “They're gonna kill me in here. Lousy food. Lousy service.” He talked about the Milwaukee Heart Hospital as if it had three Michelin stars and was about to lose one. “See my doctor?” He pointed to the nurse's station where I did see his doctor on the phone. “He's running some kind of racket. All he does is talk on the phone. Making deals.”

“Actually, Dad, I think he's arranging for organ donations,” I told him. My father's eyes widened. “I think all the other patients in the hospital are brain-dead,” I said. “You're the only one who's alive.”

This gave him pause and the complaints stopped. Just then my father's doctor came in. He explained to me quite simply that last night my father had zero kidney function. We both looked at my father, eating his ice cream, watching television. “Basically,” Dr. Brown said, “if I had his kidney function, I'd be in an irreversible coma right now.”