Palm Beach International Airport is clean, manageable, and suburban, just the way my father likes his life. It’s January now, four months after my mother has died, and with the lonely holidays behind me, I’m making one of my winter visitations when airfare is cheap. It’s a strange feeling, knowing my mother won’t be at the airport to meet me. Sometimes I miss her. Most of the time, now, I am relieved not to have to worry about her failing health. It surprises me how often she is out of my mind completely.
With carry-on bag on my shoulder, I emerge from the jetway, passing the usual herd of white hairs. Ladies in sequin sweatshirts. Men in windbreakers and baseball caps. All in every shade of pastel imaginable. It’s a flock of snowbirds thick as pigeons. They are all waiting for their children, grandchildren, anyone young to get off the plane from New York. These migratory retirees—white and middle class—number nearly a million in Florida. They are aggressive about their pursuit of the good life, and proud to show their kids the orange tree in the backyard, the alligator in the lake by the golf course, and to gift them with the warmth of the sun. As they greet their cherished visitors at the airport, they beam with pride. Yet there’s desperation in their eyes, I think. Is it reasonable to expect so much pleasure from your children? Is it reasonable to expect anything but the same old patterns of behavior from parents?
I step out onto the sidewalk and here’s something new: the front of Dad’s car is falling off. Half of the fender is mashed in and hanging off like it’s just had a stroke or been stricken with Bell’s palsy. The left side is steaming and hissing in the airport parking lot like a collapsed soufflé. I was planning on saving money on a rental by using his car while down here. I always stay with him because hotels are very expensive. The whole point was to get in some face time with both him and the sun without paying for much except airfare. The freelancer son takes a holiday. Now I won’t have any wheels to use to escape him. I tell myself to stay pleasant, avoid confrontation.
“What happened, Dad?”
“I hit the median.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all.”
“Don’t tell me you were talking on your cell phone.”
“I was calling to check your flight status.”
“Or were you answering a call from any one of your friends? I told you to stop answering that phone when you’re driving. You’re going to have your license revoked. Imagine not having a car around here! What would you do, Dad?”
“Please, Bobby, don’t start nagging at me. You just got here.”
This is not good, not the plan at all, to start off so poorly. We’ve had so many awful fights down here in the past. Always about control. We both have very firm ideas of how things should be done. Where to eat and what time, for instance. The volume of the TV in the living room. Sliding doors to the balcony opened or closed? How strong should the coffee be? Important things, the stuff of life. Once, when my mother was still alive, Dad and I fought so hard about something so minute it seems absurd to describe it (the proper exit from a mall, okay?), and I actually threw his backseat car door open on Federal Highway—this was around midnight—and told him to pull over so I could get out and walk to a hotel. He told me he was sorry I had come to visit. I told him to fuck himself, all this unfolding right in front of my mother, who never swore and hated seeing her “boys” fight. Big drama over nothing. But uncontrollable as the weather.
According to a therapist whom I was talking to at a bar down here, children do tend to get into conflicts while visiting their snowbird parents in Florida. It’s a combination of factors. Personal space issues for one, agendas for another. The kids want to get to the beach. The parents, who never set foot on a beach, want them home early so they can take them to early-bird dinner specials. They want to advise their children on how to raise children. Their children want them to butt out. They want to buy their grandchildren ice-cream cones, a deadly idea in an era of parents obsessed with childhood obesity. Control, control, control. Other than incest and alcohol, is there anything more disruptive to family dynamics? One friend of my parents, a perfectly nice, laid-back woman, had a daughter-in-law who didn’t like to see her having a couple of cocktails before dinner. So the daughter-in-law stopped bringing the grandchildren to visit. It was devastating and punitive. “She was drinking,” my mother explained at the time, “because her daughter-in-law was making her so anxious.”
Florida, in other words, can be a multigenerational mosh pit.
So why would anything go according to my carefully laid plans on this trip?
“We can still drive this,” Dad says as we pull out of the parking lot. “No problem.”
We approach the airport spur, with the front of his car rattling and smoking. Soon a distinct odor of burning—Toyota Teriyaki—permeates the air. People are driving past, giving us looks. My mood has gone murderous. The car seems to be getting worse by the minute. The temperature gauge is rising to high. I can’t take my eyes off it.
“Dad, we aren’t going to make it to your apartment,” I say. “It’s ten miles away.”
“Oh, yes, we are,” he says. “I can call Triple A from there.”
“The engine’s overheating. It’s about to catch fire. Pull over.”
“Not necessary. This is my car. I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you crazy? Pull over right now or you’ll end up getting us killed.”
We are in the middle of the little city of Palm Beach now, the billion-dollar sandbar I find so appealing. I love that he has made his winter habitat on the edge of such elegance. But I hate that his middle-brow silver sedan is now smoking and making a total spectacle of us at a red light on South County Road, within sight of two upscale restaurants and The Breakers hotel. A headband-wearing blonde in the palest blue cocktail dress crosses with her white poodle in front of us. She gives us a look that is both concerned and condescending.
“There’s a service station right here, Dad. You have to pull in.”
“I’ll do what I want. Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I will tell you what to do since you have no idea what you’re doing.”
Mad as it is, I grab the wheel and steer it to the right. He’s about to fight me when his cell phone starts ringing, or perhaps I should say singing. His natural tendency to answer a call in any situation takes over. He grabs his phone from his shirt pocket, letting me guide the car in as he applies the brakes and turns off the burning engine.
An attendant comes and looks at the broiling, hissing mess, shaking his head. “What happened?” he asks.
I just shrug and point to Dad, on the phone.
“Hello, Edie,” he’s cooing. “Marvelous to hear your voice! What a thrill!”
Edie?
Later, over dinner (next to the service station) at Chuck and Harold’s, one of the more pleasant restaurants on our regular list, he explains: “Edie lives down the road. I met her at a bridge game last year, and we played well together. She’s a terrific partner, and very pleasant to be with. A real friendship developed. Strictly platonic.”
“I certainly hope so,” I say evenly. “Mom was still alive last year.”
“But she wasn’t able to get out much,” he says.
I order another martini. What is going on here exactly?
An hour later, Dad’s car is declared out of commission. So a taxi takes us back to his apartment. It’s on Ocean Boulevard in a white wedding cake of a building called The President, sitting between the intercoastal waterway and the ocean. The owner, Dad’s landlord, has decorated it in a tasteful array of whites. The water view is very pleasant. Aunt Sylvia lives upstairs. She dresses like everyone else in this building, treating life as an occasion to look your best—women in pumps, men in sports jackets for brunch. Here life is not about sweatshirts and sneakers, and I like that. My mother never did. And my father’s essentially oblivious. He dresses how he wants.
The last time I was here my mother was still hanging on after five years of struggle. I can still see her everywhere in this apartment. There are even some leftover cans of Ensure, her dietary supplement, in the cupboard. Here’s the balcony where she used to hobble out in her housedress to watch me play tennis down below with Dad’s friends. Here’s the door that knocked her down in a fierce wind and ended up leaving her covered in bruises. She was so helpless. It was hard, watching her in her hopelessness. It was even harder seeing her thin, bruised arms and neck because she dressed in the most unflattering T-shirts. One day I convinced her to come downstairs to be with me on the dock. She sat in silence, her skeletal face sharp as a hatchet.
This was not the mother I knew, the one who was so easy to amuse.
“You know, Mom, we all feel bad that you’re so unwell,” I told her. “But it’s a sin to despair. Did you know that? I looked that up and found it in the Bible.”
“I look terrible,” she said. “My spleen is so enlarged I look pregnant.”
“But what is the point of being so down? You’re not in pain, are you?”
It wasn’t a fair question. Why should she cheer up at sixty-eight years old, with mortality hanging over her, years before it was due? She shook her head, thought for a moment. The wind whipped her thinning hair and slacks on the reeds that were her legs. Her neck was like a stalk sticking out of her T-shirt. Why couldn’t she dress up a little?
“Well, how about this? I won’t complain if you won’t criticize,” she said.
“Okay, but I just have to tell you one thing, Mom.”
“What, dear?”
“You could use some new shirts.”
“Oh no, honey. Please don’t start nagging about my clothes. I know I’m not stylish enough for you. I never have been. Why can’t you accept that?”
In a way she was right. A mother isn’t someone you can decorate according to taste, like an apartment. On the other hand, she is with you for life, isn’t she?
“It’s not about fashion, Mom,” I persisted. “When you get older, you can’t wear T-shirts and sweatshirts like that. It isn’t flattering, especially when your frame is so thin. You need shirts with collars, sleeves, and structure. It will make you feel better about yourself, I promise. And what’s with the hairnets? Aren’t those for bed?”
“My hair has gotten so thin,” she said as she touched it, yellow and wispy as sea grass blowing in the warm, salty wind. “When I step outside, it always gets messed.”
“So let’s see if we can get you some hats, okay? Please?”
“Bobby, what’s the point?”
“Why not? What else do we have to do? It’ll be my treat.”
“Oh, all right. If you insist,” she said as she stood up. “Take me to Macy’s!”
So I did. In slow motion, we traversed a busy mall in Boynton Beach. And in the women’s department, with salesclerks looking at me suspiciously, as if I were a bossy stylist from hell, I found the half-sleeve blouses I imagined for her and bought them in several colors. Then she tried on hats that looked ridiculous. But she ended up laughing at her reflection in the mirror for the first time in years. And when we got back to the apartment, she tried everything on with the kind of energy I didn’t know she had anymore. For a woman who always said that clothes didn’t matter to her, those new blouses were making her feel better than all the pills in her medicine cabinet.
“Thank you, my little personal shopper,” she said.
I can still feel the touch of her lips on my forehead.
It’s morning in the apartment now, and I’m about to make Dad some French toast using Mom’s old recipe.
“So, Dad, Edie, huh?” I’m asking as I break eggs.
“Yes, and she’s great.”
“I was just thinking, is it a little early to be running around with another woman? I mean, it’s just a few months since Mom died.”
“It’s not that serious,” Dad says. “Edie’s not available all that often anyway. But when she is, we have fun. She’s the nicest woman I’ve met down here. Just a gem.”
As I shake my head in mild disdain (Kids these days!) his phone rings. It’s Edie. Thirty years fall off his face. His eyes get big as Alka-Seltzer tablets.
“Edie! I thought you were busy! No, I have no plans. I’d love to!”
The next thing I know, the French toast is languishing upstairs and I’m standing in his parking lot watching him get into Edie’s silver Lexus for a bridge game in Delray Beach, thirty miles away. She rolls down her window to look me over. She is silver-haired, carefully tanned, lipsticked, and wearing what looks like a Rolex on her wrist. Not pretty, but nicely put together. “You have such a handsome son,” she purrs. “And Joey, he looks just like you!” Then she blows me a kiss, rolls up her window, and drives him away. I watch her make a fast hard right turn onto Ocean Boulevard. Then I stand immobilized, eating their dust, a little in shock. For a moment there’s no traffic and I hear the ocean. I hear gulls calling out, too, in mocking tones. Are they laughing at me? I came all the way down here to visit my dad, and he just ditched me for an air-kissing seductress in a luxury sedan? Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have the day to myself. But I also have—as I stand in the sun in front of his building—an entirely unexpected feeling of emptiness.
I call my brother in New York, with the news flash.
“There’s a woman named Edie in the picture,” I say.
“You’re kidding.”
“That explains why he didn’t have time for you when you were down here.”
“Who is she?”
“All I know is she drives a silver Lexus that matches her hair. Three and a half months after Mom died, and Dad appears to be dating. Is this appropriate?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff says. “But since when has Dad been appropriate?”