Together, page 8
When Henry was growing up, his father was in the restaurant business in Miami Beach and worked long hours. He was a loving father but never home. Long after Henry went to bed, his father would wake him up to kiss him good night. Even though his father was an avid sports fan (and an even stronger athlete than Henry), he was never able to go to any of Henry’s games. Henry wanted to be steady like his dad—and present.
The summer before Mike’s sophomore year in high school, we signed him up for two weeks at Duke University’s Young Writers’ Camp. This would be a big adventure for Mike, a kid who’d been content to spend summers at home, hanging out with friends, shooting baskets in the driveway, playing tennis and golf. He’d gone to camp before—basketball, golf, tennis, or soccer camp. And always with a buddy. Sports were not his only interest, though. He also was a good writer and hoped to become a sportswriter. This writers’ camp seemed perfect.
Last day of Writers’ Camp, we arrived to pick him up. He spotted us pulling in to the parking lot and ran out of the dorm to greet us.
As soon as Henry and I stepped from the car and the sun was shining down on our son, I saw the earring. It was one of those blue, fake-diamond studs. Just one. Glinting in that one earlobe. Mike! Pierced his ear! Who would ever imagine straitlaced Mike doing such a thing? I wondered what Henry was thinking. I was thinking: Don’t call attention to it, Judy. Be cool. Allow Mike to play loose—without commentary from his mother.
We stood there, on the concrete, chatting, Mike naming everyone he wanted us to meet—his girlfriend from the Philippines, his roommate from New York City, his hippie, offbeat poetry instructor.
We met them all at the final event, when the campers presented what they’d been writing all week. Then we dropped Mike off at his dorm, waited in the car while he got his stuff. I looked at Henry and tried to read his face. All it was was the face of a father delighted to be with his son again.
“Well, what did you think?” I asked.
“About what?” he said.
“The earring,” I said.
“What earring?”
I probably chewed my bottom lip. How could he not notice that his son had pierced his ear?
How could two people—married for so many years, all that cohabitation, parents together—be so different?
The borders between men and women and our wildly differing sensibilities are solidly marked. Women, of course, are noticers. Men are not. Along with a million other absolutes. No one crosses to the other side. The border guards forever keep watch.
Unless some major unexpected something causes us to try on a different trait, reposition ourselves. Then we begin sidling over.
28
The catheter is removed this morning, but Henry is unable to pee. Early afternoon, an aide does the first in/out catherization. This will continue every four hours, day and night, until Henry is able to go on his own. If he ever does.
“Good thing they didn’t remove the catheter late yesterday,” Henry tells me. “No one checked on me the entire night.”
29
The physiatrist who administered the epidural ten days ago is back from vacation and comes for a quick visit with Henry early this morning, before I arrive.
Henry tells him that, as a doctor himself, he would like to be in on any discussions he and his colleagues have about his case.
The physiatrist answers, “Oh, of course you will!”
Henry also asks him to please contact neurological centers around the country to ask if they’ve had experience with this type of injury and if they know of any treatments or procedures that might speed his recovery.
The doctor says something like “That’s a great idea! I’ll get on it this week!”
It will be almost six months before we hear from him again.
30
When Laurie was fifteen, she announced over chicken, rice, and salad at the kitchen table that her French teacher had suggested she attend School Year Abroad, a program for high school juniors and seniors. She’d live with a French family and attend the SYA school, where all the classes would be taught in French, except for math and English.
Mike, twelve, immediately chimed in: “Cool!” He had a mound of chicken bones on the side of his plate. Rice and salad untouched.
“I thought spending your junior year abroad meant junior in college, not high school.” Henry.
Laurie picked up her glass of milk, did not take a sip, put it back down.
“Wait, wait,” I said, shaking my head yes in Laurie’s direction, meaning that she should say more.
She would really like to do it, she said; she loved French, she thought the experience would be good for her, she’d live in Rennes, beginning this coming August, through next June.
“No way will I allow my fifteen-year-old to be gone an entire school year.” Henry emptied his glass of water in a gulp.
“Let’s hear her out.” I tried a smile.
“Yeah,” Mike said, pushing the rice around his plate with the side of his fork. “Let’s hear her out.” It wasn’t unusual for Laurie and Mike to team up. I didn’t discover until they were grown that, after Henry and I left the table, Mike always drank Laurie’s milk for her and Laurie ate his vegetables.
Laurie answered something like: “It’s a really good program, sponsored by Andover and Exeter. Charlotte Country Day is one of a few schools in the country that participate. I’ll be home my senior year.” She radiated life. “And, Dad, I’ll be sixteen when I go. Not fifteen.”
“No way.” Henry. Grimace. Like he’d already vetoed this idea a thousand times before.
“Here,” she said, getting up from the table, grabbing her backpack from the closet in the back hall, where she and Mike kept their school stuff, cleats, bats, gloves, balls, rackets. “Mrs. Beatty said to give you this.” She unzipped a pocket, pulled out a brochure, handed it to me. “And you can call her to find out more. And she thinks I’ll do great there.”
“Okay,” I said to the brochure, although I’m sure Laurie, Mike, and Henry heard that as an okay to School Year Abroad.
Later that evening, after Laurie and Mike had gone to bed, after we’d turned off the news, Henry and I were alone in the den. I told him that if we keep putting up roadblocks we’re essentially selling her on the idea. “Let’s just see it through,” I said. “She won’t end up going. I’d bet any amount of money she’ll be right here in the fall.”
“I’m not sending a sixteen-year-old child to France for a year,” he said, pulling himself straighter, eyeing me with something close to distrust. “Period.”
I headed into the bedroom. I heard him clicking the TV on again, shuttling through channels, looking for one he liked.
* * *
.
Information packets arrived. Laurie and I filled out forms. I ordered her passport. We heard from the host family in Rennes (father in advertising; stay-at-home mom; one son, three years younger than Laurie, Mike’s age; two younger daughters). We shopped for clothes and other items, checked off a long list. Farewell party, BON VOYAGE sign the full width of our front yard, gag gifts from her friends. Suitcase bought, ready to pack.
Last-minute, all-caps warning from School Year Abroad: HIGH-LEVEL THREAT OF TERRORISM…AMERICANS TARGETED…STUDENTS SHOULD NOT DO ANYTHING WHILE IN FRANCE TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THEY’RE AMERICANS…THEY SHOULD NOT DRESS LIKE TYPICAL AMERICANS OR SPEAK ENGLISH IN PUBLIC PLACES…
Through it all, Henry remained adamantly opposed. At night, in bed, his back to me: “What about those anti-American sentiments in France? That really concerns me. And she’s at such an impressionable age. She’ll be gone so long. How do we know what these French parents are like?”
My answer, one arm easing around his shoulder: “School Year Abroad wouldn’t let these kids go to France if they didn’t think it was safe. And don’t we believe that our children know what’s best for themselves? Laurie is so sure this is right for her.”
I had changed from believing she wouldn’t end up going to believing going would be a good thing. Henry, obviously, had not changed at all. How I pushed this dramatic decision through, I don’t know. I wonder if I was at all surprised to steamroll such an important move for our daughter right over Henry’s back.
* * *
.
On an early-August day cooled by a New England breeze, our family arrived at Logan Airport in Boston to see Laurie off for her junior year abroad. In a private room, away from the gritty noise of the main terminal, we made a wide circle with the other families. The School Year Abroad administrator, a lanky, Ichabod Crane, New England prep school kind of guy, addressed the sixty students—thirty juniors, thirty seniors—seated cross-legged on the floor, inside the tight arrangement of folding chairs we parents and sisters and brothers filled. Laurie looked so young—her mouth open, eyes wide as full moons.
Because security was pretty nonexistent in 1985, you could accompany passengers to the gate. The four of us stood beside the open door leading to the tarmac, Mike and Laurie saying jokey sibling things that weren’t really jokes about how they were going to miss each other. Then hugs and kisses all around. Then Laurie joined her new classmates up the steep steps into the plane.
Henry, Mike, and I waved big waves that Laurie, now peering at us through a foggy little window, could not miss.
Suddenly, I realized I was still holding her winter coat over my arm. I’d held on to it for so long it had become a part of me.
I dashed out the airport door, into the cool, up the stairs, into the plane, Laurie came forward, I handed off the coat, she headed back down the long aisle to her seat, I turned and left.
When the fresh air hit my bare arms, they suddenly felt so cold.
Back into the airport. Henry, Mike, and I stood at the large plate-glass window, watching the plane taxi down the runway, lift, veer off. We stood there and watched, until the plane vanished, swallowed by air. At that moment, I felt something like a fist to my stomach. A tiny fit exploding inside me. I turned to Henry. “I think we just made the biggest mistake of our lives.”
He wrapped his arms around me, pulled me so close my face got buried in his chest, all wool and warmth. “It’s going to be fine,” he said. “In fact, I was just thinking she’s doing exactly what she should be doing.”
* * *
.
This was not the first time he and I had been in different worlds, then switched. Like two sides of a dime.
I’m the real worrier. Always have been. When Laurie would hang batlike from the highest monkey bars in the park, I was already envisioning her in the back of an ambulance, arms and legs crushed to powder. When Mike headed out the door to bike to a neighborhood friend’s house, overwrought words traveled from my mouth: “Be careful! Look out for cars! Watch for loose gravel in the street! Keep your wits about you!”
But during their teenage years, Henry was the one who waited up until they came in at night. I slept blissfully. I slept blissfully because he was waiting up.
If he worried about our daughter going to France for a year, I had the luxury of not worrying. He’d take care of that for both of us. As though it was useless energy for two people to worry at the same time. One of us would take the hit and allow the other to relax. When it got too burdensome, the other would take over. Swapping our roles back and forth, that little track of accommodation, is never something we expect to do. But when it happens, it feels familiar, almost inevitable.
31
The Physical Therapy Department in the rehab facility is a large, overlit, carpeted room, wide open like a warehouse. Athletic and attractive physical therapists, with their straight backs, work with patients in every stage of disability, many of them quadriplegics, some teenagers, all trying their hardest to come back. Such earnest expressions—as they grip the parallel bars, lift weights, pull themselves up and down the little wooden staircase block in the middle of the room. They teach Henry and me that, even though he travels to physical therapy in a wheelchair and he’s dying to ditch that wheelchair, we should count our blessings.
“I have nothing to complain about,” Henry whispers to me. “Nothing at all.”
“I know,” I whisper, “I know.”
His prognosis? Maybe he’ll be able to recoup some of what he’s lost. Maybe he will eventually walk with the aid of a walker. But not a single rehab doctor or physical therapist is making any promises.
Therapy is difficult. Painful. He throws himself into each leg lift, each push and pull, each step he attempts holding on to the parallel bars. I can see his jaw muscles working. I move from station to station with him, as though we’re tethered. I count with him when he loses track of the repetitions, cheer him on by telling him he’s a John Wayne. I make sure his therapists hear me saying he’s a John Wayne, even though they’re too young to know who John Wayne is. I tell them they’ve got the former city racquetball champion here. I wonder if it’s obvious how badly I want them to know what my husband was once capable of, how I want them to know I care about him, that he’s important to someone.
Important to many, in fact. To Mike, who comes often. To Brooke and bright-eyed, one-year-old Tess, who likes pushing the button that makes Pop’s bed go up and down. Laurie, Bob, and their three-year-old identical twins drive in from Durham when they can. Lucy and Zoe, their coppery red hair (like Henry’s, before he turned gray), push Pop in his wheelchair, up the hall, down the hall. Friends visit. Henry’s sister, Ruth; my brother, Donald (now living in Charlotte); brother-in-law, Chuck (my sister, Brenda, died of cancer two months before Henry’s epidural); our nephews and nieces; our cousins.
I wheel Henry out to the back patio and we sit with our company at one of the wobbly umbrella tables. Henry tells me to fold a paper napkin into a tiny square and wedge it under the table leg. Now, that’s better. It still feels like I’m playing a role. Hosting a garden party. I try to be the hospitable, lively hostess. Henry plays his part, too. No complaints. Funny stories about rehab. We shade our eyes against the sun as it rises high in the sky. All around us, aides push patients outside, then back in, aides take breaks, smoke cigarettes, eat their bag lunches.
* * *
.
One day the physical therapist wheels Henry and two other patients—a man and a woman, probably in their eighties—around a tall, round table in the middle of the room. He helps each of them to stand. The other patients are white-haired, knobbed, bent over. I hang back. The therapist explains they’re going to play a dice-and-chips game, and the goal is to amass the most chips. Of course, we all know the real goal for these people who are relearning how to stand is to be distracted enough by the game that they don’t notice how long they’re upright. If they start to feel unsteady, they can grab the edge of the table.
Henry enters in as though he’s a croupier in Las Vegas. “Okay, roll those dice, sweetheart! They’re hot, they’re hot!” He’s also coaching the others on the fine points of gambling. (“Keep your poker face, buddy…”) He counts out the chips for each person. Then, with great drama, pinkie raised, he slides the stacks across the table. The others seem a little confused by the game. I’m guessing they’re stroke victims. But they laugh heartily with Henry. The woman, whose teeth click a little when she talks, adds her own Vegas banter. “Ohhh, baby!” she croons. For these few minutes, we all forget where we are.
32
Five years before the epidural, back pain was making it harder and harder for Henry to work. In fact, the long hours and awkward posture of standing and bending over patients while examining their eyes exacerbated his pain. Sometimes, between exams, he would have to lie on the floor to get relief. Finally, Laurie, Mike, and I held something like an intervention. The three of us, surrounding their father in our den, using all sorts of combinations of logic, insisted this endurance course was no longer possible. You have to retire, we declared. I’m not ready, he said. But working is harming your health, we insisted. I’m too young to stop, he said. But your back, look what you’re doing to yourself, we argued. Finally: Okay, okay. He was sixty-two; I was sixty.
Months later, he and I were reading in bed. I turned off my light, dropped my book and reading glasses on the bedside table, turned toward him, and said, “I think we need a new division of labor.”
He let the newspaper drift down to his chest, shifted a little to face me.
“So,” I said. “Our situation has changed.” I flipped my pillow to the cool underside and sank in. “I’m still working. And you’re not. I think we need to look at the jobs to be done around the house. I know two different couples where the husband and wife each do their own laundry. What do you think about that for a start?”
“I don’t want to do my own laundry.” He swiveled onto his back, searching for a place on the ceiling to rest his eyes. Then he turned completely away from me, weight on one shoulder, arms tightly crossed, newspaper crushed beneath him.
“Why not?” I asked his upper arm.
“I just don’t.” He pulled out the newspaper, made a big point of rattling the pages, searching for that one article that he would now read instead of continuing with me. Only, he would say one last thing: “Let’s not talk about this now.”
