Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (13 page)

I tried to fight my way past the drugs to understand what he was saying.

“And I thought so too. At first. I mean, there’s no way they can get you now. It’s documented. You’re textbook Section 8. From what I hear, you were very fuckin’ convincing. You must’ve been planning this for months.”

I was slow but I finally understood. So that was the story. I’d faked a complete mental breakdown. To avoid the draft.

“But if anyone needed to pull something like this, it’s me,” Randall went on. “Of any of us, you were the shoo-in to make JAG. I mean, editor of
Law Review
, top of our class. You didn’t have shit to worry about. And now—I mean after something like this …”

He lifted up one of the leather straps still attached to the bed but no longer to me just as Ellen walked back into the room. “Forget about politics. I mean, there’s no way you’re ever running for office. Even a judgeship will be out of the question with this on your—”

“Get out,” Ellen said, calmly dropping the water pitcher of carnations into the trash.

“What? I was just saying he should maybe have thought this through before—”

“Get the fuck out of my husband’s room.”

Jason looked from Ellen to me back to Ellen. “Okay, buddy, you rest up and we’ll see you real soon, okay?” He smiled awkwardly at me and walked toward the door, pausing when he got to Ellen.

“I never thought—I mean, we all just assumed …” Jason glanced over his shoulder at me. The look on his face was no longer conspiratorial. It was an expression reserved for limbless vets and children with cancer. I think they called it pity. “Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to Ellen. “I mean, Greyson, man, he’s the last guy you’d think—”

“You really are as stupid as Greyson always said.” Ellen opened the door for him.

“He said that?” Randall looked genuinely hurt.

Ellen just raised her eyebrows and shut the door behind him.

“FUCKING ASSHOLE!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

But it was too late. The drugs had clouded my thinking, my vision, my ability to look ahead to the long-term consequences. Not that I could have done anything differently, but to have the bomb dropped like this was—like having a bomb dropped. Suddenly everything I had worked for … my horizons had just narrowed considerably.

Ellen sat down on the edge of my bed. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This doesn’t have to mean—”

“Yes!” I yelled. “Yes, it does. He’s right. I will never be able to do what I …” Ellen put her arms around me and I wept silently into her shoulder.

“Home,” I whispered. “Want t-to go home. T-today.”

“Yes,” she said. “Home, absolutely.”

“No m-more d-rugs,” I managed.

“Definitely. No more drugs,” she said. “Not these anyway. These people are idiots.”

“I-diots,” I nodded into her shoulder.

At home I lose track of how many days, weeks, maybe longer I have been unable—or simply unwilling—to get out of bed. I lie on my back, staring at the insides of my eyelids, some days paralyzed by crushing despair, others trying to survive the panic that threatens to engulf me. I swear I can hear it. The panic that comes to get me breathes. It has a pulse and teeth. I am sure one day soon it will eat me alive. And then the despair returns. God’s idea of a reprieve.

I spend much of that time making lists in my head. Actually putting pen to paper would require a feat of superhuman strength and endurance. But so does bathing and dressing and eating. Now breathing exhausts my physical capabilities. And frankly, I resent having to do even that. I want to be relieved of the responsibility. I am no more up to the constant inhaling and exhaling than I am to running a marathon. Or leaving the house. I sleep as much as I can; pretend to be nervous even when I’m not so I can take the pills that send me off to the warm, dreamless place that is pure nothing. But the doctor won’t let me take many of those. He says that kind of sleep isn’t restorative. I say fuck restorative.

When the pills run out, he refuses to give me any more. So I lie on my back awake, categorizing and cross-referencing and alphabetizing, making endless versions of lists of the things I have, over the course of my life, lost or hidden or buried. I count among these things regrets, opportunities, disappointments, school elections, trust, loved ones, a favorite sweater, my dignity, childhood treasures, and various and sundry pieces of myself. When I am done, there is virtually nothing left. Except the despair and the panic. And so I start again. But the beginning is never where I left it.

Beverly Hills, 1960
. John was a bootstrap kind of guy. As in, pull yourself up by them. I didn’t think about the irony at the time—that John and Pop worked side by side at the Florsheim factory, cutting leather to make shoes. Only that they had nothing in common and Pop had no business working there.

John and heavy machinery, on the other hand, were made for one another. John was second-generation Polish. Thick-necked, barrel-chested, blond and blue-eyed, he looked like he’d been bred to spend his life in a hard hat. At thirty-two, he’d already swung a pickax in a West Virginia coal mine, sawed cows apart at a meatpacking plant, and killed a bunch of Japs during the war.

Pop was tall, long-limbed, and smooth. He always had clean fingernails. He was a talker, a seller—a schmoozer. He’d spent his war duty procuring things from behind a desk on a base in San Diego. On a good day Pop could charm anyone into anything. Like this job. My father had never used anything sharper than a steak knife in his entire life, but he’d convinced the Florsheim guy he was the only man in Los Angeles qualified to operate a room full of razors, electric blades, auto-drills, and industrial tanning ovens. That year, from May through August, Pop was—second only to John—the most productive guy on the line. He mastered not only his own dangerous job but every detail of production. He worked double shifts and graveyard shifts and never seemed tired.

He was also the most fun guy at the factory, hands down. John thought Pop was hilarious. And for a while, John came over for dinner every Tuesday when his wife went to visit her mother. Grandpa was skeptical of John. He told me all the most famous concentration camps were in Poland. Lucky for John, his courageous relatives back in Ciechanovietz had risked their lives hiding Jews in their hayloft. The Poles, John told me, were great friends of the Jews during the war.

But in late September, Pop started getting sick. At first it was just once in a while. Then it was once a week. Then by November, whole weeks at a time. Pop was no longer anyone’s favorite employee. In the beginning, John did his best to cover. He came in early and stayed late and put Pop’s name and number on the extra pieces he cut. But on the third Sunday in a row, when Mom called to tell John that Pop still wasn’t up to coming in, John told her enough was enough. He said he was coming over and hung up before she could tell him not to.

My mother took her time answering the door. We all watched as she slowly put down the onion she was slicing and washed her hands and wiped them on her apron and checked her hair in the gleam on the handle of the refrigerator door. She startled when he knocked again. Harder and louder. But then she looked at us and smiled.

“Who’s there?” she called out.

“Geez, Willa, it’s John. Come on already.”

She crossed the living room at its widest point and gently pulled open the door. But she didn’t let him in.

“I’ll tell him you stopped by,” she said pleasantly.

“What?”

Sensing the mounting drama, Hannah, Ben, Jake, and I rushed to my mother’s side and filled in the spaces around her. “He’ll appreciate the thought,” she said. “Really.”

“Is that right?” John spread his feet wide apart and crossed his arms over his chest. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’m sorry you made the trip over for nothing,” my mother said, her voice light. But I could see her shoulders tighten.

“If it were up to you, you wouldn’t even tell him I came.”

“What do you mean if it were up to me?”

“I want to talk to him.” John pushed past my mother, stepped around Ben and over Jake, and just kept going. My mother ran after him and caught him by the arm.

“Please, don’t. You’re going to upset him. He doesn’t want to see anyone. He’s … not himself.”

“Not himself? Then who the hell is he?” John’s neck was bright red.

When she saw the startled look on Jake’s face, my mother stopped, took a breath, and walked over to him. She ran her hand over his head and let it trail down his cheek.

“He doesn’t feel like seeing anyone,” she said quietly.

“He’s tired,” Jake whispered in his tiny toddler voice. It’s what he’d heard us all say. Over and over.

“Yes. That’s right,” my mother said, still holding on to Jake. “He just needs some rest. Undisturbed rest.”

John just stood there shaking his head. “You’re not helping him, Willa.”

“I’m sorry?” my mother said.

John leaned in closer, hoping, I supposed, to keep some of the conversation between the two of them. But I heard it all.

“I know you think you are, but you’re not. You’re making it worse. The way you’re treating him, he’s never going to be a man again.”

I used to like John.

“I think you should do what my mother says,” I told him. That made him laugh.

“Some example you’re setting.”

“I don’t know what you’re implying, John, but—”

“You want him to turn out like Ray?” John said, squeezing my shoulder. “Is that what you want?”

My mother was speechless.

“You have to put your foot down. And if that doesn’t work, you kick him out. He’s not going to snap out of this until he hits bottom.”

“I’m not like him,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Grey,” John said, slapping me on the back. “Your dad is a good guy. He’s just weak right now. But we’re going to help him.”

Then John walked past my mother, down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom, and, without knocking, opened the door and stepped into the room that for weeks had been off-limits to us. And my mother just stood there staring after him. Maybe she was too shocked or maybe she just wanted to see what would happen. I think maybe she wanted John to be right.

I wanted to know what was in there. I’d heard him crying in the middle of the night, pacing up the long, narrow hallway that ran outside the bedrooms, out into the living room, and then—always as if for the first time, remembering I was asleep on the couch—cursing to himself and pacing back down the hallway. The noises he made didn’t really sound human. I’d been listening to them night after night for weeks. I wanted to know what he looked like. I wanted this to make things different even if it didn’t make them better. Anything but more of the same.

“Christ, Ray, smells worse than my Aunt Tina in here.”

He opened the blinds and all the windows and pulled back the bedcovers. Something that vaguely resembled my father was huddled in a ball against the headboard.

“Don’t you think we all feel like crap sometimes, Ray?” John was saying.

I never imagined this. My father looked like a sick nocturnal animal desperately seeking cover—like something in pain looking for a place to die.

“Shit, Ray, you don’t think Frank would rather just crawl under the covers and pretend those beautiful little girls of his aren’t crippled because he took ’em to a goddamned public swimming pool? What the hell do you have to complain about? Four gorgeous kids and a woman who’d give her life for you. I’d say you got it pretty good, Ray.”

“I don’t think you’re making him feel better,” I said quietly.

“I didn’t come over to make him feel better,” John said, making sure my father could hear him. “I came to give him a little dose of reality—to remind him he’s got it pretty fuckin’ good compared to a lot of people we know. People with real problems.”

I couldn’t stand this.

“Jesus, Mr. Polikoff. John—okay,” I whispered. “I think he understands.”

“I know you
think
you got problems, Ray, but you don’t.” The louder John’s voice boomed, the smaller and more wasted Pop appeared.

“You are just giving in to whatever is in your head. I came over to tell you it’s time to stop. Don’t give in. You get up, you strap on your fucking balls, and you go out and do your job. Don’t look in the fucking mirror, Ray. Don’t think about it. You think too fucking much, Ray. You read too much and you think too much. That’s your problem.”

Pop said nothing. Seeing him huddled against the headboard, I almost expected him to slip down into the crack between the bed and the wall and disappear. But he didn’t. Instead, he looked up at me—unshaven, eyes wet with tears, begging.

That kind of misery had to be contagious. I turned and walked out of the room.

I lie in bed at home, and it’s like I’m falling off a cliff, only I never hit the ground. I just drop further and further and further, my stomach seizing, unable to move beyond the involuntary, normally temporary wave of panic that comes from hearing a loud noise or losing your balance.

I lie in bed and feel too light. I need weight. I need gravity. So I lie down on the floor. But that’s not enough. I imagine the ground rushing up toward me. I can see myself connecting with the sidewalk, or the smooth black asphalt. Almost like scratching an itch.

When I was sixteen, our neighbor, Mrs. Bronfman, threw herself out the window of her tenth-story apartment. Hannah and I heard her body hit the sidewalk. But, since we didn’t know that the sound—almost like a gun going off—was Mrs. Bronfman’s life ending, we continued to argue about which one of us was going to get stuck scrubbing the huge cast-iron pot grandpa had used to make chicken paprikash.

A half hour later, my mother walked in. She closed the front door and leaned against it. No smiles, no hugs. My father looked up at her from where he sat in grandpa’s recliner, feet up, sipping his scotch. He studied her face. None of us had ever seen the expression she was wearing. He put his scotch on the side table and walked toward her.

“Willa?”

She had one hand clamped tight over her mouth, and although she didn’t make a sound, I could see her shoulders begin to shake.