Habit (28 page)

Our parents' marriage was harsh for quite a while. When I was in boarding school, Daddy felt so desperate over their inability to compromise on his budgets that he moved out and sold the antiques from his side of the family to clear their debts. The formal separation lasted two years. Daddy still took care of Ma, paying her an allowance and the rent of our family home, from a distance and with firm rules. She's acknowledged that her satisfying career as a portrait painter might never have flourished without that forced incentive.

Daddy had his second heart attack just after he left her. He went to live in a small run-down dump of a hotel near our house. When I was home for vacations, I used to meet him at a local pub for dinner and watch him numb himself with martinis. He'd ask questions about school and my life, and then forget my answers and ask the same questions again. One balmy summer evening, he invited me back to his place—he had a cassette tape I'd never heard, of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. His little room was a shock: so sad, with his undershirts and socks drying on the edge of the bathtub. He perched on the bed so I could sit in his only chair, and we listened to Reverend King in rapt silence.

Years later, just when David and I had first moved back to Philadelphia with the children, I ran into an older couple who used to do things with my parents before they separated. I was glad to see these old friends after so many years, but that night I called Daddy in Florida to tell him I couldn't figure out why they'd seemed a little cold. He explained that after he'd left Ma, this couple had invited him to dinner.

—We've picked you instead of Marjorie,
they said.

He was so affronted on Ma's behalf (and well-oiled cocktail-wise, I'm guessing) that he told them both off and stalked out before they could serve the main course.

Corporate law was too dull for Daddy's taste. He had a varied legal career as a prosecutor and defense lawyer. He wrote, too, and still deserves some credit for a historic period of rejuvenation in Philadelphia under the Democrats. He so respected Ma's conviction about the necessity for art in all our lives that he eventually dreamed up the “One Percent for Fine Arts” program: One percent of public money spent on any building project must be used for fine arts—sculptures, frescoes, murals, and fountains, whatever. Whenever I go in the city, I'm bumping into reminders of Daddy—Claes Oldenburg's
Giant Clothespin
by City Hall, or Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter's pewter birds suspended in patterned flocks above my head at a ticketing lobby in the airport—and I'm thinking about his relationship with Ma.

They got back together when he joined AA, to all our amazement. They still had their moments, like when she backed her car over his shih tzu. (
Your father left the front door open, and Dusty wandered out and fell asleep in the driveway. I told him he had to be careful about the door, but he doesn't pay attention!
) Daddy was extremely sentimental about his pets.

Anyway.

—What should we do with the Chinese barrel?

—That could go to Margaret—it's in her portrait, she might like to have it.

—There are a few more books here I must have missed.

—Oh, what?

—There's one called
The White Stallions of Vienna
.

—That's for Colette. She loves the Lipizzaners.

—What about
The Birds of North America
?

—Keep. Birds are very important.

—
A Stranger in Spain.

—Strangers on a train?

—One stranger. In Spain.

—
Oh. I mumph . . .

—Ma?

—Yumph . . .

—Ma, do you need to go to sleep now or can we go on?

—
No, I'm all right. What did you say about
strange brains
?

—A STRANGER. In SPAIN.

—Why would I have that?

—I don't know; it's your book. Do you want to learn Spanish?

—Give it to your cousin Christine. She's taking her daughter to Spain.

—Okay. Christine. Now,
Gut Instinct: What Your Stomach Is Trying to Tell You
.

—Definitely keep.

—Strong's
Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
? It's an updated edition. Sounds exhausting to me.

—Ha-ha. Keep.

As Ma became more and more religious, Daddy had to find ways to keep up with her on his own terms. They went to church together. He embarked on a column for the local Florida paper, earnestly exploring the key aspects of a given religion each week—Buddhism, Judaism, Lutheran, what have you. Ma was his editor.

I stop for a minute to look at a framed photograph—a real treasure.

Colette took this picture. We all have our copies. Ma and Daddy in Sarasota, probably taken a year or two before he died. Sparkling water, bleached wood. A faded sky.

It's a picnic on a dock; Ma is holding a paper plate. She has a little cross around her neck. They're both wearing beautiful turquoise button-down shirts that almost match—Daddy's is cotton, and Ma's is definitely linen. Daddy has a jaunty straw hat to keep his freckles out of the sun, and Ma's adjusting the brim for him. His eyes are closed, and he's patiently dipping his head so she can reach, with dignified acquiescence. And they're smiling; it seems like he's just teased her about something that made them both laugh. Daddy did love to make Ma laugh.

This is a picture I hold in my heart.
Keep, yes, keep.

I was furious at Daddy for quite a while after he died, even before I heard the rumors about his gambling at the golf club. He had made some effort to warn us that Ma would need financial help. But the closer I looked into their affairs, the more clear it became that his children (who had not much of a sibling bond at that point) had been left with a colossal, time-consuming, emotionally draining, and expensive mess. Given the circumstances, it was mostly going to be
my
mess, and could end very badly for Ma. The most disappointing thing was that if the two of them had been more practical, the job I'd volunteered for could have been so much less stressful. I kept wondering what he was thinking would happen. I'd look at that picture of them in their matching shirts, smiling and fiddling away while Rome burned around them, and just think
Phooey
.

There was a night that first year after Daddy died when despair really kicked in: I was in the middle of selling their Florida house and apartment hunting for Ma and dealing with the accountant I'd had to hire to sort out the three years of tax mistakes Daddy seemed to have overlooked, and somehow trying to convince Ma she couldn't afford to keep racking up bills with her icon video project no matter how much she thought all humankind needed it, and figuring out how to set the boundaries so there wouldn't be any unfortunate episodes with Ma and the kids.

That night, I got the kids to bed and went outside to stew on the back steps. I was so focused on my anger at Daddy, I wished more than anything he hadn't gone and died so I could tell him to his face how
stupid
he was, and ask him
why, why
did he do this, and, this
terrible
job of his that I'd somehow inherited
SUCKED
and he was
really bad at it. WHAT
did he think the end of Ma's life would be like, or mine and David's and our children's for that matter? And
WHY
did he even marry her and
create
this problem if he couldn't solve it before he had to go and
DIE?
I mentally shook my fist at the night sky in the general direction of where he might be right then, and thought
Daddy! What am I going to DO???

Then I emptied my mind for a minute and listened. I'm not psychic and I don't even like the idea of communicating with spirits; whether that's possible or not is beside the point. But I was so desperate; I sat there on the steps, looked up at the stars, and waited.

I waited, and then I heard something that I've puzzled about a lot over the years. Even now, I think I'm only just beginning to understand and appreciate what I heard that night after I'd railed at my recently deceased father and demanded he come back right away and explain himself, or help, or
do something for lord's sake.

He laughed. I really heard him laugh.

The laughter went on for a while, and it grew, and sort of embraced me. It's hard to explain. It was so so real.

Daddy had a great laugh, warm and intelligent and full of compassion. His laugh was never at anyone's expense; it always included us. When he took me for driving lessons in his eager little orange VW bug, I'd regularly stall out on this one hill on a quiet road behind the golf course and start to roll backward, feverishly trying to get back in first gear, squeaking in monkey panic:

—
Ohmygodohmygodhelpohmygoddaddyhelpdaddyhelp!

He always kept his cool on that hill. He didn't barrage me with rapid-fire instructions. He'd sit back and wait till I figured it out. And he'd laugh, like we were both having the most jolly time rolling backward down the hill by the sixth fairway. As if we were sharing the most wonderful joke.

That used to really piss me off.

So here we are some three decades later, Ma and I: We're on the sun-faded dock in our matching shirts. She'll be adjusting my jaunty straw hat from now on, and I'm working on my humility and patience. Rome's not burning anymore, and we both really know how to laugh.

Toward the end of his life, Daddy told me he was hoping he'd be the first to die, because life would be just too dull without Ma. She kept him amused, he said.

I think I kind of know how he felt.

Sarasota, 1995

L
IFE IS GOOD.
Why can't I enjoy it?

The apartment at the Abbey is all painted and carpeted. I'm moving Ma's stuff in tomorrow, right after the twins head out for their Latin final. Then I'll have a couple of weeks to make things ready before I pick her up. I'll spend the night in Carlisle so we can get an early start in the morning, and Ma can stop briefly at the church for a big bash they're having that weekend. The Bishop (that hottie with the long black braid and the
Harry Potter
sorting hat) will be there, and she doesn't want to miss him.

David's home right now, but he's taking off again soon. Ma's move to the Abbey is timed for a weekend when the boys are staying with friends at the shore (we're not dumb enough to leave teenagers alone in the house overnight). She'd like to stay a little longer and go to a special service the following week when the Bishop's in town, but I've explained this is my only free block of time. Ma offered to find a friend to drive her, but I won't hear of it. There's nobody else I trust to get her here safely.

—
You're very overprotective, Susie.

—This is nonnegotiable, Ma. You're barely over the last accident. You are not going anywhere,
especially
that church, with anyone but me.

The other day, I realized what this two-year crisis has been like: Sisyphus. He couldn't stand it that everyone had to die. So he went against the gods and imprisoned Death. Death escaped, because you can't defy fate, and when it was time for Sisyphus to go to the underworld,
he
tried to escape as well. Sisyphus was very persistent, but the gods finally caught him and they were pissed. They decided that for all eternity, Sisyphus would have to push a rock all the way up to the top of a mountain. At the top, the rock would always roll down. So Sisyphus would have to start over. And over. And over again. A bit like those driving lessons in Daddy's orange bug car out behind the golf course.

As for me, I've really been in trouble, because I've had not just one huge boulder, but two. I've had the mother, and I've had the children—I've been running back and forth, trying to keep them all rolling at once. No wonder I'm such a wreck.

They call us the Sandwich Generation: people with school-age children and aging parents, stuck in the middle, everyone depending on us. Seems normal, right? Families are families, what's the big deal? Ever since cavemen there have been parents and grandparents and children. But what's getting people's attention these days is that my generation decided to wait a little to have our babies. So we're older than we used to be with children still in the home. And, with advances in medicine, our parents are living longer than cavemen's parents did.

I know what a sandwich cavewoman like Mrs. Ugh, say, would do if she was busy with baby Wugh Ugh when her elderly, toothless father needed someone to mash up his mastodon burger for him (with the shortened life span, Grandpa Ugh would be elderly and toothless by maybe age thirty). Mrs. Ugh could simply shout across the campfire if she needed help with Grandpa Ugh. Then her sister, Mrs. Mugh, would hop to it right away. Mrs. Mugh could let her teenage son, Lugh Mugh, handle the firewood chopping for a few minutes, so she could lumber over and chew up Grandpa Ugh's burger for him. (Oh, that lucky, carefree Mrs. Mugh—no worries about Lugh's Latin grades for her!)