The Bill from My Father (24 page)

“What's to discuss?” asked my father. He squinted through the windshield, through the cloud of dust stirred up by our arrival, and waited for my answer. No sentence I'd written up till then had called for such treacherous, measured phrasings. I looked away so my face wouldn't betray me.
Your thoughts are no longer dependable. Plans you cannot change have been made
. The insolvability of it all must have made me thickheaded because it took me a moment to realize that my father hadn't just opened his door to get some air but had slipped out of his seat and was headed toward the trailer. He hoisted himself up the steps of a front porch that looked like a big aluminum stepping stool. I dashed from the car and caught the screen door an instant before it sprang shut behind him. Neon tubes leeched color from the room, and even now I remember the scene in black-and-white,
like one of the images Brian had described from the Thematic Apperception Test, a picture whose story is imminent yet fixed. My hand forever reaches out but never touches my father's shoulder. I'll never restrain or calm him down. Wrenched from solemn conversation, Brian and Betty turn their heads, not knowing for a moment who's barged through the door. My father stands within a glaring room and ceaselessly reads two startled faces:
Who are you,
they demand.
Where did you come from? What do you want?

When I gripped my father's shoulder, our misunderstanding, like a rusty machine, shuddered and started up again. He spun around at the touch of my hand.

“Betty is going to stay here with you, Dad.”

“That's nice,” he said warily. “Why wouldn't she?”

“Why wouldn't I,” echoed Betty. “I'm his nurse.” She carried her mug into the kitchen and rinsed it under the blasting tap. A pair of headlights swept past the windows, the raucous dog pack giving chase.

“In the meantime,” I said, “we can start looking for a place where …”

“Did you offer Brian a cup of tea?” he asked Betty.

“No,” she said curtly. “I offered him soda.” She grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator and refilled Brian's glass. A head of foam hissed toward the rim. Brian chugged soda before it overflowed, coughing his thanks.

“And one for my son?”

“Maybe later,” I said.

Betty glared at my father, then marched back into the kitchen and opened a cupboard door with enough force to send a vehement little breeze across the room.

“This place is certainly compact!” exclaimed Brian.

“You'd never know to look at it,” remarked my father, eager to resume his role as the man of the house, “but there's storage galore.”

“Built-ins,” added Betty, handing me a glass. “The mess is hidden.”

I couldn't blame her for mocking my father's expectation that we'd carry on as normal, though it wasn't clear if he wanted to avoid a confrontation with Betty until after Brian and I left, or if he had succumbed to what further tests would determine was dementia. For now, however, none of us could come up with a better plan than complicity.

“How 'bout a tour?” Dad asked no one in particular. Brian and I made enthusiastic noises and stood at the ready.

“I think I'll sit this one out,” said Betty. She settled into her seat at the dinette table, but the trailer was so small that she essentially joined us without having to move an inch.

It seemed logical, I suppose, to start the tour with a few interesting facts about the dinette set since it was right there in front of us, waiting for explication. My father informed us that it was made of Formica and chrome and purchased by Betty at the Furniture Barn's liquidation sale. Betty shifted in her chair and gave us a perfunctory wave, as if she were on display in some absurd museum.

The tour resumed with a slow pivot around the room. Dad said, “That open space between the kitchen and the dining area is called a … a …”

“A pass-though,” said Betty.

“Due to the fact that you can pass food and other items through it, on a plate or what have you, without walking all the way from the kitchen to … well, to over here.” He paused. “It seemed like a selling point at the time. The agent called this floor plan …” He deferred to Betty. “A what did he call it?”

“A step saver.”

My father snorted. “Not that your old man has many steps left!”

The mahogany breakfront so prominent in the former living room had been replaced by a hutch containing Betty's collection of religious figurines, including a sculpture of praying hands. Plugged into an outlet, the hands emanated a pious light thanks to the Oxnard
Department of Water and Power, which, according to my father, routinely sent “nuts” out to the trailer park to read the tenant's meters. And the meter for their particular trailer, my father insisted, was always “on the fritz.” This explained the ominous pile of unopened bills I'd noticed on the kitchen counter, several from the DWP.

“And over here,” he said, pointing to three cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, “you'll see the moving boxes we haven't unpacked.” Various destinations—bath, bedroom, storage—had been scrawled across them. Emphatic black arrows indicated which end was up. Somebody (I hoped my father) had stacked the boxes in such a way that each arrow was aligned in the correct, ascending direction, like a child's blocks balanced one atop the other. Never had that simple injunction—
This Side Up
—seemed to me as meaningful. Is there anything more important than being oriented, in complete accord with the compass points, your feet firmly planted on the ground? Is there any knowledge sweeter than knowing whether you're coming or going?

The tour continued as my father guided us a few steps here, a few steps there, stopping to identify the trailer's standard features with an enthusiasm the average tour guide usually reserves for suspension bridges and natural rock formations.

Here is the linen closet.

The medicine cabinet's salves and tablets.

Here is the light switch.

The thermostat.

Up there you'll see the smoke detector.

Behold the phone jack.

We squeezed into a hallway that was really more of a vestibule with exits. My father opened the door to his “office” and stood at the portal, barring our way. Brian and I peered over his shoulders. The hidden mess Betty had spoken of was not, as I had first thought, metaphoric, but a Dumpster's worth of genuine refuse. The depositions and memos and old manila folders that had been gathered into stacks and piles at the former house now blanketed the floor, ankle-deep, sorted according to alphabet soup. A small wooden desk broke
through the clutter like an island rising from a paper sea. On the last Friday of every December, at five o'clock sharp, people who worked downtown celebrated the new year by opening their windows and flinging outdated calendar pages onto the streets below, and my father, judging from the state of his office, had decided to continue this tradition indoors. The drawback to his version of the ritual was that he didn't rid himself of clerical excess but trapped himself within it, like a bird who gathers twigs and grasses to build a nest it can't fly out of.

Brian had always been able to discern, in a crowded public place and from a considerable distance, those seemingly ordinary people who turned out to be mad ranters, prisoners to tics and repetition, obeyers of demanding imaginary voices, and he'd developed a subtle grunt to warn me if one of them was headed our way. He made that sound now, and I leaned against him—I could hardly avoid it in those cramped quarters—for the solace of his body heat.

Dad stepped back and quickly shut the door. “Been busy,” he said. “Swamped. Retirement is a full-time job.”

At the threshold to the master bedroom, he again blocked our way, though this room was inaccessible for a different reason. Whereas entering the office would have meant tramping over layers of paperwork, the bedroom was almost entirely occupied by his old California king, the mahogany headboard blocking the lower half of the only window. I say the room was “occupied” by the bed but it would be more accurate to say that the bed “consumed” the room, which was cushioned like a playpen and yet as abject as a padded cell. It amazed me that he'd decided to take the bed with him to Oxnard, and I wondered what feats of strength and engineering had been necessary for the movers to cram so large a mattress through so small a door. A narrow, very narrow aisle ran along two sides of the bed, just wide enough for Betty and my father to sidle along it like people trapped on a window ledge. The door from the hall swung open less than halfway before it struck the edge of the mattress with a muffled thud. Bedtime preparations must have culminated with my father and Betty sucking in their stomachs and drawing themselves
upright in order to squeeze the sleepy bulk of themselves through the door, inadvertently polishing the doorknob with the chamois of their pajamas. If the bedroom closet hadn't been accessible through sliding doors, their clothes would have hung there, as Betty might have said, till kingdom come. Not surprisingly, the bed was unmade, since one of them would have had to crawl across it to tuck the sheets in along the two sides flush with the walls, and then crawl back to dismount the mattress, leaving a trail of self-defeating wrinkles. No, for the two people who shared this room, neatness was a pretense best abandoned.

As we peered at the rumpled bed, I heard Betty pad up behind us. She placed her hand on my shoulder and left it there with just enough reassuring pressure to let me know she'd calmed down. My father was telling Brian that he'd owned the bed for practically half his life, that it was the only bed he could depend on for a good night's sleep, that its springs were of an enduring quality absent in the sorry excuses for a mattress they sold folks today. It may be an old bed, he said, but it was a hell of a lot better than sleeping on the floor. He also told Brian that my mother died of a heart attack in the bed, which was true, and that my brothers and I were born in it, which was false, and I didn't have either the energy or heart to set the record straight. The record was bent beyond repair. Exhausted as I was by the prospect of a long drive home, the “Lament of the Bed” seemed to me as elegiac in its failed longings as a story by John Cheever or a poem by James Merrill. It may have been the jewel of my father's oeuvre, a ballad on par with “Cooper & Sons” and “The Captive Bride.”

“Now you've seen everything,” said Dad, closing the door to the bedroom and concluding the tour.

Brian said, “You two have quite a place here.”

“Yes,” said my father, “I do.”

Betty remained quiet, but her hand slid off my shoulder and fell to her side.

The hall was cramped and stuffy now that the doors to the office and bedroom were closed. We huddled there with the palpable self-consciousness
of strangers in an elevator who suddenly don't know where to look or how to stand. I half expected to feel the hallway descend and to hear a soft melodic gong when it slowed to a stop, the doors swinging open upon an entirely different world or, short of that, an entirely different trailer in a less depressing park.

“Shall we retire to the living room?” asked Dad. The formal locution came out of nowhere, a snippet from an old movie or an outdated book on etiquette. If his grandiosity was unintentionally comical in the drab setting of the trailer, it was lamentable too, a relic from the world of refinement to which my father had always aspired.

“Let's,” said Brian, and we jostled down the hall.

Betty told me that after Brian and I had left, she decided to establish the new ground rules of their relationship by sleeping on the couch. She said she was singing softly to herself as she lofted a clean white sheet over the cushions. She owned half the furniture, had contributed half the down payment on the place, and now she was making a refuge within it, a space that was indisputably hers. She was too wistful to pay much attention when she sensed my father standing in the hall, watchful, pensive. He asked her what the hell she thought she was doing, a question she'd fully expected from him, and one she would have answered in a more kindly tone if her exasperation from earlier that night, from the whole futile move to Oxnard, wasn't coiled in her voice. She told him she wouldn't think of depriving him of
his
bed in
his
home, adding that
his
relationship with her was going to have to change until I'd found another place for him to live.

“You can't kick me out!”

“Oh, Ed,” she'd said, “I'm not kicking you out. We went over this already, before the boys left.”

“My boys?”

“Remember all of us talking at the table? It couldn't have been more than an hour ago. Look at me, Ed. Are you listening? You and me are going to sell the trailer and split the money. If we're lucky we
might break even. And don't waste your breath on accusations. I'm as honest as the day is long. Bernard is paying me to stay with you until he can find you another place to live.” Betty remembered, too late, that the monetary part of our bargain was supposed to remain confidential.

“He's paying you to be with me?”

Betty couldn't have known it then, but by “be with” my father meant “love.”

“Yes,” she said.

I imagine him reeling at the idea that I'd been paying Betty to love him.
For how long?
he must have wondered.
From the beginning?
Was being in his company so abhorrent a chore? Wasn't he a joker, a generous man, tender when she didn't drive him up the wall? Had Anna also been paid to love him? Had his wife? His sons? Betty said he leaned unsteadily against the door frame. He looked chastened, maybe, but otherwise alert. In his head, however, the world ground its gears and turned in reverse. Not only had love been a bluff, but paternal concern, passing romance, fondness for colleagues, neighborly regard. Every connection came undone. A lifetime of practice shedding his past had prepared him for this moment of amnesia, the first of many. The reason he stood there suddenly unraveled. The hours scattered in different directions. Nothing existed outside his skin. There was only the black contraction of his birth. That's when Betty saw him open his mouth and wail like a baby.