Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [50]
The last time I spoke with her, my mother said she was doing okay but that she missed minorities terribly.
“You left Florida because you miss black people?” I asked.
“Not just black people, Jeanne. Gays and Latinos and the Chinese and the Koreans.”
“Lesbians?”
“Actually I’ve never thought lesbians add that much to the city, frankly. Anyway, I’m at your father’s.”
I sparked up the ashy doob I had gleaned. “Uh-huh.”
“He’s being absolutely impossible.”
“Really?” I said in a loud, shocked way. My mother was the perfect “stone call,” because she herself made no sense. People often make the mistake of trying to bring people to their level of sanity or sobriety or intelligence or what have you. A much more pleasurable option is to go to their special place for a few hours.
“I slept on a bed with no sheets last night. He said his sheets were at the Chinese place when I arrived. I said, ‘Steve, do you mean to tell me you don’t have any spare sheets?’ The man doesn’t have a set of spare sheets, dolly.”
I puffed further on the doob, but it had gone out. I relit it.
“And he’s sleeping on that rubber thing in the living room.”
“The raft.”
“The what?”
“The raft.” Dad had a primitive inflatable mattress, extremely narrow, that looked like an actual raft you’d use at the beach. The air would go out of it as you slept so you woke up with a flat piece of rubber between you and the floor. He offered it up to relatives and friends who were in town.
“Stay at the Carlyle if you’d like, Hereford,” he’d say, “but you’re more than welcome to lay your head at my place during the trial. Very comfortable. Absolutely.”
“Oh my God, it is a raft. The man is fifty-five years old and he’s sleeping on a raft.”
“On the banks of West Fourth Street. Sounds kinda Bob Dylany.”
“Believe me, Bob Dylan has a nice suite up at the Waldorf. I guarantee you if you go to visit Bob Dylan there’s sheets on the bed. Total insanity.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“The man doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Did you know your father sometimes sleeps upright, in his computer chair?”
“Why?”
“Apparently his asthma is so bad that he has to sleep upright sometimes to be able to breathe.”
“Why doesn’t he prop some pillows up in bed?”
“He’s afraid he’ll stop breathing if he lies flat in bed.”
I hear my mother light a cigarette and exhale.
“Are you smoking in his house?”
“He’s not here right now.”
AFTER TWO DAYS of Mom staying with Dad, Eleanor calls from St. Vincent’s Hospital.
“Hi. So Dad had a major asthma attack and . . . well, it’s weird.”
I hung up wondering what in the world Eleanor could mean by weird. Suspicious? Salacious? Depressing?
It was my birthday, so I had plans with my friends for later that night. But first I had to head to St. Vincent’s third floor, down the corridor, through the double doors, past the nurse’s station, on the right after the water fountain. I paused before opening the door to his room. I rolled my eyes, inhaled, exhaled, stared at the ceiling, chewed on the insides of my cheeks a little and started in the door. A nurse appeared.
“Who are you, dear?”
“I’m his daughter.” I held up the pass I had gotten downstairs for her to see. The six-by-four-inch plastic pass that read VISITOR was all she needed to verify my genetic honesty.
“Oh, okay, fine, dear. Now, you know your father had some reactions to the steroids?”
The nurse informed me that my father had gotten out of bed the previous night and hurled a wooden chair out the hospital window. The chair landed on Seventh Avenue, apparently killing no one.
“Wow.”
“So I’m going to have to ask you not to give him anything he could possibly injure himself with.”
Did she mean more chairs?
“He’s been asking for a pen. And that could be dangerous. No pens.”
I opened the door and went in. He wasn’t in the first bed so I walked past the curtain to the second bed. His eyes opened the second I walked in, which disturbed me. I needed a minute to take the vision in. But I didn’t get it.
His arms were tied with belts to