You Can Say You Knew Me When

I
t had been five years since I’d visited Greenlawn, and as soon as I stepped off the bus from Newark Airport, it was clear the only thing that had changed was me.

Many of the same family-owned shops that had been here when I was a kid still stood: the pet store, the hardware store, the place selling musical instruments, the one that made custom-ordered curtains. There was even Georgie’s Sweet Shoppe, where I worked one summer during high school, mixing ice cream and chocolate in the basement, putting twenty pounds on my teenage frame. Each of these stores was housed in brick, all warm hues and weathered corners, so that the main street resembled a single, long storefront, sturdy and timeworn. In San Francisco, where I lived, brick was nearly nonexistent; brick walls collapse during earthquakes. The old brick warehouses that I biked past every day on my way to my boyfriend Woody’s apartment were all being retrofitted with massive steel beams in X formation along the weight-bearing walls. The effect was something like seeing a brace put on a leg before any bone has broken: The buildings were stronger, but you were newly aware of how vulnerable the original structure had been.

Growing up, I saw Greenlawn, New Jersey, as the epitome of American suffocation and conformity. Now here it stood, a pleasant little village preserved in amber. The brickface was part of this, and beyond that, the fact that there were almost no chain stores on the main street. I looked across the intersection to the town park, whose Veterans Memorial and white gazebo had seemed to my rebellious teenage self symbols of oppression, but which now simply seemed old-fashioned; not
Amerikkka
, but Americana.

My father loved living in Greenlawn. As I stood at the bus stop, waiting for my sister to arrive—luggage at my feet, a lit cigarette in my mouth—I repeated that sentiment in my head, a platitude at-the-ready for meeting and greeting relatives during his wake and funeral in the days to come.
It’s good that he died here, in this place that he loved.
This was bullshit, of course: He’d died too young, in the hospital, after a painful deterioration, and for those involved the whole thing was suffused with tragedy. That I wasn’t one of those involved was the reason I needed to rehearse platitudes at all. I needed something to say, a way to be and behave during this visit.

A screech of tires, a blur of silver in the winter air: a minivan arcing sharply through the street in front of me. For a split second I imagined it roaring over the yellow-striped curb and plowing into me—I saw the headline,
ILLEGAL U
-
TURN ENDS IN DEATH
—but instead it slid efficiently to the curb. At the wheel was my sister, Deirdre. The passenger window lowered halfway, and her voice carried over from the driver’s seat: “I know I’m late. Put your bags in the back.”

I took one last drag off my cigarette, glancing at the clock on the First Jersey Bank across the street. 10:05. “In my world, five minutes late is early,” I said.

I turned to lift my luggage into the back of the van. Staring across the backseat was a small boy bundled in winter clothes. My nephew, AJ. I hadn’t seen him since he was born, and what I caught in his wide brown eyes, gazing out from below a snowflake-patterned ski cap, was equal parts anticipation and suspicion. Distracted, in mid-swing, I banged my forehead on the edge of the roof, letting out a pained “Fuck!” I’m all too famous for this kind of klutzy move.

AJ’s eyes widened.

“Pretend I didn’t say that.” I sent him a wink. As I circled back to the front seat, he twisted beneath his safety belt to keep a watch on me.

I hopped inside and leaned across a topography of gray leather to give my sister a greeting: a no-contact kiss near the side of her face and an awkward shoulder pat meant as a hug. She remained more or less motionless through this, her hands firmly on the steering wheel. “How was your flight?” she asked. Her face was thinner than I remembered, tight around the jaw. Or maybe it was the severe way she’d pulled back her hair into one of those clip-combs. When she pressed her burgundy-painted lips together, the effect was one of strain.

“The flight was fine,” I said. “No, actually, it was awful. I was in and out of sleep. I’m sort of stiff all over.”

“Can’t remember the last time I flew anywhere,” she said as she pulled the van into the street.

I was contemplating how much accusation I should insinuate from her tone—
I haven’t flown anywhere because I’ve been here, taking care of our dying father
—when AJ interrupted from the backseat.

“Was I ever on a plane, Mommy?” His voice was New Jersey through and through:
evva onna plane.

“Ayj, you know you weren’t,” she replied. “Did you say hello to your uncle Jamie?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He said the F-word.”

Deirdre exhaled wearily. “Off to a great start.”

“It was self-defense!” I threw my arms apart, exaggerating a plea for mercy, trying to keep things light. “I was attacked by the rear end of this high-octane death machine.” I turned around and looked at AJ. “Come on, kid. Don’t give your mother any ammunition against me.”

Deirdre sighed again. “Just watch your mouth around him, Jamie.”

AJ had already grown since the Christmas photo Deirdre and her husband, Andy, had mailed me; dressed in a shirt and a tie and framed by an evergreen wreath, he’d seemed prim and well behaved. He looked more playful in person, rolling a multicolored rubber ball from hand to hand, but I guessed he was kept pretty tight under Deirdre’s thumb. “You can fly on a plane to California. That’s where I live,” I said to him.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed.”

“You can go when you’re ten,” Deirdre said.

“That’s two times my age,” AJ protested.

“He has Andy’s knack for numbers,” Deirdre whispered.

“Five years is a long time. We’ll work on her, AJ.” His eyes twinkled back—a lovely moment, a little reward for my efforts to befriend him, but one that evaporated quickly as Deirdre spoke again.

“You’re still smoking.”

“I’ve cut back quite a bit,” I said.

“
Cut back
isn’t the same as quit.” She sounded like a mother lecturing to a teenager—like our mother, who’d once caught us sneaking cigarettes in the attic. How old were we then? Mom died when I was seventeen and Dee was fifteen; this would have been a couple years before. I’d taken the heat that day, “confessing” that I’d pressured Dee, when in fact it had been little sister who wanted to get in on big brother’s bad habit. The whole episode had ended in some kind of punishment for me when Dad got home.

“Look, I’m a very civilized smoker,” I said. “I sit next to an open window when I smoke in my own apartment. I’m not some
chimney
you have to tolerate under your roof.”

“You’re not staying under my roof.”

“Where am I staying?” But I knew before I’d completed the question: at my father’s house. About a half mile ago we hadn’t turned right at the middle school, which would have taken us to where Deirdre, Andy, and AJ lived on the other side of Greenlawn. Instead we had continued straight on, toward the house where we grew up.

“I need you to keep an eye on Nana,” she said.

Our grandmother had been living with our father, her only son, for the past few years, taking care of him through his illness. I had no idea what state I’d find her in, what kind of help she needed. I tried to remember the last news I’d gotten about Nana, in one of Deirdre’s monthly phone calls. “How is she?”

“Well, she’s eighty-five years old, and she just watched her son die,” she said, turning the van into the driveway. “Think about it.”

A tightness took hold of my stomach, the awful feeling of returning to a place reverberating with old hostility. The yard looked barren. The spindly oak tree that had stood near the sidewalk was gone, opening up the view to the house—two stories and an attic covered in pale, sooty shingles. The place had always looked its best in the summer, surrounded by green grass, leafy oaks, flowering honeysuckle and azalea bushes. In the winter it resembled some kind of Gothic rooming house, all cold doorknobs and creaky floorboards, a block of grayish white not so different from the grayish white winter sky above it. I thought of what I’d find inside: canned beer in the fridge, a thermostat not turned up high enough, lights flipped off in every empty room. The thrifty way Teddy Garner kept house. Then I remembered what I wouldn’t find: Teddy—my father—at the center of it.

For years everyone had referred to my father’s condition as Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t exactly that. He suffered from a particularly virulent form of what the doctors labeled nonspecific dementia, akin to Alzheimer’s but ultimately not diagnosable without a brain biopsy—something my father, with his fear and loathing of the medical establishment, did not allow. The label made no difference; the nerve connections corroding inside his brain, nonspecifically, from the time he was in his mid-fifties, made all the difference in the world. He was dead before he turned sixty.

I had ceased contact with my father five years earlier. Had cut him off. Deirdre periodically pressured me to come home. Her most recent plea came ten days before, when she warned me that this hospitalization would likely be his last. But he was brought in just before New Year’s, 2000, the turn of the millennium, a time when even the most rational people were spooked by dire apocalyptic scenarios: computer networks powering down, electricity fritzing off around the globe, passenger jets falling from the sky. No one was flying then. I’d personally stocked up on batteries, canned food and bottled water, just in case. It was a distracting time—neurosis on a mass scale.
Y2K.
A compelling reason to stay away.

But even if I had simply taken the first available flight to New Jersey, stood alongside my sister and brother-in-law, my grandmother and my aunt, claimed my belated membership in the vigilant inner circle, it wouldn’t have changed one basic fact: My father lacked the faculties to recognize me. The moment for restorative visitations had passed long ago. Woody had urged me to hurry back for my own sake, for
a sense of closure,
but I didn’t take much stock in this. “The case has been closed for years,” I told him. For five years, to be precise, since my father and I had our last argument—what I decided would be our final argument.

Deirdre’s call had come during an unlit early-morning hour while I was deep in sleep. “It’s over,” she said, sniffling through tears. “You didn’t get to say good-bye.” I couldn’t tell if she was angry or felt sorry for me.

I propped myself up, half awake, tented in blackness, fumbling for something to say. All the usual sentiments seemed wrong, inappropriate to our family’s situation, our strained relations. “What happens now?” I asked.

“There’s a lot to do,” she said. “I’m going to need your help.”

I found myself struggling to recall if I had any freelance work lined up for the next couple days; how difficult it would be to meet with Anton, my pot dealer, before I left San Francisco; which of my overburdened credit cards had room for a last-minute cross-country airfare. “I’ll probably need a little time to get myself together,” I told her.

“Sure, just take your time,” she said, sobs sucked up into steely sarcasm. “See if you can fit it into your schedule, you know, before he’s fucking buried.”

This caught me off guard. I can see now that it shouldn’t have; estranged or not, he was my father, this was his funeral. But on the spot, I thought, I hoped, that I could just show up at the last minute, shake a few hands, and move on—like any other far-off acquaintance. I was wrong.

When we were children, Deirdre and I used to push past our parents and race each other up the stairs of the apartment building in Manhattan where Nana lived. We’d find our grandmother standing ramrod straight in the doorway, wearing an apron over a fancy dress, a potholder in her hand. We’d throw ourselves at her, and she’d always say, in her heavy Irish brogue, “Smelled the cooking, did you?” as she shooed us inside to eat something hearty like baked ham and boiled potatoes. The ritual changed over time—we got older and less demonstrative, and Nana spent far fewer hours in the kitchen after her husband, who we called Papa, died—but I still thought of her that way. Welcoming.

There was no sight of her as I lugged my bags from the minivan into the house. Instead I found her sitting in the kitchen, her eyes fixed on a TV perched atop the refrigerator. I went to her side and wrapped my arms around her. Even in the old days, Nana had been more of a back-patter than a hugger; along with her stiff posture came a certain emotional rigidity. But this time, as I felt the nubs of her vertebrae and the hard lines of her shoulder blades, I got absolutely nothing in return.

I asked her how she was feeling. She shrugged, nothing more. As I slunk back toward the counter she said, “Make yourself a cup of tea, Jimmy.”

The name halted my steps. No one had called me Jimmy since high school, and I’d more or less forgotten that anyone ever had.
Jamie
was the name I’d given myself when I left home. (No one ever, ever, used the name on my birth certificate, James, though the stoners I hung out with in college liked to call me Rockford, after the TV detective played by the actor whose name I shared.) When members of my family used
Jimmy,
I felt them clinging to a me who no longer existed. To Nana I would always be the boy racing up four flights of stairs to greet her.

I was starting to take off my coat, thinking about a nap, when Deirdre called from across the room, “Don’t get too comfortable.”

She was scanning a clipboard and repeatedly clicking the end of a ballpoint pen,
snap-snap, snap-snap,
a tic that pressed whiteness into the tip of her thumb. I noticed her manicured fingernails, maroon like her lipstick. She used to bite her nails, right down to the skin. “Follow me,” she said, waving toward the stairs, whisking me into the centripetal force of her plans.