The Narrow Door (23 page)

After two weeks I fly back east to see Denise. I step over filthy crusts of snow as I walk down the streets. I walk past blocks of brick row houses on—Walnut Street? Locust? I have a clear sense of how long those houses have been around, how many different generations and cultures have passed by their long, many-paned windows. (Wealthy neighborhood, less-wealthy neighborhood, poor neighborhood, up-and-coming neighborhood …) They also strike me as bleak, in spite of their classical symmetry, but maybe that’s the stripped trees, the empty, soundless sidewalks. It’s probably a good sign that nothing else about our four hours together stays with me. I must be inside the visit, sitting inside our talking, looking out at a sky that promises snow but won’t deliver snow. I’m not already interpreting, representing our day. I have every reason to think we’ll have years ahead of days like this—sweet, unremarkable days. And it’s only when I dig up a letter that I see a different story about that day.

My friend.

2009 | 
A sweet evening in San Francisco. M and I are walking down a street, an unusually quiet street in Chinatown, when a young woman pulls up behind a double-parked car and holds down the horn. She holds it for a good twenty seconds. It is the nastiest horn I’ve ever heard. An elderly man with a walker is being maneuvered into the backseat of that double-parked car, and the sight of the young woman’s twisted face is enough to stir up an animal panic in us. “You stop that,” M says with a decisive gesture, and the Chinese people just look at us with bemusement, as if they might be used to these dark altercations, where Chinatown collides with North Beach. But the raging young woman doesn’t like to be told what to do by two men, especially two men whom she decides to call faggots. Words are volleyed back and forth, she pulls ahead, and to our shock, she’s parked the car. She’s walking back, walking right back up to M to call him a faggot. Over and over so it sounds like the verbal equivalent of a knife striking skin. We curse back, which only makes matters worse. Human confrontation without boundaries, without control. I cry out, “What happened to your soul?,” which I know is ludicrous and darkly funny as I say it, straight out of Flannery O’Connor. Still, I really want to know what would make a human being that mad. She walks down the street, across Columbus Avenue to a restaurant with outside tables. We keep walking. And the next thing we know six guys are heading toward us, with shoulders squared, in a row, as if in the opening sequence of some TV crime drama. The raging woman has summoned these six guys, so we duck into the first door we see: a small empty restaurant. We’re laughing and frightened and stunned all at once—this is too absurd. We tell the waiters we’re being followed. They say,
We’ll hide you. Of course, of course we’ll hide you
, until they see their
boss
coming in through the front door. Their boss is one of the six men. The boss owns the restaurant we’ve chosen to hide in, oh God. Certainly we can project into the future and can see the comic insanity of the situation transpiring in front of us—isn’t this situation right out of a movie, or a parody of some movie? At the same time, we’re aware of how close we are to getting killed—or, if not killed, seriously beaten up. We’re told to step outside, which sounds like an invitation to fight, and we say no, we’re not going to fight. We’re going to stand right here until the anger in the atmosphere dissipates. This sequence happens over and over, until we’re finally out of the restaurant, out on the sidewalk, into the chilly night. We’re told that the Castro is on the other side of Market. We’re called some names, some ridiculous names and some that hurt. And this is San Francisco? A smell of dog fear follows us as we walk down Columbus. We hail a cab. We go back to the guesthouse. We walk up the stairs, open the door, bolt the door, sit on the bed. I am out of breath. Any humor or distance about the situation fades to quiet and numbness. I turn on the eleven o’clock news, but I can’t keep my attention on the mouths moving on the screen. And at some point—is it that night? or is it sometime the next morning?—the two of us try to describe what happened on our blogs.

Not the most brilliant move. It takes all of a few hours for another blog to pick up the story. The story is simplified, and soon enough the situation isn’t ours anymore, but a broad outline, a broad version of a story told over and over again—just the particulars are different this time. San Francisco. Such things are not supposed to happen in San Francisco, capital of benevolence and open-mindedness. The city newspaper passes on the story, and then another. Comment after comment appears on the restaurant’s Yelp page. There are calls for gay people, straight people, to boycott said restaurant. A volcano is spewing. True, it is a small volcano in the realm of volcanoes, but it is a volcano nonetheless, bits of ash and fire falling on so many foreheads now. Things only shift a bit when the restaurant owner—or his associate—and I come to some peace in the comment field on M’s blog. I remind him that the argument started as part of a defense of sick people—it was never about name-calling, it was never about restaurant boycotts. I say, my mother has broken her hip. Wouldn’t you want someone to stand up for you if someone you knew were in that position? It sounds self-righteous, I know. But I want this to come to some use, some peace. Besides, I can think of no other way to stop the flow of it, which keeps slopping all over the web: an uncapped well. Neither one of us has listened to the other. Beneath our rage and pride, two strangers reach out to each other, or attempt to.

For some reason I don’t tell any of this to Denise. Am I just embarrassed to have taken part in a confrontation that somehow became public? Maybe, simply, there is no need to tell her about grace exchanged between two people. Grace—she knows enough about that.

2009 | 
A clear scrubbed sky without any moisture in it. Leaves darker, greener, and more resilient than just a few days before. Tree pollen inside our nostrils, on our lashes and lips, and maybe that makes my father’s phone call easier to bear. He is crying, crying about my mother and her health, the turn it’s taken, and for the first time he’s asking me to fly to Florida, as in tomorrow—he’s never said such things during any of her recent health crises. Should I come? I’d been so used to saying that question, so used to hearing him say no; maybe I thought his confidence would somehow see her through, would lift her and work on her. I’m not used to hearing this vulnerability in his voice. The last time he sounded like this was after my mother’s mastectomy seven years before. Instinctively, I go into neutral. I must be strong and sane for us, for her. Not one tear falls down my face. I soak in the yard outside the restaurant where I’m standing: the green, green grass; the gravel parking lot; the white picnic benches; the people biting meticulously into their dosas. From here on out, that will be the texture of emergency to me, that calmness and beauty, and well-dressed mothers passing plates of healthy food to their children.

The plane flies low over the artificial canals of Sunrise and Plantation as it approaches the airport. I snap a shot of the wing of the plane, and I’m not surprised that the shot looks as blurry as my interior state. Everything is blurry: the back of the seat in front of me, the magazine on my tray table, the flight attendant walking down the aisle with a dazed, serene smile beneath her curtain of blond.

The next morning, my brothers, father, and I are in my mother’s room, where she’s lying unconscious. Bobby, who’s already beside her in a chair, hides his face with the fingers of his right hand when he sees us walking into the room. His shoulders shake. I have not seen Bobby cry since childhood, decades back. He always has a good joke, even for the darkest things, for somebody’s bad luck, someone’s stupid line, an irritating neighbor’s death. The jokes aren’t exactly mean. They never intend to be black, and of course there’s the slightest thrill about aiming straight into the heart of taboo. The jokes are also a way of making the moment in front of us bearable. Bobby? Where are your jokes right now? Why aren’t you making us laugh?

There’s not much to say in the face of a mother’s death. We shift and we jitter. We’re not at ease. How could we be? The four of us crowd the tight little bedroom of the assisted living facility, which smells of chicken broth, hand cream, old blankets. Air that hasn’t been stirred by a breeze for so long. Her things are on the walls, on the bureau. A painting she did of a dog and a rubber ball. A small photograph of herself in a red coat. (No pictures of us? She needs to remember who
she
was first.) A hospice nurse walks in. She has the practiced demeanor of a good hospice nurse, detached and kind, and she handles the questions my brother Michael asks her, questions that are impossible to answer, but answers that anyone would want to know. How is she feeling? Is she in pain? How long will this process take? And just as she’s ready to walk out the door, she turns to say that the dying need to be reassured that we’re going to be okay without them. She sees it all the time, dying people hanging on, long past the time their bodies are ready to go. The advice is so sound, so true to my mother’s character that I’m sure the light shifts in the room. Nothing seems to have changed out the window; the century plant and the datura are still there, but I see better. And smell the Lipton being steeped in the kitchen.

How do we let her know that we will go on without her? It’s easier to do than we’d think, easier to enact than to say it straight on. The four of us sit around her bed, haphazardly remembering. The early years. The time the boat ran out of gas, and Vic Forte, our neighbor next door, showing up in his boat to tow us back home. Old restaurants along the Black Horse Pike on the way to the shore house: Pat’s Tavern, Ann’s Tavern, Finnerty’s Hut, Tony’s. Storybookland. The Race Track. Forest fires: the smell of them, the stinging in our eyes, the taste of smoke, and our animal reaction. Our first memories: mine? Choking on a penny I’d picked up from the pink bathroom floor and swallowed. The sides of the coin muscling down my throat. The taste: part spit, part blood, a little dirt, some yellow Dial soap, like nothing I’d ever tasted. And my father’s palm slapping my back until my ribs and lungs hurt, as if that were the one true way to dislodge anything.