Probation (24 page)

He smiles, neither encouraging nor discouraging me.

It’s a pathetic scene, this needy little boy, begging his father for friendship, affirmation.

“Can I come back next week?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“Would you like that?”

“Yes, I would like that.”

“God, what I must sound like.”

“You’re hurting.”

So are you. So are we all. But at least one hour a week I don’t need to do it alone.

I’
ve got a hole in my hip.

Sounds like a lyric from an old standard by Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart.

I’ve got a hole in my heart.

I’ve got a hole where my heart used to be.

It’s the kind of song you’d hear in a piano bar, a wrinkled old pixie with Vaseline teeth crooning away. I’ll write down the lyrics and send them to my furry blond friend in Honolulu.

Anyway, playing here tonight…

I’ve got a hole in my hip.

My sister returns bearing gifts, a towel and ice. The last pack melted on my leg and all over the sofa and my boxers are dripping wet. She offers to go upstairs and fetch a dry pair, but I decline, saying they’d just be soaked in a few minutes. Then I relent, knowing I’m selfishly depriving her of the opportunity to play Big Nurse in the Nocera family medical melodrama.

I reach for the remote and change channels. It’s late afternoon, the Day After. I’m exhausted. The oncologist says I should be feeling better tomorrow. I hope not. This provides the only acceptable excuse for dropping out. Soon enough, the routine will start all over again….

…Up before seven, a quick j.o., swallow coffee from a paper container (blue, with a frieze of Greek soldiers, like the Parthenon) and chew on a powdered doughnut, sing along, loudly, to the car radio, find a parking space, take the “shortcut” through the ER (“Hey, Steve.” “Hey.” “Sorry, gotta run.”), squeeze into the elevator (chattering nurses in soft, blowsy smocks; young orderlies, all hard muscles beneath those loose green scrubs; octogenarians, beyond gender, being wheeled to MRI), stop at the nurse’s station, ask if she’s awake, ask what kind of night she had, ask when the oncologist is making rounds, remember forgetting something, take the elevator back down, hang around the locked door to the Gift Patch, wait another five minutes until it opens at nine, buy a couple dollars’ worth of peppermint patties, stall a little longer leafing through the tabloids (Oprah’s Diet Secrets!: she has a personal trainer and private chef on call twenty-four hours a day. William and Harry’s Secret Anguish: fading memories of their mother), stop for a pee then back up the elevator, give my mother a good morning kiss and ask how she’s feeling, unwrap one of the peppermint patties, watch her place it on her tongue, squirm at the dry sucking sounds she makes, hope that it relieves the rancid metallic taste of the chemicals battling the tumors in her body, fall into the chair beside her bed, the day all but done by nine twenty in the morning, nothing to do but stare at the four walls, the television, my mother struggling to stay alive….

I never thought I’d miss having to make a six A.M. flight to Dayton or the eleven P.M. red-eye from Denver. But the situation has become desperate, necessitating THE LAST BEST HOPE, and I’m on leave begrudgingly approved by my Born Again National Sales Manager under mandate of federal law. I’ve appeased him by promising to be back in time to work the show at the Chicago Merchandise Mart.

Ouch. Stupid of me to roll over on the goddamn hole in my hip.

My sister is hovering in the corner of the room.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No. Yes. Can you bring me a beer?”

She screws her face into a question mark.

“Are you allowed?”

“Of course I’m allowed. The treatment regimen is two Tylenol, as needed,” I say, exasperated.

I could have told the oncologist the preliminary blood work wasn’t necessary. There was only one possible donor, the results were inevitable, the conclusion foregone.

My mother and I are A Perfect Match.

My bone marrow is being transplanted in a sterile room in the hospital in Charlotte. I’ve got a hole in my hip where they drilled for oil. Now my mother and I are closer than ever, not simply a Match anymore, but One and the Same, the very cells of our blood generated from a single source.

“You ought to head back to the hospital,” I say as Regina hands me a can of beer. “I’ll be fine.”

“Do you need anything else before I go?” she asks.

“No.”

“Do you want me to bring anything back for you?”

“No.”

Once she’s gone I hobble around the kitchen looking for something to eat. I settle on another beer. It’s oppressively hot, even for Gastonia in early summer. I flop on the couch. It’s almost four o’clock, Oprah time. She’s my new best friend. My mother and I both love her. I don’t even begrudge her the ability to summon exercise gurus and gourmet chefs with the snap of her fingers. Those big cow eyes and her nonjudgmental attitude are irresistible. But I’m beyond tired or fatigued. I feel crushed, sinking, with pains in my joints and the sinews of my muscles. A team of sled dogs couldn’t drag me to my bed upstairs. So long, Oprah, I mutter, plunging into a coma, dead to the world…

…only to be rudely awakened hours later by a loud crack and the sound of a metal bowl spinning across the tile floor. I wander into the kitchen to investigate. My sister is standing on a kitchen stool, back toward me, head and hands deep inside a cabinet, muttering, swearing. I’m careful not to startle her since her balance is precarious. Dishes and glasses, canned goods and spices, boxes and jars clutter the counter.

“What are you doing?” I ask when her footing seems sturdy and she’s not likely to topple and break her neck.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Relining the cabinets.”

“Bingo. You were always the smart one.”

“It’s half past eleven.”

“So?”

She steps down from the stool, trying to hide the half-empty wine bottle on the counter.

“Have you had anything to eat?” I ask, trying to gauge the effect of two glasses of wine.

“Yeah, a piece of cheese.”

“You want me to call for take-out?”

“It’s too late,” she says.

“Want me to make something?”

“I just want to get this done. You can tell she’s been sick by the condition of these cabinets. I bet she hasn’t relined them in two years. She never used to let things get this bad.”

The crumpled, torn paper on the floor doesn’t look so bad to me. A few blemishes, a ring here and there, certainly not the grease-smeared, dust-coated mess you’d assume from my sister’s comments.

“Is that some type of criticism?” I ask.

She looks up, clearly perplexed.

“I mean, are you saying if I’d only paid a little more attention to the shelf paper I would have realized she was sick and could have gotten her to the doctor earlier, on time, before it was too late?”

“No. Of course not. No criticism intended. For God’s sake…” She reaches for the bottle and pours another glass of wine without offering any. “Why would you think that…What do you…Why do you hate me so much?”

What kind of question is that?

I don’t hate her. How could I hate my little sister? My buddy, my pal, the one person on earth who knows things about me that would still smart and sting if she were to fling them in my face. Which, remarkably, she hasn’t, despite numerous provocations, still protecting me, God knows why, never mocking me, knowing how deep a wound she would inflict just by reminding me…

…that I would creep down the hallway and crawl into her bed after another bloody nightmare roused me from a deep sleep.

…that I kept silent, allowing her to take the blame for the ruined lipstick, knowing the consequences would be far more severe if it were ever discovered it had been me that smeared it across my mouth.

…that I would talk Randall Jarvis into pulling down his pants and letting Gina and me touch his thing whenever we played
General Hospital.

…
that the real reason Billy Cunningham split my lip was because I tried to kiss him on the mouth.

How could I hate the woman who once was such a tough little kid, who spat when my mouth was dry from fear, punching and swinging when I was unable to make a fist, screaming and cursing when I choked on the words.
Don’t cry, Andy,
she would console me as she prepared for battle, grabbing a brick, a bat, a board, her arms flailing, threatening to draw blood from the Billy Cunninghams and Richard Tricketts, never backing down when they taunted her with names like Fatty, Blimpie, Whale Girl.

Fuck you,
she shouted at our tormentors.
Fuck you, assholes.

No one
, she insisted as our mother pinched her mouth with her thumb and forefinger, threatening to insert a bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap if she didn’t confess who taught her such terrible, terrible words. Brave little Gina, always standing up for the men in her life, her foul-mouthed daddy and me.

Of course I don’t hate you, baby sister. If I did, I’d free you to tell the world all my dirty little secrets.

She finally gets around to offering me a glass of wine, which I decline, getting a beer instead. I let her question drift away, refusing to answer. I go out on the porch for a smoke, leaving her to her cabinets. But she follows me, using the excuse she’d like a cigarette too. I remind her she quit (not to preserve her pulmonary functions but to halt the erosion of the fine skin around her face and eyes).

“Why do you have to be such a prick?” she asks. “What have I ever done to you?”

She thinks she deserves an explanation why I refuse to acknowledge the bond that existed between us before I erected a barrier more permanent than the Berlin Wall. Truth is, I’m straining to think of some way to respond, a bone to throw her, some reason that justifies my slow intractable retreat over the decades. I could tell her I resent her for outgrowing me.

Do you remember when no one was more fun or fascinating than me, your older brother, whose vivid imagination cast you as Robin to my Batman, Becky Thatcher to my Tom Sawyer, Joe to my Frank Hardy (and, yes, I’ll admit it to you but no one else, sometimes Ethel to my Lucy or Mary Ann to my Ginger)?

I could blame her for losing her baby fat and growing into a beauty, for making friends with the girls who’d taunted her when she was big and clumsy, not simply forgiving them, but sharing her secrets and confiding her dreams in them.

When did you realize you wanted a brother like their brothers instead of one who was interested in your crushes and jealousies and rivalries?

But both of those ring a bit a hollow. They’re excuses, neither of them completely true. Anyway, my impatient little sister would never understand concepts like erosion and accretion and evolution. She needs a moment, an instant that changed everything, a gunshot, an explosion, a confrontation, the Big Bang. She needs a wound we can lance so we can move on with the healing. Except I can’t think of any single cruel act she’s ever perpetrated that deserves such unrelenting hostility. Well, maybe one.

“You are such a faggot,” I say.

“What?” she asks, taken back, her suspicions confirmed. I have lost my mind.

“Not you. Me,” I say.

“What are you talking about?”

“You are such a faggot.”

“You aren’t making sense. Sometimes I think you’re crazy,” she says, her voice getting in pitch for the argument that’s beginning. This is the stuff she’s made for. In ten minutes, she wants us sobbing, collapsing in each other’s arms, competing in contriteness for all our past mistakes, pledging undying fealty.

I repeat the mantra again, frustrating any attempts at quick angry retorts. She needs to serve and volley. I keep hitting junk balls, soft lobs she can’t swing at.

“What’s your point? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No. I do not.”

I search for a few facts for backdrop, but my recall betrays me, coming up short. All I can retrieve is a stray moment, isolated, stripped of context. I’m standing at the open refrigerator door, poking around loosely wrapped moldy cheese, disgusted, whining, probably squealing, and sounding like a bratty little girl.

You are such a faggot,
my sister, behind me, says.

I hid my face in the ketchup bottles and milk containers until she walked away. Five little words that branded me, irrevocably. How old was she? Who knows? I can’t remember anything else about that day, not the month, not the year, not if it was summer or winter, not if it was dark or light. All that survives is that one blazing minute, seared into my memory, the act of betrayal, the sharp kick in the guts, completely unexpected, by my loyal ally, the girl who had always put her thick orthopedic saddle shoes to good use, bruising the shins of our enemies.

I should have pulled my head out of that refrigerator and punched or slapped her, taking a lesson from her book. One gesture to ensure she would never forget what she did to me that day. Some violent act to teach her the consequences of turning against me, abandoning me, leaving me with nothing left to rely on but the benevolent protection of my mother. But I let her walk away with her bowl of chocolate ice cream, and today she has no recollection of this life-changing event. It’s as lost to her as a single grain of sand tossed back on the beach, indistinguishable and irretrievable.

“I don’t know what you are talking about. I really don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” I repeat, halfhearted, unwilling to concede the insignificance of the remark.

“How old was I?” she asks.

“Old enough. I can’t remember. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

“So you hate me because of some stupid remark I made twenty-five years ago. Do you think I even knew what the word meant at that age? Maybe
you
did. Remember, you were the smart one.”

She pours the last of the wine into her glass, drains it, and opens another bottle. I anticipate a head-on assault, a blistering attack, anything but unconditional surrender.

“I give up. You win. I don’t care anymore. How many times have I tried to reach out to you? For years, I blamed that wife of yours. Oh, sorry. I forgot. We’re not supposed to mention the perfect Alice. I guess I can tell you now I never liked her, hated the way you were when you were with her, the two of you in your own little world, laughing over some private joke you thought everyone else was too stupid to get. I suppose I should feel sorry for her now for putting up with you all those years. You’re a coldhearted bastard, you know that, don’t you?”