Hanging Up

“I’m the social worker,” he says cheerfully. “Why don’t we sit down?” He gestures toward the nearest Formica table.

Angie wheels my father to the table and then stands back, waiting for the rest of us.

“I’ll sit next to my father,” I announce. This is an unnecessary statement. In the almost twenty-five years since my mother left, my sisters and I have taken turns calling the doctor about him, putting him in loony bins, drying him out, buying him clothes. And when more than one of us are present, we even take turns sitting next to him. But today, at UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric, my father’s final incarceration, there is no one here but me.

I hear a squeal as Dr. Kelly jumps, throws my father a dirty look, then catches herself. She smooths the back of her pants, where he obviously has just pinched, then takes a chair, sits, and smiles calmly.

I’ll be out of here in a half-hour, I comfort myself. This is a trick my son has taught me, the way he gets through classes he hates.

They start asking my father questions. Your name? “Lou Mozell.” Age? “Thirty-nine,” he says.

“Eighty-one,” I say, smiling.

Where were you born? “The Bronx.” College?

“Harvard,” says my father. “I graduated with honors.” They write all this down dutifully.

“What month is it?” My father has no idea. “What day of the week?” He looks up at the ceiling, studying it as if there were something to see.

“Look,” I say, “this is ridiculous. My father lives in a Home. Every day is the same. How does he know whether it’s Monday or Wednesday? And this is Los Angeles. The sky’s always blue. Even I don’t know what month it is half the time.”

“These questions have been tested,” Dr. Kelly says, an edge to her voice.

“Well, they don’t make any sense.”

Meanwhile my father is refusing to say anything.

“Will you write your name, Mr. Mozell?” She offers a pen and her clipboard.

He obliges.

“Would you write a sentence?”

He does that too. She shows me the clipboard.

He has written, “It’s too late.”

Oh, wow. I actually have this dumb high school reaction. Oh, wow. Heavy. And in my mind, I am already on the phone to my sisters.” ‘It’s too late.’ That’s what he wrote. Do you believe that?”

“Why don’t we show you to your room,” Dr. Kelly says to my father.

“Are you leaving me here?” he asks me. His hands, which have been lying listlessly in his lap, fly up and seize the arms of his wheelchair.

“You’re going to stay here for a week or two.” Maybe more, I don’t say. “You’re having memory problems, Dad. They’ll run some tests.”

“You bitch. You and Claire. You put me here before. You’re in cahoots.” My father flings a backslap at me but misses by a mile.

“That’s not Claire, that’s Angie, and you’ve never been here before.” I say this quietly, but I can feel my face flush.

Angie springs up. “I’ll take him.” She spins the wheelchair around. “I’m taking you to your room, Mr. Mozell,” she declares, as Rob Bateson jumps to open the door for them. “Bitch,” my father shouts as she steers him out, and Bateson closes the door behind them.

There is silence. A moment of respect for the departed.

“My father didn’t go to Harvard.”

Dr. Kelly laughs, then immediately crosses out the entry on her form. “Where did he go?”

“He went to, oh, what’s that school, you know, it’s in New York City, what is it, ohh—”

“Columbia?” says Bateson.

“No, no, downtown.”

Bateson and Kelly look at each other, stumped. Dr. Kelly actually winds some of her long sandy hair around her finger while she thinks. “New York University,” she offers tentatively.

“Right. He went to NYU. I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. I do know this is the month of May and it’s somewhere between the fourteenth and the twentieth, right?”

No one laughs. Bateson leans toward me across the table. “Are you close to your father?” he asks.

I hate this question. It’s none of their business. Their business is to find out what’s wrong with his brain this time. Their business is to adjust his medication so he functions. He just needs a new cocktail. He’s gone off his rocker before. He’s gone off many times. I will answer this question dispassionately. I will show that an inquiry about my feelings for my father triggers nothing. “I look out for my father but I am not close to him,” I say firmly. I smile to show that this cool answer is not only the truth, but easy.

“He wrote, ‘It’s too late.’ Do you believe that?”

“Really,” says Georgia.

It’s impossible to convey Georgia’s affection for the word “really.” She caresses it. She packs in multiple meanings: astonishment, disbelief, sometimes disgust, suspicion, pleasure, maybe even thrill, plus curiosity. All understated. She owns “really.” Also “possibly,” just because she knows exactly how to emphasize it.

“Do you think our father could possibly have meant what he wrote?” she asks me.

“You mean, can you be brain-damaged and cosmic all at once? I think so.”

“But what did he actually mean by it? Too late for what?”

It occurs to me I don’t know what he meant. “I guess help. It’s too late for help, right? But then it could be too late for anything to change, or for anything to happen, or just, too late.”

She says nothing. I assume she is mulling this over, but maybe she is just editing some copy on the computer while she talks to me on the phone. Sometimes Georgia switches off right in the middle of a conversation—she starts doing something else or thinking about something else. I have to work to get her back.

“He pinched Dr. Kelly. On the tush.”

“Really,” says Georgia.

Maddy shrieks when I tell her about the pinching. “What a riot.”

“It wasn’t a riot, believe me. You weren’t there.”

“You told me I could go away. You said you’d take him to … what’s this place called?”

“UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric.”

“Is it like a hospital?”

“More like a loony bin really, sort of a cross. Anyway, I don’t care that you aren’t here.”

“It’s my only vacation. We work ten hours a day, five days a week.”

“Maddy, it’s okay.”

But she’s on a roll. “We work fifty-two weeks a year, Eve. Fifty-two weeks!” I think about putting the receiver on the table. If you check out of a conversation with Maddy and then return several minutes later, you are usually in the same place. The identical thing happens if you watch the soap opera she’s on and then don’t see it again until two weeks later. “The only reason I can go on vacation now is that Juliana is supposed to be in the Bahamas so her boss can have an affair with the temp.”

“Who’s Juliana?”

“My character? Eve, don’t you even know that? God, don’t you ever watch the show?”

“Of course I do. I just didn’t realize what you were saying, Maddy, it’s no big deal.”

“You know it’s not easy to get to the phone here. It’s not easy to get to anything in Montana. You can drive forty-five minutes just to buy milk.”

I call Georgia back. “Maddy says it’s a forty-five-minute drive to buy milk in Montana.”

This is one of my favorite things—to serve as a conduit between my sisters. What is the joy in hearing something absurd from one if I can’t pass it on to the other? But this time I’m just using Maddy’s comment for an excuse, so I can unload more to Georgia.

“Imagine Dad pinching that doctor. It’s so sad, repulsive, I don’t know. I think he winked too. Is that all that’s left to you when you’re old? Eating and flirting?”

“He’s a pathetic old man,” says Georgia. I am certain I hear her shudder.

“That’s for sure. Dr. Kelly looked like Doogie Howser’s younger sister.”

“Well, Eve, she obviously wasn’t the doctor. Obviously, obviously. She’s a resident. What you have to do tomorrow is call and speak to the doctor. The real doctor. Find out who’s in charge of the whole place and insist that he or she speak to you directly. You know it makes a huge difference whether you’re speaking to the top or the bottom.”

“Maybe you should call.”

“Darling, I would, but you’re right there. I’m in New York, so if they have to call me back, it’s long-distance, which is a big thing to doctors, I have no idea why. Besides, I’m totally backed up on this tenth-anniversary edition. I keep thinking, On the one hand, I am so lucky my magazine has lasted ten years, on the other hand, why am I putting out a special edition, it’s a nightmare.”

I am hit suddenly with an exhaustion I get only when I converse with my sisters. I feel as if my mouth and ears are going to fall off my head. “I’ve got to go,” I say. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hang up. The phone rings. “Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Hi, Jesse, where are you?”

“It’s not my fault.”

“What?”

“It was an accident.”

“Goddamnit.” I burst into Joe’s study. “Jesse had another car accident.”

“Is he all right?” Joe spins around in his desk chair, knocking into phone books from different cities, stacked like building blocks around him.

“He’s all right.”

To make room to sit, I shove over a bunch of radio tapes that are littering his couch. “He’s on his way home. He had to tie his car door closed with rope. His insurance is going to go through the roof, but maybe we can convince the driver not to notify his insurance company. Would you take care of this?”

“I’m going out of town next week,” he reminds me.

“So you have time. Besides, they have phones in Iowa.”

Joe just looks at me. He knows and I know that I am going to make this call. We’ve been married too long to have a conversation we’ve had sixty times before and already know the ending of.

I hear a car and peek through the blinds to see Jesse pulling up to the curb. He slides over to the passenger side and gets out. He strolls to the door, his shoulders moving back and forth enough to cause, with each step, the slightest ripple of muscle across his T-shirt.

“I’m home,” he yells, but not too loudly. There’s a bit of dread in his voice.

“Come in here. We’re in Dad’s study.” I hear the refrigerator open and close, and then Jesse appears, swigging water from a large plastic bottle.

“What happened?” Joe asks.

Jesse slaps a hand against his head and lets his mouth hang open a second to let us know he’s been through hell. “I was sitting there, okay, just opening the door, when this guy comes around a curve at about, I swear, sixty.”

Joe slips his fingers under his glasses and rubs his eyes. He’s tired in anticipation of this discussion. “You were parked?” he says wearily.

“Yeah, I was parked. That guy should look where he’s going. Thanks to him, I couldn’t take Ifer home.”

“Who’s Ifer?”

“Only my best friend, Dad. God.”

“Ifer is Jennifer, but there are so many Jennifers in the class that she calls herself Ifer. I told you, you forgot.” This is something I do to Joe when I am feeling cranky. Make him feel guilty for not remembering all the fascinating things I tell him.

“Why doesn’t she call herself Jenny?” asks Joe.

“Ifer is Kasmian,” says Jesse.

Joe’s glasses land back on his nose and his eyes snap open. He knows he’s just heard something that is going to turn out to be satisfyingly off-kilter. He’s no longer interested in the car accident. Too mundane. Jesse’s fine, he’s sitting right in front of him. But Ifer could turn out to be as intriguing as the woman in Iowa he’s going to interview who bakes six-foot-tall cakes. “So Ifer is a Kasmian name?” he says.

Jesse uses a tone of voice that means that you are ignorant but he will condescend to enlighten you. “In the Kasmian religion, Dad, four letters is good luck. ‘Luck’ is four letters, get it?”

“I hope these Kasmians aren’t nuts like those people who drank that drink in some South American country,” I say. “What was it? It starts with a large letter.”

“Kool-Aid,” says Joe.

“I didn’t remember Kool-Aid? My God.”

“Kasmians drink only Coke. Four letters, get it?” says Jesse. “This guy owes us. He could have killed me.”

I take a few breaths, just for punctuation. “Look, the important thing is that you’re fine. That your leg wasn’t outside the car or anything.” This is the important thing, and it’s not that I don’t know it, but I say it for only one reason: So I feel entitled to say the next thing, which I feel guilty about. “But it’s your fault.”

Jesse slams the bottle down. “The guy came around a blind curve. I can’t see behind a blind curve, can I? I am really having a hard day. I don’t need this. It’s not my fault I can’t see a guy coming around a blind curve going eighty.”

“Did he take the door off the car?” I ask. The phone rings. I pick it up. “Hello?”

“Georgie Porgie won a Pulitzer.”

“That’s great.”

“Your sister’s something, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s great, Dad.”

He hangs up. I hang up.

“Georgia won the Pulitzer again. How can he call? I don’t think he has a phone in his room. The only phone I saw was a pay phone.”

“Did you give him quarters?” asks Joe.

“Are you kidding? Why would I do that? To torture myself?” I turn to Jesse. “I had a hard day too. I had to put your grandfather into the geriatric/psychiatric facility at UCLA.”

“Oh yeah, how come?” Jesse collapses in a chair. His long legs stick straight out into the room; he’s waiting to trip someone so he can insist it’s not his fault.

“He’s having memory problems.”

“He’s always had memory problems. He doesn’t even know my name.”

Joe laughs.

“It’s not funny, Joe.” Now I’m angry with them both. “He’s having other problems too. He hit someone, he’s been screaming just out of the blue whenever he feels like it. He can’t walk—his balance is off. They think his medication’s out of whack. You could both be a little compassionate.”

“I have no compassion for your father, and you know why,” says Joe.

“Why?” Jesse asks.

“None of your business,” I say. “So Jesse, did he take the door off the car?”

“No.”

“Well, if he didn’t take the door off the car, he couldn’t have been going eighty.”

“Just ’cause your door stays on the car has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with the weight of the car that hits you.”

Is this true? I have no idea. Even though, as far as I can tell, schools these days don’t even teach you what a pronoun is, Jesse claims to know everything. He knows whether dogs can be said to commit suicide, under what conditions planes can take off at LAX, whether astigmatism will one day be curable by laser. I give up trying to prove my point. “Did you get the guy’s insurance information? I hope you got his phone number too.”

Jesse holds out his hand. A name and a number are written on his palm in black ink.

“Jesse, that’s so careless. Suppose you got water on that? We’d never be able to reach him.”

“He’d find us.”

“That’s not the point.”

“He would find us. Unfortunately,” says Joe. “Do Kasmians have a place of worship?”

“They light candles in their rooms,” Jesse tells him.

“Can we talk about this accident, please?”

Joe and Jesse both look at me—their heads swivel exactly the same way and stop at exactly the same tilt to the right. They look as if they have paused mid-beat in a song they perform in unison, like the Temptations. They are both vertical in the extreme, and whenever they walk or eat or just move around, their arms and legs go from straight lines to angles. Only, Joe wears glasses—round horn-rimmed glasses. With those comical circles on either side of his narrow nose and the rest of him hanger thin, he has the appearance of a very friendly figure painting reduced to its geometric essence. They both wait for me to talk, Joe tolerantly, Jesse with his familiar scowl.

“It’s important to contact this guy before he contacts you so—”

“So what, Mom?”

“So you have a plan, so it doesn’t get out of hand.”

“Do your mom a favor,” says Joe. “Copy that information off your palm onto a piece of paper and leave it on her desk.”

Jesse gets up slowly, stretching, so we notice him ascend to his six-foot height. He saunters out.

I wait until I hear Jesse on the stairs. I don’t want him to hear me. “What?” Joe says, knowing something’s coming.

“You shouldn’t make fun of my father, especially now.”

“Don’t expect me to have feelings you don’t have.” He shrugs. “Besides, this is just another round.”

“It is not. For God’s sake, Joe, why don’t you clean up in here? Look at these tapes. And there are newspapers and telephone books all over the place.”

“I like it messy. Then I know where everything is. Eve, stop worrying. Your father just phoned, so obviously he’s fine.”

“Then why can’t he walk? And he kept calling Angie Claire. He knows Angie.”

“You just couldn’t remember Kool-Aid.”

“That’s hardly the same thing.” I start picking newspapers up off the floor, grabbing them two-fisted, each one a big deal. “Look, this place is a complete mess. Suppose we have a fire or something? This room would go off like a rocket. And then the house.”

Joe takes the stack of papers from me and puts them back on the floor, carefully, even ceremoniously, as if they were not old newspapers but an elaborate silver service for tea.

“Joe, he’s dying.”

“You wish.”

“Yes, I do. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Three

When I went home for Christmas after my parents had separated and Maddy had moved out, Maddy picked me up at the airport with her boyfriend, Isaac.

Her hair, long and parted in the middle, left just a sliver of her face showing, and looked as if it should come with a cord so it could be drawn open like a curtain. When we hugged, her hair got in my mouth. “Where’s Dad?”

“Probably playing tennis. Stay with Isaac and me. Only ten of us are living there.”

“No, I’ll go home.”

“Well, don’t expect me to go in. I’m not going in.”

Maddy and Isaac were dressed identically, in jeans with silver studs running down them and jean jackets with American flags sewn on the back. She had a tank top underneath and he had his bare chest. Below each of their jacket collars was an embroidered red heart with embroidered tears falling from it. “We’re still in mourning,” she explained, reaching over and fluffing my hair.

“Don’t.” I knocked her hand away.

“It’s wilder than ever,” she said.

“I know.” I squished my curls against my head.

“Your hair’s the same color as Mom’s,” she said wistfully.

“Don’t remind me.”

“Why don’t you let it grow? Live a little, Eve.”

I changed the subject. “Why are you in mourning? Who died?”

“Jimi Hendrix, who else?” Maddy boomed this and did not seem to mind that half the airport turned to look. She called ahead to Isaac. “Eve’s really nice, she’s just ignorant.” Then she spoke only slightly lower: “Jimi was Isaac’s soul mate.”

“Right on,” said Isaac.

“I embroidered the hearts.”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“I’ll teach you,” said Maddy. “It’s really fun.”

We walked through the airport, Maddy clumping along on thick platform shoes, Isaac’s head bobbing, as if there was music in it and he was keeping time. “Isaac’s a musical genius,” she said. “He’s like hot, I’m not kidding.” She tugged playfully on his ponytail.

“Get lost,” said Isaac.

“What’s your instrument?” I asked him.

“He can play everything, bass guitar, keyboard …” Maddy thought a second. “Bass guitar, keyboard.” She put a period at the end this time. “They’ve got this group—Isaac, Aaron, Kevin, Presto.” She ticked the names off on her fingers. “I’m going to be the lead singer, and we’re going to make a demo tape. Do you think Georgia would know anyone who could help us get, you know, arrested?”

“Why Georgia? Madeline, don’t you think you should live at home?”

She ignored that. “’Cause Georgia works at Mademoiselle. Even though they only do stories on dumbos like Karen Carpenter, I thought maybe …”

“Are you going to school?”

She laughed. “When I want. Listen, Eve, we’ve got this groovy song that Isaac wrote. ‘Born Too Late for Woodstock.’ We just missed it, you know.” Her voice was pained. “If Woodstock had been this year, we would have been there. Isaac’s got some dirt from it. He bought it at this head shop. You’ll see it—it’s on the dashboard.”

“I don’t know, ask her.”

“Ask who?”

“Georgia, if she can help you. That’s mine.” I pointed at my suitcase rolling toward me on the conveyor belt. Isaac didn’t move so I pulled it off myself.

“The car’s right over there.” Maddy indicated the lot directly across. Isaac preceded us, his head still bobbing. “Isn’t he cute?” she whispered. I nodded. She squeezed my arm. “Do you believe your little sister’s going to be a rock star?”

We rode home in a car with a peace sign dangling from the rearview mirror over a mayonnaise jar filled with dirt. Isaac stayed in the car while Maddy helped me get my suitcase out of the trunk.

“Don’t ask me to go in, okay, Eve? I can’t stand it.”

“Why?”

“It’s creepy. He’s creepy.” She pulled one foot up behind her and stood there like a flamingo.

“Get going, Maddy. Don’t worry, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Peace,” she shouted as they took off.

The house looked the same, except for the rosebushes. They hadn’t been cut back. The stalks were long, with the remains of dead blooms on the ends, pathetic yellow centers with a petal or two hanging off.

I tried the door. It was unlocked. “Dad?”

“Hey, Evie, I’m out back.”

I left my suitcase in the entrance hall and walked through the living room to the garden behind. My father jumped up from the patio table. “Evie, baby.” He pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his tennis shorts and mopped his eyes. “I always cry,” he explained to the woman who was sitting with him.

“It’s true,” I said. “He used to cry when I came home from Brownies.”

“Or from camp,” he said. His mouth wiggled as he tried to get control, stiffen it up. He tucked his handkerchief back in his pocket and hugged me. “This is my Evie,” he said proudly.

“Well, don’t I know it,” said the woman.

“You do?” I said doubtfully.

“I knew she wouldn’t recognize you. Want a hint?” my father crowed.

“Sure, but what happened to your nose?”

My father touched the bridge of his nose, where there was a big scab. “I hit myself serving.” He paused. “But at least I got it in.”

“Well, that’s what matters, isn’t it?” I smiled at the woman.

“Mouthwash,” said my father.

“Oh my God, Esther.”

She was the receptionist at our dentist’s. She’d been the receptionist forever. Her hair, an assortment of browns that would be very attractive on a puppy but was unlikely on a person, was piled on top of her head in large loopy curls, and she had frosted orange polish on very long nails. I had always viewed them with wonder while she filled in the card for my next appointment.

“I’m so sorry about your mom. It’s tragic,” said Esther.

“What hap—” I saw my father put his finger to his lips, shush. I corrected, “Oh, thank you, that’s very kind.”

“Myself, I hate to fly.” She fixed some of her stray hair in place with a bobby pin. “I think it was so brave of you to get in that airplane to come home for Christmas. If that happened to someone in my family, I’d stick to cars.”

I noticed a pitcher of iced tea on the table. With real lemons floating in it. That’s great. Mom left, and Dad finally learned to make something: iced tea. He even made it with loving care, which is more than Mom ever did.

Esther poked around in her purse and pulled out a little round compact. She peered into the mirror, remade her lips, and snapped the compact shut. “I’m going to buzz off now and let you two gab. Would you like me to leave the tea and just take my pitcher home?”