HANGING UP
DELIA EPHRON

Dedication

To MY FATHER, HENRY EPHRON

1911–1992

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

I always knew my mother had no friends because she never talked on the telephone. During the day, when the phone rang, the cleaning lady would answer, saying, “Mozell residence.” Or my father would pick up, yelling, “I’ve got it.” Or else my sisters and I would fight for the receiver, grabbing it out of each other’s hands. If Georgia answered and then just dropped the receiver, leaving it dangling about an inch above the floor, the call was for me. It was never for my mother.

My father planned their social life. “The Irvings on Friday,” or whoever, he would say, bounding into the room after hanging up. Social life turned him on. He was like a dog pulling at its leash, waiting for the moment when he could bolt out to dinner, see friends. My mother lay on the couch doing the crossword. “The Irvings on Friday”—sometimes he had to say it three times to get her attention.

Every day, when she returned from teaching, my mother did the New York Times crossword puzzle. We were the only family I knew in Los Angeles who took The New York Times, and we took it because my mother said, “It’s the only crossword puzzle worth doing.” She lay there, her head propped up on throw pillows, her stocking feet neatly crossed, and worked her way straight through from one across to sixty-two down.

The crossword seemed to be the thing she lived for, and it was the main constant in our daily lives, until the fights.

That’s what my sisters and I called them: the fights. As if the frequent arguments between my parents were bouts in a ring.

They started in the fall of 1966, when I was a sophomore at Uni High School in West Los Angeles, the same high school where my mother taught literature—A Tale of Two Cities, My Ántonia, The Stranger. She finished teaching at two, I didn’t get out until three-thirty, and I would go into the living room to let her know I was home. She always said the same thing, “If you’re hungry, have an apple,” working her pen on the crossword without pause. But one day when I came home she was staring at her feet, the puzzle lay undone on her stomach. Her shoes were on, and they were not the usual brown pumps that she wore each day with her shirtwaist dresses. They were red high heels with open toes. As I watched, she raised one leg and turned her slender foot to and fro, wiggling her toes and then admiring the open back with the strap across.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

She sat up and slipped the shoes off. “Slingbacks,” she said. “Do you like them?”

“No.”

“No?” She smiled at me. “Well, I do.” She got up and walked over to a mirror and did something else I had never seen: She turned up the collar on her shirtwaist dress.

“That looks dumb,” I said.

She ignored my comment, smoothing her hair over her ears.

My mother wore her dark wavy hair cut almost as short as a boy’s, and slicked back off her face, a style she referred to as “no nonsense.” Her only concession to vanity, until the slingback heels appeared, was the bright pink lipstick she freshened every hour or so.

I kept an eye on those shoes. They disappeared into the closet for the rest of the week, although her collars stayed up, and she even added a scarf, a jaunty silk thing that she tied around her neck western style in a little knot, letting the short ends lap over her collar.

Then, on Saturday morning, she tipped her hand.

Maddy, my younger sister, who was ten, was lying on the floor in the family room watching The Flintstones. I was perched on the pantry counter clocking the first of many daily hours of conversation on the telephone with my boyfriend. His name was Stuart, but I called him Sonny and he called me Cher because, like Sonny and Cher, we fancied ourselves sparring partners. “What are you doing?” he would say. “Who wants to know?” was my quick comeback. We thought this was hot stuff. Anyway, Georgia, four years older than I, was in Massachusetts, a sophomore in college, and it was just another peaceful weekend morning—my parents drinking coffee, the lazy Susan stacked with bagels, lox, and cream cheese—when my mother, reading the newspaper, said, “Those damn loggers.”

The swinging door was open and I could see my parents in the breakfast room. Even though I was deep in Stuartland, I heard the comment and noticed that my father, who was spinning the lazy Susan in search of a second helping of lox, halted a second.

A few nights later, instead of going to his weekly poker game, he followed her to a motel and nearly broke down the door.

They fought regularly after this. Night after night, they relived the moment—my father’s eureka at the breakfast table, my mother’s fury and humiliation at being caught in bed with Tom Winston, the biology teacher, who, we learned from the fights, was a very active member of the Sierra Club.

He had red hair and he was huge. “His body is as big as a double bed,” Georgia said ominously when Maddy and I took the telephone into the hall closet and, hunkering under the coats, called to let her know what had happened.

“Was he your teacher?” I asked.

“Yes. He taught me to dissect frogs. How can Mom have sex with someone who knows that much about your in-sides?”

Maddy yanked the phone away from me. “Come home, Georgia.”

I pulled it back. “She can’t, Maddy. Do you want her to flunk out?”

I tried to imagine what I would look like if Tom Winston were my father. Would I be as big as an ostrich, forced to buy my clothes at the tall women’s shop instead of wearing my neat size seven? Maybe I wouldn’t have black hair with curls springing in all directions but thick, well-behaved tangerine-colored locks that kept a clear part in one-o’clock position. Would I have blue eyes instead of brown—blue eyes with, oh God, pinkish lashes like his?

Every day I invented reasons—told to no one but myself—why I had to walk by the science lab. I sneaked a look, barely taking in a blur of microscopes and Tom Winston’s white lab coat. I never saw my mother with him (something I craved and dreaded), and Tom Winston never looked at me. He traveled through the halls as if on cross-country skis, making gigantic strides, and if by accident we passed, he didn’t jerk or slow down. There wasn’t even a flicker in his eyes that we had a connection.

I checked out the lab every day right through June, and then, on the first day of my junior year, I took another surreptitious stroll past. Where was Tom Winston?

I waited until after French class, pretending to take a long time collecting my books. When I was the only one left in the room with Monsieur Lecard, I said very casually, “Oh”—the “oh” was important, it showed that this thought had just popped into my head—“Oh, I was walking by the science lab and I noticed there’s a new teacher. What happened to Mr. Winston?”

“En français,” said Monsieur Lecard.

“Où est Monsieur Winston?” I said, starting to sweat, thinking that my mother was going to appear, just waltz in from her English class at that very moment.

“Il est à Big Bear.”

Big Bear? I called Georgia at college. “He moved to Big Bear. Do you think they’re through? Where’s that?”

“It’s this grungy little town in the mountains. I went there by accident once when I was going to Lake Arrowhead. It has a bowling alley.”

“Los Angeles has bowling alleys.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I could hear her disgust. “I mean that’s all there is. At night people come out of their log cabins and go bowling. Guess what, I’m engaged.”

“Hey, congratulations.”

“Georgia’s engaged,” I said to my mom when she came in from the garden, where she was inspecting the rosebushes. My mother frequently inspected the roses after she did the puzzle. Then she gave the gardener instructions. When I was older, I wondered why she had so much to say. Joe and I have rosebushes, and the only thing we do is cut them back and spray them. Cut and spray. Cut and spray. Maybe she was having an affair with the gardener too. “She’s going to call tonight and tell us all about him.”

“It won’t last,” said my mom. She opened the cabinet, took out a bottle of scotch, and poured herself a glass. It was four in the afternoon and she did it as if she were having orange juice. I watched, eating Oreos, as she dropped in two ice cubes.

“Are you looking at something?” she asked.

“Uh, no. Want an Oreo?” I offered the bag.

“Don’t be smart, Eve.”

“I’m not.”

My mother considered, poking the ice cubes down with her finger. I thought she was thinking about me, but then she turned, looked out the window, and began slowly sipping her drink as if I weren’t there at all.

She had never been much of a cook. Her idea of dinner was broiled meat (chicken, lamb chops, or steak), baked potatoes, and a Birds Eye frozen vegetable. But at least she used to arrange the food on platters and let my dad serve. These days she loaded up our plates in the kitchen, and while we ate, she disappeared into the den and poured another scotch.

I tried to keep my father occupied. “How’s the writing going?” It was something I’d heard one of his poker friends ask him.

“Fine.” My father stared at the door, in my mother’s direction.

I kicked Maddy.

“Mrs. Weber plays favorites, she really does,” Maddy yakked. “She won’t put me in the front row of the Pilgrim tableau. I’m going to complain to the principal.”

“She can’t complain about that, can she, Dad?”

My father flung his fork across the room and we were struck dumb. He went into the den. And they started screaming at each other.

Our house, like all the houses on the street, sat on an ivy-covered hill, which sloped down to the sidewalk. Once, really late at night during the fights, my mom threw herself off the front steps. It was as if she were doing a gigantic belly flop off a diving board. She landed with a smack in the ivy and lay there facedown. Maddy and I watched, amazed, our faces pressed against an upstairs window, making little breath circles on the pane, with our mouths hung open. After a few minutes, our mother stood up and came back inside. Had she expected us to rush out? Or had she been waiting for something to happen, something like death, and when it didn’t, had she just returned to the house to scream some more?

When Georgia came home for Christmas, she, Maddy, and I went out for ice cream. We sat in a row—Georgia eating pistachio, Maddy peppermint stick, and me chocolate chip—and I told Georgia all about Mom’s feeble attempt at suicide.

“Death from ivy asphyxiation.” Georgia laughed, then snorted by accident, sending us into hysterics. Normally she was utterly composed. She kept still, her arms very close to her body, and although she wasn’t tall, she seemed to be looking down at everyone, even when she was sitting. She licked her ice cream in an exquisitely well-mannered way. It remained a perfect round mound that got smaller and smaller. It never dripped.

I couldn’t keep up with my ice cream. It melted onto the back of my hand, which I licked, getting some on my chin. Once, when I flipped my hand out to the side to emphasize some comment or other, the scoop flew out of the cone and across the store. I always talked with my hands. Georgia could pull the eye just sitting. I must have known I had to work harder for attention, because whatever I said was accompanied by a streak of hand patter.

“Really,” I said, my hands doing their usual dance, “we watched from the window. Mom was in her fancy pink robe, facedown in ivy.”

“Maybe next time she’ll impale herself on the rosebushes,” said Georgia.

“Or take an overdose of daisies.”

“I know, I know.” Maddy threw her hand up high.

“Yes, Miss Madeline Mozell,” said Georgia, imitating Mom’s teacher voice. “Do you have a suggestion to make to the class on how our mother, Patricia Mozell, might commit suicide?”

“She’ll run around the science lab until she drops. Around and around and around and around.”

“Like The Red Shoes,” said Georgia.

“Her red shoes?” I asked.

“No. It’s this movie where a girl puts on ballet shoes and can’t stop dancing until she dies.”

“Kerplop,” said Maddy. She threw her arms up and flopped down on the floor, dead. “Kerplop, kerplop, kerplop”—she died over and over, all around the ice cream store.

One night, while Mom and Dad fought, Maddy and I sneaked out. I had just passed my driver’s test, and braving the freeway for the first time, I drove us to the airport. “People always hang out waiting for planes,” I told Maddy. “No one will notice us. They’ll think we’re meeting our parents.” After an hour or so of traipsing from one arrival gate to another, we called Georgia collect.

“We’re at the airport because of the fights. We don’t want to go home. What should we do?”

Georgia instructed us. “Go to a motel. There’s a gray one with white iron railings at the corner of Sepulveda and Washington. Not the one across from it with the sign that says ‘Our rooms are tops.’ You’ll think it’s better, but it’s not.”

Georgia always knew how to advise us so we wouldn’t make a mistake. She even anticipated our anxieties. “You can register in your own name, they won’t ask you any questions, but do you have fifteen dollars? That’s what the room will cost.”

“Maybe this is where Mom went with him,” Maddy said after we checked in.

We stood in the center of the room, not knowing what to do, although there were only two choices, bed or television. “We should sleep in our clothes,” I said.

“Is it safe here?” Maddy wondered. She sat on the tiniest inch of bed, looking down at it warily, then over at me.

“I’ll tell you what, if you get scared, just say ‘Aroo.’”

“What’s that mean?” Maddy scooted back against the wooden headboard.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Aroo.” I marched over to the TV and turned it on.

“Aroo.” Maddy pulled the blankets out from under herself and tucked her feet in. “Aroo, aroo, aroo.” She snuggled down and put her head on the pillow.

I got into her bed, although we had never slept in the same bed before. “Move over.” I kicked her.

“Aroo.” She kicked me back.

We left the TV on all night.

In the morning we tried to put the bed back exactly as we’d found it. The sheets were barely rumpled. We had each slept in one position, or else it seemed that way, but we folded and smoothed the pillows so they were again shaped like Tootsie Rolls, and tucked the spread over them, working together, feeling very competent, a team.

“When they find out where we were, they’ll feel awful,” I told Maddy on the way home. “If they’re mad, I’m leaving forever.” I slammed my hand against the front door, pushing it in, and moved aggressively ahead of her. She trailed a car’s length behind as we hunted around, finally locating our parents in the kitchen. My father said, “Hi, you hungry?” My mother glanced over from where she was squeezing oranges for juice, and kept squeezing.

A year and a half later, when I left for college, my parents came to the airport and we all pretended to be a family. Mom bought me magazines and Dad stood at the departure gate with his arm around her. The plane was announced and Maddy jumped on me, piggy-back.

She was thirteen now, taller than I was, and long and gangly. Her legs went on forever, and disappeared into her baggy shorts like firehouse poles that go right through the ceiling. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. “Maddy, let go.” It was like being locked in a vise.

“Aroo,” she squeaked.

Not fair. I shook her loose. “Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. I’ll miss you.” Big lie. I got in line and didn’t look back.

During my first two years of college, my mother never phoned. But my father did. There was a pay phone in my dorm that served the entire floor. It was in a wooden booth with glass doors and a seat inside, and I spent more time in that booth talking to my father than the girl next door to me spent gabbing with her fiancé. I began to anticipate my father’s calls. “For Eve,” whoever answered would shout. I approached the phone with trepidation, picking up the receiver and listening to see whether the call was long-distance. You could hear long-distance then. It was an empty sound, like air in a tunnel. If that sound was there, I knew who it probably was.

“Hello. Just checking in,” he’d say.

“What’s new?” I’d say.

“We had a fight last night. Your mother’s driving me crazy.”

I called Georgia to complain. “Do you believe they’re still at it?”

“Refresh my memory,” said Georgia, who was now in New York City, working as a girl Friday at Mademoiselle magazine.

“What?”

“Mom had one affair, right?”

“As far as we know.”

“Well, I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s hardly a big deal.”

“Maybe she can’t get over him, Georgia.”

“Over that lab rat? Over a man who smells of formaldehyde? I don’t think so. Anyway, doesn’t our father start the fights?”

“Not exactly. She drinks, which provokes him. Besides, it’s all her fault for having an affair in the first place.”

“Eve, there are hundreds of people in the country right now having open marriages, swinging, the works, and he is carrying on about one petite affair. You know, when Richard and I get married—”

“Who’s Richard?”

“You’ll love him. If he talks. But he doesn’t talk that much in public.”

“Where does he talk?”

“At work—he’s a lawyer. Or with me.”

“Is this serious, or is it like that engagement you had in college? Mom predicted it wouldn’t last.”

“This is serious. We’re eloping next summer. I can’t have our parents at the wedding. Who knows what they’ll do.”

I spent the summer when Georgia eloped as a camp counselor in Maine. No sooner had I dumped my luggage back in my dorm room than the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“She won’t go to school,” my father said. This was new: He didn’t say hello. He left the front off the conversation.

“What? She’s dropping out? Put her on, Dad.”

“Not Maddy, your mother. She says she doesn’t give a shit about Sydney Carton. She’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of scotch.” He hung up.

This was also new: No good-bye. He left the end off the conversation.

The next day, I answered again. And again I heard long-distance. Then crying. Well, not crying, sniffling. Very large sniffles.

“Dad, what is it, what happened?” I closed the phone booth door.

Still nothing but major intakes of breath.

“Are you all right?” I started breathing heavily too, inadvertently, in unison. I could see Joanne, the girl with the fiancé, coming down the hall to use the phone. Minutes went by. She stared at me so I couldn’t help but notice that she was waiting.

“Dad?”

No answer.

Joanne used her diamond ring to knock on the door. I twisted in my seat so I wouldn’t have to see her.

“She’s gone,” my dad said finally.

“Mom’s gone?”

“Yeah.”

Fine, I thought. Great, she’s gone. Thank God. No more drinking, no more fights. “Dad, don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be back.”

“She ran off with that redwood.”

“What?”

He hung up.

She ran off with that redwood. She ran off with that redwood. His words played over and over in my brain. Joanne rapped her rock against the glass again and glared at me. She ran off with that redwood. I stuck my tongue out at Joanne and yanked open the door.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I couldn’t focus on anything. I had invented a system, five minutes of study, five minutes of daydreaming, which allowed me to relive necking each weekend with my boyfriend, Mark. But as I sat at my desk trying to study, then trying to think about Mark, my mind kept veering off to Mom and Tom Winston. Had she pined for him for five years, or had she been seeing him secretly the whole time? Did they meet at exits off the freeway all along the route from Westwood to Big Bear, or did they have a favorite rendezvous, a favorite room? Did he pin her on the bed the way he pinned those little frogs when he cut them open?

“It’s for you,” Joanne yelled. “Telephone.”

Maybe it’s Mom. Maybe she’s calling so I’ll know where she is.

I took the receiver and, holding it away from my head, stood outside the booth and listened. There it was again, but dimly, the long-distance sound, plus noise, horns, traffic. “Hello?”

“Evie?”

I slammed the phone against my ear. “Maddy, where are you?”

“In Malibu. In a parking lot. Guess what? I’m moving in with Isaac.”

“What do you mean? You can’t move in with Isaac. You’re only fifteen. What about school?”

“I don’t have to live at home to go to school. God, I knew you’d say that.” Her words turned into a wail. “Just leave me alone, all right? You don’t have to live with a drunk.”

“But I thought Mom moved out. Dad called last night. He said she left.”

Now she was crying. Gulping sobs. Big fat teenage tears. “Not Mom, dummy. Dad. Look, I’ll be at Isaac’s. He doesn’t have a phone. Bye.”

Dad? What was she talking about?

Two

The door is unlocked from the inside, an orderly opens it, and Angie wheels my father in. This place is not old, really, just battered. The painted plaster walls have scrape marks on them, probably from wheelchairs. The wooden trim around the doorways and windows, that homey touch signifying extra care and concern, is gouged, and the walnut stain is scratched and thin. “UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric”—the words are discreetly printed on a rectangular plastic plaque next to the door, which the orderly relocks after us.

The wheelchair squeaks on the linoleum as we go down the hall. We pass first an old-fashioned telephone booth built into the wall—it is nearly identical to the one in my college dorm years ago—then a room filled with rows of chairs. Assorted chairs in assorted colors, but mostly they have metal legs and metal arms, with cushioned vinyl seats and vinyl pads on the armrests. Old people are sitting in some of them. They are facing a television set, which is on. Straight ahead is something I will begin to call the cage. It’s an office that has a small opening fitted with a protective grate, like the kind in front of bank teller windows in dangerous neighborhoods. The nurses hang out here. There is glass on the sides so they can see out into the patient rooms that surround them.

My father twists around to look at Angie. It’s a strain for him to turn because he’s so fat. He takes up all the space in the chair, and when he turns, his shirt strains, almost to popping open. “What’s Claire doing here?” he growls.

“I’m not Claire, I’m Angie.”

“You know Angie,” I say. “She works at the Home, where you live. She’s helping me bring you here.”

Angie wheels him into a dining room. An older man in glasses and a woman, both in medical whites, come into the room, closing the door behind us.

The woman introduces herself. “I’m Dr. Kelly,” she says. She looks like a high school cheerleader. That young and wholesome. “This is Rob Bateson.”

“I’m the social worker,” he says cheerfully. “Why don’t we sit down?” He gestures toward the nearest Formica table.

Angie wheels my father to the table and then stands back, waiting for the rest of us.

“I’ll sit next to my father,” I announce. This is an unnecessary statement. In the almost twenty-five years since my mother left, my sisters and I have taken turns calling the doctor about him, putting him in loony bins, drying him out, buying him clothes. And when more than one of us are present, we even take turns sitting next to him. But today, at UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric, my father’s final incarceration, there is no one here but me.

I hear a squeal as Dr. Kelly jumps, throws my father a dirty look, then catches herself. She smooths the back of her pants, where he obviously has just pinched, then takes a chair, sits, and smiles calmly.

I’ll be out of here in a half-hour, I comfort myself. This is a trick my son has taught me, the way he gets through classes he hates.

They start asking my father questions. Your name? “Lou Mozell.” Age? “Thirty-nine,” he says.

“Eighty-one,” I say, smiling.

Where were you born? “The Bronx.” College?

“Harvard,” says my father. “I graduated with honors.” They write all this down dutifully.

“What month is it?” My father has no idea. “What day of the week?” He looks up at the ceiling, studying it as if there were something to see.

“Look,” I say, “this is ridiculous. My father lives in a Home. Every day is the same. How does he know whether it’s Monday or Wednesday? And this is Los Angeles. The sky’s always blue. Even I don’t know what month it is half the time.”

“These questions have been tested,” Dr. Kelly says, an edge to her voice.

“Well, they don’t make any sense.”

Meanwhile my father is refusing to say anything.

“Will you write your name, Mr. Mozell?” She offers a pen and her clipboard.

He obliges.

“Would you write a sentence?”

He does that too. She shows me the clipboard.

He has written, “It’s too late.”

Oh, wow. I actually have this dumb high school reaction. Oh, wow. Heavy. And in my mind, I am already on the phone to my sisters.” ‘It’s too late.’ That’s what he wrote. Do you believe that?”

“Why don’t we show you to your room,” Dr. Kelly says to my father.

“Are you leaving me here?” he asks me. His hands, which have been lying listlessly in his lap, fly up and seize the arms of his wheelchair.

“You’re going to stay here for a week or two.” Maybe more, I don’t say. “You’re having memory problems, Dad. They’ll run some tests.”

“You bitch. You and Claire. You put me here before. You’re in cahoots.” My father flings a backslap at me but misses by a mile.

“That’s not Claire, that’s Angie, and you’ve never been here before.” I say this quietly, but I can feel my face flush.

Angie springs up. “I’ll take him.” She spins the wheelchair around. “I’m taking you to your room, Mr. Mozell,” she declares, as Rob Bateson jumps to open the door for them. “Bitch,” my father shouts as she steers him out, and Bateson closes the door behind them.

There is silence. A moment of respect for the departed.

“My father didn’t go to Harvard.”

Dr. Kelly laughs, then immediately crosses out the entry on her form. “Where did he go?”

“He went to, oh, what’s that school, you know, it’s in New York City, what is it, ohh—”

“Columbia?” says Bateson.

“No, no, downtown.”

Bateson and Kelly look at each other, stumped. Dr. Kelly actually winds some of her long sandy hair around her finger while she thinks. “New York University,” she offers tentatively.

“Right. He went to NYU. I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. I do know this is the month of May and it’s somewhere between the fourteenth and the twentieth, right?”

No one laughs. Bateson leans toward me across the table. “Are you close to your father?” he asks.

I hate this question. It’s none of their business. Their business is to find out what’s wrong with his brain this time. Their business is to adjust his medication so he functions. He just needs a new cocktail. He’s gone off his rocker before. He’s gone off many times. I will answer this question dispassionately. I will show that an inquiry about my feelings for my father triggers nothing. “I look out for my father but I am not close to him,” I say firmly. I smile to show that this cool answer is not only the truth, but easy.

“He wrote, ‘It’s too late.’ Do you believe that?”

“Really,” says Georgia.

It’s impossible to convey Georgia’s affection for the word “really.” She caresses it. She packs in multiple meanings: astonishment, disbelief, sometimes disgust, suspicion, pleasure, maybe even thrill, plus curiosity. All understated. She owns “really.” Also “possibly,” just because she knows exactly how to emphasize it.

“Do you think our father could possibly have meant what he wrote?” she asks me.

“You mean, can you be brain-damaged and cosmic all at once? I think so.”

“But what did he actually mean by it? Too late for what?”

It occurs to me I don’t know what he meant. “I guess help. It’s too late for help, right? But then it could be too late for anything to change, or for anything to happen, or just, too late.”

She says nothing. I assume she is mulling this over, but maybe she is just editing some copy on the computer while she talks to me on the phone. Sometimes Georgia switches off right in the middle of a conversation—she starts doing something else or thinking about something else. I have to work to get her back.

“He pinched Dr. Kelly. On the tush.”

“Really,” says Georgia.

Maddy shrieks when I tell her about the pinching. “What a riot.”

“It wasn’t a riot, believe me. You weren’t there.”

“You told me I could go away. You said you’d take him to … what’s this place called?”

“UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric.”

“Is it like a hospital?”

“More like a loony bin really, sort of a cross. Anyway, I don’t care that you aren’t here.”

“It’s my only vacation. We work ten hours a day, five days a week.”

“Maddy, it’s okay.”

But she’s on a roll. “We work fifty-two weeks a year, Eve. Fifty-two weeks!” I think about putting the receiver on the table. If you check out of a conversation with Maddy and then return several minutes later, you are usually in the same place. The identical thing happens if you watch the soap opera she’s on and then don’t see it again until two weeks later. “The only reason I can go on vacation now is that Juliana is supposed to be in the Bahamas so her boss can have an affair with the temp.”

“Who’s Juliana?”

“My character? Eve, don’t you even know that? God, don’t you ever watch the show?”

“Of course I do. I just didn’t realize what you were saying, Maddy, it’s no big deal.”

“You know it’s not easy to get to the phone here. It’s not easy to get to anything in Montana. You can drive forty-five minutes just to buy milk.”

I call Georgia back. “Maddy says it’s a forty-five-minute drive to buy milk in Montana.”

This is one of my favorite things—to serve as a conduit between my sisters. What is the joy in hearing something absurd from one if I can’t pass it on to the other? But this time I’m just using Maddy’s comment for an excuse, so I can unload more to Georgia.

“Imagine Dad pinching that doctor. It’s so sad, repulsive, I don’t know. I think he winked too. Is that all that’s left to you when you’re old? Eating and flirting?”

“He’s a pathetic old man,” says Georgia. I am certain I hear her shudder.

“That’s for sure. Dr. Kelly looked like Doogie Howser’s younger sister.”

“Well, Eve, she obviously wasn’t the doctor. Obviously, obviously. She’s a resident. What you have to do tomorrow is call and speak to the doctor. The real doctor. Find out who’s in charge of the whole place and insist that he or she speak to you directly. You know it makes a huge difference whether you’re speaking to the top or the bottom.”

“Maybe you should call.”

“Darling, I would, but you’re right there. I’m in New York, so if they have to call me back, it’s long-distance, which is a big thing to doctors, I have no idea why. Besides, I’m totally backed up on this tenth-anniversary edition. I keep thinking, On the one hand, I am so lucky my magazine has lasted ten years, on the other hand, why am I putting out a special edition, it’s a nightmare.”

I am hit suddenly with an exhaustion I get only when I converse with my sisters. I feel as if my mouth and ears are going to fall off my head. “I’ve got to go,” I say. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hang up. The phone rings. “Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Hi, Jesse, where are you?”

“It’s not my fault.”

“What?”

“It was an accident.”

“Goddamnit.” I burst into Joe’s study. “Jesse had another car accident.”

“Is he all right?” Joe spins around in his desk chair, knocking into phone books from different cities, stacked like building blocks around him.

“He’s all right.”

To make room to sit, I shove over a bunch of radio tapes that are littering his couch. “He’s on his way home. He had to tie his car door closed with rope. His insurance is going to go through the roof, but maybe we can convince the driver not to notify his insurance company. Would you take care of this?”

“I’m going out of town next week,” he reminds me.

“So you have time. Besides, they have phones in Iowa.”

Joe just looks at me. He knows and I know that I am going to make this call. We’ve been married too long to have a conversation we’ve had sixty times before and already know the ending of.

I hear a car and peek through the blinds to see Jesse pulling up to the curb. He slides over to the passenger side and gets out. He strolls to the door, his shoulders moving back and forth enough to cause, with each step, the slightest ripple of muscle across his T-shirt.

“I’m home,” he yells, but not too loudly. There’s a bit of dread in his voice.

“Come in here. We’re in Dad’s study.” I hear the refrigerator open and close, and then Jesse appears, swigging water from a large plastic bottle.

“What happened?” Joe asks.

Jesse slaps a hand against his head and lets his mouth hang open a second to let us know he’s been through hell. “I was sitting there, okay, just opening the door, when this guy comes around a curve at about, I swear, sixty.”

Joe slips his fingers under his glasses and rubs his eyes. He’s tired in anticipation of this discussion. “You were parked?” he says wearily.

“Yeah, I was parked. That guy should look where he’s going. Thanks to him, I couldn’t take Ifer home.”

“Who’s Ifer?”

“Only my best friend, Dad. God.”

“Ifer is Jennifer, but there are so many Jennifers in the class that she calls herself Ifer. I told you, you forgot.” This is something I do to Joe when I am feeling cranky. Make him feel guilty for not remembering all the fascinating things I tell him.

“Why doesn’t she call herself Jenny?” asks Joe.

“Ifer is Kasmian,” says Jesse.

Joe’s glasses land back on his nose and his eyes snap open. He knows he’s just heard something that is going to turn out to be satisfyingly off-kilter. He’s no longer interested in the car accident. Too mundane. Jesse’s fine, he’s sitting right in front of him. But Ifer could turn out to be as intriguing as the woman in Iowa he’s going to interview who bakes six-foot-tall cakes. “So Ifer is a Kasmian name?” he says.

Jesse uses a tone of voice that means that you are ignorant but he will condescend to enlighten you. “In the Kasmian religion, Dad, four letters is good luck. ‘Luck’ is four letters, get it?”

“I hope these Kasmians aren’t nuts like those people who drank that drink in some South American country,” I say. “What was it? It starts with a large letter.”

“Kool-Aid,” says Joe.

“I didn’t remember Kool-Aid? My God.”

“Kasmians drink only Coke. Four letters, get it?” says Jesse. “This guy owes us. He could have killed me.”

I take a few breaths, just for punctuation. “Look, the important thing is that you’re fine. That your leg wasn’t outside the car or anything.” This is the important thing, and it’s not that I don’t know it, but I say it for only one reason: So I feel entitled to say the next thing, which I feel guilty about. “But it’s your fault.”

Jesse slams the bottle down. “The guy came around a blind curve. I can’t see behind a blind curve, can I? I am really having a hard day. I don’t need this. It’s not my fault I can’t see a guy coming around a blind curve going eighty.”

“Did he take the door off the car?” I ask. The phone rings. I pick it up. “Hello?”

“Georgie Porgie won a Pulitzer.”

“That’s great.”

“Your sister’s something, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s great, Dad.”

He hangs up. I hang up.

“Georgia won the Pulitzer again. How can he call? I don’t think he has a phone in his room. The only phone I saw was a pay phone.”

“Did you give him quarters?” asks Joe.

“Are you kidding? Why would I do that? To torture myself?” I turn to Jesse. “I had a hard day too. I had to put your grandfather into the geriatric/psychiatric facility at UCLA.”

“Oh yeah, how come?” Jesse collapses in a chair. His long legs stick straight out into the room; he’s waiting to trip someone so he can insist it’s not his fault.

“He’s having memory problems.”

“He’s always had memory problems. He doesn’t even know my name.”

Joe laughs.

“It’s not funny, Joe.” Now I’m angry with them both. “He’s having other problems too. He hit someone, he’s been screaming just out of the blue whenever he feels like it. He can’t walk—his balance is off. They think his medication’s out of whack. You could both be a little compassionate.”

“I have no compassion for your father, and you know why,” says Joe.

“Why?” Jesse asks.

“None of your business,” I say. “So Jesse, did he take the door off the car?”

“No.”

“Well, if he didn’t take the door off the car, he couldn’t have been going eighty.”

“Just ’cause your door stays on the car has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with the weight of the car that hits you.”

Is this true? I have no idea. Even though, as far as I can tell, schools these days don’t even teach you what a pronoun is, Jesse claims to know everything. He knows whether dogs can be said to commit suicide, under what conditions planes can take off at LAX, whether astigmatism will one day be curable by laser. I give up trying to prove my point. “Did you get the guy’s insurance information? I hope you got his phone number too.”

Jesse holds out his hand. A name and a number are written on his palm in black ink.

“Jesse, that’s so careless. Suppose you got water on that? We’d never be able to reach him.”

“He’d find us.”

“That’s not the point.”

“He would find us. Unfortunately,” says Joe. “Do Kasmians have a place of worship?”

“They light candles in their rooms,” Jesse tells him.

“Can we talk about this accident, please?”

Joe and Jesse both look at me—their heads swivel exactly the same way and stop at exactly the same tilt to the right. They look as if they have paused mid-beat in a song they perform in unison, like the Temptations. They are both vertical in the extreme, and whenever they walk or eat or just move around, their arms and legs go from straight lines to angles. Only, Joe wears glasses—round horn-rimmed glasses. With those comical circles on either side of his narrow nose and the rest of him hanger thin, he has the appearance of a very friendly figure painting reduced to its geometric essence. They both wait for me to talk, Joe tolerantly, Jesse with his familiar scowl.

“It’s important to contact this guy before he contacts you so—”

“So what, Mom?”

“So you have a plan, so it doesn’t get out of hand.”

“Do your mom a favor,” says Joe. “Copy that information off your palm onto a piece of paper and leave it on her desk.”

Jesse gets up slowly, stretching, so we notice him ascend to his six-foot height. He saunters out.

I wait until I hear Jesse on the stairs. I don’t want him to hear me. “What?” Joe says, knowing something’s coming.

“You shouldn’t make fun of my father, especially now.”

“Don’t expect me to have feelings you don’t have.” He shrugs. “Besides, this is just another round.”

“It is not. For God’s sake, Joe, why don’t you clean up in here? Look at these tapes. And there are newspapers and telephone books all over the place.”

“I like it messy. Then I know where everything is. Eve, stop worrying. Your father just phoned, so obviously he’s fine.”

“Then why can’t he walk? And he kept calling Angie Claire. He knows Angie.”

“You just couldn’t remember Kool-Aid.”

“That’s hardly the same thing.” I start picking newspapers up off the floor, grabbing them two-fisted, each one a big deal. “Look, this place is a complete mess. Suppose we have a fire or something? This room would go off like a rocket. And then the house.”

Joe takes the stack of papers from me and puts them back on the floor, carefully, even ceremoniously, as if they were not old newspapers but an elaborate silver service for tea.

“Joe, he’s dying.”

“You wish.”

“Yes, I do. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Three

When I went home for Christmas after my parents had separated and Maddy had moved out, Maddy picked me up at the airport with her boyfriend, Isaac.

Her hair, long and parted in the middle, left just a sliver of her face showing, and looked as if it should come with a cord so it could be drawn open like a curtain. When we hugged, her hair got in my mouth. “Where’s Dad?”

“Probably playing tennis. Stay with Isaac and me. Only ten of us are living there.”

“No, I’ll go home.”

“Well, don’t expect me to go in. I’m not going in.”

Maddy and Isaac were dressed identically, in jeans with silver studs running down them and jean jackets with American flags sewn on the back. She had a tank top underneath and he had his bare chest. Below each of their jacket collars was an embroidered red heart with embroidered tears falling from it. “We’re still in mourning,” she explained, reaching over and fluffing my hair.

“Don’t.” I knocked her hand away.

“It’s wilder than ever,” she said.

“I know.” I squished my curls against my head.

“Your hair’s the same color as Mom’s,” she said wistfully.

“Don’t remind me.”

“Why don’t you let it grow? Live a little, Eve.”

I changed the subject. “Why are you in mourning? Who died?”

“Jimi Hendrix, who else?” Maddy boomed this and did not seem to mind that half the airport turned to look. She called ahead to Isaac. “Eve’s really nice, she’s just ignorant.” Then she spoke only slightly lower: “Jimi was Isaac’s soul mate.”

“Right on,” said Isaac.

“I embroidered the hearts.”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“I’ll teach you,” said Maddy. “It’s really fun.”

We walked through the airport, Maddy clumping along on thick platform shoes, Isaac’s head bobbing, as if there was music in it and he was keeping time. “Isaac’s a musical genius,” she said. “He’s like hot, I’m not kidding.” She tugged playfully on his ponytail.

“Get lost,” said Isaac.

“What’s your instrument?” I asked him.

“He can play everything, bass guitar, keyboard …” Maddy thought a second. “Bass guitar, keyboard.” She put a period at the end this time. “They’ve got this group—Isaac, Aaron, Kevin, Presto.” She ticked the names off on her fingers. “I’m going to be the lead singer, and we’re going to make a demo tape. Do you think Georgia would know anyone who could help us get, you know, arrested?”

“Why Georgia? Madeline, don’t you think you should live at home?”

She ignored that. “’Cause Georgia works at Mademoiselle. Even though they only do stories on dumbos like Karen Carpenter, I thought maybe …”

“Are you going to school?”

She laughed. “When I want. Listen, Eve, we’ve got this groovy song that Isaac wrote. ‘Born Too Late for Woodstock.’ We just missed it, you know.” Her voice was pained. “If Woodstock had been this year, we would have been there. Isaac’s got some dirt from it. He bought it at this head shop. You’ll see it—it’s on the dashboard.”

“I don’t know, ask her.”

“Ask who?”

“Georgia, if she can help you. That’s mine.” I pointed at my suitcase rolling toward me on the conveyor belt. Isaac didn’t move so I pulled it off myself.

“The car’s right over there.” Maddy indicated the lot directly across. Isaac preceded us, his head still bobbing. “Isn’t he cute?” she whispered. I nodded. She squeezed my arm. “Do you believe your little sister’s going to be a rock star?”

We rode home in a car with a peace sign dangling from the rearview mirror over a mayonnaise jar filled with dirt. Isaac stayed in the car while Maddy helped me get my suitcase out of the trunk.

“Don’t ask me to go in, okay, Eve? I can’t stand it.”

“Why?”

“It’s creepy. He’s creepy.” She pulled one foot up behind her and stood there like a flamingo.

“Get going, Maddy. Don’t worry, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Peace,” she shouted as they took off.

The house looked the same, except for the rosebushes. They hadn’t been cut back. The stalks were long, with the remains of dead blooms on the ends, pathetic yellow centers with a petal or two hanging off.

I tried the door. It was unlocked. “Dad?”

“Hey, Evie, I’m out back.”

I left my suitcase in the entrance hall and walked through the living room to the garden behind. My father jumped up from the patio table. “Evie, baby.” He pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his tennis shorts and mopped his eyes. “I always cry,” he explained to the woman who was sitting with him.

“It’s true,” I said. “He used to cry when I came home from Brownies.”

“Or from camp,” he said. His mouth wiggled as he tried to get control, stiffen it up. He tucked his handkerchief back in his pocket and hugged me. “This is my Evie,” he said proudly.

“Well, don’t I know it,” said the woman.

“You do?” I said doubtfully.

“I knew she wouldn’t recognize you. Want a hint?” my father crowed.

“Sure, but what happened to your nose?”

My father touched the bridge of his nose, where there was a big scab. “I hit myself serving.” He paused. “But at least I got it in.”

“Well, that’s what matters, isn’t it?” I smiled at the woman.

“Mouthwash,” said my father.

“Oh my God, Esther.”

She was the receptionist at our dentist’s. She’d been the receptionist forever. Her hair, an assortment of browns that would be very attractive on a puppy but was unlikely on a person, was piled on top of her head in large loopy curls, and she had frosted orange polish on very long nails. I had always viewed them with wonder while she filled in the card for my next appointment.

“I’m so sorry about your mom. It’s tragic,” said Esther.

“What hap—” I saw my father put his finger to his lips, shush. I corrected, “Oh, thank you, that’s very kind.”

“Myself, I hate to fly.” She fixed some of her stray hair in place with a bobby pin. “I think it was so brave of you to get in that airplane to come home for Christmas. If that happened to someone in my family, I’d stick to cars.”

I noticed a pitcher of iced tea on the table. With real lemons floating in it. That’s great. Mom left, and Dad finally learned to make something: iced tea. He even made it with loving care, which is more than Mom ever did.

Esther poked around in her purse and pulled out a little round compact. She peered into the mirror, remade her lips, and snapped the compact shut. “I’m going to buzz off now and let you two gab. Would you like me to leave the tea and just take my pitcher home?”

“You brought that over?”

“I did.” Esther arranged the ruffles around her neckline.

“Leave it here,” said my dad. “You know where the refrigerator is.”

“I certainly do.”

She was not anything like my mother. My mother was not coy, did not wear ruffles, and would never make the words “I certainly do” into a sexual innuendo. At least I didn’t think so. But every time Mom brought Tom Winston a beer—that’s what I imagined a large, meaty science teacher drank—maybe she sat in his lap and blew the foam off for him.

My mother wasn’t here anymore. That was clear from the neglected roses. But her leaving made everything about her behavior when she was here mystifying. Not only didn’t I know who she was now, I didn’t know who she was then.

Before disappearing into the house, Esther waved goodbye by holding her hand up next to her shoulder and flapping her fingers.

“Great gal,” my dad whispered.

“Are you dating her?”

“Yeah, she’s a great lay.”

“Dad, please, I don’t want to hear about that, all right?”

“Sure, kid. Let’s go sit with the bullet.”

On the mantel in the living room was a gold-colored bullet standing straight up like the Empire State Building. John Wayne had presented it to my father when he wrote a movie called Luck Runs Out, in which Wayne played a sheriff who had to track a killer named Lucky. The year was 1956. I was five years old, and I met John Wayne on the set. There was a fake saloon and five cancan girls. “Your father’s a great writer,” Big John had said, and he patted me on the head. I always insisted I had no memory of this, because my father had told the story so many times it made me perverse, actually made me perverse by age ten, but I did remember. I had looked up at this tall man. I remembered his red neckerchief and stubble—little black hairs sprouting like grass on his cheeks and chin. I remembered knowing that this was supposed to be a really important moment. I had said, “Howdy,” which had made him laugh three times, “Ha, ha, ha.”

My father didn’t write movies anymore. After several westerns, he switched to television, and worked on a sitcom called Ghosttown, which sounded like a western but wasn’t. Supernatural shows were in, like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and his show was similar. It was about this town where a husband lived with the ghost of his dead wife, and you knew when she was around because you could see the couch cushions in their house getting punched and puffed, and a vacuum cleaner moving back and forth across the carpet.

My father settled in on the living room couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. I couldn’t decide where to sit. The logical place, the chair directly across, was where Mom had always situated herself when we had company. I noticed one of my father’s tennis shoes was untied. “How’s school?” he asked.

“Fine. What did you tell Esther about Mom?” A picture on the wall was lopsided. I straightened it.

“Oh, nothing. I just said she went down in that crash over Denver.”

“What crash over Denver?”

“Kid, you heard it here first. People always think they remember plane crashes, even when they didn’t take place. Or maybe they did. You think we know about every plane crash?”

“But Mom’s not dead.”

“She’s in Big Bear, it’s the same thing.”

I laughed.

“See, I can make you laugh, can’t I? Your old man’s still got it.”

“Have you seen Maddy lately?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Your sister’s a bitch. I’m her father. I can say it.”

“It doesn’t seem too horrible here.” I was in my room that night unpacking while I talked on the phone to Georgia. “The only thing in the refrigerator is iced tea, which he didn’t make, and packets of soy sauce, but I don’t see why Maddy had to move out. She probably wanted an excuse.” It was nine in L.A., midnight in New York. I could hear Georgia yawn. “Why don’t you and Richard come out for Christmas?”

“What? Next week?” She sounded incredulous. “First of all, Richard works nonstop. Lawyers kill themselves. Besides, coming there could be a disaster for me. I’ve been assigned to Makeup. At Mademoiselle, Makeup is the fast track. Remember my friend Ursula? She went to the dentist, and when she came back, she’d been transferred to Health, a dead end.”

I could hear Georgia moving around as we talked. “What are you doing?”

“Getting out my clothes for tomorrow.”

Georgia always made a “flat man” on the floor, putting her clothes in the shape of a body. She even placed earrings approximately where the earlobes would be. “Do you wear base?” she asked.

“No.”

“That’s good. I thought it was bad, but it turns out to be good. You want to show your natural skin color as much as possible even if it’s blotchy. Yellow covers red, did you know that?”

“I had no idea. What does it mean?”

“It means if you have a big red nose, you put yellow makeup on it. You know what your nose is like when you have a cold, Evie.”

I checked my nose in the mirror. It was a nice pinkish white. When I was eleven and Georgia was fifteen, she had informed me that my skin was the color of a scallop—an insult with so much power I think about it every time I see my reflection. In truth, my skin is my best feature: clear, fair, delicate. “It’s like porcelain,” I had shouted back at her. This was a description I had picked up from a romance novel. But she was right about my nose: it did turn bright red when I was sniffly.

“You’re not going to believe this, but Dad’s dating Esther with the nails from Dr. Seymour’s.”

“Esther?” Georgia was appalled. “After Mom, he’s dating Esther?”

“I know.” We contemplated the comedown of it. “Does Mom miss us?”

“I doubt it. Do you miss her?”

“No. I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like something’s wrong.”

“In the house?”

“Maybe. No, with me.”

“You might need analysis.” Through the phone I heard a doorbell. “That must be Richard,” said Georgia. “He doesn’t have his key. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I sat cross-legged on the bed with the phone in front of me. It was silent in the house, more dead than quiet. I couldn’t hear the TV, which my father almost never turned off now. I wondered if I should buy a Christmas tree tomorrow and get out all the ornaments. That would be so weird.

I spotted my tennis racquet propped against the wall. The wooden kind nobody has anymore. I got off the bed and picked it up. I switched my grip a few times from forehand to backhand.

I did a service swing: dropped the racquet down, then lifted it high, a big stretch, dropped it behind my back and circled, then up again, and snapped it down. Wrist action. I repeated this a second time, trying to make the racquet hit my nose. I couldn’t. My father got the strangest injuries. His accidents were impossible to replicate. There was a knock on the door. “Eve?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

He came in, in his blue pajamas, and stood there, filling up the space. I could smell scotch. He smelled like Mom. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Not really. Why don’t you call Esther?” He swayed gently from side to side. “What about your friends?” I threw out a few names, people he and Mom had seen regularly.

“That’s couple stuff.” His eyes became watery. “I can’t sleep without her.”

“Yeah.” I started thinking about my dorm room, wishing myself there. “Where do you want to go?”

“Does it matter?” The odor of scotch was really strong. I considered not breathing. Get out, Dad, get out, please. “Let’s just drive, okay, Evie?”

“Okay, get dressed. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

I drove around Los Angeles while he slept stretched across the backseat, snoring loudly. Listening to these noisy wheezes over and over and over, I felt like a victim of this water torture Georgia had told me about in which a man had to lie under a leaky faucet and after a while just waiting for the next drop to fall drove him mad. I tried to blot Dad out by reciting poems that I’d memorized in the fifth grade. “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!” “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day.” As I tried to blanket my brain with them, my father snorted, a sound so sudden and gigantic that he woke up sputtering. He took a moment to orient himself. I watched in the rearview mirror while he jerked his head, looking out one window, then the other, before crashing back down on the seat. And the snores began anew.

Eventually I drove home and parked in the driveway. It took me a while to get out because I tried to open the car door silently so I wouldn’t wake him. Probably nothing could have awakened him, but I didn’t want to find out.

These drives became a routine.

I stopped sleeping and lay in bed each night waiting to hear his footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I didn’t want him to surprise me.

“Move in with us,” said Maddy, who was calling from her neighborhood taco stand. I was lying in bed with the phone receiver tucked between the pillow and my ear.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“He’s so lonely. It would hurt his feelings.” I was listening for his footsteps then, dreading to hear them. “Where did all his friends go? Did he dump them or vice versa?”

“Probably vice versa. He’s a drunk, Evie. He drinks scotch. Who drinks that anymore? Isaac says Dad should smoke dope. Then he wouldn’t be a drunk, he’d just be out of it.”

“Goddamn Mom. This is all her fault. If she’d stayed, this would never have happened to him. Not that she cares about anyone but herself.”

“She cares about me,” said Maddy.

“Oh, right.”

“I see her every couple of weeks.”

“What?” I sat up in bed. “Did she phone you? She didn’t phone me.”

“She gave me her address when she left. She’s not much for the phone.”

“You have her address? Does Georgia have it too?”

“No, only me.”

“Who cares, anyway. I don’t want to see her. I have no interest in it.”

The next day I called Big Bear information.

“I have a Thomas Winston on Coot Street, would that be it?”

I guessed a number. “One thirty-five?”

“No, twenty-six,” said the operator.

I started driving south on the San Diego Freeway, then cut east to the San Bernardino. With each mile the ground got flatter, the buildings uglier, and when it seemed that the world could get no duller, civilization stopped, and the only things on either side of the road were cactus and tumbleweed. The turn for Big Bear was modestly marked with a wooden sign. As I negotiated the winding road up the mountain and into a forest of pines, I felt more and more ridiculous. I passed motels—built of whole logs, just as Georgia had promised—with names like Hitching Post Inn. I couldn’t turn back, I’d come too far, but I felt as if, on a lark, I was heading for Dodge City.

At elevation four thousand feet there were patches of snow between the trees. I didn’t even have a sweater with me, and my radio now was picking up only one station, which played country-western music. I stopped for gas but didn’t want to ask the man how far it was to Big Bear. He might guess why I was there, and I would be found out: girl needing to see mother. In the gas station office I browsed among the maps. There was a street map of Big Bear, not officially printed but something that had been run off on a mimeograph machine. I chose it in what I imagined was an offhanded way, so the guy who was paying no attention to me wouldn’t notice.

Driving the twisty road was beginning to make me carsick, when the road suddenly straightened and I passed into town—almost through it, actually: Big Bear General Store, the Bear Claw Diner, a bowling alley, many more motels. All the buildings on the left had a shiny blue lake as a backdrop.

At the edge of the main drag was Spruce Street, which headed away from the lake up the mountain. At the first curve I found Coot—not a proper street really, but a gravel road with houses turning up every so often. One was a trailer; some were prefabricated shacks with water tanks and stacks of wood in the front yard. But then I hit Twenty-six. The number was painted in whitewash on a pile of rocks by the driveway. The same type of gray rocks, only much larger, formed the foundation of the house, which, like almost everything else, was constructed of logs.

It wasn’t a one-room cabin like Abe Lincoln’s. It had a big wide porch and even a second story, although the second story was much smaller than the first. But it was as different from our home in Westwood as a little grass shack in Hawaii would be. Dad always called our place a “Father Knows Best house”—graceful but sturdy, two stories, gray with a white door and white wood trim around the big bay windows, which proudly offered a peek at the comfort within: wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstered couches and armchairs in sensible rectangular arrangements.

I started to get out and then realized that the lumps of brown that I had mistaken for more tumbleweed were squirrels. At home we had one squirrel per block, but this place had squirrel armies. I was terrified to leave the car. I sat there trapped, occupying myself by trying to figure out how to explain my arrival. I couldn’t say that I was passing by. That was ludicrous. Suppose I said that I was on my way back from Palm Springs and detoured on a whim? That seemed okay, I thought, as a pickup truck pulled into the driveway and my mother got out. She walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. Oh my God, she has a kid. I had this panic that she might, in three months, have produced a five-year-old. Instead two dogs bounded out. Golden retrievers, I guessed, but then I didn’t know dogs.

“Mom?”

“Eve, is that you?” she said in a way that sounded pleasantly surprised. The dogs barked, chasing off the squirrels.

As I followed her into the house, I rubbed my bare arms for warmth. She was wearing a jacket stuffed like a pillow, a kind I’d never seen before, and she’d exchanged her shirtwaists and pumps for jeans and heavy brown laced boots. She tramped, placed her feet down solidly with evident pleasure. My mother’s identity is all tied up in her shoes, I thought, watching her whack the soles with a piece of kindling to clean off the snow and mud before she opened the front door. I just wiped my feet on the mat and felt, as I did so, that I was maintaining allegiance to Westwood and my father.

I tried to get past the entry but the dogs kept sniffing me. “I’ll put them out. Muffin, Daisy.” My mother snapped her fingers. The dogs immediately trotted after her into the kitchen, leaving me alone in Frontierland.

The floor of the living room was wood, something never seen in my neighborhood, and scattered here and there were small multicolored circular rugs. There was a huge stone fireplace. The pine cones on the mantel seemed less like decoration and more like a scientific display of forest vegetation. The furniture was made of branches tied together and bent into shape, with the barest concession to comfort—flat corduroy cushions. A plump throw pillow sitting by itself against the back of the twig couch frame was embroidered with these words: “Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footsteps. “There was a framed photo of Mom with Tom Winston, standing by the lake. He had his huge pale arm around her, and she, barely visible, looked like a plant tucked into the crevice of a very large rock.

“Would you like coffee?” she called out.

I looked at the photo. I couldn’t answer. She appeared in the doorway. “Do you drink coffee now?” I shook my head. “How about orange juice?” I nodded yes.

She waved me into the kitchen. It had no conveniences. There weren’t even cabinets, just shelves with pots and pans and a jumble of canned goods piled on them. The tile on the counters was chipped. Out of an ancient refrigerator she took a carton of juice, then handed it to me with a glass. This was what she would have done at home, let me decide how much I wanted. As I poured, she put the kettle on and opened a jar of Sanka. “She’s switched from scotch to Sanka,” I prepared to tell Georgia.

I stood there holding the juice carton. It seemed too forward for me to stick it back in the refrigerator. The carton got heavier and, in my mind, more prominent. Finally I placed it on the counter. While my mother spooned some Sanka into a mug, I examined my glass, running my fingers over the design of dancing balloons which was almost worn off.

“So how’s college?” my mother asked.

I burst into tears. She stood there watching. She did not come over and put her arms around me. She just waited. Eventually I stopped crying long enough to ask for a tissue. She disappeared into another room and returned with a box. I wiped my eyes. “Come home, Mom, you have to.”

The water in the kettle started to boil, sending a scream into the room. My mother poured hot water into her cup. “Why don’t we sit in the living room,” she said.

She pointed to a rocker as if it were the most comfortable spot, and seated herself opposite on the couch, her back squarely against that embroidered pillow. She looked the same, really, her hair just longer, curling now around her ears. Probably there wasn’t a decent place in Big Bear to have your hair cut. The pink lipstick hadn’t changed. So if I poured her back into her old clothes … “Why did you leave, Mom?”

She dusted some imaginary spot off the corduroy while she considered. “I turned forty-five.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“You’ll see,” she said seriously.

I glanced at the picture of her and Tom again. I didn’t mean to, but … once I had a toothache, the tooth really hurt if I touched it, yet I couldn’t help myself. I kept poking my tongue there to see if it still ached.

“We were looking for aeries,” she said.

“Huh?”

“When that picture was taken, we were looking for aeries.”

“What’s that?”

“Eagles’ nests. I knew the word only from the crossword. It’s always used, I guess because it has so many vowels. Who thought I’d ever see one?” She laughed, almost embarrassed.

“Are you still drinking?” I startled myself with this question, but my mother didn’t blink.

“Tom said he wouldn’t be with me if I drank.”

Tom set conditions? He actually told her something like, “I won’t be with you unless you …” That made their relationship so ordinary it was finally real. My mother was going to spend her life in this log cabin with these dogs, these twig chairs, this man.

“What about me? What about me and Maddy and Georgia?”

“Darling, look at you. You’re fine.” She sat back and crossed her legs. She didn’t seem disconcerted. Or guilty. She took a sip of Sanka. “Let me think how to put this.”

“Yes?” Now I was in no danger of ever crying again.

“Motherhood doesn’t turn out to be a reason.” That idea sat in the air for a while.

“For what?” I asked.

“What I mean is”—she considered again—“I’m not one of those women who needed to be a mother. When I was growing up, all girls wanted to be, so I did too, only—” She leaned forward as if she was about to blurt out a whole paragraph, set a record for revealing herself. Then she changed her mind. All she added was, “I’m being honest.”

“Thank you.”

“I do not believe you thanked her,” Georgia told me later. “You do need analysis.”

“You have your father’s brown eyes,” my mother said. “Have I ever told you that?”

“Lots of times. Should I pluck them out?”

“Eve, don’t get smart.” She was mad, drawing the line, brooking no backtalk. For a second, she was my mother.

Then she said, “Tom makes me happy.”

I stood up. “Well, good, great. Look, I was just stopping by because I was on my way home from Palm Springs and Maddy gave me your address. I’d better get back.”

“Are you sure you can’t stay? Tom will be home soon. I’d like you to get to know him.”

“I really can’t.”

“Would you like to come by for Christmas?”

“I’m spending Christmas with Dad. We’re going to do it the way we always have.” I took my purse. “I’ll see you,” I said, moving toward the door. As soon as I was out, I saw the squirrels. I picked up the piece of wood that Mom had beaten her boots with, and tossed it into the yard. The squirrels scattered and I ran to the car.

When I got home, I practically fell on the telephone. “She doesn’t need to be my mother, fine. I don’t need to be her daughter.” That was the first thing I told Georgia; then I ran her through the entire encounter. “It’s like she’s turned into an earth mother, minus the mother part.”

“Thank God she waited until we grew up,” said Georgia. “Suppose we had to live there?”

“Look, I’m not going to tell Maddy. Oh, maybe I will, I don’t know.”

As soon as I hung up with Georgia, Maddy called. “But didn’t you think it was beautiful there?” she asked.

“What are you talking about, it’s nowhere. And the squirrel situation is completely out of control. They probably have a million cases of rabies a year.”

“But did you notice the sky? If you’re there at night, it sparkles.”

“It sparkles,” I said sarcastically. “I’m sure you didn’t make that up yourself. Did Mom say that, or Tom?”

“You’re impossible.” Maddy hung up on me.

I went downstairs and into Dad’s study. He was in his tennis outfit, which he now wore during the day even when he wasn’t playing, and he’d swiveled his chair around to stare out the window. A yellow legal pad lay in his lap. “Are you still working?”

He showed me the pad was blank.

“Let’s buy a Christmas tree.”

He bounced up, as if he’d been ejected. “Great idea, Evie.”

He drove, which was a switch. “There’s a big lot on Third and Fairfax,” he said. “I noticed it last week.”

It felt luxurious to sit in the passenger seat, to have him know where he was going, to be able to fiddle with the radio dial. I hunted for some Christmas music.

“Let’s get a big tree.” My father slammed his hand against the steering wheel defiantly. “Like always.”

He was humming along to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when we pulled into the lot. “I see it,” he announced. “I’ve got my eye on one already.”

“But who will make the turkey?” I asked.

“Esther,” said my father. “We’ll invite Esther.”

So Dad, Esther, and I had Christmas dinner together. My dad looked snappy in suit, tie, the works. Esther had a wide red ribbon wrapped around her hair and tied into a bow. “I’m your gift,” she told my dad. She presented me with a roasted turkey.

While Esther prepared the rest of dinner, Dad and I loaded the tree with ornaments. The history of our family was on the tree; at least the public history. The angel Maddy and I used to fight over. The garlands Mom was partial to. The clay elf Georgia had made in Girl Scouts. The clear glass ornaments with wreaths inside, our pride and joy. “Put those where they show,” my dad said happily, knowing it was something he’d said all the years before.

We ate turkey, sweet potatoes, creamed onions, and string beans. Esther was a better cook than my mother—not much of a stretch—but she informed us that she had broken a nail while opening the can of cranberry sauce, and had left the nail on the windowsill. “Remind me to take it home,” she said.

By dropping by her place to apologize for my behavior, I had managed to talk Maddy into paying a visit. She gave us all, even Dad, homemade bead necklaces, and he reciprocated by giving her money to install a telephone.

Later my father turned up the Christmas music really loud. You could hear “Joy to the World” in every corner of the house. “I forgot about celebrating,” he said. “I forgot all about it.” He closed his eyes for a moment and let the music wash over him. “Evie?”

“What?”

“When you don’t celebrate, you might as well be dead.”

“Hardly, Dad.”

“Hey, wait a second.” My father chucked me on the chin. The gesture was so cliché-paternal it might have come from a sitcom, maybe even the one he wrote. “I don’t say too many smart things anymore, sweetie pie, so when I do, listen up.”

On the basis of his behavior on Christmas Day and the fact that, between Christmas and New Year’s, I had to drive him around only twice in the middle of the night, I informed my sisters that he was simply brokenhearted, our old dad was somewhere inside the droopy outer shell and would be back eventually. But this didn’t mean I wasn’t ecstatic to return to school. “Just drop me at the airport,” I told him.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

When we arrived at the terminal, my father pulled my suitcase out of the trunk and stood there, his handkerchief out, ready to catch his tears. I kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“We have something special, don’t we, Evie?” A sad smile trembled out.

I grabbed my suitcase. “Bye, Dad.” I backed up fast. “Bye,” I shouted louder, although he wasn’t far away.

I wanted to cheer when those automatic doors opened and I was standing in the check-in area with tons of other kids returning to college. They had parents hanging around them, handing them gum and Life Savers, asking them if they’d packed everything. I was anonymous. Not one person there was related to me, and my heart soared.

At school, I threw myself into final exams. My last was in a course called Great American Plays. We’d had to read a play a night. My friend Zoe had obtained a copy of the previous year’s final, and it had questions like “Pork chops?” You had to know what play pork chops figured in.

Zoe and I, fueled by No-Doz, stayed up all night shouting clues at each other. “Water?” “The Miracle Worker.” “Dog?” “Come Back, Little Sheba.”

When the hall phone rang, it was four in the morning.

“It’s my dad, who else?” I picked up the receiver. “Hi, Dad.” I didn’t even wait to hear his voice, and was punch-drunk enough to be nice. There was no response. “A prank,” I told Zoe.

“Sorry, Wrong Number,” said Zoe.

I was hanging up when I heard, “Pills.” Thickly. Like he had mud in his mouth.

“Pills?” I put the phone back to my ear.

“Long Day’s Journey into Night. No, After the Fall,” shrieked Zoe.

I waved her to stop. “Dad, what is it?”

“I took No-Doz.” Really thickly now. Tongue-too-fat-for-mouth thick.

“Well, that’s no big deal. Believe me, I know.”

He hung up. I hung up. “What happened?” asked Zoe.

“Nothing. We’re taking No-Doz here and he’s taking it there. That’s weird.”

We returned to my room. I sat on the bed and pulled my textbook, 100 American Plays, onto my lap. It was the heaviest book in all my classes—ten pounds. I knew this because Zoe and I had weighed it. In protest we only dragged or slid it. “He doesn’t have finals. Why would anyone take No-Doz who didn’t have—Oh my God. He didn’t say, ‘No-Doz,’ he said, ‘Overdose.’”

I shoved the book off my lap and started hunting under clothes, papers, books. “What are you looking for?” asked Zoe. There it was, my address book, under a bag of potato chips. I raced to the phone.

I couldn’t get the booth open. I yanked and yanked at the door. “Help.” Zoe had followed me. She reached over and pushed. The door folded in.

“I need change,” I shouted as I thumbed through the book for Maddy’s number.

“Shut up,” I heard someone yell groggily.

“Eve’s father took an overdose,” said Zoe, running to her room.

“You’re kidding?”

“Eve’s father took an overdose.” I heard it repeated over and over, punctuated by yawns, as Zoe tore back, holding out a jar filled with nickels, dimes, and quarters.

I fumbled with the coins as I stuffed them in, misdialed, and tried too quickly to start over. I banged on the receiver to get a dial tone.

“Let me dial.” Zoe pressed down on the receiver, held it awhile, then released it and inserted several quarters. “What’s the number?”

The entire floor was out of bed and gathered around the booth. I noticed that Joanne, the engaged person, was now sleeping with toilet paper around her head. While Zoe dialed for me, I wondered whether Joanne would sleep that way after she got married.

Zoe handed me the receiver. I heard ringing. An angry male voice answered: “What is it?”

“I’m sorry to wake you—” I stopped. I could barely speak. “This is Maddy’s sister, Madeline Mozell’s sister Eve. Get her, hurry up, please, it’s an emergency.”

While I waited what seemed like five minutes, but was probably only two, several girls got bored and went back to bed.

Finally Maddy picked up. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad took an overdose of something, I don’t know what. You’ll have to call the police and get over to the house.”

“Me?”

“You’re the only one out there, for God’s sake.”

“But suppose he’s dead. Suppose I find him plopped on the carpet. Or like, he could be in the bathtub.” She started gasping, hyperventilating.

“Maddy, you have to.”

“I won’t go.” She screamed this really loud, and kept on screaming. Probably everyone in the hall could hear.

“What’s going on? Is that her father?” asked Joanne.

I yelled into the receiver, “Isaac, Isaac, are you there?”

“’Lo.”

“Isaac?”

“This isn’t Isaac, it’s Presto. If Maddy wanted to be with Isaac, she could, but she doesn’t want to. She wants to be with me.”

“Presto, please slap my sister, she’s hysterical.” I heard a slap. “Thank you. Would you please put her back on?”

She was crying tamely now, making sad little hiccuping sounds, as if she’d scraped her knee in the playground and the teacher had finally quieted her.

“Madeline, you have to do this.”

“Why? It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not mine either.” Now I was crying too, heading her off at the pass. “Maddy, someone has to take care of this, so just do it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” We were sniffling in unison. I hung up.

“Are you all right?” Zoe asked.

“Yes.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I don’t think I can study anymore,” I said as Zoe trailed me to my room. “I think I have to”—I made a face at her, trying to smile—“go to bed.” I closed my door.

That was my father’s first hospitalization, and my sisters and I were a great team. After I got the crazy call, Maddy checked him in, and Georgia did the follow-up. “Not enough to kill him. Big surprise,” she reported.

“I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I probably flunked my final,” I told Georgia, knowing I hadn’t. I was too much of a trouper to flunk. I was one of the supercompetent Mozell sisters. I could abort my father’s suicide and pass a final exam the next day. “Look at you. You’re fine,” my mother had pointed out. Was she right, or was I proving her right, living up to her expectations even now, especially now, when I could never get her seal of approval?

Four

At six a.m., the phone rings. “He’s dead,” I say to Joe, and grab the receiver. “Hello.”

“Is this the beautiful, wonderful daughter of Lou Mozell?”

“Hi, Dad. Are you all right?”

“Why’d you lock me in the pen? ’Cause of Jesse?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Go to hell.” He hangs up.

I feel dizzy from the jolt—first to the body, then to the brain. Joe puts out his arm for me to snuggle into. I shake my head.

“He’s been in that geriatric/psychiatric ward a week and he’s definitely not better. I wish they would slap some handcuffs on him. At least then he couldn’t phone.”

“How about a straitjacket?” suggests Joe.

“Right.” I throw off the covers and get up. I jerk open the closet and look for my robe.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Joe pats the bedside table, hunting around for his glasses. He puts them on and watches me from the bed.

I go into the bathroom. Why am I in here? “What am I looking for?” I yell to Joe.

“Your bathrobe.”

“Right.” I take it off the hook and go back into the bedroom. “I hope this memory thing my father has isn’t catching.”

The phone rings again. Joe reaches for it, but I get there first. “It’s my father,” I say nobly.

He removes the receiver from my hand. “Hello.” There’s a long pause. I try to read Joe’s eyes, which seem faintly amused. “He’s calling collect now,” he tells me, covering the receiver. “Yes, I’ll accept the charges. Hello, Lou.” Another pause. “No, of course Jesse isn’t mad at you.” He hangs up.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. He’s not my father.” Joe turns over to sleep some more. The phone rings again. He groans and picks it up. “Yes. I’ll accept.… You’re not in jail and Jesse isn’t mad at you.” Blunt this time. He hangs up. “Shit. What a way to get up in the morning.”

This is something Alexander Graham Bell never anticipated. I believe I read somewhere that he grew to hate his own invention, but I don’t think it was because he had a senile parent phoning him ten times a day. I’m sure he didn’t know that people who couldn’t recognize their own pants would remember their children’s phone numbers—could actually recall a seven-digit number plus an area code. I hate Alexander Graham Bell. Of course, right now I hate everyone.

“I think we should buy telephone stock,” I say later, at breakfast, while I am pacing back and forth, eating granola. “Not now, but when we baby boomers hit eighty.”

Joe doesn’t look up. He’s reading his newspapers from all over the country—the San Jose Mercury News, the Waco Tribune, the Boulder Daily Camera—to find stories for his radio show.

“Jesse, when I’m eighty, be sure to buy telephone stock.”

Jesse doesn’t look up either. He’s reading the back of the milk carton.

“Do I have to visit him today?” I wonder aloud.

Joe does not ask who “him” is. “No,” he says.

“But I haven’t seen him since I checked him in. Jesse, you’ll be happy to know that this morning your grandfather remembered your name. It was a miracle.”

“That could not be considered a miracle, Mom. That is simply a scientific inevitability.” Jesse’s mouth develops a little sneer. “When the brain deteriorates—and your dad is like wacko—the frontal lobe damage causes a person to remember things they forgot and forget things they know.”

I don’t respond, and I deem this an extraordinary feat. “That reminds me, I have to phone that man you had the car accident with. I’ve already tried him twice, and he hasn’t called back.”

“So forget about it.”

“You should probably do this yourself. You know, I really am busy.”

“If you think you’re busy, you should try high school.” Jesse continues to eat as he carries his cereal bowl to the sink. “I’ll be back late. Ifer and I are going to a séance. You know, Mom, all doors are entrances. Think about it.” He puts his bowl in the sink. “Bye.”

I pour another cup of coffee, even though after two cups my whole body rattles from the caffeine. I allow myself to sit. For a moment it’s completely quiet. Not even a breeze; nothing to ruffle anything. Stop, right now. Stop, with this feeling in this room: Joe at the table reading his papers, the smell of coffee, the warm cup in my hands, two sips before the jitters.

“Joe, when are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be home in about a week.”

“I wish you weren’t going.”

Joe pays no attention to this, which I resent and admire. “Aren’t you late?” he asks pointedly.

I start my general pre-departure routine. Finding my purse, going through my briefcase, checking for pens, Filofax, a legal pad. “Have you seen my sunglasses?” I run upstairs. Search the night table, the bureau, the bathroom, stop at the mirror. Oh God, is that my face?

This is not the first time this has happened. Not the first time, since I turned forty, that I have passed a mirror and stopped short, startled by my own reflection.

These sideways unexpected encounters are the most jarring, these candid glimpses when I have not taken time to prepare my face to be seen and my brain to see it. All I notice are the lines around my eyes. Are these new? The creases running south from the edge of my nose. Definitely deeper. My mouth, of which I am extremely fond, have been ever since a girl in my bunkhouse at Camp Tocaloma told me it was rosebud-shaped, my mouth is starting to turn down. I need a vacation. No. This is just me. Me at forty-four.

I look the way I always have, but the face of the future is threatening to take over. I have two faces in one, a nonreturnable bargain.

One day, when Joe and I passed an old couple walking arm in arm, I warned him, “Soon we’ll be them.” “I hope so,” he replied. He was admiring their coziness, but that’s not what I meant.

The first time I “got” death, I was eight years old and standing in my elementary school playground, waiting in line for my turn at handball. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” The kid in front turned to me, announced this, and then rubbed his fist around in his eye. “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Every time I went to sleep I would count frantically, lie in my bed going from one to a hundred as fast as I could, so I wouldn’t think about it, and eventually I succeeded. I didn’t think about it for years. But when I started being surprised by my reflection, the thought came back, and lately every morning I wake up with that little boy’s face staring into mine: “When you’re dead, you don’t know it.” Also, for the past year I have changed my hairstyle every two months. Somehow this seems connected.

Why am I here? “Joe,” I yell, “do you know why I came upstairs?”

“No,” he shouts back.

“Oh, I remember. My sunglasses.” I find them on my desk, next to Dr. Omar Kunundar’s phone number. Good grief, I almost left without taking care of this. I sit down at my desk and dial. I hear the voice of a very businesslike woman.

“Hello, this is the office of Dr. Kunundar. If you are having an emergency, please press one and leave a message. If this is a nonemergency medical call, press two and leave a message. For other business, press three. Thank you.”

I press three. “Hello, this is Eve Mozell again. A week ago, my son Jesse opened his car door into Dr. Kunundar’s car. I would like to discuss the accident as soon as possible and would really appreciate it if the doctor could give me a call at 555–4603.”

These words don’t convey how charming I am on an answering machine. I am sincere and warm, polite but inviting. It’s all in my voice, and it’s one reason I’m good at my job: I do special events. People hire me to throw fund-raisers or convention parties. I am a great planner, great at anticipating what might go wrong so it doesn’t. No Surprises is the name of my company. I do most of the planning on the phone, so I end up leaving many messages for people, like about whether we want a pasta station or a roast beef station, or about this adorable mariachi band I have located. I have “phone talent.” I easily become buddies with people over the phone.

So why haven’t I heard from the doctor after I’ve left several messages, even if he’s out of town? I assume it’s because he hasn’t heard my voice. Because this nasty nurse, obviously she’s nasty, has been screening his calls.

I phone my assistant.

“Hi, Kim, I’m running a little late. Any messages?”

She gives me the number for Madge Turner, who is on the board of several medical associations in southern California and who hires me frequently to do their special events. I am planning one for her now. “Hello, Madge, this is Eve Mozell.”

“Hello, Eve, how are you?”

I consider answering truthfully, spilling out my general state of anxiety. “Fine, I’m fine, thank you. How was the cruise?”

“It was very relaxing.”

I like talking to Madge because she always says the most obvious thing. If she were on Family Feud—“One hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board”—Madge’s answer would always be the top one. (Why do people take cruises? Number-one response: To relax.)

“That’s nice, I’m glad to hear it.”

“The food was delicious. They had canapés with salmon and caviar every evening before dinner. Do you think we could have salmon and caviar?”

“I think so. I’ll price it out.”

“I ate way too much.” (What do people regret about cruises? Number-one response: Ate too much.)

“I was talking to the people at the Biltmore—”

“Eve.” She cuts me off. I hear nervousness.

“Yes.”

“Could we change the location? Wait, don’t say no. I know the invitations have gone out.”

“The party is only a month away.”

“I know, I know, but if you send me the RSVP list, I’ll take care of mailing the location change. I’ll organize a little group to make follow-up calls, I promise you. And I’ll get us out of our obligation to the Biltmore. You know, the Biltmore’s downtown and I hate downtown. Besides, I had the most brilliant idea and I had it right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Well, great, what is it?”

“We should have our party at the Nixon Library.”

I don’t say, You’re kidding. I don’t say, In all the time we’ve worked together, I’ve never known you were a Republican. Part of my job is restraint, being careful where I put my foot. I try to be chummy, never frank. “They do parties there?” is all I say, mildly.

“Oh yes, it’s quite wonderful. It’s not really a library, it’s a museum. There are fountains and a reflecting pond. And they have the place he was born right on the premises in case people get bored and want to take a little walk. I have the name of a woman there.”

I write it down, get off with Madge, then phone Kim and ask her to set up an appointment for me with the woman at the library and to send the RSVP list to Madge immediately. I come banging down the stairs. “I’m going,” I call out. But I can’t leave without complaining. I detour into the breakfast room. “You know this party for four hundred fifty ear, nose, and throat doctors? Well, Madge Turner is changing the location to the Nixon Library.”

After a long beat, Joe looks up from his paper. “Who goes to that place? Probably the most white-bread group in the country.”

“I suppose you think it would be interesting to talk to them.”

He laughs. “‘What Nixon means to me.’ I bet you’ll have a great time.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll see you later.”

At five o’clock, I visit my father. I call Joe and tell him he does not have to come too. “I should hope not,” he says.

There’s one thing I like about doing something the second time, even when it’s unpleasant: I like knowing the ropes. The elevator is to the left, past the admissions office. Seventh floor, I don’t have to check the listing. After I ring the doorbell, I have to state my name in the intercom, my business (visiting my father), and the door will be unlocked from the inside. I will store this knowledge. It will comfort me. Maybe I can pass it on to someone. Maybe my friend Adrienne will have to commit her mother.

Also, the sights and sounds that I closed out the first time, that even scared me, become curiosities. Then familiar, even familial. I like this process.

The first thing I see is a woman sitting in a wheelchair facing the phone booth. She has the receiver in her hand. She has pulled it as far out of the booth as it will reach so she can talk. And she is screaming, “Come and get me.”

Her hair is white, there isn’t much of it, and it’s pulled back by a child’s barrette. She is little and her chin is pointed. I wonder who is on the other end of the phone. I wonder whose number she doesn’t forget.

I go past her to the cage. “I’m looking for my father, Lou Mozell.”

“Just in time,” says the nurse.

“For what?”

She leans forward so her mouth is almost against the grate, and whispers. “They get difficult now. We call it sun-downing.”

I nod in understanding. She points to the left. “His room is the third. Doris will show you.”

Doris, who has frizzy hair the color of straw and two very fat cheeks that scarcely leave room for her mouth, which runs like a straight road between them, comes out of the cage. I follow her down the hall. “So he’s being difficult?”

“He wants to leave.”

“Well, that’s understandable.” I state this loyally, in a tone that says, For God’s sake, what would you expect? Then I hear him.

“Goddamnit, you bitches, get in here.” He is shouting loud enough to be heard over the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

He sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, stranded—a passenger in a car that broke down on its way to nowhere. His pants aren’t fastened at the top, and there’s a rope around his waist holding them up. “Could you buy him some suspenders?” Doris asks.

“What’s wrong with his belt?”

“It doesn’t seem to work on all his pants.” She bends until her face is level with his. “Your daughter’s here.”

“I’m not blind,” says my father.

I sit down on the bed. “So how are you?”

“I’m hungry.” His face wrinkles up tight, as if someone took a screwdriver, put it in the center, and twisted it.

“I think you’re having dinner soon.”

“Order room service.”

I say as patiently as possible, “Dad, this isn’t a hotel.”

There is a pause. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s a hospital. They’re going to fix your medications.”

He thinks about this for a bit. “They don’t take Georgia’s magazine here,” he says petulantly.

“I’m not surprised.”

“What kind of a hotel doesn’t get Georgia?”

“Hotels don’t subscribe to Georgia. Anyway, this is a hospital and hospitals never subscribe to Georgia.” I am very bad at being patient.

“You put me here because of Jesse, didn’t you?”

“No. Listen, do you want some company? Do you want to go sit with the other—” I am about to say inmates, I realize, so I stop the sentence there.

“Sure, kiddo, let’s go for a walk.”

My father stands up and pitches forward, crashing onto the floor. It’s sort of beautiful—he’s straight all the way, as if he’s tracing the quadrant of a circle. The sound when he hits is a gigantic squish, air being punched out of a cushion.

“Help, help!” I shout. Is this it? Is he dead?

I am flat against the wall staring down when Doris runs in. My father lies there like a permanent fixture.

“Jocko!” Doris’s voice is so commanding she could be summoning troops. “Fortunately your father’s fat,” she says to me. “They fall better if they’re fat.”

I nod as though I agree or understand or know something. Then Jocko appears. He is as big as a Bekins van. His head is shaved except for some hair on top that sprouts like a plant. The sight of him probably has sent many old people who are mentally on the edge right over.

He wraps his arms around and under my dad, and pulls him up stomach first. “We really need a crane for these situations,” Doris confides as Jocko pushes my father onto his knees. Then he lifts him from behind and puts him back in his chair. My father is conscious but silent. He looks quite puzzled.

“He fell over,” I tell Dr. Kelly. We are in an empty patient room a day later, having our official end-of-first-week consultation. Dr. Kelly is wearing high-top sneakers with her medical whites. “Why can’t he stand up anymore?”

“It’s part of his dementia.” She opens his file and spreads the pages on the bed. “All your father’s tests are normal. His EEG, his EKG, blood work. We did a CAT scan this morning.” She mentions a few more workups. I lose track, and I know I should take notes, because Georgia is going to quiz me later.

“Look, my father’s been nuts before. He’s been mixed up about who he is and where he is. If you adjust his lithium and whatever else he’s on, he’ll come right back.”

She shakes her head.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?” I say this bravely. It makes me nervous to confront any doctor, even this soda-pop version. I don’t say, “I want to speak to someone over you—the doctor in charge,” but I try to imagine I am Georgia, who inspires fear. Who can make salesgirls scurry in all directions.

Dr. Kelly stiffens. “I know your father’s case.”

“Fine.” I cave in that quickly. And now her voice is sterner. Meaner. I owe this to you, Georgia. “Look,” I say, smiling, trying to win her back. “My sister’s concerned that we know everything, that’s all, that no stone is left unturned.”

“Your father has the dwindles.”

“The dwindles?”

She nods.

“You mean he’s dwindling?”

“Exactly.” She acts proud of me—I have caught on to an extremely difficult concept.

“Are you sure it isn’t Alzheimer’s?”

“Well, we can’t be sure of that until after he’s dead and we do an autopsy, but this severe dementia and loss of motor skills came on fairly rapidly. I think”—she says “I think” as if she were drawing on years of experience—“it’s just the dwindles.”

“How long do you live with the dwindles?” It sounds as if I’m asking, How long will he live? But maybe I am really asking, How long will I have to live with his dwindles?

“A year or two.”

“Why does he keep bringing up my son? He says I put him here because of Jesse.”

“Could he be referring to something in the past, some event?”

I don’t have to think about this. “Yes.”

“He’s perseverating.”

Perseverating? I insult her and she pays me back by using an SAT word. Who knows what this means? I don’t bother to ask. She shuffles the pages together and slides them back in the file.

“Oh, Dr. Kelly?”

“Yes?”

“The other day, I couldn’t remember why I went upstairs. Is that normal?”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“Yes.”

I go to my father’s room. He’s leaning over trying to reach his shoe, which is untied. He doesn’t have the dexterity to tie his shoe even if he could reach it, and he can’t walk anymore, so it doesn’t matter whether his shoes are tied. He is no longer able to trip on his laces.

I stand in the doorway, watching coolly, like a plant manager assessing some employee’s capability. You’re not going to live two more years. Not one more year. I don’t believe it. He looks up.

“Dad, come on, let’s do something. Let’s go find company.”

I push him out the door and down the hall. The last time I pushed someone along like this it was Jesse in a stroller.

A man walks toward us in a lively way, on the balls of his feet. He has a healthy head of white hair and a trim body. He resembles an aging, weathered camp counselor, someone who might lead us all in jumping jacks. “I bet you don’t recognize me,” he says to my father.

“Sure I do.” My father puts out his hand.

The bouncy man grasps it. “Great to see you again. I’ve been traveling.”

“Me too,” says my father.

“The Orient, Baghdad, Taiwan. But you know, I was thinking”—the man turns his head to one side, then the other, like a bird on a branch deciding which way to fly—“it’s great to see you.”

“Me too.” My father is smiling and so is the man, as their conversation goes ’round and ’round, a horse on a racetrack with no finish line.

“Would you like to get by?” I pull the wheelchair to the side.

“I’m going in there.” The man points to the dining room door. “Would you open it?”

I try. It’s locked, so I knock. Doris peeks out. “Excuse me,” I say.

She opens it further, spots the bouncy man behind me, and slams it closed. “Wait here,” I say to my dad, as if he could go somewhere.

I run to the cage. “That man”—I point—“wants to go into the dining room, but Doris slammed the door in his face.”

The nurse leans close to the grate and whispers. “He gets into everything.”

“Oh,” I say, as if it makes perfect sense. Who would want that? “Well, we’ll see you later,” I tell the bouncy man, who may have lost his mind but who does not have the dwindles. His family will expire from exasperation long before he dies.

“I have no idea who he was,” says my father. Was. That’s the correct tense. He was someone else once. My dad was too, I guess. I’m not sure.

I wheel him into the TV room. Old people sit and stare at a television, which is showing a weather report of conditions at nearby beaches.

“I hope you aren’t jealous of your sister,” he says suddenly, very loudly.

“Of course I’m not,” I reply, noticing that several old people have turned to look. People who are otherwise not interested in anything. I smile at them to show that this conversation is harmless.

“She’s a big success.” He booms it.

I don’t answer. Maybe this train of thought will go away.

“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie.” He’s chanting and happy. He’s ten and on the jungle gym, hanging upside down and swinging. “She’s Georgia, the magazine,” he chants. “We named her and then they named a magazine after her. Who ever thought when we gave her that name it would end up a magazine? Wasn’t that brilliant? I’d like some applause.”

Several demented people clap.

“This is her sister.” He has swung to the top of the jungle gym and is shouting to the entire playground. I smile, nodding at everyone. My father turns his head toward me sharply. “What’s your name?”

“He’s always been like that,” says Joe, who is packing.

“True.”

“But now he’s senile. If you could see his brain, I’m sure it would look like Swiss cheese.” He smiles, pleased at the notion of my father’s brain with gigantic holes in it. “Of course, it’s the holes that make Swiss cheese interesting. Although Swiss cheese can never really be interesting. Like your father.”

Joe does three half-hour shows a week for National Public Radio. What that means to me, married to him, is that at any moment some idea takes hold, like this mini-essay on Swiss cheese, and then he’s no longer talking to me but experimenting with an idea that, in some form or another, may end up on the air. His show, USA from Here, features oddballs. Joe spins their lives into tales.

He loves it. He was spinning tales before he was on the radio. He grew up in New Hampshire, in a small town, a place where it was safe to be curious. His parents still live there contentedly, in an 1846 white clapboard house with vines of roses encircling the windows and a weathervane standing at the peak of its shingled roof. Joe could always tell which way the wind was blowing.

With the confidence of the truly secure, Joe does not pay tremendous attention to how or what he packs—except for his tape recorder, which is always carefully snapped into its leather case and stashed in the small zippered pouch on his hanging bag. Clothes are selected almost at random: the first shirt his hand touches in the drawer, the pair of pants nearest the closet door. Our bathroom is full of duplicates and triplicates of things Joe forgot and had to buy on the road.

“My father’s interesting,” I protest.

“You’re praising your father? He’s not dead yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, when Nixon died, they turned him into a hero. Revisionist history. But your father’s not dead.”

“He’s dying.”

“He’s not dying and he’s not interesting.” Joe talks to me as if he were correcting my wrong answer to a test question. “Mainly he’s trouble.”

“You pack like a complete slob.” I say this with a smile that I tack on after I hear myself speak. It doesn’t fool Joe.

“What is this about?”

“You always get there and don’t have what you need, that’s all.”

“So I buy it. Or don’t.”

“Right. Forget it.” I go look in the mirror. Is this new haircut weird, or is it my imagination? My hair is short around my ears, then takes a two-inch drop in the back. It looks like upstairs, downstairs. “If my father is senile, why does he know how to upset me? Do people always get senile in character?”

“Ask Jesse. That sounds like something he’d have an opinion on.” Joe zips his bag, folds it in two, and starts buckling the sides.

“Why? Because you don’t want to talk to me?”

He stops buckling and stands up straight. He pushes his glasses back on his nose. It’s a remarkably aggressive gesture for being so simple. Casual, affable Joe is deceptive this way. He uses his index finger and pushes the glasses back firmly, and it is now immensely clear that he’s looking at me piercingly, and not just with two eyes but with four. “That is not what I mean, Eve. The reason you should ask Jesse is, he has an opinion on everything. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your sense of humor?”

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