They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (2 page)

3

“You’d better come home,” Joy said to Molly on the phone. “Daddy’s on the floor.”

“He fell?” Molly tried to calm herself. “Is he okay? Did you call 911?”

“He slid out of his chair. I never should have gotten it in leather. I gave him a cracker.”

“Mom!”

“The handyman’s coming in a minute. He’ll get Daddy up. Never a dull moment, right, Aaron?”

The phone was handed to Aaron. “Never a dull moment.”

“Daddy, are you all right?”

“Your mother gave me a cracker.”

“I’ll be home soon,” Molly said. She repeated it when her mother got back on the phone. “I’ll be home soon, Mom. I arranged an extra week off in November.”

“November?” A pause. “Oh.” Then, “Wonderful, Molly! And how are your students this semester?”

Molly heard the strain in her mother’s voice and hurried through a rundown of some of the more interesting students. “Anyway, nothing to write home about.”

“Daddy’s having a hard time, Molly. He gets confused sometimes.”

“I know. But he does have dementia.”

“Don’t be disrespectful.”

Joy didn’t like the word “dementia.” “Alzheimer’s” was worse.

“Sorry,” Molly said. “I just meant, you know, it’s natural that he’d be confused and forget things.”

“Well, he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it one bit. And he doesn’t admit it. Which is tiring for me, I can tell you.”

“Maybe—”

“We can’t afford it.”

“Well, what about—”

“Absolutely not.”

“Not a
home
, exactly—”

“He has a home,” Joy said. “His home is here.”

*   *   *

Molly poured herself two fingers of bourbon, just as her father had taught her. No bourbon for him these days, just Ensure, many fingers of Ensure.

“I should be home,” she said to Freddie. “I’m a horrible daughter. I might as well shoot myself.”

Freddie thought, You are home, Molly.

“How many times can the doorman scrape him off the floor? At least she tips them at Christmas. I really have to go back. This is … it’s…”

“What about your brother?”

“What
about
my brother?”

Now they would have a fight.

“I don’t want to have a fight,” Freddie said.

“Then don’t mention my brother.”

“Ever?”

“See? You
do
want to have a fight.”

She went out to the garden, and Freddie followed. It was six o’clock and still hot, which was unusual where they lived, near the beach on the west side of Los Angeles. It had been an unusually hot summer, though. Molly brushed miniature pink petals off the chaise before sitting.

“Autumn leaves,” she said, examining one blossom on the tip of her finger. She smiled. “What a place we live in, what an amazing place.” She patted the cushion, motioned Freddie to sit beside her. “My brother is perfect,” she said.

Freddie laughed. Molly’s brother was off-limits. Absolutely, completely, utterly off-limits. She knew that. It was like criticizing Stalin in Moscow in 1939. Except her brother wasn’t Stalin. More like a Dostoevsky innocent.

Molly’s entire family, in fact, was off-limits. They were like a cult, one that did not accept disciples or converts. They had been through a lot as a family, it had drawn them together, but what family hadn’t been through a lot? Well, every family has its myth, she supposed. The myth Freddie’s family told itself was one of freedom. Her sisters and brothers were scattered across the globe, all of them—with the exception of Freddie—too independent and too far away to notice that their father wrecked the car three times in six months, or at least too far away (one hoped not too independent) to do anything about it.

The Bergmans, on the other hand, were a clan, tight knit and suspicious of strangers. They were tribal and closed, bound by blood. They were one, the world the other. Freddie was used to them now, used to their insular ferocity. She didn’t often make the mistake of even implicit disapproval. There were worse things than loyalty and family love in this world. Sometimes she envied Molly her certainty, the way the atheist sometimes envies the believer.

“I know Daniel works very hard,” she said. “I know he’s incredibly busy. I love your brother, I think he’s wonderful to your parents, and to us. I didn’t mean anything, Molly. Really.”

She did mean something, that Daniel was a son not a daughter, and they both knew it, but it wasn’t his fault, and they both knew that, too.

“He can’t be there every second,” Molly said.

But neither could Molly, even if she was the daughter, Freddie thought, and the unspoken words hung between them.

“I could change my ticket, go to New York a week early. I could Skype my classes, right? I have to keep an eye on those two crazy old people. Check on their medications, clear up their bills, talk to the doctors, hire someone to come in, something. I have to do something.”

“They won’t let you hire anyone.”

“I know.”

“Maybe it’s really time to start thinking about—”

“I’m one hundred percent sure you’re not going to say what you’re about to say, because no one is sending my father anywhere, okay? He would hate it. He’d be so confused. So please don’t even mention it.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, I already tried talking to Mom about it.”

Freddie laughed again.

“She said he had a home.”

“I wonder,” Freddie said, “what would happen if they called them ‘nursing hotels,’ instead of ‘nursing homes,’ if people would be more receptive.”

“You’d still get infections.”

“Like a cruise ship.”

Now and then Freddie wished someone would send her to a Home. Assisted Living—couldn’t everyone use a little assistance in living? Three meals a day—nice comfort food, too. And a room of your own. You would be retired, of course, so you could read novels all day long without feeling guilty, assuming you could still see through the inoperable cataracts you might, at that age, have developed. Really, if people were sent to old-age homes at a younger age, they would get so much more out of them.

Freddie had already moved her own father into three different assisted-living facilities. The first time, he went to the Motion Picture Home in the Valley, an inviting-looking place with its gardens and neat paths and scattered terraces and benches, though no one could walk on its neat paths or sit on its benches or gaze at the fat roses from the terrace. It was simply too hot, it was always much too hot. Her father had been lucky to get in, though, hot or not—there was always a long waiting list. He was an actor, Duncan Hughes—a minor actor you might see in a party scene of a romantic comedy with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, lifting his martini glass above people’s heads as he squeezed through the crowd and made a few humorous comments to the stars. He had been dapper and not quite dashing when he was young. Now his face showed the good life he had attempted to live. Decades of professional disappointment, as well as his attempts to comfort himself in that disappointment, had left their mark on his florid drinker’s face.

Duncan had always attributed failure to bad luck. He was a believer in luck and had never reconciled himself to not having any. But at last, Freddie thought, he had hit the jackpot, not one he had expected, certainly not one he had dreamed of, but a jackpot nonetheless: the Motion Picture Home.

Duncan’s memory had started to go even earlier. He had managed to sign with a new agent, however, a chatty man who operated out of a disreputable-looking office in a strip mall. It wasn’t as if Duncan Hughes would get any parts, Freddie knew that. He wouldn’t be able to remember his cues, much less his lines. But having an agent meant he could still hope for roles, which provided some continuity for him, as hoping for roles, Freddie thought uncharitably, had always been a dominant part of his life. And perhaps having an agent might keep her father sitting safely by the phone rather than driving all over town to open auditions. When he drove to auditions these days, he tended to total the car. The bottle of rye he kept on the passenger seat didn’t help.

So on the day, a year ago, when Freddie got a call from her father asking if she could drive him to the airport, her first reaction had been relief—her father had finally agreed that he shouldn’t drive! He was asking for help! He was reaching out! But then the rest of the request hit her.

“The airport? Why are you going to the airport, Dad?”

“To catch a plane, obviously.”

“Where is the plane going?”

“It’s going to Sweden, obviously.”

“That’s not obvious to me, Dad. Why is it going to Sweden?”

“That’s where the commercial is being shot.”

Freddie was devastated. Her father was having hallucinations, she would have to call his neurologist, the Aricept was clearly not helping. She called his agent first, just to ask if he knew of anything that could have triggered the hallucination.

“Well,” the agent said, “I guess the fact that your father’s been hired to do a commercial and is flying to Sweden—that could have done it.” He chuckled at his joke. “It’s legit, Miss Hughes. I just got the contract.”

She tried to talk her father out of it, as she had tried to talk him out of driving. She tried to enlist the aid of his doctor, as she had tried to enlist the aid of his doctor in convincing him to give up driving. But she knew he was even less likely to give up a role than he was his car. He had been waiting a long time for a role. She remembered him waiting for roles through her entire childhood. She remembered the change of atmosphere in the house when he got a part, the relief, the temporary dispersion of clouds of disappointment and failure. Actors do not give up parts. She knew that.

She drove him to LAX, parked, and walked him inside to make sure he found the group. She imagined them all lined up, holding on to a bright yellow rope, the way the preschool children did on the sidewalk in New York. But the director and crew just stood in a loose bunch, most of them wearing safari jackets and baseball caps. Her father kissed her goodbye and made straight for an attractive young woman in the group who seemed to know him.

“Hello, handsome,” she said, and her father, unable to help himself, gave his practiced half-smile and preened with pleasure.

“You will look after him, won’t you?” Freddie asked the director, who did not seem to think it irregular to have hired someone showing clear signs of senility. But why would he? He was a man who thought it reasonable to cast a commercial in L.A. and fly everyone thousands of miles to shoot it in Sweden in English to then be dubbed into Swedish.

“Don’t worry,” the director said.

Her father called her that night from Chicago, where they were changing planes.

“Pretty soon you’ll be in Sweden, Dad.”

“
Sweden?
”

It was that trip that shocked Freddie into action. By the time he came home, three days later, a little vague about having gone at all, she had called the Motion Picture Home so many times and spoken to so many people that when she discovered a room had suddenly opened up there, she was sure it was because she had annoyed the director of the facility to such an extent that the director had taken it out on an employee who had taken it out on a patient who had consequently died and vacated a room.

It took only five months for the Motion Picture Home to realize it had made a terrible mistake.

“We are concerned about STDs,” the director had said.

Duncan was now on assisted-living place number three.

“The social worker called again today,” Freddie told Molly.

“What did old Duncan do today? Pinch the nutritionist?”

Freddie shrugged. “They decided to cut back his wine at dinner.”

“They should just water it. Would he know?”

“That’s what I told them. But the social worker thought that would be dishonest. Dishonest! So she had a talk with him, and of course he objected. He demanded to see a lawyer. He threatened to sue. I think this place may kick him out soon, too.”

Molly held her drink out to Freddie. “Here. It’s neat. The social worker has no jurisdiction in this house.”

Freddie said, “I want to be cremated, Molly.”

“I know, honey.”

“No, I mean now.”

“I know, honey.”

Freddie said, “Let’s go to the beach and watch the sun set instead.”

It was a beautiful sunset, the brilliant red streaks of sky fading to gentle mauve. There was a full moon hanging over the parking lot, plump and orange. The wind blew and there was no one on the pier, just a few surfers below.

“We’re so lucky to live here,” Molly said as they walked back to the parking lot. She was radiant in the blinking light from a bar, her cheeks glowing red, then green, and Freddie had to agree.

4

They had been sorority sisters, and they were still friends—Daphne, Eileen, Natalie, and Joy. Daphne got on Natalie’s nerves; Eileen got on Daphne’s nerves; Natalie, who was bossy, particularly about her politics, which were of the radical right, got on everyone’s nerves; but all three were extremely close to Joy, which had kept the group intact through all the decades and divorces. Every few months they would get together for a girls’ lunch.

“I’m not happy about this old-age business,” Joy said.

“I refuse to feel old,” Daphne said. She slapped the table. “
Je refuse
.”

The silverware and coffee cups rattled, and Joy marveled at Daphne, not a bit different from the day they met, sleek, beautiful, noisy, every auburn hair in place. Natalie was, as she had been since college, wearing chic, expensive bohemian clothes, her hair cut in the same bohemian bob with bangs. Eileen had been less glamorous than the others, but she had grown into her looks as she got older, looking somber but dignified these days. They all still had their marbles, though only two still had their husbands. But pretty good for a bunch of old bags, Joy thought.

“We’ve been friends for sixty-five years.”

“Our friendship could get Medicare,” Eileen said.

Natalie began to explain how Obamacare was ruining America.

“How’s the new great-grandchild?” Joy interjected, offspring being a successful diversion for any of the girls. Though she was asking Natalie, Daphne immediately began digging around in her bag, probably for her iThing with her own great-grandchild baby pictures on it.