The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

  “What?” says Trev.

  “Showtime,” I say.

  And without further delay, we stand to leave—I stand to leave, anyway, acutely aware of the boyfriend’s eyes in my back like daggers.

  Trev hunches his shoulders to buttress the weight of his head, clutches his joystick with a knotted hand, and whirs around in a semicircle, piloting himself toward the exit.

  “Regal or Cineplex?”

  “Regal,” he says.

  It’s always the Regal.

  o-fer

  Doing anything with Trev is slow, no matter how many times we’ve done it before. There’s the matter of the ramp, along with all that buckling and unbuckling, the fact that he’s a slow eater, and the fact that he likes to make me wait. But at least we always get a good parking spot. Thursdays are tight for me schedulewise, depending on the movie. Usually, by the time the matinee is over and Trev’s had his fish-and-chips, and I drop off the van, I’ve got just enough time to put on my navy blue sweats with the drawstring and the elastic cuffs, my knee braces, my jersey, my cleats, and my hat.

  My softball team hasn’t lost a game in three seasons. It helps that we play the same two teams over and over—helps us, anyway. Line us up, and we look like any other stooping, paunchy, hobbled men’s league roster from here to Casper, Wyoming, but we hit line drives all day long, and our defense is strong up the middle. Me, I can’t seem to buy a base hit the last two seasons, not when it counts. Back in the day, I was a line-drive machine. Back when my skin was elastic and I wasn’t so soft around the middle, and people used to tell me I looked like Johnny Depp, I played a nifty center field. I was a vortex where fly balls went to die.

  Nowadays, the last thing I want to do after a week of caregiving is strap on some cleats and make a spectacle of myself in front of my peers (and worse, their wives and children), by going 0 for 4 against a guy who recently sprained his back making an omelet. But I soldier on for the team. And it is with the same sense of duty that I agree to accompany Forest and a few of the guys to the Grill on game nights to celebrate our victory.

  Forest is my best friend. I roomed with him freshman year at the U. Even back in those days, he was gently trying to show me the way. Years later, he was my best man when Janet and I got married.

  Forest is about six foot, 230, with big arms and a little bit of a gut in recent years. The crotch of his red sweats is starting to ride uncomfortably high—uncomfortable for everyone involved. We call him the Grape Smuggler because—well, use your imagination. Forest is the backbone of the O-fers. He pitches, bats cleanup, collects the fees, makes all the pregame reminder calls, fills out the lineup card, and is the undisputed (though unspoken) team captain. Few things inspire like watching Forest round third in the late innings with a head full of steam and two bad knees, his spare tire heaving violently beneath his snug jersey, just as the second baseman is fielding the relay.

  “Run, Forest, run!” we yell, from the dugout. It never gets old.

  Tonight at the Grill, it’s cricket. Forest and I against Max and Teo. Max has a mustache of the biker/leather fag variety. We call him Lunch Box because he always brings his hustle. He may not look like a player with his straggly locks and stovepipe legs, but he hits ropes all day long, and though he runs like a man who is angry at the ground, he can actually motor. Pretty good at darts, too. He and Teo are currently smoking us. I’m not helping matters with my short-arm delivery.

  “Good darts,” Forest says, patting me roughly on the shoulder.

  He’s lying, of course. I’ve managed only a single 20, and I’ve left 17 wide open. Triple 17 used to be my sweet spot. I was money on 20. I’ve lost my steady hand. Teo is raping us on 17s, and I’m letting Forest down again. But the truth is, it’s hard to care for very long. The world flows right through me like a human dribble glass.

  I know I should be counting my blessings: Forest, for starters. The guy is solid. Then there’s the fact that I get to see a matinee every Thursday for free—how many people can say that? I should be doing my work. I should be plugging those holes, healing myself, filling myself back up like a jug. It’s been over two years. But I’m still stuck in that driveway, my arms loaded with groceries, looking back helplessly over my shoulder as my universe implodes.

  “Yo, Benjamin,” Forest says to me, handing me the darts. “Why don’t you focus on bull’s-eyes, and I’ll work on closing those seventeens?”

  “I’m on it,” I say.

  Having just scored a double bull, Max is grinning like a chimpanzee. I know I’m a loser because I’m always happy for the opponent.

  “Good darts,” I say to him.

  Forest slugs me on the shoulder. “Bear down,” he says.

  And I do. Adjusting a not-so-snug flight, and tightening a tip, I toe the line and narrow in on the bull’s-eye. It actually looks pretty big tonight. I can still see it when I close my eyes. I tell myself I can hit it. Forest is probably telling himself I can hit it, too, but like me, only half believing it. Finally, leaning forward on my right foot, poised like a marksman, I let the first dart fly.

  And, well, you can probably guess the rest.

  the long way home

  On the way back from the Grill, I do what I haven’t done in months. I take the long way home. I don’t know why I decide to take this backward step tonight of all nights. Maybe because Piper’s birthday is approaching. Maybe because I can’t bear the apartment tonight—or the compartment, as I often refer to it. No matter how many nights I spend in the compartment, it continues to defy the expression “lived in.” The place smells of hand soap and new carpet. I eat from paper plates. Nothing new accumulates, no call from the outside world eludes compartmentalization. To the tune of several hundred dollars, I’ve purchased from Rite Aid hard plastic vessels of every shape and size to contain the bric-a-brac before it spreads. I stack them in the master closet, three and four high. Beneath one of those glacier blue lids, nested like a matryoshka within an envelope, inside of a folder, within a container, you will find my unsigned divorce papers.

  Had I gotten shit-housed at the Grill tonight, had I matched Max beer for beer, shot for shot, I probably wouldn’t be taking the long way home. But that would’ve been a backward step, too. Everywhere I step seems to be backward.

  The drive home down Agatewood is still so familiar that my muscles know every wooded bend by memory. I could drive this stretch without headlights. Indeed, in those agonizing months following the disaster, after Janet ran off (or rather, walked away), I frequently drove this stretch from the Grill to the house so gooned I might’ve pissed myself and not known better. Those were the nights without Forest, the nights before serving Trev had imposed any shape back on my life. The other nights I was in Forest’s care, too selfish and shortsighted to consider that I was robbing him of his own family. For a year he tried to coax me to dinner at his house. But I always insisted on going out. Nights I spent with Forest were moderate nights by comparison—a few pitchers for distraction, a ball game, a pizza, and yet those occasions are no less blurry. By my count, I lost eighteen months to the blur. Eighteen months in which I could not move myself to seek employment, even as my small nest egg dwindled. Eighteen months in which I may well have been inhabited by somebody else or nobody at all. I participated in hundreds of conversations of which I have no memory. I forgot my birthday. For eighteen months I was awash in a sea of faces, some of them concerned, some frightened, some even repulsed, to which I can attach hardly a single name or context, at least not from where I’m sitting now. I made friends I don’t remember, collected numbers without names, made promises based on good intentions that were not my own. My life, if it could be called one, bled mindlessly through the hours like ink on a blotter. It’s a miracle I didn’t start smoking again.

  There’s somebody living in the place now, finally. For over a year after the foreclosure, the house stood vacant, and that doesn’t happen around here, even in a slumping market. You’d think the place was haunted all
those months. But not anymore. It’s a home again, that much is clear. There’s a jungle gym in the side yard, which I can just make out by the ghostly light seeping from the upstairs bedroom. The old greenhouse is gone. Piper’s bottle tree is gone. The tenants have erected a cedar fence between the driveway and the ledge, a great big sturdy thing. They’ve planted boxwood to obscure it. How can I help but wonder how things might’ve been different had I erected such a fence? But the truth is, I was remiss in so many other ways the fence is irrelevant.

  And what was I thinking in that instant just before the world went icy black, as I strode toward the front door irritably beneath my mountain of groceries? That the ice cream was melting? That if I hurried, I’d still have time to put away the groceries, take a shower, and preheat the oven before Iron Chef? That I wished like hell the kids would go to bed early, so I could have twenty minutes and a beer to myself before Janet got home? Maybe I was thinking about those hundred feet of waterfront on Discovery Bay. Thinking about buying a skiff. What thought so consumed me in that moment, what matter was of such pressing importance in my life, that I could be so absent? And the answer is: I don’t remember.

  The car is still idling. I see that a light has come on in the foyer, and now a face peers out the window at me. I pull away from the curb slowly, resisting the urge to look back.

  adventures in cartography

  On Fridays, Trev and I work on the map for ninety minutes. The map was my idea. It was inspired by one of those “America’s back roads” type of travel channel shows where the host goes to some rotting seaside burg and learns how saltwater taffy is made, or he travels to some dark hollow in Appalachia where the hoecake was invented. Except in this particular show, they went to places like the Two Story Outhouse, in Gays, Illinois (alternatively known as “the Double Dumper”), or the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, or the Wonder Tower in Genoa, Colorado. The host, with his overactive eyebrows and tall hair, was impossibly irritating, but the unique destinations made the show worth watching. You wouldn’t believe what’s out there. They’ve got an actual stuffed jackalope in Wyoming. There’s a Virgin Mary in a stump in Salt Lake City. Liberace’s ghost is haunting an overpriced Italian restaurant in Vegas. The town of Bedrock actually exists. Yabba-dabba-doo!

  We started the map early in the spring, as a sort of survey of North American roadside attractions, from double dumpers (of which we’ve cataloged no less than sixteen) to Hitler’s stamp collection, which purportedly resides in Redmond, Oregon. I suspect the ongoing project appeals to Trev for the same reason that the Weather Channel appeals to him; it’s an opportunity to note conditions he will never experience himself. We’ve devoted the better part of a living room wall to our AAA road map, which Rick down at Kitsap Reprographics was kind enough to enlarge by 400 percent for us in spite of certain copyright infringements—and at a nifty price, too. People will do most anything for a guy in a wheelchair as long as he doesn’t have food in his beard. Working on the map means a lot of Googling and pushpins. Of course, I, being of fine digital health, do all the Googling and pinning. Trev delegates like a field general from his wheelchair. Lately, we’ve been focusing our survey on Muffler Men. We’ve cataloged over four hundred of these giant fiberglass humanoid relics coast to coast. They are a diverse lot from Loggers, to Vikings, to Cowboys, to Indians, to a former Big Boy in Malibu who’s been made over into a Mexican, complete with serape and burrito platter.

  To keep track of everything, we use a color-coding system. Muffler Men are red. Museums are blue. Mystery houses, vortexes, crop circles, and other unexplained phenomenon are green. Dead celebrity parts (Einstein’s brain, Napoleon’s johnson, etc.) are black. Everything else is yellow—this would include anything from ghost towns to two-headed farm animals, to Thomas Edison’s last breath, which, technically speaking, should probably be cataloged as a dead celebrity part. Somewhere behind all of this pinning and mapping, there lingers the vaguest of notions that we will someday visit some of these places. Needless to say, it’ll never happen and we both know it. The map is just another exercise in hope. Next comes the slow, steady deferral of that hope over the coming months.

  After we conclude our mapping for the day, Trev whirs to the bathroom, urinates into his plastic vessel for what seems like an inordinate period of time, whereupon I dump his pee (which is invariably too yellow by my estimation), flush the toilet, rinse the jug out, and replace it on the counter. This I do efficiently and respectfully, like a waitress, in strict adherence to my sensitivity training. I do not stand by tapping my foot as he struggles to liberate his dingus after I’ve unzipped his fly. I do not say things like Gee, you really had to take a squirt, or Why does it dribble out so slow? or Try not to get any on the rim. I do not grimace when I wash the vessel, nor do I wrinkle my nose on those occasions when he’s evacuated his bowels and I must clean him with baby wipes, as he leans helplessly forward with his face buried in my inner thigh for support. This is my job. I’m a pro.

  From the bathroom we move on to the Weather Channel, where our host, a chubby blonde with a Rachel cut and big hooters, informs us that it’s not a good day to be wearing flannel in Charleston, that Portlanders might consider carrying an umbrella this afternoon, and to “think layers” if you live San Francisco. Meanwhile, out the window, the clouds are burning off, and I have no idea what the temperature is.

  “I’d hit that,” Trev observes, matter-of-factly.

  Trev is a hopeless chubby chaser, as I once was, before Janet broke the mold. Maybe it’s because he’s withering away to nothing—he was 103 pounds at his last checkup. Whatever the case, he likes his women generously proportioned.

  Trev flashes an evil-genius grin. “She’ll go crazy for my Big Mac cologne.”

  “You’ll know it’s over when she starts singing.”

  And so the hours pass. When I first started working for Trev, he whiled away these same afternoon hours with his wheelchair two feet in front of the computer, gaming online at full volume. First-person shooters. I used to sit on the couch with the cat in my lap and watch stupidly, marveling at the bloodbath. Or try to read Edith Wharton in spite of the racket. Now and then, I’d sneak a little one-eyed nap. But then a couple months ago, Trev’s digital functions started deteriorating rapidly. Imagine somebody putting screws through your finger joints and tightening them one turn at a time until your fingers can no longer move. Gaming suddenly became an exercise in frustration for Trev. The more he played the game, the less proficient he became. Finally, he hung up his joystick (threw it away, in point of fact) and turned his attention to the weather. Lately, I’ve noticed that even the TV remote is giving him problems. To change channels, he has to contort in his wheelchair with his head lolling heavily to one side and his forearms dangling out in front of him like a tyrannosaurus. The remote looks as though it weighs ten pounds.

  Now more than ever, as his fingers turn to stone and his heart weakens, I want to push Trev to new places—if not to the American back road, then at least to Quiznos for a change of pace.

  “You wanna go to Quiznos and get a sub?”

  “Not today.”

  “What about IHOP? They’ve got waffles.”

  “Nah.”

  “Mitzel’s?”

  “No.”

  “Mickey D’s?”

  He’s stony silent. My pushing annoys him. It makes him uncomfortable. I can tell by a slight flush in his face as he rears his big head back toward the Weather Channel, where he leaves it until it stops bobbling. He stares straight ahead as the color continues to suffuse his cheeks.

  I want to say KFC. God, I want to say KFC.

  But I don’t. As it stands now, he will exact his revenge in some trivial way by defying my will to push him into new places. Maybe he’ll send his message by shrinking our world still further. Maybe there will be no matinee next Thursday, no food-court gazing, no fish-and-chips. Maybe next Thursday we will sit right here in the living room and watch storm systems gather along the Gulf
Coast while Trev eats waffles. Could it be because we both know he’s stuck with me, and that quality care is hard to find at nine bucks an hour, that I push him so? Do I make it my business to force Trev’s hand daily because I care about him deeply or because it vexes me that he refuses to live when Piper and Jodi no longer have the chance? I suspect it’s neither, but because I know that no matter how safe one plays it, no matter how one tries to minimize risk, to shelter oneself or one’s charge from the big bad world outside, accidents will happen.

  any other day

  June 12, 2007, begins like pretty much any other day in the Benjamin household. Toilets flushing, footsteps up and down the carpeted stairs, Buster scratching at the door to get out.

  Janet’s running late for surgery. She’d skip breakfast if I let her.

  “Have you seen the keys to the Jetta?” she calls down.

  “Check in your coat pocket!”

  Piper pads into the kitchen in slippers, the hem of her bright red cape dragging on the linoleum. Yes, my child is wearing a cape—this is not unusual. Her hair is in a sleepy jumble. But already she’s bright-eyed at 7:45 a.m. During the school year, I had her up at 6:10 every morning, and she was a trouper.

  “Jodi’s got a runny nose,” she announces.

  On cue, Jodi rumbles into the kitchen barefoot, every inch a boy, despite the grief I’ve taken for giving him a “girl’s” name. I should have named him Sylvester the Cat, to hear him talk. I can’t understand a word he says. Without Piper, his communications would be lost on all of us.

  “Squish-squish-squishity-squish,” he says.

  “He wants cereal,” Piper explains.

  “Too late,” I say, skillet in hand. “Besides, we’re out.”

  “You were right,” says Janet, dropping the keys in her purse as she strides into the kitchen.