Eli has just gotten a new short haircut, too short. His head looks like it’s been shorn, and has the effect of making his dark eyes look even larger than usual. When he comes into my bedroom from the other side of the apartment, he looks very sad and the whites of his eyes are red, like he’s been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he answers. It’s not that easy to get information out of Eli these days, but I persist.
“Does it have to do with Dad?” I ask, knowing that he’s just been in the kitchen with Roy.
“No.”
“With Gloria?” I ask, even though this seems unlikely. Eli hasn’t mentioned Gloria at all lately.
“No,” he says again.
Neither of my children seem to be brooders. Eli can be a sensitive soul, but he usually doesn’t sit with disappointment or sadness for long. And Eva, while dramatic by nature, moves past her emotional outbursts quickly. “The performance is over now, Eva,” Roy often says to her. I count myself lucky to have two children with basically sunny dispositions, but still it can be hard to just sit back and let the odds fall. With my family’s history of emotional pitfalls, I’ll probably always wonder about how much nature and nurture can really be divided, and where we all reside in that constellation. But down deep, I’m pretty sure we’re on a good route.
“Does it have to do with school?” I ask Eli.
“I don’t think so.”
“With your friends?”
“I don’t know. Mom, I’m only telling you that I’m sad. No one else.”
“Does it have to do with me?” I keep guessing.
“I don’t think so.”
“Eva?”
“I don’t know.”
I leave it alone, thinking this is probably one of the countless situations that will make itself known later. But then suddenly, Eli’s ready to talk. “It has to do with milk,” he blurts out.
“What?” I say. And we both burst into laughter. Eli is doubled over at the nonsense of his words, while I laugh at the absurdity of my worry. “Dad made me drink milk again!” Eli stamps his foot. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s milk!”
I breathe in deeply at the beauty and humor of my life. “I’m such a lucky mother,” I tell my children repeatedly, even though they probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m happy for that, too.
We’re ready to leave for Connecticut to visit Ted and Janet for the Fourth of July weekend. It will be fun to go to the beach together like we did last year. And my father will meet us there. We’ll catch him before he leaves next week with Judith on a trip to Italy, Judith’s first trip out of the country.
As I turn off the fans and pull down the shades, I stop to pick up the ringing phone. Out of the blue, it’s Aunt Anita, my father’s sister who lives in Westchester. I can’t remember Anita ever calling our apartment before except maybe once to speak to my father when he was visiting. She’s talking fast and she’s assuming I understand what she’s talking about. She is in fact trying to reach my father and she thinks he’s here with me. She’s talking about “the fall” and “the hospital” and my father calling her that morning and never calling her back again. I piece together that it’s Great-Aunt Sylvia that’s causing the alarm. Aunt Sylvia is now ninety-seven and she’s been feuding with Aunt Anita for decades. For years, Anita catered to Sylvia’s whims, dutifully fulfilling her role as beleaguered niece, until Sylvia’s complete disrespect became too insufferable even for Anita. More recently my father has taken on the job of tending to Aunt Sylvia, albeit from 200 miles away in Boston. “I’m giving all my money to Israel when I die!” is Sylvia’s ongoing threat, although we all doubt there can really be much left from the dockworker’s pension that her husband left her forty years ago.
On the topic of Aunt Sylvia, I side with my mother, who charged Sylvia with being ridiculously self-centered, even if she was an old woman. Twenty years ago at my grandmother’s funeral, I’d been shocked by Sylvia’s words. “I have no tears to shed!” she shouted as they lowered the body of her older, prettier, and more gracious sister into the grave. For a few years when I first moved to New York, I tried to make a tradition of taking Great-Aunt Sylvia to lunch at B. Altman’s every few months, thinking I was being deferential to this old aunt who lived on her own. But eventually, especially when she sent Ted the check for $1,000 after Danny died and ignored me completely, I gave up on being nice.
My father likes to think that family is important, so he takes his job of taking care of Sylvia seriously. He reports regularly to Ted and me on Sylvia’s status, even though we don’t care very much. Lately, he’s told us, Sylvia’s housekeeping and her appearance have become disorderly. And she refuses to allow the social worker to enter her apartment, convinced that she’s been tampering with her checkbook. Most recently even my father has been thought to be a threat, and she’s asked him to return the key to her apartment. But until Anita’s phone call I hadn’t heard anything about Sylvia being taken to the hospital.
“He had to call 911,” Aunt Anita is saying, “when Sylvia’s neighbor reported that Sylvia hadn’t answered her phone for three days.” The ambulance driver had to break down Sylvia’s locked door, and he found her lying unconscious on the floor. Then she ended up at Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, where they said she had a broken hip. “But that was a few days ago,” says Anita. Hadn’t my father mentioned it? “Sylvia is now refusing to have hip surgery. That’s why Joel drove down—to take care of things,” she says. “They were going to send her back to her apartment on her own, if she didn’t agree to the surgery.” Anita had been waiting all day by the phone for my father’s call from the hospital, but he’d never called. Where was he? “I don’t know what to say,” I tell her. “I’ll find out more. I’ll call him once I get to Ted’s. And then I’ll call you.” It sounds tumultuous and irresponsible even for my father, but not impossible either.
When we arrive at Ted’s house, the first thing I do is call my father. “Just walked in the door, Annie,” he says, his voice cheerful. When I ask him about Aunt Sylvia, he tells me it’s been a long haul for one day, but he’s visited Sylvia in the hospital and successfully convinced her to have the operation on her hip, and now he’s made it back to Andover. He’ll see us at the beach tomorrow, he says. And two days later, he says with satisfaction, he and Judith will be on their way to Italy.
“You’d better call Anita,” I tell him. “She’s been waiting all day to hear from you.”
“Right,” he says. “I’ll do that.”
“Dad, why didn’t you say anything to Ted or me about Aunt Sylvia?” I ask him.
“She was fine,” he says. “911 took care of getting her to the hospital. It was only when she refused the operation that she got into trouble. And that only just happened today. Now everything’s taken care of.”
I cringe at the thought of my father as caretaker. Yet he is my father, the one who I always believed wanted to take care of me when my mother couldn’t come through.
The next morning we all convene at the beach on the Fourth of July, as planned. My father arrives last, reporting that he’s found a great parking spot in the grocery store lot. He spreads out his towel and goes to join the grandchildren who have already begun to build a sandcastle. The kids are already hungry so Ted and I go to the snack bar to get sandwiches. When we return, my father is folding up his towel and preparing to leave. “You’re going now?” I ask. “You just got here.”
“I need to leave,” he tells me. “I told Judith I’d help her with tonight’s dinner. You know, we invited over a couple who’s just returned from Italy and who may have some interesting tips,” he says. “Besides, I may be parked illegally and I don’t want to get a ticket.”
“But we arranged this day at the beach a month ago,” I start to berate him. But I stop myself from going on, from pointing out that it was because he wanted to spend time with the grandchildren that we’d planned the trip to begin with. His logic has always been his own, and I know he loves his grandchildren. Just like he believes he’s doing a good job taking care of Aunt Sylvia. “Bye, Dad,” I say. “Have a good dinner tonight.”
The next day when I call him to say goodbye again, he’s in excellent spirits. “It’s a good thing I left yesterday when I did,” he tells me. “The patrol car was just coming into the grocery store parking lot to give tickets to the illegally parked cars.” He’d managed to park the car in the lot and not get a ticket.
Communicating with my father has always required taking one step back. His actions don’t necessarily mesh with what his intentions seem to be. And the fact is, that’s demanding. His brand of being a father requires a kind of care in return. If I can remember to pay attention to that, maybe I can finally be an adult with him. I can only hope that my own children will always feel my love clearly.