Exit Laughing (12 page)

“Stop bragging,” I said.

“I’m not 106?” He looked at me, genuinely surprised.

“You’re 92,” I said, realizing that he really didn’t remember how old he was.

“Well, what do you know,” he laughed, and then the doctor and I laughed too.

We drove back to The Breakers, Al once again his cheerful self. “Are you sure I’m not 106?” he asked me.

“Positive,” I said.

“Well, I sure feel 106.”

In the following year he would have times of clarity, but our lunches together changed. His hearing, always bad, became worse. Finally, we had lunches in the dining room of The Breakers instead of at the Belmont Brewery by the beach. Because he was always losing his hearing aids, I’d write him notes: “YOU HAVE A DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT NEXT WEEK!” “DO YOU NEED A NEW BELT?” “YOU’RE LOSING WEIGHT!” All in caps, like shouted messages. His eyesight was failing, and his glasses were getting to be a problem, too.

I began to find his meticulously kept apartment in disorder—piles of clothes in the living room, plates not picked up. “They just leave my clothes everywhere,” Al said. I stormed down to the manager’s office to complain. “We try,” said the manager. “Al pulls his clothes out of drawers and the closet and dumps them on the floor. He won’t let us take the dishes. He’s still drinking martinis. We don’t know what to do.”

And neither did I. I was in constant contact now with his cousin George, sending him Al’s mail and bills, and every few
months George would fly down to visit him and we’d have dinner. There was talk of whether Al should have a hernia operation; the nurse said his hernia was the worst she had ever seen. But he was getting weaker, too weak for an operation. We called hospice.

Lunches together were now in his room on a tray, and there was no conversation, spoken or written. But I wanted to be there, and I wanted the people at The Breakers and the hospice nurses to know he was loved and had a family. The martinis were still a problem; one night he drank an unknown number of them and went down to the lobby and left The Breakers. He had to be chased down the street.

Months went by. He didn’t die, so hospice left.

My husband and I have a trip planned in April: “WE’RE GOING TO FRANCE!” I write on a card. And Al nods. “France!” he says.

Just before we return from our trip, I get an email from George saying that hospice has returned and the nurse just called him to say that Al is close to the end. He’s flying down to Long Beach as soon as he can get on a flight.

My husband and I return late that night, and early the next morning I get on the freeway, praying I won’t be too late. George is on a flight that arrives early afternoon.

The hospice nurse lets me into his apartment and Al is in bed with his eyes closed, unconscious, but he looks like he’s sleeping. The nurse, a new one I don’t know, says it’s very close to the end, he’s probably been waiting for me to return. I hold his hand, all bones and bruised skin, and talk to him.
Can he hear me? I’ve read that hearing is the last sense to go, so I believe that he does know I’m here.

Sun pours into his little apartment, the radio is playing music, and as I sit next to his bed, I explain to the nurse who everybody is in the family photographs—my mother celebrating New Year’s Eve with him, my brother, my husband, our children, and all the grandchildren. I tell her the story of Al and my mother’s romance, the piano playing, the handholding. He’s no longer her anonymous dying patient; he’s a man who has had a wonderful romance in old age with a beautiful woman, a man with a large family who loves him dearly.

Here’s something I’ve never told anyone because it sounds so farfetched, so odd, but it’s true: on the radio, Tony Bennett is singing that he left his heart in San Francisco. The soundtrack for Al’s death. Can Al hear it? I hope so.

His breathing begins to change and there’s a sigh, then silence, and he’s gone. In his own bed, with no tubes, no machines.

His wallet is on his dresser. I take out the Neptune card, grateful for his planning to make it easier for us to handle, for not being in denial about dying someday. I call and give Neptune his prepaid number and they say they’ll be there in an hour or so. The help at The Breakers—the housekeepers, the cooks, the repairmen who have helped care for Al this past year—all come in to pay their last respects, crying and telling me what a good man he was. His cousin George arrives. The hospice nurse leaves for lunch. George goes to check into his hotel.

I’m alone with Al’s body in the apartment. I’m sure he’d have had a fit over this.
Gone is gone
. He’d have told me to leave, go home, this isn’t part of the plan. But I don’t want to leave him alone.

Finally, the Neptune guys show up, polite and dignified in their shiny black suits, and I hand them Al’s prepaid card and go over the paperwork with them. Then they both go into Al’s bedroom with their stretcher and I can hear the rustling of the body bag and I remember what Al had said about death and how unafraid he was. It doesn’t feel like Al going into that bag, it’s like an old suit being collected that he left behind.

And suddenly I realize I can have the real Al again. Not the confused and frightened old man who had dumped piles of clothes on the floor, whose mind became muddled, but the guy my mother fell in love with, who had given her diamond rings and made her happier than she’d ever been, and who loved playing the piano as much as she did. The real Al who has simply gone back to where he came from.

The Zenith my parents bought in 1978 had five channels and weighed about as much as an economy sized Buick. It took seven minutes to produce a picture, which began as a Tinkerbell-sized dot in the center of the screen. When school ended each day, I’d tear off for home, pluck the circular on/off button, and make myself an Ellio’s frozen pizza, which would be finished a few minutes after Tinkerbell morphed into the Road Runner. The premise of this program was biblical: coyote chases fast bird, but fast bird is more desert-savvy than coyote, so food chain theory gets turned on its head, and hilarity ensues.

In hindsight, I see that I cherished this particular cartoon because I, in fact, was the Road Runner. With no voice whatsoever, save for a “beep-beep” here and there, and using only his remarkable speed and quiet intellect, he outwits his tenacious nemesis and is free to run. No one in my life in 1978 wanted to eat me. But elementary school was my coyote, and I couldn’t get away fast enough.

On this particular Tuesday afternoon, the Zenith came to life just as the coyote was plummeting off a cliff and his body was about to smack the earth in a small mushroom cloud of brown smoke. I’d missed the setup as I had tried to cool my
pizza and was distracted by the sound of a vacuum cleaner just outside the den. It was Janice, a woman who was once employed as a nurse in her native Haiti, but was now a housecleaner, our babysitter, and an American citizen. I knew she missed the life she once had, and it always made me sad for her. She said that being a nurse gave her “purpose in life,” and it was hard for me to look at her and not think about these words.

The vacuum bumped the edges of the wall in a lonely and graceless drone. To and fro, repeat, to and fro, and it drowned out my show, leaving the TV screen snowy with static. I got closer, turned up the volume even louder and began, as I often did, to envy the ease of being animated, the utter freedom to scatter and smash, to chase and fly. BOING! ZOINK! ZOWIE!

I took a bite of my pizza, but it was too soon, way too soon. The cheese slid off, and the sauce underneath was hotter than lava, capable of burning a hole through German steel.
Auuuugh!
The skin was burned off the roof of my mouth, riddled to raw by the magma-hot sauce. I touched it with my tongue, knowing I’d be feeling it all night, and tomorrow in school, while my teacher clicked her chalk against the board in a cloud of endless monotony.

Janice rolled closer, just outside the TV room, and I turned to her because the sound was erasing every zoink! and zowie!, every boink! and doing! I knew she was lost in the task, dreaming of doing anything but running over Cheerios with our vacuum cleaner, and I squeezed my eyes shut to avoid the thought of it. And when I opened them the coyote, who’d strapped himself to a lit missile, was soaring toward the Road Runner with a huge and confident grin. This animal had
amazing optimism for someone who failed as often as he did. The vacuum shut off for a second, and the silence was joyous.

BOING! ZOINK! ZOWIE! Yes! But then my younger sister and brother came barreling into the room, chasing each other and toppling near my plate of pizza, blocking the television with their lesser sibling selves. “Move!” I barked, but they didn’t listen. My brother, Alex, a toddler, was smothering my little sister, Rachel, and she screamed in his ear and slapped his butt, and I starting watching them like I watched the television, adding to their mayhem by lightly jabbing any bit of flesh that pointed my way. Rachel’s foot hit my pizza, and it sprayed sauce on the laces of her white sneaker. “Hey!”

“Whoops.”

“Move!” I said again, and they did, to the couch where they settled, quieted, watching the cartoon. The pizza was okay, thank God. Rachel, sucking her thumb, leaned on a huge floor pillow with a barn setting painted on it. The sheep looked like polar bears, and for some reason a zebra was in the yard, eating where the cows should have been. Alex sneezed and had a bubble of snot expanding from his nose. It filled and rounded while he ignored it and laughed at the way the Road Runner pulled to a halt just before a cliff, leaving the coyote to overrun the edge, dropping once again. Alex giggled and looked at me, swiping at his nose with his elbow.

In the quiet, I could hear the wind outside making a swirling, high-pitched whistle, and a tapping began on the window above the TV, as if someone out there were trying to get our attention. I looked up and saw the rhododendrons in our front yard bumping the glass. A gray sky blanketed what had
been blue, so sudden a change, and now it might rain, even pour. When I stood to see the action, I noticed my father’s car in the driveway. Really? During the Road Runner?

It was the first time in my life that I’d ever seen the man home before six on a weekday, and my immediate thought was a parent-teacher conference. Yikes. I could hear my teacher sighing before she spoke, “He daydreams, stares out at the trees, never seems engaged, and is constantly looking at the time, packing his things a half hour before the bell.”

Please. No.

Did my father exist at 3:45
PM
on a school day? was a question that hadn’t been answered until now, so I stared at his Lincoln Continental, which I knew was making those panging noises under its wide, overheated hood. I asked my siblings if they knew why he was home and waited to hear his booming voice or the sound of his two thick briefcases as they pounded onto the floor in the front hall. Alex got up to see the car, and I sat on the couch next to my sister, ignoring the zoinks! and zowies! and the taps of the rhododendrons, because I needed to know where my father was. I knew it couldn’t be good, the Lincoln in the driveway during cartoons, and then I thought it was a surprise, and then I thought he was away on a trip and had taken a cab, and then I heard the strangest thing: a yelp or a high scream, but not a woman’s scream. A fierce and piercing shriek, a man’s cry for life, and the eyes of my brother and sister leapt to me for answers, but my eyes searched theirs for the same.

Janice said something in a mumble, and the heavy thumping of feet raced down the back staircase like thundering guns, straight for the TV room, and silence would have found us but
for the beep-beep of the Road Runner as my father’s terrified face came into view. And he just glared at me, slack-jawed and pale, as I waited for the walls to crumble, the fire to spread.

“Take your brother and sister in the backyard,” he said. “And don’t come back until I tell you to.”

It was bad. Whatever it was. And my skin tingled as the possibilities swirled in my brain. I knew this much: my tone with my brother and sister would need to reflect calm. I kept my voice high and friendly, as if we’d all just met. “Should we play a game? Who wants to go on the swings?”

As a leader, I was new, a rookie, wobbly-kneed but standing, and they both looked at me like a stranger.

“Good. Let’s play on the swings,” I repeated, and thought only of my father, picturing him entangled with a predator, a murderer, and where was Janice, poor Janice? Outside, I pointed at the jungle gym and asked Alex what he had done in school that day, and the absurdity of the question, coming from me, seemed to be the clincher for him. He began to cry, the tears building on themselves, his mouth wide now, the end of times. His sorrow thwarted our route to the swings, and I told them both that Dad would call us when it was time to come back and that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. My sister looked back at the house and I guided them, my hands on their shoulders, farther into the yard.

“Look,” I said, finding a dog-chewed Wiffle ball near the swings. Neither of them cared. The sky was silver and streaked with blackened clouds that were trading positions with bizarre speed. A storm. I tossed the ball to Rachel, and it landed at her feet. “Come on, throw it back.”

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Why was Dad scared?”

“I … didn’t think that. There’s nothing wrong. Throw it. Throw me the ball. Give me a pop up.”

She didn’t. She leaned to see the house.

“I want to go back,” Alex said.

“What happened to Dad?” Rachel said and began to weep as well.

I walked to the ball and tossed it to Alex. It bumped his chest and fell to the grass. In my brother and sister’s faces I saw my own thoughts. Doom. I told them to stop crying and to just toss me the stupid ball, but I knew something evil was unraveling back there, hovering over our things, our suburban safety. The gnawing of it all was in my throat and my kneecaps, and I, too, was beginning to freak. Was my dad hurt? Would we ever be the same? Frozen pizza, teacher conferences, and vacuums creating the buzzes of lazy weekday afternoons. Had the Road Runner ended? Was the TV engulfed in flames? Where was Janice standing, and would the zebra pillow be charred by the vicious bite of whatever scared my father into that hideous scream?