We Are Not Ourselves(154)

“Can you sit down? If you sit down this will go a lot easier.”

“Go away!” his father shouted. “Go away!”

Connell moved behind him and pulled his father down onto him, breaking his fall with his body. His father crashed an elbow into his chest and flailed around like a man on fire. He would have punched Connell in the face if he could have turned around.

Connell held him in a tight grip. “It’s okay,” he said, over and over. He had to slow everything down.

He climbed out from under him, cradling his head. He tugged off his father’s shoes, unzipped his pants, and started pulling them off. His father grabbed at them and kicked at him, but Connell got them past his butt and off his feet. Crap clung to his father’s legs and fell to the tub in clumps. Connell heard it splat and realized he could never be a nurse like his mother. His father was breathing hard and staring at him with an eerie intensity, as if to keep his gaze from drifting to his nakedness.

Connell dropped the pants in a heap on the floor. He didn’t have the heart to tackle the underwear yet, so he went after the button-down shirt. His father was slicked with crap all over and hard to grip, but Connell got the shirt off; only the socks and soiled briefs remained.

“Will you stop, Dad? Will you stop for a minute?”

“Go away!” his father shouted. “No more!”

“You are going to have to listen to me,” he said sharply.

“Leave me alone! Leave!”

As he took his father’s underwear off, Connell looked away, partly so as not to mortify his father and partly because he hadn’t seen his father’s penis since he was a little kid in the shower with him. The smell in the hot shower overpowered him, and he gagged. Some of the crap fell out of his father’s underwear, which Connell cupped like a diaper and dropped into the little trash bin with the grocery store bag in it. His father lay there naked. Connell would have to pick him up and wash him, but he would have to get the tub clean too, or they would both track it around the house. His own clothes were going to get sopping wet, so he quickly undressed. He left his underwear on. He needed all his strength to lift his father up. His father wasn’t resisting anymore, but he was dead weight. Once Connell got him standing, he closed the curtain and turned the water on. The crap stuck to the bathtub began to wash toward the drain. He grabbed a towel from the rack and started wiping the crap from his father’s legs and butt. It seemed that no amount of wiping could get him clean. His father’s head hung down and his shoulders slumped. His chest heaved in deep, mournful sighs. When the towel was too filthy to continue, Connell rolled it up and dumped it on the floor. He grabbed the bar of soap and another towel and made it into a giant washcloth with which he washed his father’s genitals and gave his legs and backside a good scrubbing. He had never touched his father so much in his life. He soaped up his hands and washed his father’s feet and his own. He washed his own arms and legs and scrubbed at his hands, then turned the water off. “We’re almost done,” he said, opening the curtain, taking his father’s hand, and helping him out into the steam-filled room. He ran to the closet and grabbed more towels. His first thought was to wrap one around his waist and remove his sopping underwear beneath it, but something told him it would be a great indignity for his father to be naked while his son was clothed, so he took his underwear off and stood exposed. He toweled his father down and they stood naked together. He wrapped a towel around each of them. He found his father’s cologne in the medicine cabinet, made a little well of it in his hand, and clapped it to his father’s neck. The smell rushed up at him, and he was reminded of when his father showed him how to shave. “Go with the grain,” his father had said into the mirror. “To avoid bumps. Take it easy. Take your time. Don’t go over the same spot twice if you can avoid it.” Afterward, he’d leaned down to let Connell pull at his cheeks and feel the cool, smooth skin of his face.

Connell put some underwear on his father, and a T-shirt, and led him to the bed and tucked him in.

When his father was asleep, Connell left the house to go buy a box of adult diapers. He didn’t know why his mother hadn’t thought of this sooner. It would save everyone a lot of trouble and be a simple fix. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to use them.


“He wants to leave you his desk when he’s gone,” his mother said at breakfast the next morning, before she left for work. His father was upstairs. “The rest you’ll have to wait for me to die to get.”

“Jesus.”

“You want to be a kid forever? You have to hear this stuff eventually.”

Connell knew that getting that desk had been one of the few happy experiences his father had shared with his own father as an adult. It was of no use to his father anymore, though. Now it was where his mother did the bills. She could use the little desk in Connell’s room for that; he could switch them out.

The desk was five feet wide and three deep and made of solid wood. It wasn’t an heirloom, exactly. The wood was scratched and nicked from the banging by the chair. A set of drawers on either side formed the base on which the desktop rested.

Taped index cards ran along the front and side edges. One card listed the day, month, and year of all three of their birthdays. One had a little family tree branching out from his grandparents to his aunts, uncles, and cousins. Off EILEEN TUMULTY LEARY (WIFE) and ED LEARY (SELF) was CONNELL LEARY (SONN). One card read SOCIAL SECURRURITURY #, as though his father had picked out a syllable at random to keep the thread going. Inside the desk was a card with a pump pin affixed to it and the caption, PIN FOR BLOING UP OF BACKET BALLS.