I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (15 page)

“The Silver Fox,” Karleen calls him. She rinses her own hair with Miss Clairol #20 Arctic Blonde. Lucky is her second husband; she is his second wife. Though they’ve been married for fifteen years, each plans to be buried next to his or her original spouse. Of her first husband, Karleen says, “He was a decent man and a hard worker. Unlike some people,” she adds, as if to suggest Lucky needs to put down the crack pipe, get off his duff, and hang some drywall, as if she’s forgotten there was an article in the newspaper about how Lucky is a decent man, how he found a purse in the street that contained several hundred dollars, and instead of tossing the purse and sliding the cash into his pocket, instead of thinking of it as free money, Lucky turned it over to the police.

When I asked Al if he would have done the same, he said probably. But that’s also what he said when I asked him if he’d eat the dog if he was hungry and there was nothing else he could eat, and when I asked him if I died before he did, would he ever have sex again.

But Lucky doesn’t live in a world of probably. Lucky is all about definitely. You turn in a purse full of money because it’s the right thing to do. You remain married to a woman who berates you, you pay your debt. You don’t look back. You don’t talk about the infant daughter who died, or that you didn’t appreciate your first wife until after she was dead; you don’t mention the grandson who died; you don’t talk about the job you didn’t take or the chance you didn’t take, or any of the ways your life might have been different, better, bigger. Because what good does it do to talk about it?

What Lucky wants is simple: a glass of milk with his supper, and after supper, he wants a cup of decaf and a piece of pie; and after that, he wants a cigarette. Lucky wants a bowl of ice cream while he’s watching television. He wants for people to be happy, and for people to be nice, and for people to get along. Everyone but Karleen thinks he’s a sweet old guy.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “Uh-huh.”

The reason he doesn’t like to talk about the past probably has something to do with how messy it is, how it’s something he can’t disinfect or straighten up or rearrange. A retired school janitor, Lucky wants structure and order and routine. The custodian’s closets and storage rooms at his school were immaculate; he keeps his house just as tidy. No dust, no clutter, nothing out of place.

“I just can’t stand the mess,” he says, and his son is the same way. Last Christmas morning, I woke up early to the noise of Al running the vacuum cleaner, Al squeaking the mop across the kitchen floor, Al wearing rubber gloves and scouring the sink. Oh my God, I’d said. What is wrong with you? It’s Christmas. Don’t start with the cleaning.

Karleen patted my hand. “Oh, honey,” she said. “It will only get worse!” She lit up a Virginia Slim 100. With smoke swirling around her face, she looked wise. She also looked pleased, like she was glad to be delivering the bad news. It meant she wasn’t alone. “Just you wait!” she said. Then she described for me my future. It included doilies under the milk jug in the refrigerator and Al hovering outside the bathroom door, wearing a pair of rubber gloves and waiting for me to finish up my business so he could rush in there with a bottle of pine-scented Lysol.

“If the son is anything like the father,” she said, “your life is not going to be easy.”

Karleen and I looked at Lucky, asleep in his La-Z-Boy, and in his face, there is Al’s: the rectangular shape, the wide forehead, the blunt chin. Father and son look so much alike, except the son weighs about twenty pounds more. When Al returned to the living room with a piece of pie, Lucky, who hadn’t said much since his inquiry into the price of laundry detergent, said, “My goodness, Allen, you sure are fat. Why are you so fat? I’ve never seen you this fat.”

 

 

 

 

 

After the Melissa Gilbert / Valerie Bertinelli movie, Karleen changed the channel to QVC. The merchandise that can be purchased on that station—the Diamonique tennis bracelets and mock-neck jackets with the metallic-bead detail, the pink palace chandelier earrings (designed by Joan Rivers) and the vanilla-scented battery-operated candles—never fails to amaze me. For a certain segment of the population, QVC is a lot like porn: the soft lights, the hyped-up enthusiasm, the I-got-to-get-me-some-of-that response it provokes in the viewer. Lucky and Karleen watch a lot of QVC.

But one of them doesn’t stop with watching.

Karleen has herself a nasty little addiction to buying stuff she will never use. Everyone seems to know about it, but nobody talks about it, about how she ratcheted up forty thousand dollars on their Discover card because she can’t stop herself from dialing the toll-free number and buying whatever. An exercise bike. A wrought-iron umbrella stand. A vehicle snow kit with a heated ice scraper (it plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter), snow brush, and shovel. Her shopping addiction distresses Lucky: Last summer, he fretted silently and to himself about how on earth they’re ever going to pay their Discover card bill, until he ended up in the hospital with shingles—aggravated by stress, the doctor said—but he seems powerless to stop her, while she seems powerless to stop herself. When I suggested to Al that maybe she’s just trying to get his attention, maybe it is lonely when you have no one to talk to, maybe it’s incredibly irritating to open the refrigerator and find that your husband has placed a doily under the milk, he wanted to know was I empathizing with Karleen?

Whose side was I on?

While Karleen commented from her easy chair on whether or not she liked a particular product and why or why not, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do: I kissed ass. I smiled, I nodded, I agreed. Lucky, sitting in his easy chair, his feet up and his hands folded across his belly, snoozed.

But Al sighed. Al stood up, he sat down, he looked around the room. Al looked at his hands, his feet, the space between his feet. He stared into space. When he straightened up a pile of newspaper that was already in a tidy pile, Karleen said, “Look at him. He’s like his father. He can’t sit still. He’s always got to be messing with something. There’s something wrong with both of them.”

Al said he did not know what a goose-down pillow costs at a store in our town, but the price of the goose-down pillow QVC host Bob Bowersox was pushing seemed like a good deal, though the call-in testimonials seemed too gung-ho to be real. Al looked at his watch, he chewed on his thumbnail. Ten minutes went by, then twenty, then twenty more. Al stood, stretched, groaned, then he shuffled down the hall, first into our room, then toward the bathroom. I heard him brushing his teeth.

On QVC, a blond former beauty queen prattled on about a velour tunic-and-pants set. This outfit came in five rich, gemlike colors (emerald, sapphire, amethyst, peridot, and ruby). You can wear it anywhere! she chipperly pointed out. How dressy, sassy, and comfy you would be in this outfit, and because of the rhinestones along the neckline and sleeves, how sparkly. It seemed like all of the tunics (V-neck, asymmetrical, crinkle georgette, stretch waffle, chiffon, bell-sleeved, long-sleeved, long-sleeved with side slits, long-sleeved pucker-knit raglan) were decorated (with rhinestone details, beadwork, embroidery, rhinestone snowflakes, dragonfly sparkles, glitter, crotchet trim, scattered rhinestones, faux fur, gold-tone sequins, fairy dust). It seemed like all of the coordinating pants had an elastic waistband. I’d always heard elastic referred to as the devil’s measuring tape, and because I was alone with Al’s parents, and I felt weird and awkward and uncomfortable, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said this.

“What’s that?” said Lucky, snapping awake.

“SHE SAYS YOUR SON NEEDS AN ELASTIC WAISTBAND!” Karleen shouted. “BECAUSE HE’S SO FAT!”

Lucky shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “why he got fat.”

How many times had Al described this house to me? So many that it felt familiar, I felt like I’d grown up in it, too. There was the kitchen table where, night after night, every night, four-year-old Al spilled his milk. There was the dining room where nine-year-old Al drew pictures that disturbed his mother because they were pictures of naked ladies with two circles for their breasts, two dots for nipples. There was the spot on the living room floor where ten-year-old Al played with plastic Army guys. I could almost see him setting them up then knocking them down then setting them up again.

I could hear fifty-five-year-old Al calling to me, urgently stage whispering my name. “C’mere, c’mere, c’mere,” he whispered. He was peeking out from the guest room, the room that used to be his bedroom, the bedroom where fourteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old Al pumped the python, buffed the banana, and played flute solos while thinking about Sophia Loren, imagining himself wooing Sophia Loren, offering her a single red rose, a box of chocolates, his hand, picturing Sophia Loren guiding his hand to her breast (a circle with a dot). His Sophia Loren fantasies were something else I’d heard about a million times before. Al’s old bedroom is now a claustrophobic space with a sleeper sofa and framed photographs of Karleen’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a progression of age that begins at infancy and culminates with high school graduation hangs from floor to ceiling.

“C’mere, c’mere, c’mere,” Al was whispering. I murmured excuse me to my hosts, who were watching young women model outfits for old women, this time a gingham shirt and capri pants set embroidered with pineapples, ladybugs, daisies, cherries, or palm trees, your choice. As I approached, Al reached out, took my hand, and tugged me into the room.

“Hello there,” he said. He embraced me then slipped his hand in my shirt and started feeling me up. “Those old people are driving me crazy!” he said. Al said he had a plan. Very soon, we would take the old people out for dinner, somewhere nice, somewhere fun, somewhere where we could have a drink. “You deserve a drink!” he said. “You deserve two drinks!” But first, Al said, before we did anything else, he sort of felt like fooling around. Did I want to fool around? “Come on,” he said, inching one hand up my shirt and the other down my pants. “What do you say? Let’s you and me fool around.”

 

 

 

 

 

We emerged from the guest room ravenous.

Lucky said he could order a pizza. He suggested Little Caesars. He had a coupon that he’d clipped out of the phone book which would save us a few bucks, plus they’d deliver it right to our door, isn’t that handy? “I like to stay close to home,” Lucky told us. He lived twelve miles from downtown, but hadn’t been there in years. “I can’t even tell you what’s downtown anymore.”

“I’ll tell you what’s downtown,” Karleen said.
“Black people.”

Lucky said but if we were going to insist on going out to eat, he didn’t want to go anyplace too fancy like Applebee’s or Red Lobster, which are also too expensive. He’d be okay to eat supper at Ram’s Horn, a family-style restaurant franchise across southern Michigan. There was one only two miles from the house, and, according to Lucky, they had good fish and chips, taco salad, turkey dinner with all the fixings, really good pie, and chicken Parmesan.

Ram’s Horn it is!

Before we left, I wanted to brush my teeth, but I’d forgotten to pack my toothbrush. When I’d asked Al if I could borrow his, he said no. He said sharing a toothbrush was disgusting.

“It seems unhygienic,” he said.

Never mind what we did in his childhood bedroom while his father and stepmother sat in their easy chairs watching QVC. Al was repulsed by the idea of his toothbrush in my mouth. “Rub some toothpaste on with your finger,” he said, “but can you make it snappy? My father is waiting.”

 

 

 

 

 

My worst experience with food poisoning happened because of a gyro I ate at a street carnival in Syracuse, New York. I should have known better as I’d been made violently ill by gyros before and would be again. In fact, every single time I’ve ever eaten a gyro I got stomach-churning sick, but I keep coming back for more, thinking this time it will be different. When it comes to seasoned lamb cooked on a rotisserie, sliced in slivers, slathered with that white sauce, buried under tomatoes and onions, then swaddled in a warm, soft, chewy pita, mine is a piggy appetite made even piggier by the fact that I live in a town where there is not a single Greek restaurant.

I ordered a gyro at Ram’s Horn served with French fries and cole slaw, though instead of a handsome moustached man named Nikos shouting hey have some more ouzo,
oopa!
have some delicious baklava, Amber the Waitress stood cranelike on one foot, scratching the back of her leg with the other while asking did I need ketchup. Al sat across from me, wiggling his eyebrows, and licking his tongue across his lips, and winking in an exaggerated way. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

So did my father-in-law. Lucky is fun to share a meal with. He loves the food in front of him, no matter how simple, no matter how bland, and if you’re sitting next to him at Ram’s Horn, you’ll hear him emit a series of low soft Mmmmmms, his reaction to bites of something delicious, the last taste every bit as good as the first.

But he is color-blind. Sixty-some years of smoking Winston Lights have fouled up his sense of smell. He has arthritis. Maybe food is so delicious because his gustatory system is picking up all the slack, his taste buds working time and a half. He says Mmmmm about his daily bowl of instant oatmeal or his serving of canned cream-style corn or the dish of strawberry Jell-O they gave him for dessert when he was in the hospital.

He said Mmmmm about the slice of white bread that came with his meal at Ram’s Horn; otherwise, it was silent. Karleen picked up a fried shrimp, nibbled once or twice, put it down, then repeated the procedure on another. While I sucked on ice from my Diet Pepsi, Al rubbed his foot against my leg. He’d ordered the fish-and-chips, but he hardly touched it. Instead, he was intent on playing footsie with me.