They May Not Mean To, But They Do(13)

*

Joy had already gotten Aaron dressed. All Molly had to do was bring her father his breakfast and his lunch, and make sure he didn’t wander or fall.

“For once I can relax at the office,” Joy said. “Goodbye, Aaron. Goodbye, Molly. Don’t drive each other crazy. I’m off to the salt mines.”

Aaron poked at the lump in his sweatshirt and asked what it was doing there. Molly explained about the colostomy bag at great length, as if a longer explanation would stay in his head longer, but at a certain point he just waved his hand at her, a dismissal, and she left him in his chair and washed his dishes. By the time she was done, he was calling for her mother.

“She went to work, Daddy,” she said from the doorway.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

He called for Joy ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, until Molly decided to stay in the bedroom with him.

“No wonder Mom is going nuts,” she said to him.

“Who can from Joy refrain,” he sang, “this gay, this pleasing, shining, wond’rous day?”

By two o’clock, the apartment was driving Molly insane, the banging radiators and stifling steam heat, the television’s endless loop of NY1 weather and politics and interviews of off-Broadway dancers. She had to get out.

“You have to get out,” she said to her father. She bundled him in his jacket and herded him and his walker to the door. “Come on. It’s so hot in here. With the TV grinding on and on. I can’t stand it.”

“Well, I can.”

“You need fresh air.”

“You sound like your mother. Where is your mother? Joy! Joy!”

“She went to work.”

“Oh, she did, did she?”

He often took on this joshing tone when he was confused. Molly hustled him into the elevator.

“Well, where’s your mother, anyway?” His voice had gone from joshing to desperation. “Joy? Joy! Where are you? Where’s your mother?”

They made it to the park, and Aaron stared at the evergreen bushes.

Molly sat on a bench beside him. The air was cold and wet. “So,” she said. Before the dementia, he had been a kind of genius at small talk, always able to chat and charm. That gift had been lost, gradually, but even so he had continued to enjoy a good attack on the mayor. She mentioned the mayor now, and he said, “All a bunch of crooks,” but did not elaborate. Molly moved on to the grandchildren. He liked to hear anything at all about them, laughing and calling them spitfires or wisenheimers.

“So Cora and Ruby go to public schools,” she said.

“Imagine that.”

“I hope they’re really good ones.”

Her father nodded. “Yes, indeed,” he said.

“I thought Ruby would go to private school for seventh grade for sure. Not that anyone asked my opinion. Of course no one can afford the tuition anymore. Except Russian oligarchs.”

“Well, now.”

“Are there any good public middle schools?” she soldiered on. “There weren’t when Daniel and I were that age, that’s for sure.”

“Is that so?”

Molly tried a couple of other topics, but none of them, not the state of the CIA or health care or water quality, sparked more than a nod, an all-purpose phrase: You don’t say; imagine that.

Oh, Daddy, Molly thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was a useless, selfish daughter, dragging her father out into the cold against his will so that she could get some fresh air, so that she could breathe, so that she could escape when she knew he could never escape what was happening to him, not if she made him stumble behind his red walker as far as the North Pole. And to top it all off, in these precious moments at what was surely the beginning of the end of his conscious life, she couldn’t even think of anything to say to him. To her own father.

She tried reminiscing. Older people loved to reminisce. “Remember when you had to drive up to Vermont to take me home from camp?”

“You don’t say?”

“Yup. Twice, actually. Because when you got there the first time, I had already changed my mind and wanted to stay. But by the time you got home again, I had changed it again and wanted to leave. I was so bossy. Why did anyone listen to me? I was eleven, for god’s sake.”

But her reminiscences were apparently not his reminiscences. He smiled and patted her gloved hand with his gloved hand, his expression blank.

“Now, look, Daddy,” she said, “you drove all day. I know you remember. You have to. You were so annoyed, but then you just laughed. That got me really upset—that you laughed at me, that my situation was comical and I was just one of a million little girls who did this, just an ordinary, predictable child. You have to remember all that. I got mad when you laughed, and you somehow understood and stopped laughing and pretended to take me very seriously, and then I was happy.”

“Imagine that, imagine that.”

Then another old man with an identical red walker appeared, and Aaron seemed to come alive. He stood up, with great effort, and offered the man his hand. “How do you do?” he said.

The slow determination of his movements, the difficulty and awkwardness of them, lent them a seriousness, almost dignity. Why don’t we revere the elderly? Molly wondered briefly. She knew why. They were difficult and inconvenient. But how brave her father was just by standing up, by insisting on the code of conduct he’d been brought up with, by being, simply, polite. He still tried to open doors for Molly, his hand shaking. At first she told him not to, afraid he’d topple over. But then she saw it mattered. It was what a man did, a man brought up when he was brought up.