The End of the World as We Know It (7 page)

My parents came to see my brother before they flew back home. My mother put a cross around my brother's neck and kissed his hand. My brother suddenly said, without opening his eyes, his right hand fingering the cross, “I want to see Stevie Wonder. I have something to tell Stevie Wonder.” Then he lapsed back into silence.

People who are in comas don't look like they're sleeping peacefully. They look inert. They look like a breathing dead person. Everything has gone slack. Whatever self they have has left their bodies. We thought it a hopeful sign that he had said anything, that he had moved his hand.

Every day the motorcycle guy had another operation, and
there was one less baggy hanging off the side of his bed. Sometimes he was even conscious. They wouldn't even put him on painkillers. He was so close to death they thought sedation would put him over the edge. I don't know how he stood it. The pain must have been terrible, what with the gas tank up the rectum and all.

My parents left. There was only so much trauma they could stand, and they'd run out of their bourbon and my brother had moved his hand and talked about Stevie Wonder and so they left. My sister-in-law had taken to coming home for dinner, although she still slept at the hospital. I did her laundry. I cleaned her toilets. I had people over for dinner I thought might comfort her. I had the woman who had said she gauged how much meat to get by the price and not by the number of guests. My sister-in-law was enormously pregnant.

We took turns going to the ICU. We could only go for fifteen minutes twice a day, even though Elvis seemed to be surrounded by fans and fellow bikers all the time. My sister-in-law would go in the mornings, sometimes we would both go, sometimes I would go and she would rest after a dinner I had cooked, surrounded by friends, and she would wait for news.

People in comas are not attractive. They have foul breath and yellow cheese between their teeth and they stink. The motorcycle guy was not in a coma, he was just in unimaginable pain, so his lights were sort of always out, but he was gorgeous every time you looked at him. I think his family combed his Elvis hair, black and shiny and pompadoured. My brother, with a cross around his neck, a cheap cross, not even real silver, did not look like somebody your heart cried out to see.

One night I went alone to see him, while my sister-in-law sat with her best friends at the dinner table. I walked in and started talking to him. I had taken to having these conversations with him, even though there was no indication that he would respond. I told him things that I thought would irritate him, to try to get a rise out of him. I told him our sister's house had burned down. I told him I had wrecked his car. I told him his wife had told me she would hate me forever.

This night, I talked about his stereo. My brother had a new stereo of which he was inordinately proud. We had talked about it on the phone, before his aneurysm, and I knew it meant a lot to him. He didn't want anybody to touch it. I knew he valued his record collection like gold, and I had noticed that, before his head blew up at the party, he had bought the new Paul McCartney album, the one with the cherries on the cover. So I told him I had played the McCartney album on his new stereo, and I had scratched the vinyl on both sides of the album. I was holding his thin right hand, and I told him I'd wrecked his new record.

He opened his eyes, and looked at me. “I know this is hard,” he said. “I know you take care of everybody, but I want you to take care of yourself. I know it's been hard on you.”

Then he closed his eyes, and he sang in a thin, whispery voice, so softly I could barely hear him, “Maybe I'm amazed at the way you're with me all the time. And maybe I'm amazed at the way I love you.”

Then he lapsed back into a coma. But I knew he was going to live.

For the next three weeks, I flew down to Atlanta every weekend. I would leave on Thursday night after work, and come back
on Sunday or Monday. They were very understanding at work, although, come to think of it, they fired me six months later, so maybe their patience was more superficial than it seemed.

I flew Delta F class, saying to myself I was so exhausted, and that was partially true, but also because you could get a lot of free drinks in first, without having to wait for the cart and then feeling guilty when you ordered a double gin and tonic, which was never enough anyway.

One time, I got so drunk on the plane that I went straight from the airport to a restaurant to meet a friend for Sunday night dinner and passed out on the bar stool. I fell on the floor.

On one of these trips, I went for a drive in Buckhead with my sister-in-law. It was pouring rain, but we drove on and passed the governor's mansion, and, across the street, my rich friend's richer mother's house. My brother's wife asked me to pull over; she wanted to talk. She told me that, while it was true that she had always hated me, she had seen in recent weeks that I had a good side and she hoped we could go on to be friends. I was very touched, although it lasted about six months, after which she hated me as much if not more than ever, going around to parties in my own hometown saying horrible things about me, saying that somehow I had robbed my brother of his inheritance—they both seemed to be given to these archaic phrases, as though they were characters out of Faulkner—and trying to turn my own relatives and friends against me. My friends and relatives, of course, immediately reported all these remarks to me.

She really seemed to have found her element. She was pregnant, her husband was a brilliant comatose journalist, and she was, as she had always been, the absolute center of attention. But
never had the focus of solicitude been turned so absolutely and single-mindedly on her. The story of her situation could soften the most jaundiced heart. There was nothing people wouldn't do for her, run errands, feed her, take her for drives when they knew she hated their guts, and so on.

After awhile, I didn't go any more. I meant to, but I didn't. I said I couldn't get away from work, but that wasn't the real reason. I said I couldn't afford the flight, but I was charging it all anyway, so that wasn't it. It took me years to pay it off. I was making $75,000 a year, not exactly F-class income. But Delta loved me. Every Thursday night the stewardess would ask me if I wanted the usual, fixing me a stiff gin and tonic in a real glass glass before the plane even took off.

The truth was, I couldn't stand her and I didn't trust her, and I didn't want my brother to have married her, but he had, while she was wearing a bias-cut satin dress my mother and grandmother had made, and which she had had them make all over again, stamping her foot because she didn't like the way it fit, causing her own aunt to warn my mother about her the night before the wedding, saying she had always been selfish. It was sweet Minnie Lee Lee who wasn't Chinese whispering these confidences to my mother at the rehearsal dinner, while Judy Judy, in a black cocktail dress and a lot of opera-length pearls, flirted and let all the men look down her cleavage. And while I didn't want my brother to be lying in a hospital room with cheesy breath and thin white arms and the stink of death about him, you can only be so assiduous about even the most terrible grief for so long.

He was paralyzed and speechless but he wasn't dying, so he
was moved away from Elvis and into his own room. Elvis must have been in excruciating pain all the time. By now he was sedated against the pain. Morphined to the gills. My brother wasn't in any pain at all.

My sister-in-law finally had the baby, in the same hospital, and she and the little redheaded girl were taken in a wheelchair down to my brother's room so he could see his daughter. He didn't even open his eyes.

The next morning, the nurse went in to draw the blinds and feed him his breakfast. My brother suddenly sat up in bed and said, “Can you tell me something? I know I've been kind of out of it for awhile, and I missed Wimbledon, so there's something I want to know. Who won the ladies' finals?”

The shocked nurse answered him, Chrissie Evert or whoever, Martina, somebody, and then she asked him, “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Sit up in bed. Talk.”

“I don't know. It seemed like it was time.”

“You know you have a baby? A little girl?”

“I know,” said my brother. “I saw her yesterday.”

And after that he never went backward. He only got better. He never got worse. But he was never the same again. Ever. Never the same.

When my brother and sister and I were children, men and women had two things we don't have now: cocktails and hairdos. They had Gimlets and Manhattans and Gibsons and Singapore Slings and Vodka Stingers and Blue Mondays and Grasshoppers and Old Fashioneds and Highballs and Sidecars. They had Mint Juleps for Derby Day. They also had muddlers and swizzle sticks. Men were known and even famous for their ability to make one or the other of these cocktails. Women never made them, except maybe during the war, they did, when they were alone. But not as well.

It was a whole male ritual of equipment and liquor and deft hand gestures and quips. My father and his friends would say things like “Let me freshen that up for you.” They would say things like “grease cutter” and “Just have a nightcap and then you can go.”

People had bars that stood out in the open, on fancy pieces of furniture. They had silver ice buckets. They had silver julep cups. They had Highball glasses with their monograms on them. They got these things for wedding presents.

Nowadays, except for the trendy run at a Cosmopolitan or a
Mojito or something, people drink wine. Or hard liquor on Wall Street. When I was little nobody drank wine; they hardly even drank it at dinner, except for very fancy dinner parties. And it was bad wine. At least it was bad wine in the country. It came in jugs. They had cocktails instead. Nobody even says
cocktails
nowadays.

After dinner parties, at which the women wore taffeta or silk dinner dresses, at which they wore earrings and necklaces and clever dinner rings, my mother used to have a tray of cordials with tiny glasses she would bring out, crème de menthe and Triple Sec and Drambuie and cognac and Cherry Heering. Sometimes she would make pousse-café, an amazingly complicated thing she learned about in
Gourmet
that involved layering cordials according to their various densities, so you ended up with a vertical rainbow of six or seven liqueurs. It was like being the Marie Curie of after-dinner drinks. I still have all the fancy little cordial glasses.

The women had hairdos, then. Not haircuts—hairdos. They would wear their hair up or down, in braids, in French twists, in bouffant concoctions, according to the various occasions. They put their hair in rollers in the afternoons, before a party, but they never went to the grocery store with their hair in rollers, just bobby pins sometimes, and their hair sparkled from the hair spray used to hold it all in place.

It was very different then. People in the country lived the kind of life they imagined being lived in the pages of the
New Yorker
magazine. And they were good at it, and it gave them pleasure to be good at it.

People had real parties. My mother and father would grab at any excuse for a cocktail party or a dinner party. Anywhere people were gay and bright and didn't have a care in the world.

They once gave a going-away party for a couple who were going to Europe for two months in the summer. Napoleon came to be the bartender, making cocktails, macerating mint and sugar in the bottom of silver julep cups, serving up Old Fashioneds and Highballs, and the women wore raw silk summer dresses or sleeveless linen dresses with shoes that matched, and some even wore gloves and even hats, and everybody looked like they had a lot of money, even if they didn't have a dime and had just charged it all at J. Ed Deaver or Grossman's, the two local clothing stores for grownups.

There were rules, then. My mother, for instance, never drank or served rum. That was a rule. Nobody had even heard of tequila, then.

My mother was lovely in her bones, as the poem says. She could sew, and so she could make beautiful dresses out of Liberty lawn or linen or, once, gray wool with a jeweled collar. She wore them well. She didn't have any money, but she was always turned out beautifully. She had a friend whose sister or somebody lived in Ohio and bought her clothes at the Dayton Oval Room, and, every now and then, a box would arrive with this woman's castoffs, which wouldn't fit my mother's friend, so my mother had some clothes with fancy designer labels like Pauline Trigere.

At the going-away party, all the guests looked like they didn't have a care in the world. Men stood on the back terrace and told jokes in the waning sunlight and talked about the war and the Virginia Military Institute. Women talked about books or poetry
or the garden club. They talked, but they didn't talk dirty. My mother once told me that she'd never heard a woman say
fuck
until after the men came back from World War II, and even then they never said it in public.

A lot of them had grown up together. They had had adventures. My mother and her friend Sunshine and my godmother Emily and my other godmother, Fran Pancake, true, would sometimes talk about the week they had spent at Virginia Beach when they were young, sunning themselves and drinking what they called Scotch-type whiskey. They never tired of talking about that trip, and it was always funny. I saw photographs. They were on the beach, wearing very dark glasses, like blind people in bathing suits.

We heard the stories because we would work the parties. My brother and sister and I would dress up and we would pass things, little cheese straws and cucumber sandwiches with the edges cut off. My mother made this dip for which she was famous. It was made of crabmeat and sherry and Cheez Whiz, and people thought it was delicious, so a lot of them would hover around the dining room table where the chafing dish was. Imagine having a chafing dish.