Hanging Up

On the basis of his behavior on Christmas Day and the fact that, between Christmas and New Year’s, I had to drive him around only twice in the middle of the night, I informed my sisters that he was simply brokenhearted, our old dad was somewhere inside the droopy outer shell and would be back eventually. But this didn’t mean I wasn’t ecstatic to return to school. “Just drop me at the airport,” I told him.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

When we arrived at the terminal, my father pulled my suitcase out of the trunk and stood there, his handkerchief out, ready to catch his tears. I kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“We have something special, don’t we, Evie?” A sad smile trembled out.

I grabbed my suitcase. “Bye, Dad.” I backed up fast. “Bye,” I shouted louder, although he wasn’t far away.

I wanted to cheer when those automatic doors opened and I was standing in the check-in area with tons of other kids returning to college. They had parents hanging around them, handing them gum and Life Savers, asking them if they’d packed everything. I was anonymous. Not one person there was related to me, and my heart soared.

At school, I threw myself into final exams. My last was in a course called Great American Plays. We’d had to read a play a night. My friend Zoe had obtained a copy of the previous year’s final, and it had questions like “Pork chops?” You had to know what play pork chops figured in.

Zoe and I, fueled by No-Doz, stayed up all night shouting clues at each other. “Water?” “The Miracle Worker.” “Dog?” “Come Back, Little Sheba.”

When the hall phone rang, it was four in the morning.

“It’s my dad, who else?” I picked up the receiver. “Hi, Dad.” I didn’t even wait to hear his voice, and was punch-drunk enough to be nice. There was no response. “A prank,” I told Zoe.

“Sorry, Wrong Number,” said Zoe.

I was hanging up when I heard, “Pills.” Thickly. Like he had mud in his mouth.

“Pills?” I put the phone back to my ear.

“Long Day’s Journey into Night. No, After the Fall,” shrieked Zoe.

I waved her to stop. “Dad, what is it?”

“I took No-Doz.” Really thickly now. Tongue-too-fat-for-mouth thick.

“Well, that’s no big deal. Believe me, I know.”

He hung up. I hung up. “What happened?” asked Zoe.

“Nothing. We’re taking No-Doz here and he’s taking it there. That’s weird.”

We returned to my room. I sat on the bed and pulled my textbook, 100 American Plays, onto my lap. It was the heaviest book in all my classes—ten pounds. I knew this because Zoe and I had weighed it. In protest we only dragged or slid it. “He doesn’t have finals. Why would anyone take No-Doz who didn’t have—Oh my God. He didn’t say, ‘No-Doz,’ he said, ‘Overdose.’”

I shoved the book off my lap and started hunting under clothes, papers, books. “What are you looking for?” asked Zoe. There it was, my address book, under a bag of potato chips. I raced to the phone.

I couldn’t get the booth open. I yanked and yanked at the door. “Help.” Zoe had followed me. She reached over and pushed. The door folded in.

“I need change,” I shouted as I thumbed through the book for Maddy’s number.

“Shut up,” I heard someone yell groggily.

“Eve’s father took an overdose,” said Zoe, running to her room.

“You’re kidding?”

“Eve’s father took an overdose.” I heard it repeated over and over, punctuated by yawns, as Zoe tore back, holding out a jar filled with nickels, dimes, and quarters.

I fumbled with the coins as I stuffed them in, misdialed, and tried too quickly to start over. I banged on the receiver to get a dial tone.

“Let me dial.” Zoe pressed down on the receiver, held it awhile, then released it and inserted several quarters. “What’s the number?”

The entire floor was out of bed and gathered around the booth. I noticed that Joanne, the engaged person, was now sleeping with toilet paper around her head. While Zoe dialed for me, I wondered whether Joanne would sleep that way after she got married.

Zoe handed me the receiver. I heard ringing. An angry male voice answered: “What is it?”

“I’m sorry to wake you—” I stopped. I could barely speak. “This is Maddy’s sister, Madeline Mozell’s sister Eve. Get her, hurry up, please, it’s an emergency.”

While I waited what seemed like five minutes, but was probably only two, several girls got bored and went back to bed.

Finally Maddy picked up. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad took an overdose of something, I don’t know what. You’ll have to call the police and get over to the house.”

“Me?”

“You’re the only one out there, for God’s sake.”

“But suppose he’s dead. Suppose I find him plopped on the carpet. Or like, he could be in the bathtub.” She started gasping, hyperventilating.

“Maddy, you have to.”

“I won’t go.” She screamed this really loud, and kept on screaming. Probably everyone in the hall could hear.

“What’s going on? Is that her father?” asked Joanne.

I yelled into the receiver, “Isaac, Isaac, are you there?”

“’Lo.”

“Isaac?”

“This isn’t Isaac, it’s Presto. If Maddy wanted to be with Isaac, she could, but she doesn’t want to. She wants to be with me.”

“Presto, please slap my sister, she’s hysterical.” I heard a slap. “Thank you. Would you please put her back on?”

She was crying tamely now, making sad little hiccuping sounds, as if she’d scraped her knee in the playground and the teacher had finally quieted her.

“Madeline, you have to do this.”

“Why? It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not mine either.” Now I was crying too, heading her off at the pass. “Maddy, someone has to take care of this, so just do it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” We were sniffling in unison. I hung up.

“Are you all right?” Zoe asked.

“Yes.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I don’t think I can study anymore,” I said as Zoe trailed me to my room. “I think I have to”—I made a face at her, trying to smile—“go to bed.” I closed my door.

That was my father’s first hospitalization, and my sisters and I were a great team. After I got the crazy call, Maddy checked him in, and Georgia did the follow-up. “Not enough to kill him. Big surprise,” she reported.

“I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I probably flunked my final,” I told Georgia, knowing I hadn’t. I was too much of a trouper to flunk. I was one of the supercompetent Mozell sisters. I could abort my father’s suicide and pass a final exam the next day. “Look at you. You’re fine,” my mother had pointed out. Was she right, or was I proving her right, living up to her expectations even now, especially now, when I could never get her seal of approval?

Four

At six a.m., the phone rings. “He’s dead,” I say to Joe, and grab the receiver. “Hello.”

“Is this the beautiful, wonderful daughter of Lou Mozell?”

“Hi, Dad. Are you all right?”

“Why’d you lock me in the pen? ’Cause of Jesse?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Go to hell.” He hangs up.

I feel dizzy from the jolt—first to the body, then to the brain. Joe puts out his arm for me to snuggle into. I shake my head.

“He’s been in that geriatric/psychiatric ward a week and he’s definitely not better. I wish they would slap some handcuffs on him. At least then he couldn’t phone.”

“How about a straitjacket?” suggests Joe.

“Right.” I throw off the covers and get up. I jerk open the closet and look for my robe.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Joe pats the bedside table, hunting around for his glasses. He puts them on and watches me from the bed.

I go into the bathroom. Why am I in here? “What am I looking for?” I yell to Joe.

“Your bathrobe.”

“Right.” I take it off the hook and go back into the bedroom. “I hope this memory thing my father has isn’t catching.”

The phone rings again. Joe reaches for it, but I get there first. “It’s my father,” I say nobly.

He removes the receiver from my hand. “Hello.” There’s a long pause. I try to read Joe’s eyes, which seem faintly amused. “He’s calling collect now,” he tells me, covering the receiver. “Yes, I’ll accept the charges. Hello, Lou.” Another pause. “No, of course Jesse isn’t mad at you.” He hangs up.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. He’s not my father.” Joe turns over to sleep some more. The phone rings again. He groans and picks it up. “Yes. I’ll accept.… You’re not in jail and Jesse isn’t mad at you.” Blunt this time. He hangs up. “Shit. What a way to get up in the morning.”

This is something Alexander Graham Bell never anticipated. I believe I read somewhere that he grew to hate his own invention, but I don’t think it was because he had a senile parent phoning him ten times a day. I’m sure he didn’t know that people who couldn’t recognize their own pants would remember their children’s phone numbers—could actually recall a seven-digit number plus an area code. I hate Alexander Graham Bell. Of course, right now I hate everyone.

“I think we should buy telephone stock,” I say later, at breakfast, while I am pacing back and forth, eating granola. “Not now, but when we baby boomers hit eighty.”

Joe doesn’t look up. He’s reading his newspapers from all over the country—the San Jose Mercury News, the Waco Tribune, the Boulder Daily Camera—to find stories for his radio show.

“Jesse, when I’m eighty, be sure to buy telephone stock.”

Jesse doesn’t look up either. He’s reading the back of the milk carton.

“Do I have to visit him today?” I wonder aloud.

Joe does not ask who “him” is. “No,” he says.

“But I haven’t seen him since I checked him in. Jesse, you’ll be happy to know that this morning your grandfather remembered your name. It was a miracle.”

“That could not be considered a miracle, Mom. That is simply a scientific inevitability.” Jesse’s mouth develops a little sneer. “When the brain deteriorates—and your dad is like wacko—the frontal lobe damage causes a person to remember things they forgot and forget things they know.”

I don’t respond, and I deem this an extraordinary feat. “That reminds me, I have to phone that man you had the car accident with. I’ve already tried him twice, and he hasn’t called back.”

“So forget about it.”

“You should probably do this yourself. You know, I really am busy.”

“If you think you’re busy, you should try high school.” Jesse continues to eat as he carries his cereal bowl to the sink. “I’ll be back late. Ifer and I are going to a séance. You know, Mom, all doors are entrances. Think about it.” He puts his bowl in the sink. “Bye.”

I pour another cup of coffee, even though after two cups my whole body rattles from the caffeine. I allow myself to sit. For a moment it’s completely quiet. Not even a breeze; nothing to ruffle anything. Stop, right now. Stop, with this feeling in this room: Joe at the table reading his papers, the smell of coffee, the warm cup in my hands, two sips before the jitters.

“Joe, when are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be home in about a week.”

“I wish you weren’t going.”

Joe pays no attention to this, which I resent and admire. “Aren’t you late?” he asks pointedly.

I start my general pre-departure routine. Finding my purse, going through my briefcase, checking for pens, Filofax, a legal pad. “Have you seen my sunglasses?” I run upstairs. Search the night table, the bureau, the bathroom, stop at the mirror. Oh God, is that my face?

This is not the first time this has happened. Not the first time, since I turned forty, that I have passed a mirror and stopped short, startled by my own reflection.

These sideways unexpected encounters are the most jarring, these candid glimpses when I have not taken time to prepare my face to be seen and my brain to see it. All I notice are the lines around my eyes. Are these new? The creases running south from the edge of my nose. Definitely deeper. My mouth, of which I am extremely fond, have been ever since a girl in my bunkhouse at Camp Tocaloma told me it was rosebud-shaped, my mouth is starting to turn down. I need a vacation. No. This is just me. Me at forty-four.

I look the way I always have, but the face of the future is threatening to take over. I have two faces in one, a nonreturnable bargain.

One day, when Joe and I passed an old couple walking arm in arm, I warned him, “Soon we’ll be them.” “I hope so,” he replied. He was admiring their coziness, but that’s not what I meant.

The first time I “got” death, I was eight years old and standing in my elementary school playground, waiting in line for my turn at handball. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” The kid in front turned to me, announced this, and then rubbed his fist around in his eye. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Every time I went to sleep I would count frantically, lie in my bed going from one to a hundred as fast as I could, so I wouldn’t think about it, and eventually I succeeded. I didn’t think about it for years. But when I started being surprised by my reflection, the thought came back, and lately every morning I wake up with that little boy’s face staring into mine: “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Also, for the past year I have changed my hairstyle every two months. Somehow this seems connected.

Why am I here? “Joe,” I yell, “do you know why I came upstairs?”

“No,” he shouts back.

“Oh, I remember. My sunglasses.” I find them on my desk, next to Dr. Omar Kunundar’s phone number. Good grief, I almost left without taking care of this. I sit down at my desk and dial. I hear the voice of a very businesslike woman.

“Hello, this is the office of Dr. Kunundar. If you are having an emergency, please press one and leave a message. If this is a nonemergency medical call, press two and leave a message. For other business, press three. Thank you.”

I press three. “Hello, this is Eve Mozell again. A week ago, my son Jesse opened his car door into Dr. Kunundar’s car. I would like to discuss the accident as soon as possible and would really appreciate it if the doctor could give me a call at 555–4603.”

These words don’t convey how charming I am on an answering machine. I am sincere and warm, polite but inviting. It’s all in my voice, and it’s one reason I’m good at my job: I do special events. People hire me to throw fund-raisers or convention parties. I am a great planner, great at anticipating what might go wrong so it doesn’t. No Surprises is the name of my company. I do most of the planning on the phone, so I end up leaving many messages for people, like about whether we want a pasta station or a roast beef station, or about this adorable mariachi band I have located. I have “phone talent.” I easily become buddies with people over the phone.

So why haven’t I heard from the doctor after I’ve left several messages, even if he’s out of town? I assume it’s because he hasn’t heard my voice. Because this nasty nurse, obviously she’s nasty, has been screening his calls.

I phone my assistant.

“Hi, Kim, I’m running a little late. Any messages?”

She gives me the number for Madge Turner, who is on the board of several medical associations in southern California and who hires me frequently to do their special events. I am planning one for her now. “Hello, Madge, this is Eve Mozell.”

“Hello, Eve, how are you?”

I consider answering truthfully, spilling out my general state of anxiety. “Fine, I’m fine, thank you. How was the cruise?”

“It was very relaxing.”

I like talking to Madge because she always says the most obvious thing. If she were on Family Feud—“One hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board”—Madge’s answer would always be the top one. (Why do people take cruises? Number-one response: To relax.)

“That’s nice, I’m glad to hear it.”

“The food was delicious. They had canapés with salmon and caviar every evening before dinner. Do you think we could have salmon and caviar?”

“I think so. I’ll price it out.”

“I ate way too much.” (What do people regret about cruises? Number-one response: Ate too much.)

“I was talking to the people at the Biltmore—”

“Eve.” She cuts me off. I hear nervousness.

“Yes.”

“Could we change the location? Wait, don’t say no. I know the invitations have gone out.”

“The party is only a month away.”

“I know, I know, but if you send me the RSVP list, I’ll take care of mailing the location change. I’ll organize a little group to make follow-up calls, I promise you. And I’ll get us out of our obligation to the Biltmore. You know, the Biltmore’s downtown and I hate downtown. Besides, I had the most brilliant idea and I had it right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Well, great, what is it?”

“We should have our party at the Nixon Library.”

I don’t say, You’re kidding. I don’t say, In all the time we’ve worked together, I’ve never known you were a Republican. Part of my job is restraint, being careful where I put my foot. I try to be chummy, never frank. “They do parties there?” is all I say, mildly.

“Oh yes, it’s quite wonderful. It’s not really a library, it’s a museum. There are fountains and a reflecting pond. And they have the place he was born right on the premises in case people get bored and want to take a little walk. I have the name of a woman there.”

I write it down, get off with Madge, then phone Kim and ask her to set up an appointment for me with the woman at the library and to send the RSVP list to Madge immediately. I come banging down the stairs. “I’m going,” I call out. But I can’t leave without complaining. I detour into the breakfast room. “You know this party for four hundred fifty ear, nose, and throat doctors? Well, Madge Turner is changing the location to the Nixon Library.”

After a long beat, Joe looks up from his paper. “Who goes to that place? Probably the most white-bread group in the country.”

“I suppose you think it would be interesting to talk to them.”

He laughs. “‘What Nixon means to me.’ I bet you’ll have a great time.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll see you later.”

At five o’clock, I visit my father. I call Joe and tell him he does not have to come too. “I should hope not,” he says.

There’s one thing I like about doing something the second time, even when it’s unpleasant: I like knowing the ropes. The elevator is to the left, past the admissions office. Seventh floor, I don’t have to check the listing. After I ring the doorbell, I have to state my name in the intercom, my business (visiting my father), and the door will be unlocked from the inside. I will store this knowledge. It will comfort me. Maybe I can pass it on to someone. Maybe my friend Adrienne will have to commit her mother.

Also, the sights and sounds that I closed out the first time, that even scared me, become curiosities. Then familiar, even familial. I like this process.

The first thing I see is a woman sitting in a wheelchair facing the phone booth. She has the receiver in her hand. She has pulled it as far out of the booth as it will reach so she can talk. And she is screaming, “Come and get me.”

Her hair is white, there isn’t much of it, and it’s pulled back by a child’s barrette. She is little and her chin is pointed. I wonder who is on the other end of the phone. I wonder whose number she doesn’t forget.

I go past her to the cage. “I’m looking for my father, Lou Mozell.”

“Just in time,” says the nurse.

“For what?”

She leans forward so her mouth is almost against the grate, and whispers. “They get difficult now. We call it sun-downing.”

I nod in understanding. She points to the left. “His room is the third. Doris will show you.”

Doris, who has frizzy hair the color of straw and two very fat cheeks that scarcely leave room for her mouth, which runs like a straight road between them, comes out of the cage. I follow her down the hall. “So he’s being difficult?”

“He wants to leave.”

“Well, that’s understandable.” I state this loyally, in a tone that says, For God’s sake, what would you expect? Then I hear him.

“Goddamnit, you bitches, get in here.” He is shouting loud enough to be heard over the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

He sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, stranded—a passenger in a car that broke down on its way to nowhere. His pants aren’t fastened at the top, and there’s a rope around his waist holding them up. “Could you buy him some suspenders?” Doris asks.

“What’s wrong with his belt?”

“It doesn’t seem to work on all his pants.” She bends until her face is level with his. “Your daughter’s here.”

“I’m not blind,” says my father.

I sit down on the bed. “So how are you?”

“I’m hungry.” His face wrinkles up tight, as if someone took a screwdriver, put it in the center, and twisted it.

“I think you’re having dinner soon.”

“Order room service.”

I say as patiently as possible, “Dad, this isn’t a hotel.”

There is a pause. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s a hospital. They’re going to fix your medications.”

He thinks about this for a bit. “They don’t take Georgia’s magazine here,” he says petulantly.

“I’m not surprised.”

“What kind of a hotel doesn’t get Georgia?”

“Hotels don’t subscribe to Georgia. Anyway, this is a hospital and hospitals never subscribe to Georgia.” I am very bad at being patient.

“You put me here because of Jesse, didn’t you?”

“No. Listen, do you want some company? Do you want to go sit with the other—” I am about to say inmates, I realize, so I stop the sentence there.

“Sure, kiddo, let’s go for a walk.”

My father stands up and pitches forward, crashing onto the floor. It’s sort of beautiful—he’s straight all the way, as if he’s tracing the quadrant of a circle. The sound when he hits is a gigantic squish, air being punched out of a cushion.

“Help, help!” I shout. Is this it? Is he dead?

I am flat against the wall staring down when Doris runs in. My father lies there like a permanent fixture.

“Jocko!” Doris’s voice is so commanding she could be summoning troops. “Fortunately your father’s fat,” she says to me. “They fall better if they’re fat.”

I nod as though I agree or understand or know something. Then Jocko appears. He is as big as a Bekins van. His head is shaved except for some hair on top that sprouts like a plant. The sight of him probably has sent many old people who are mentally on the edge right over.

He wraps his arms around and under my dad, and pulls him up stomach first. “We really need a crane for these situations,” Doris confides as Jocko pushes my father onto his knees. Then he lifts him from behind and puts him back in his chair. My father is conscious but silent. He looks quite puzzled.

“He fell over,” I tell Dr. Kelly. We are in an empty patient room a day later, having our official end-of-first-week consultation. Dr. Kelly is wearing high-top sneakers with her medical whites. “Why can’t he stand up anymore?”

“It’s part of his dementia.” She opens his file and spreads the pages on the bed. “All your father’s tests are normal. His EEG, his EKG, blood work. We did a CAT scan this morning.” She mentions a few more workups. I lose track, and I know I should take notes, because Georgia is going to quiz me later.

“Look, my father’s been nuts before. He’s been mixed up about who he is and where he is. If you adjust his lithium and whatever else he’s on, he’ll come right back.”

She shakes her head.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?” I say this bravely. It makes me nervous to confront any doctor, even this soda-pop version. I don’t say, “I want to speak to someone over you—the doctor in charge,” but I try to imagine I am Georgia, who inspires fear. Who can make salesgirls scurry in all directions.