Waveland (7 page)

After a few minutes he said, “Okay. Here's the deal. I'll get over it. But I feel this and I'm not going to stop feeling it because you say it's silly, or you say I did fine. I did not pay enough attention to my father. I didn't call him. I didn't go see him. I didn't take care of him. I didn't respond to hints he made in conversation. I think he wanted to come live with us. I knew it but I ignored it. When it came up, I'd say, ‘Well, that's an idea. We can think about that.’ I was trying to get him into a home where people would take care of him, other people, where he would pay people to see to his needs, really to be friends. But of course, the people in those places aren't very often friends, are they? And we knew that, Newton and I. We went over there and tried to get him
interested in the idea—took him around, showed him various old folks' homes where he could buy a crummy future. We almost had him convinced once. It wasn't a bad place. Some of the places were frightening, but a couple were livable. One was kind of charming, like a bigger version of a good hospital room. It had that kind of hospital room feel about it, but it would have been just that room, a single room, all the time. He would have to go out in the hall to meet anybody, to see any of the other people. The hall was like the street. He'd have this room instead of an apartment or a house. In fact, I think Newton looked at an apartment one time. Newton the Fancy, the Swell, the Well-to-Do. I should tell you about Newton someday.”

“You've told me already,” she said. “You don't like him.”

“I like him well enough. I used to, anyway,” he said. “He's my brother. I love him. I care for him.”

“No, you don't,” she said. “You wouldn't kill your father, but your brother, maybe.”

“Where do you get these ideas?” he said.

“Double duh,” she said.

“Okay, he's sort of a jerk. I'll give you that. I'll just admit that right up front. He's full of himself. He's thrilled to be alive and he thinks the world should be thrilled right along with him. He's condescending, presumptuous, controlling, devious, self-centered, and narcissistic.”

“Hey! Welcome home!”

“I know,” he said. “Everyone in my family. Well, everyone but my mother. She was none of that.”

“Your brother is very successful,” Greta said. “This upsets you.”

“Of course it does. Everybody loves him.”

“If everybody hated him, you'd be buddies, right?”

“Probably,” he said.

“So you feel better now? Cleansed? Did you get this passion for truth and justice from your father? That sounds like your father. Everything I've heard about your father, that sounds like him, like what he wanted more than anything else.”

“Well, he didn't get much from us, not the last days, anyway.”

“How many days was it? Let's talk about this; let's get down to brass tacks. How many days?”

“Don't be funny,” he said.

“I'm not being funny,” she said. “Are you talking the last week or the last six weeks or the last hundred days? What? Six months?”

“From the moment my mother died until the day he died. A year and a half. But he was old. I mean, I'd written him off before that, but I think before that I was acting okay. It was after Mother died that I couldn't bear him anymore. He knew it, too. He knew as soon as she was gone it was all over for him. He knew that we'd only been paying as much attention to him as we had been for her sake. That's probably the worst of it.”

“That's bad,” Greta said. “That couldn't have been much fun for him.”

“Exactly,” Vaughn said.

Some geese were flying by and honking. Vaughn looked up in the sky—he couldn't see them. There were a lot of lights up and down the highway along the edge of the water but no geese that he could see. They were odd-sounding.

Greta started the car. “Let's go to the house,” she said. “I'm tired.”

“Me, too,” he said. “This is weird shit with Gail, huh? I feel better having said this stuff. I don't know. Who knows what's happening next?”

“What do you mean?”

“Moving,” he said.

They had started rolling out of the car park, tires crunching the sand, and the car stopped suddenly. Greta turned to him and said, “It's fine. Just don't make a big deal out of it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I don't
want
to do it,” she said. “But it's not a deal killer. Eddie can take care of the house. We can stay over there. Or you could, for that matter. I don't have to, if Gail would rather.”

“No,” Vaughn said. “She said ‘us’ specifically. ‘Us’ is what she said. I said I'd talk to you about it.”

“It is kind of crazy,” Greta said. “Your house, your ex-wife—nutball.”

“I could tell her you said no.”

“Great,” Greta said. “No, thanks. It's a short-term thing anyway, just to get her straightened away.”

“She was pretty beat up,” he said.

“We didn't do it, Vaughn.”

“We are angels of mercy,” he said.

“Oh Jesus,” she said.

Back at Greta's he couldn't sleep. The morning sun was glowing in the smeary windows and neighbors were moving around outside, chain saws chattered, tiny rented bulldozers roared. The guest bedroom was too small, too cluttered, and Vaughn felt out of place, and he was worried about Gail. He lay in the bed holding his eyes shut with his fingertips and thought about the thoughts running through his brain, which were mostly about his father, who was dead, and about whom he thought more often than ever. This morning he imagined, as he often did, his father's life during the year after his mother died. His father lived then in the two-bedroom, two-story apartment outside Atlanta in the group of four hundred apartments called the Mark V that he and Vaughn's mother picked out years before—a large apartment in a gated development with landscaped lawns, large sections of glass in
the buildings, brick construction, shingled roofs, handsome fences around the patios, small private gardens.

His father had the corner apartment, and he was alone now all the time except for when the woman came in from Catholic Services. This was a woman Vaughn had hired when his father started using the walker—an aluminum apparatus with wheels on the front, feet to the back. He also had a wheelchair, which Vaughn had bought for him.

The woman who came in every day to care for Vaughn's father arrived at eight o'clock in the morning. She cleaned up, made him breakfast, turned on the television—for him at first, and then, when he got tired, for herself, the Spanish stations, the volume very low. Often Vaughn's father did not know her name since the same woman did not come every day. Usually there were two different women every week. Sometimes the same two women for two weeks, then two other women the next two weeks. Sometimes three women a week. It was never the same. It went on like that. None of them spoke English well. Vaughn's father spoke no Spanish. He was an orderly man and kept the apartment clean with the help of these women. He had all of his important papers and documents lined up on the dining room table in stacks. When he looked for his investments, he knew exactly where they were, in which folders, in which stacks. Insurance, similarly. Medical papers, the same—all arranged around the dining table so he could get at them as necessary. At one end of the table were his personal items—his car keys, though he hadn't driven in over a year, his wallet, change, the credit cards he gave to the women when they went to the grocery store for him. He had recently stopped going upstairs because the
stairs were impossible. There had been talk about renting a new apartment all on one floor, but moving seemed out of the question, so he had abandoned the upstairs of the town house. He lived downstairs—the kitchen, the living room, a small bath, the dining area, a small den. The living room was large and open, with a nine-foot ceiling and white, cut-pile carpet, white walls, white vertical blinds covering a pair of three-panel sliding glass doors on the west wall. Outside, a small patio was surrounded by fencing on which still grew a vine he had planted many years before. The vine seemed lavish—lacy green stems dotted with pretty pink flowers.

When the woman who was taking care of him arrived, she opened the blinds and flooded the downstairs of the apartment with light. Because the weather had already turned cool, she opened the sliding doors to air out the apartment. Vaughn's father was still resting on the couch in his blue pajamas, his body tangled in sheets. The sheets were not fitted to the couch, of course, but he was short and it was a large couch, so he fit inside its arms. It was the size of a coffin. Every night he slept there on top of a sheet with a second flat sheet pulled over him, and often a blanket in winter. The woman had a Catholic Services name tag on her uniform. He dozed off after the woman arrived, then woke again with a start to the smell of bacon and eggs, elbowed himself up on the couch, and slid into his wheelchair, rolled himself over to the bathroom, and backed into it so he could relieve himself. He missed the bowl as he did almost every morning. He wanted to pee sitting down on the toilet, but he couldn't, so he struggled to his feet holding on to the vanity on his left, and a handle on the wall to his right that had been placed there for him. Still, he missed the bowl.

He called to the woman in the kitchen, and when she came out and knocked on the bathroom door, he asked her to help clean him up with a washcloth that he handed her. She rinsed it in the sink, soaped it lightly, stripped off his shirt and cleaned his armpits, his chest, his shoulders, his arms, his wrists, his hands. She cleaned his neck and his back, rinsing with a barely damp cloth. He watched all this in the bathroom mirror. The woman was not unattractive. She was young and dark-skinned and wore an odd-colored lipstick, something in the flaming-brick range. She washed his face with the washcloth, taking special care around his eyes, his ears, under his chin, at the back of his neck.

“You have to clean down there,” he said, pointing. She pointed, too, and raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She turned to the sink and rinsed the washcloth again.

“Take the trousers off,” he said, motioning to his waistband. He was facing her. She hooked her forefingers in the waistband on either side and pulled the pants down to his ankles. She went all the way to the carpet with the pajama pants, squatting there, holding the waistband at the floor.

“Help me get my feet out,” he said, slapping his leg and motioning upward with his hand. She remained crouched there, lifting first his left foot by the ankle, then his right, and snapping the pajama pants out from under each foot in turn. Now he stood there naked in the small bathroom with the woman from Catholic Services, who retrieved the washcloth from the edge of the lavatory and began to clean his penis and his testicles, to rinse his pubic hair, to wipe between his legs with the washcloth, to clean his backside and the crack of his ass, constantly rinsing the washcloth, soaping it lightly, applying the soap, then re-rinsing and applying the damp cloth
to his skin. In this way she worked down his legs to his feet, cleaning the tops and then, as if he were a plump two-legged horse, lifting one leg after another, and reaching around to clean the bottoms of his feet.

When she had cleaned him head-to-toe, she said, “You dirty,” and motioned with her hand for him to stand there and allow the air to dry him while she took the washcloth and the pajamas into the laundry area in the kitchen.

Vaughn's father stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He reached down and encircled the head of his penis with his thumb and forefinger and pulled the penis out and down, as if trying to elongate his member, to un-shrivel it, but the penis would not cooperate and it contracted back into the extra flesh and hair of his crotch. It was barely there at all.

When the woman returned she had fresh pajamas—white this time, with blue piping—folded over her arm. She shook out the pants and put them on the white carpeted floor of the bathroom, like two small connected pools, and then in the reverse of the procedure used to take off his pajama pants, she put one foot after the other in a leg hole, and then pulled the pants up and knotted them at his waist and tied a bow there. She held out the pajama top as if helping a gentleman on with his coat and threaded his left arm, then his right into the sleeves, and then returned to the front and buttoned him up—four buttons—bottom to top. She patted his arm and smiled at him, wiggled her finger in a circle to tell him to turn around and face away from the bathroom door, then fetched the wheelchair, which had been around the corner, just outside the bathroom, the whole time. She rolled the chair up behind him, helped him sit, and pulled him backward out of the bathroom and into the living room where she pushed him
to the small table at which he would eat the breakfast she had been keeping warm on a hot plate in the kitchen.

As he was eating, and knowing that she could not understand what he said, he spoke to her, while she was in the kitchen cleaning up.

“I expect to hear from the boys today,” he said. “I expect to get a couple of calls today. We have some business to talk over—some matters about the estate.” He ate his eggs—they were poached—and his toast, and he listened to himself chew, and he looked out the window at the little pink flowers crawling on the wooden fence of the patio.

Speaking louder, he said, “I'm going to need you to go to the store for me today.”

She turned around and said,
“Qué?”

“The store,” he said.
“Groceria.”

“Sí,”
she said.

“I'll need to make a list,” he said.

“Qué?”
she said again from the kitchen.

“I'll give you a credit card,” he said.

“Card,” the woman said.

“I think I'm going to need some things from the store,” he said again, and this time she did not reply.

At mid-morning he busied himself with a grocery list. He worked first from memory, then rolled into the kitchen and opened the cabinets, one after another, with a rubber-tipped stick that he had made for this purpose. He had the Catholic Services women front all the cans in the cabinets so he could see what vegetables he had in those cans, so that he could inventory his holdings in vegetables. If there was a blank spot
at the front of a shelf, he knew he needed peas, beans, or soup, depending upon which row was empty. He was an orderly man.