“He’s always staring at me! Just staring!” Patricia complained one day, coming in the kitchen.
“Shhh, Patty. He’s not deaf!” I scolded. “That’s the way people with Parkinson’s often look. He doesn’t mean to stare.”
“Well, if he doesn’t mean to, then make him stop!” she said, and I felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
“Could we have a little more empathy here, please?” I asked, knowing her grandfather might not last out the year. “Can’t you even imagine what it must be like for him to be so dependent on us?”
“No, I can’t, because I’m not him! I’m me! And I only know what it feels like to be me!” she said.
I was furious with her. “Then I pity you!” I said. I’d had a difficult day already. I’d forgotten to pick up the ingredients I needed to make dinner, I was facing a root canal in a couple of days and the tooth was hurting again, and now this. I turned on her. “I’m embarrassed for you, that you have so little feeling for other people.”
“I do too have feeling for other people!” she shrieked. “I just can’t get along with old people! They’re weird and they’re creepy and they smell and—”
My patience gave out and I slapped her. I had never slapped either of my children before, other than a quick swat on the seat, and I was as shocked as she was.
“Mo-ther!” she gasped, her face flushed, one hand on her cheek.
I started to say, Oh, Patricia, I didn’t mean that! when she rushed upstairs and shut herself in her room.
I leaned against the stove, stunned. What was I thinking? Was I never young and self-centered and thoughtless?
Upstairs, I tried to open her door, but it was locked.
“Patricia,” I said, “please let me in. I’m sorry.”
“Go away. I hate you!” she cried. I could hear the sob in her voice.
Sadness welled up in my throat, almost choking me. “Patricia . . . ,” I began again.
“Go away!” she wept.
I sat down on the floor outside her room, my head on my knees, hugging my legs. I didn’t want things to be like this between us. I wanted us to be close. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer. I heard Tyler come in for a drink of water and run back out to his buddies on the basketball court. I didn’t move.
I don’t know how long I was there. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, trying to remember anything about my own mother, any fights we might have had, but I had simply been too young. I did remember several big ones I’d had with Sylvia. What would Patricia remember of me?
Finally I heard the door open. Patricia started to come out, then stopped. I said nothing. She said nothing. She went on to the bathroom and closed the door. I heard the toilet flush.
When she came out again, hesitantly, I turned in her direction, and for a long moment we studied each other. I held out my arms.
Wordlessly, she came over and collapsed on the floor beside me, both of us crying. I hugged and rocked her.
“I’m so, so sorry, Patricia,” I said. “I’ll never do that again.”
“I’m sorry too,” she sniffled. “And I . . . I hope he didn’t hear me.”
“So do I,” I said. I waited until we were both more composed, and then I told her, “Parents have bad days too sometimes. I have problems and worries you don’t know anything about, and sometimes, if you catch me at a bad moment, I thoughtlessly take it out on you. You’ll probably do the same to your own children now and then. Not often, I hope, but it won’t mean you don’t love them.”
We continued to hug, her arms tentatively creeping around my waist, her wet face against my neck.
“Are . . . are there any big problems?” she asked.
“None that we can’t handle,” I said, and kissed the top of her head.
24
CATCHING UP
I knew that Les and Stacy had been trying without success to have children, and over the years I had hoped they might adopt, but they didn’t. It was a topic we didn’t discuss any longer, and never, of course, unless one of them brought it up. Les was forty-six, Stacy forty-one, and they seemed more or less settled as a childless couple.
They had moved to Virginia, where Lester became head of personnel at George Mason University, and Stacy taught physical education at a nearby high school. They often drove back to Silver Spring so that we could celebrate holidays together, and we all planned to gather at Dad and Sylvia’s for Father’s Day. We brought Patrick’s dad with us, helping him out of the car and moving slowly up to the house as he shuffled along the sidewalk.
My own dad was semi-retired now from the Melody Inn—he only went in three days a week. He and Sylvia were talking about a trip to Scandinavia, and that was beginning to appeal to him a lot.
“It’s probably time to turn the store completely over to another manager,” he said.
“I don’t want you to give up the work you love,” Sylvia told him, carrying a stack of plates to the table. Her hair was thinning prematurely, so that pink scalp showed through in places, and she was self-conscious about this. But she still dressed in those delicate filmy clothes of gorgeous colors. I think Sylvia was born beautiful.
“Well, I love you even more,” Dad told her. “I can’t very well take the store to Norway, can I?”
We heard a car door slam outside, and then Les’s and Stacy’s voices as they came up the walk. They descended on Dad with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers from their garden.
“Happy Daddy’s Day,” Stacy said playfully, kissing Dad on the cheek.
“Thank you, honey,” he said.
Lester, I noticed, gave Dad a hug, not the usual man-to-man handshake, and he seemed different to me somehow. Dazed, maybe. Distracted. I was instantly overcome by the thought that he might be sick.
They were late in arriving, and Sylvia had the roast ready, so we sat down almost at once to eat. Dad poured the wine Stacy had given him, and we all raised our glasses for a toast. He had filled Mr. Long’s glass only half full, and still Patrick’s father, holding it shakily, had a difficult time with it.
“To Dad,” Stacy said. “The best father-in-law a girl could have.” Then she looked at Lester and said, “And next year there will be another daddy at this table.”
It took a couple of seconds for the announcement to sink in, and then we all went wild.
“You’re expecting?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes! I’m pregnant!” Stacy said delightedly, and we cheered and screamed some more. “We’ve known for three months, but I was afraid to tell anyone for fear it . . . the pregnancy . . . wouldn’t take.” She smiled at Lester. “And . . . Les, tell them what we found out yesterday.”
I turned to my brother. He still looked like a deer caught in the beam of headlights. He opened his mouth and said only one word: “Triplets.”
This time it was pandemonium. There were shrieks and laughter and clapping, and both Les and Stacy were swallowed up in hugs.
“When are they due?” I cried.
“The week before Christmas,” said Les, suddenly a man of very few words.
“Yuk!” said Tyler, wanting to be in on the fun. “Three diapers to change all at the same time.” We whooped some more.
“Three hungry mouths,” I said. “Three noses to wipe.”
“Three bottoms to wipe!” said Patricia.
Lester was slowly coming out of his fog. “We’re going to raise them on a rotation basis,” he said. “Got it all figured out.”
“How’s that?” asked Sylvia, chuckling already.
“Switch ’em off weekly. First week you and Dad will take Kid Number One, Alice and Patrick can have Kid Number Two, and we’ll take the third one. The next week we’ll switch so each of you will have a different baby.” We laughed.
“Oh, Les,” I said, getting up and hugging him again. “I can’t believe you’re going to be a dad!”
“What I am is scared half out of my wits,” he said.
It could onl
y happen to Lester. Triplets!
“Cheer up,” I told him. “You could be the one carrying them, for heaven’s sake.”
* * *
We all offered to help when the time came, of course. Stacy and Lester became totally baby-centric. They began picking up books on breast-feeding and infant care, pediatric medicine, and How to Finance Your Baby’s Education. We knew that fertility drugs sometimes meant preemies, and didn’t want to worry them, so we worried each other.
“I wonder if I should take off work a few days to be there for them when the triplets come,” I said to Patrick.
“I think if they want you there, they’ll ask,” he said.
We already knew the date the babies would be born because Stacy was to deliver by Cesarean section. As fate would have it, the day before the delivery was scheduled, the forecast was horrible. Heavy snow was expected, and already the announcement came that schools would be closed. I’d made Belgian waffles—one of Dad Long’s favorites—for a festive breakfast, as much to occupy my mind as to please the family, because we were all thinking the same thing: worrying about Stacy.
The phone rang at twenty past ten, just as I had placed the last waffle on the table and Patricia and Tyler were dividing it meticulously. It was Lester.
“Al?” he said.
“Les! What are you going to do about tomorrow?” I asked. “We’ve all been wondering.”
“The five of us are doing fine,” he told me.
“What?” I yelled as the family gathered around and Mr. Long looked confused there at the table by himself.
We heard Les laugh. Two days before the snow began, he told us, they had heard the forecast and simply called the hospital to see if they could move the C-section up. The doctor had been thinking the same thing, so that’s what they did.
“And now we’re parents!” he said joyfully. “And you have two nieces and a nephew!”
We all went bonkers. “Oh, Les! I’m so happy!” I cried, and one by one, I had to put the family on the line, speaker setting so we could all hear.
“What are their names, Uncle Les?” Patricia asked.
“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” Lester told her.
“Uncle Les-ter!”
“Dopey, Sneezy, and Grumpy,” said Les.
“Les-ter!”
“Their names are Sara, Hannah, and Benjamin,” said Les.
“Another Ben in the family!” said Patrick.
“Dad must be totally thrilled,” I said, and could imagine his smile, as wide as his face.
* * *
Parenthood, for better or worse, shows us parts of ourselves we didn’t know were there. I was more impatient at times with my children than I ever thought I would be, while Lester, who usually gagged at even the words dirty diaper, threw himself into parenthood with abandon.
He took a month’s leave and organized his life with the “Tumultuous T,” as he called the triplets, so that he would be around when Stacy needed him most. I would often visit to find one baby slung over his shoulder for burping, one in his arms getting his supplemental feeding, and the third sprawled facedown over Lester’s knees for a “burp in progress,” as Les described it, each of them expertly pinned in place by a finger, a hand, or an elbow.
“Look at you!” I said to him once. “Les, you’re fantastic. Who would have thought!”
“The older, the wiser,” said Les. “When I’m eighty, I’ll be so smart, they won’t be able to stand me.”
* * *
We’d had to put Mr. Long in a nursing home at last because he’d fallen and broken a hip and needed more care than we could give him. I think even Patrick finally realized it was the best place for him. I noticed Patrick was developing deep creases on either side of his mouth, and I found myself staring in the mirror, pushing the skin up a little on my cheekbones to see how nicely it tightened the jawline, wishing I looked that way again. I hadn’t minded my thirtieth birthday at all, because I’d felt trim and healthy and pretty, but my fortieth . . . !
“Patrick, do you think I need a face-lift?” I asked.
He was shaving at our double sink, and he eyed me skeptically.
“No, I’d be afraid that when I kissed you, something would fall,” he said.
“Be serious,” I told him. “Look.” I pulled skin on my cheeks back again to tighten the chin line. I opened my eyes as wide as possible to demonstrate an eyelid lift and pouted my lips to show what a collagen injection might do.
Patrick stopped shaving and stared at me.
“Alice,” he said, “that looks like a dead fish. Please don’t tinker with the woman I love. I like her just the way she is.”
Still . . . a new wrinkle here, another gray hair there. They kept coming, all the same. And parenthood was like that too. Just when I thought we had a handle on Patricia’s assorted problems, we found that Tyler needed our attention. And once we’d worked through his difficulty, Patricia would confront us with a new crisis.
Our children seemed to be changing from week to week. Patricia’s body was curvaceous, lean as a gazelle, while Tyler was a gaggle of arms and legs and ethereal as fog. One day they were perfectly normal children on the verge of adolescence, and the next I hardly recognized them.
One morning, Patricia came down to breakfast wearing raccoon eyes; she had bought some mascara and applied it along with eyeliner so thick that when Patrick glanced up from his newspaper, he actually jumped.
“My God!” he said, without thinking. “What is it?”
Patricia fled the table crying, and I had to get the cold cream and help her wipe it off.
A few evenings later Tyler put down the magazine he was reading and yawned, slowly unkinking his arms and legs, and then, elongating his body in a giant stretch, he slid off the couch, under the coffee table, and, completely oblivious to us, it seemed, used his forearms to inch his way across the room on his stomach, into the hallway, and, step by step, up the stairs.
Patrick looked at me. “What was that?”
“Our son, I think,” I answered, and knew I could never love my crazy kid more than I did right then, the very epitome of adolescence. “You’d better quit asking and just accept that they live here,” I told Patrick.
But Patricia was fifteen now and not nearly as communicative as she used to be. If acne wasn’t ruining her life, it was her super-strict parents. Like a puppy straining at the leash, she longed for more independence. We tried to give her all we felt she was ready for, but to Patricia Marie, it was never enough. The rules were absolute: no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no sex, no riding with anyone who hadn’t been driving for at least six months without an accident, and no parties where adults weren’t present.
Patrick, however, surprised me by how strict he was with her. It was not the rules so much as the authoritarian way he presented them. Maybe all dads were so protective of their daughters, I thought.
“What do you mean, ‘sex,’? ” Patricia demanded, standing belligerently in the doorway with her arms folded, glaring at us. It could so easily have been me at fifteen, I thought.
“Anything that leads to intercourse,” Patrick said, heedless of the quicksand he’d just stepped into.
“Daaaaad!” she wailed. “That could be anything! Sex always starts with something! A look, a touch, a word, a smile!”
“So don’t look, touch, speak, or smile,” Patrick told her. He was trying to be funny, but this was lost on our daughter.
“I won’t have intercourse, but you can’t dictate everything I do!” she insisted. “You kissed when you were fifteen, I’ll bet! I’ll bet you even French-kissed, and did a lot more than that!”
I was making tomorrow’s lunch at the counter and cast a sidelong glance at Patrick. What did we do at fifteen? Everything we could get away with, I knew. I wasn’t about to tell Patricia, but I remember how Patrick first tried to French-kiss me when I was twelve. When I was babysitting, yet! Good gosh, should I be worried about what Patricia might be doing when she was o
ut babysitting?
“Blow jobs,” said Tyler, who was eating a bowl of ice cream at the table.
“What?” I said, turning around.
“Where did you hear about that?” demanded Patrick. We were both surprised. Tyler was only twelve!
“Oh, everybody knows about oral sex,” he said nonchalantly, digging out the chocolate chips to savor when he was through. “We watched them do it on cable over at Bernie’s house.”
“And when was that?” I asked in the calmest voice I could muster.
“A sleepover. After his parents went to bed.”
Patrick gave me a look that said, Don’t react now. We’ll talk to Bernie’s parents later.
“You kids grow up too fast,” I told my children. “There won’t be anything left to discover or appreciate when you’re older. You’ll be jaded.”
“Mom, just because we talk about something doesn’t mean we do it,” said Patricia after Patrick left the kitchen.
“I know,” I told her. “And I understand that. But it’s important that you know how we feel about things, and dads are pretty protective of their lovely daughters. I not only thought about all kinds of things, but I fantasized about doing them, even though in real life, I never would. Although I do remember riding around a few blocks on a motorcycle with the kind of guy I would never seriously consider going out with.”
“Really?” Patricia stared at me, grinning a little. “Did your dad ever find out?”
“No. But Sylvia did. Because she was having lunch with someone and saw us go by on the street. And, bless her, she never told him. She talked to me about it instead.”
“Well, I think about a lot of things I’d never do either,” said Patricia.
That was encouraging, if true. Liz and Pamela and I certainly knew about a lot more than we had actually tried, but we wanted to know about things just the same. It helped us feel sophisticated without taking any risks. Patricia, however, was still testing the limits, it seemed, because it was only a few weeks later that we were faced with a serious infraction of our rules.