(44 weeks)
SATURDAY.
My father doesn’t get out much, but when he does, he enjoys himself. The man is certainly capable of joy. It’s just that his happiness makes my mother uncomfortable. Whenever he starts to come out of his shell, she likes to cram him right back in there. So disco dancing at weddings, eating dessert with too much gusto—even drumming on the kitchen table to a radio jingle—all rub my mother the wrong way. If my father even laughs too loudly, my mother tells him he’s getting “punchy.” That usually quiets him down.
So the first order of business is getting him out of the house.
After all, it is his birthday.
“Come over,” I say to him over the phone. “We’ll go out and celebrate a little. Just me and you.”
Whenever I get together with my father, I can’t help seeing it as a chance to nurse him back to health. Really, all we’re doing is heading downtown for a bite to eat, but my father is wonderfully easy to please. One time, about ten years ago, we took a walk to the old part of the city and he still talks about it to this day.
“Remember how hot it was?” my father asks me every few months. “Remember how we had to stop in at that convenience store and each of us got a soda? You got a Coke, and so did I. We drank them straight from the can— no straw, no cup. Just like that. Like construction workers. Like street hustlers!”
4:00 P.M.
When he gets to my apartment, I offer to take over the driving. He gets into the passenger seat, and right off the bat he says, “Being chauffeured makes me feel like I’m on vacation.” When he’s with my mother, my father does all the driving while my mother sits shotgun, elbows bent, pointing her house keys towards the front-door lock from forty miles away.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
He waves a hand and tells me he doesn’t need pampering.
Pampering! Since the mid-eighties, the man has been using the same ninety-nine-cent VHS tape to record and re-record the same documentaries about Nazi hunting. He keeps his cufflinks in a washed-out yogurt container on his dresser. When I was growing up, any time a roll of toilet paper accidentally fell in the toilet, my mother would set it to dry on the basin and forbid me from using it, referring to it as “your father’s toilet paper.” He has a meatball-shaped wallet made of vinyl, fat with expired coupons. When he sits down he looks like a wobbling Weeble.
4:30 P.M.
The first thing I want to do is find us a fancy bar. My father enjoys a drink, and at home, he usually can’t enjoy one properly. Unfortunately traffic is bad, and parking is even worse, so by the time we find a spot, my father is ready for supper.
After debating the meaning of various contradictory parking signs with the fervour of Talmud scholars, my father looks around.
“The area looks seedy,” he says.
We check and recheck the car doors and windows, and finally, we’re on our way.
As we walk along, my father comments on everything he sees, his index fingers pointing every which way as though he’s on a tour bus through Paris or he’s a character in a Menudo video going to a shopping mall for the first time. A panhandler! A boy with a hoop through his lip like a witch doctor! An unsavoury-looking character who might be a pickpocket!
4:50 P.M.
We find a Middle Eastern restaurant which, to be honest, is more of a cafeteria.We each order a big plate of chicken and rice, and as we eat, we drink a beer each. Beer helps my father relax. Rather than eating hunched over as though planning a prison break, he reclines and looks around. At home, he finishes a great many of his meals with the plate yanked away in mid-bite, forced to finish his corn on the cob stooped over the sink.
“What kind of rice is this?” he asks.
“White,” I say.
“I’ll have to ask your mother to buy some.”
5:25 P.M.
Finished eating, we head back to the car. There are no tickets on the windshield, and the Chicago’s Greatest Hits audio cassette still sits on the dashboard, unstolen. The afternoon has been a success.
7:10 P.M.
I call the house later to make sure my father has made it back okay, and my mother answers. She says he’s downstairs eating peanuts at the kitchen table.
“He had such a fabulous time with you today,” she says a little suspiciously. “He can’t stop talking about it.”
I ask her if he enjoyed the meal we had, and she tells me not to feed my father garbage. Beer keeps him up all night, and he has to watch his cholesterol.
“When’s the last time you had yours checked?” she asks.
I really can’t recall. My mother is always reminding me how her brother had a heart attack when he was around my age.
After I put down the phone, I stop to imagine, as I find myself doing lately, several times a day, what my heart attack would look like. It would be an undignified, pulling-down-the-drapes, cheeks-bulging-with-veal sort of thing. It would be the kind of heart attack that friends would laughingly imitate in the kitchen during my shiva, my mother shushing them from the other room.