All Fall Down: A Novel Page 11

  “Excellent,” Dad said. “Because I’ll be watching.” With that, according to the plan I’d begged my parents to approve, Marc and I went down to our finished basement, where there was a wide-screen TV, a Ping-Pong table, and an air hockey game where the puck glowed in the dark, requiring that the lights be turned off. I’d flicked the switches and plugged in the machine, and after a few minutes, Marc and I had retired to the couch for what I even then recognized was inept and unsatisfying fumbling when, suddenly, my father’s voice came booming out of the ceiling, sounding, for all the world, like God. “I’LL BE WATCHING,” he intoned. Marc, shrieking like a girl, sprang into the air, hit his back on the arm of the couch, and tumbled to the floor in a groaning, tumescent heap. I started laughing, and every time I came close to collecting myself to the point where I’d be able to comfort my paramour, I’d hear my dad’s voice again, coming through the house-wide speaker system he’d installed last year so my mother could hear James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkle wherever she went. “I’LL BE WATCHING.” Marc had never asked me out again. I didn’t mind. It had been worth it.

  • • •

  In the driveway of the modern four-bedroom house in Cherry Hill where I’d grown up—a model of late-eighties chic, all angled hardwood and glass—I sat for a moment, taking deep breaths. I pictured a deserted beach, with white sand and lace-edged waves lapping at the shore. That was good. Then I slipped my hand into my purse and curled my fingers around the Altoids tin that contained ten magical blue pills. That was even better. I put one in my mouth and stepped out of the car.

  The instant my feet touched the driveway the front door popped open. My mom opened her mouth, undoubtedly prepared to launch into her catalog of woe, and then shut it, slowly, as she considered my outfit. “You know,” she said, “in my day you’d have to put on your face to even open your front door to get the paper.”

  “Aren’t I lucky that times have changed,” I said lightly, wishing I’d taken two pills. I looked down at myself: black leggings, a gray-and-black wool tunic that could have benefitted from a trip to the dry cleaner’s, black patent-leather clogs. No makeup, true, and my hair was in an untidy bun, but it at least had been recently washed. My mother, meanwhile, had lost her bounce, the ponytailed girlishness that had kept my father in thrall for all those years. Her skin, normally tanned and glowing, had a crepey, wrinkled pallor, suggesting that she’d been spending most of her waking hours indoors. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her ring, a rock the size of a marble that my father had purchased (at her insistence, I suspected) for their thirtieth anniversary, hung loosely from her finger. She was, as always, tiny. Never in her life had she topped a hundred pounds—“except,” she liked to say, in a just-short-of-accusatory tone, “when I was pregnant with you.” She had on the same Four Seasons bathrobe she’d been wearing last Saturday, only there was a stain I hoped was ketchup on one sleeve, and a smear of something yellow on the lapel. Her trembling hands were pressed together—my mother’s hands had shaken for as long as I could remember. I think I’d been told it was related somehow to the Accident. When I hugged her, I breathed in her familiar scent, something fruity and sweet with top notes of Giorgio and Listerine. Her tiny feet were bare, with chipped coral polish on the toenails and purple veins circling her ankles. In the morning sun, I could see the outline of her skull through her thinning hair.

  “Sidney!” she yelled, over the sound of financial news. “I’M GOING TO TAKE A SHOWER!”

  My father called back something I couldn’t hear. My mother walked up the stairs, head bent, moving slowly, as if every step hurt. I draped my coat over a chair at the breakfast bar. I guessed Brenda, the last cleaning lady the agency sent, hadn’t worked out any better than Maria, or Dot, or Phyllis, or whoever had preceded Phyllis. When my dad had gotten his diagnosis, I’d offered to pay for a cleaning lady–slash–helper to come five days a week. But Blanca, who’d worked for my parents forever, coming every Tuesday and Thursday to wash the floors, vacuum the carpets, run a load of laundry, and wipe down the countertops with bleach, had other families to tend to and couldn’t quit on them. I’d found an agency and explained what I needed—someone to do the housework, to help with the laundry, to take my mother to the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s and to run whatever other errands she might have, someone with a decent personality and a driver’s license. The agency had sent over an entire football team’s worth of women, but my mom had a complaint about each one of them. Maria the First had insisted on being paid in cash, not by check, and my mother refused to “make a special trip to the bank, just for her.” The second Maria drove a Dodge that was missing one of its front hubcaps. Exit Maria the Second. “There’s no way,” my mother had sniffed, “that I’m driving around in that . . . vehicle.” Dot had either refused to iron the sheets or done it badly. Phyllis, my mom claimed, had stolen a pair of Judith Leiber earrings right out of her jewelry box. (My suspicion was that if I looked hard enough, I’d find those earrings somewhere—my mother was a notorious loser of things, from keys to credit cards to jewelry—but it was easier to call the agency again than to have the fight.)

  That morning, the kitchen table was covered with salad-bar take-out containers, a glass with an orange juice puddle coagulating at the bottom, a collection of prescription bottles, and crumpled sections of the newspaper. I started to straighten the mess, then gave up and went to the den to find my father.

  He was sitting on the couch in a crisp white shirt with monogrammed cuffs, suspenders, and pin-striped navy pants. His suit jacket, still on its hanger, was waiting on the doorknob. I swallowed hard. He looked just the way he had the morning he’d driven me to Lancaster for college, the way he’d looked every morning of my girlhood, when he’d slipped into my bedroom, smelling of Old Spice and the grapefruit he ate for breakfast. “With your shield or on it,” he would say, which is what Spartan fathers would say to their sons before sending them off to war.

  Maybe he’d have been a little gentler, more inclined to treat me like a little girl instead of a son or a successor, if I’d looked more like my mom . . . but I’d inherited my face and figure from my dad’s mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall, especially for a woman back then, and busty. I’d learned to modulate my voice (Grandma Sadie’s honk could silence an entire supermarket), and, after an embarrassingly minor amount of begging, I’d gotten my nose done the summer between high school and college. (My father had said, “You look fine!” My mom had asked if I wanted to get a breast reduction, too.)

  My mother was Sadie’s opposite, tiny and soft-voiced and sweet. Unlike my grandma, who drove the car and signed the checks and made all of her household’s big decisions, my mother was utterly dependent on my dad. He hired Blanca so she wouldn’t have to clean; he hired a car service so she wouldn’t have to drive after the Accident. When they entertained more than one other couple, he’d hire a catering company to cook and clean. If it had been possible to pay someone to go through pregnancy and labor for her, so she wouldn’t have to suffer even an instant of pain, he would have done that, too.

  Until now, she had drifted through life like a queen who had only a few ceremonial duties to discharge. She didn’t work, or take care of me or the house. What she did was amuse my dad. She would gossip and dance and play card games and tennis and golf; she’d listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and use her long, painted fingernails to scratch at the back of his neck. Her biggest fear, voiced daily, was that she would outlive him and be left all alone in a world she couldn’t begin to handle, so it wasn’t surprising that she became a world-class hypochondriac by proxy. If my father sniffled, she’d schedule a doctor’s appointment to make sure it wasn’t pneumonia. If he had indigestion, she’d want him to go to the emergency room to make sure it really was the tomato sauce and not his heart. She’d stand by the front door in the morning, refusing to let him leave until he’d put sunscreen on his hands, face, and bald spot (his own father had died of melanoma), and in the e
vening she’d bring him a glass of red wine (okayed because of the healthful tannins). Instead of nuts, he’d take his drink with a little green glass dish filled with vitamins, supplements, fish-oil capsules—whatever she’d read about in Prevention or Reader’s Digest that week.

  We would have dinner, the two of them would retire to the den, and I’d go to my bedroom and shut the door, doing my homework or listening to music or drawing in my sketchbook.

  I wasn’t the most popular girl in my school, but I wasn’t a total embarrassment either. In high school, I was moderately popular, with a circle of reliable friends and, from the time I was sixteen on, a boyfriend, or at least someone to make out with at the movies. I worked hard on my looks, keeping a food journal all the way through college that recounted everything that went into my mouth and every minute of exercise I’d done. (Recently I’d found stacks of notebooks in my childhood room’s desk drawers describing cottage-cheese lunches and apple-and-peanut-butter snacks. Why had I saved them? Had I imagined wanting to reread them someday?)

  In the den, my father was bent over, pulling on his white orthopedic walking shoes, the ones that closed with Velcro straps. I turned away, my chest aching. My father had always been fastidious about his clothing. He’d loved his heavy silk ties from Hermès, the navy blue and charcoal gray Hickey Freeman suits he wore to work. Once a year, he and I would make a trip to Boyd’s, an old-fashioned clothing store on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the clerks would greet my father by name. I’d sit on a velvet love seat with a cup of hot chocolate and an almond biscotti from the store’s café, and watch as my father and Charles, the salesman who always helped him, discussed summer-weight wool and American versus European cuts and whether he was getting a lot of use out of the sports jacket he’d bought the year before. My dad would ask about Charles’s sons; Charles would ask me about school and sports and if I had a boyfriend. Then my dad would disappear into the changing room with one suit over his arm and two or three more hanging from a hook on the door, and he’d emerge, with the pants bagging around his ankles, for more discussion with Charles, before turning to me.

  “What do you think, Allie-cat? How’s the old man look?”

  I would narrow my eyes and nibble my cookie. “I like the gray suit the best,” I would say. Or, “I bet that navy pinstripe would look nice with the silver tie I got you for Father’s Day.”

  “She’s got quite an eye,” Charles would say—the same every year.

  “She’s an artist,” my dad would say, his tone managing to convey both pride and skepticism.

  Eventually, a tailor would be summoned, and my dad would stand in front of the three-way mirror while the stooped old man with a mouthful of pins and a nub of chalk between his fingers marked and pinned. Then my father would change back into his weekend wear—khakis and leather boat shoes and a collared shirt—and he would take me out to a dim sum lunch. We’d order thin-skinned soup dumplings, filled with rich golden broth and pork studded with ginger, and scallion pancakes, crispy around the edges, meltingly soft in the middle, fluffy white pork buns and cups of jasmine tea, and then we’d walk to the Reading Terminal for a Bassetts ice-cream cone for dessert.

  My father got up. Ignoring the gray nylon Windbreaker my mother had left hanging over one of the kitchen chairs—an old man’s jacket, if ever there was one—he took his trench coat off the hanger in the closet, put it on, and followed me out the door.

  “Remember when we used to go to Boyd’s for your suits?” I said as I pulled into the street.

  “I’m not brain-dead,” he said, staring out his window. “Of course I remember.”

  “Do you think Charles still works there?” In all the years we’d shopped at Boyd’s, Charles, a handsome, bald African-American man who always matched his pocket square to his tie, had never seemed to age.

  “I have no idea,” said my father. “I haven’t needed a new suit just lately, you know.”

  We rode toward Philadelphia listening to NPR, not talking. My plan was to get him lunch at Honey’s Sit ’n Eat, a Jewish soul-food diner where they served waffles and fried chicken and all kinds of sandwiches. “Where’s your girl?” asked my father, as we pulled off the highway at South Street. I tried to remember whether he’d called Ellie “your girl” before, or if this was new and meant he’d forgotten her name.

  “She’s with Dave at a birthday party.” Although Dave was never around as much as I’d hoped he would be, when he was with Ellie, he was a wonderful dad. The two of them adored each other, in exactly the way I’d always hoped my dad would adore me. Ellie would slip her little hand sweetly in his, beaming up at him, or pat the pockets of his jacket, searching for treats, when he came home from the Examiner. “Hello, princess,” he would say, and hoist her in his arms, tossing her once, twice, three times gently up toward the ceiling as she shrieked in delight.

  I found a parking spot on the street, fed the meter, and followed my father into the restaurant, where we were seated at a table overlooking South Street: the fancy gym, the fancier pet shop, the moms piloting oversized strollers, hooded and tented against the rain.

  “I love the fried chicken. And the brisket’s great. Or if you want breakfast, they serve all their egg dishes with potato latkes . . .” I was chattering, I realized, the same way I did with Ellie, trying to keep the conversational ball in the air without any help from my partner.

  My father shrugged, then stared down at the menu. Was he depressed? It wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case . . . but could he take antidepressants, with the Aricept for his dementia and the other meds he took for his blood pressure? Was there even a point in treating depression in someone who was losing touch with reality?

  By the time the waitress had filled us in on the specials and we’d placed our orders—a brisket club sandwich for my father, a grilled cheese with bacon and avocado for me—I was exhausted.

  “Tell me the story of the night I was born.” Asking someone with memory loss to tell you a story, to remember something on cue, was risky . . . but this was one of my father’s favorites, one I’d heard him tell dozens of times, including but not limited to each of my birthdays. Maybe he would talk for a while, and I could sit quietly, catching my breath, maybe sneaking a pill in the ladies’ room before we left.

  He took a bite of his sandwich, dabbed at his lips, and began the way he always did: “It was a dark and stormy night.” I smiled as he went on. “It was three days after your mother’s due date. We lived on the fourth floor of an old Victorian at Thirty-Eighth and Clark. I was a starving graduate student, and she was . . .” He paused, his eyes losing focus, his features softening, his face flushed, looking younger than he had in years, more like the father I remembered, as I mouthed the next five words along with him. “Your mother was so pretty.” We smiled at each other, then he continued. “When she started having contractions, we weren’t worried. First babies can take a while, and we were maybe ten blocks from the hospital. Her bag was packed, and I’d memorized the numbers for two different cab companies. She had one contraction and then, ten minutes later, another one. Then one more five minutes after that, then one two minutes after that . . .” He used his hands as he told the story—how my mother’s labor progressed faster than they had expected, how by the time they got down to the street to wait for the cab, rain was lashing the streets and the wind was bending the trees practically in half, and the mayor and the governor were on the radio, telling people to stay inside, to stay home unless they absolutely had to leave. “I was ninety percent sure you were going to be born in the back of a taxicab,” my father said.

  He got every detail, every nuance of the story right—the way the cab smelled of incense and curry, the driver’s unflappable calm, how he’d left my mother’s little plaid suitcase on the sidewalk in front of our house in his haste to get my mom in the cab, and how one of the neighbors had retrieved it when the rain stopped, dried each item of clothing, and brought it over the next day.

  �
�Did you want more kids?” I asked him. All these years of wondering, and I’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask. He waited until the waiter had cleared our plates and taken our orders for two cups of coffee and one slice of buttermilk chocolate cake, and patted his lips with his napkin again before saying, “It wasn’t meant to be. We had you, and then your mother had her trouble . . .”

  “What trouble?” I asked, half my mind on his answer, the other half on my sandwich. He probably meant the Accident. That was the only trouble I’d ever heard about.

  He pushed the salt and pepper shakers across the table like chess pieces and did not answer.

  “Was I a hard baby?” I asked. Had I been like Ellie, shrieky and picky and inclined toward misery? Again, no answer from Dad. I knew, of course, how overwhelming a baby could be, and I suspected that in addition to feeling like a newborn’s demands were more than she could handle, my mother had also felt isolated. It couldn’t have been easy, I thought, and pictured Little Ronnie, her flawless skin suddenly mottled with stretch marks, her beauty sleep disrupted, all alone in the apartment and, eventually, in the big house my father had bought her. Who had she gone to with her questions and concerns? I’d had friends, a pricy lactation consultant, and the leader of the playgroup I attended, who had a degree in early childhood development. I’d had Janet, and my own mom, and even the Indomitable Doreen. My mother had no one. Her own mother had died before I was born, and as a teenage bride and young mother, she hadn’t yet formed bonds with the types of women I’d come to know. She had only my father . . . and that might have been lonely.