NICK
BEFORE
Sunday afternoon we get in the car and make the trip to Clara’s parents’ home, just a short drive from ours. She brings the same cinnamon crumb cake as always, one she buys from Costco because she knows it’s something her mother will eat. We’re still a good ten minutes from the house—a blah ranch in a retirement community just a few miles from our own home—but already Clara’s hands are shaking, her knees jiggling on the passenger’s seat beside me. On her lap, the cinnamon crumb cake rattles in her agitation, and I ask if she wants to set it down before she drops it. She says no.
In the car, on the drive to her parents’ house, Clara says to me, “We should have Connor over sometime. For dinner. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him,” and at the mention of his name I feel my arms and legs tense up and my face turn red. It’s a completely innocuous comment; it means nothing, but still, I have this sense that Clara can see right through me. I look to her and say sure, and okay, hoping she doesn’t see the obvious omission, how awkward and uncomfortable it would be to have Connor at my dining room table when, in the back of my mind, I’m wondering how and when to lay him off. I hear his arrogant voice in the back of my mind, egging me on. What are you going to do about this, Boss?
“When?” she asks, and I shrug my shoulders and say, “Maybe next week?”
“I’ll make tacos,” she says, and I say okay, though of course I have no plans to invite Connor to dinner.
Clara turns to Maisie and tells her how she wants her to say hi to her grandmother when we arrive. To make an effort to be friendly. “Give her a hug, or at the very least, say hello,” she says, but immediately Maisie begins to protest vehemently, screaming that she doesn’t want to.
“No, Mommy, no!” she demands, kicking hard at the back of the passenger’s seat where Clara sits. Louisa scares the daylights out of Maisie. I know this, and Clara knows this. I don’t blame Maisie for her fears. They’re with good reason, and yet I hate seeing Maisie so scared.
“It’s okay, Maisie,” I coax, reaching a hand into the back seat to pat her knee. “Grandma’s not trying to scare you,” I tell her. “Pinkie promise, she’s not. Grandma’s just a little bit sick,” I say. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation.
At Tom and Louisa’s home, we park the car and form a procession to the front door, me in the front, Clara in the rear, Maisie in between. Clara walks slowly, clutching that crumb cake, telling Maisie to be careful of her step and not to trip.
Tom yanks a baseball cap from his head as we step into the living room, eyes gaping wide at Louisa as she sits in her chair. Tom greets us all, and then bends down to Maisie’s level to whisper into her ear. We watch on as Maisie creeps to her grandmother’s side and waves flittingly, though her grandmother only stares. There is no whining, no crying, no begging and pleading, Nooo! Maisie simply does as she’s told, though Louisa says nothing. That doesn’t surprise me in the least bit, but what does surprise me, what has always surprised me, is this leverage Tom has on Maisie, not so much power but a pact. She’ll do whatever he asks because she worships him just that much. If Tom leaned down and whispered into her ear to jump off a cliff, she might just do that, too.
Louisa is dressed up nicely when we come, her hair well groomed. We all know Izzy—the in-home caregiver who works untiringly to care for Tom and Louisa—is to thank for this. She keeps Tom’s and Louisa’s lives on track in a way that Clara and I can’t; she tolerates Louisa’s dementia, the confusion and the memory loss, the anxiety and mood swings, the tremors, the bathroom accidents, the aimless wandering. What I know about Izzy is relatively small, but I know there’s a kid sister in college, and nearly every last cent Izzy makes goes to pay for tuition and housing at the U of I, while Izzy lives in a squalid apartment in one of the more crappy neighborhoods around town. Their parents died within a year of each other nearly a decade ago—the kind of tragedy that makes you stop for a minute to appreciate your own lot in life—and Izzy has since supported the sister, whose name I don’t know. Izzy is a nice girl, dependable, maybe even a little too selfless for her own good.
Clara places a tender kiss on her mother’s cheek and says, “Hi there, Mom.” Maisie, scared as always, now clings to my leg, though Tom makes silly faces to conciliate her, and she giggles. How she loves Tom.
Visits as always start with a nonchalant medical report, such as, “Louisa’s having a great day today,” or, “Louisa didn’t sleep very well last night,” so we have an idea of how the day will go.
Today Tom says, “Louisa’s lost her glasses. We can’t find them anywhere,” and we all spin in half circles to see if we can spot them, the clear plastic frames loafing on top of the TV set or on an end table. We don’t. “She keeps misplacing her things,” says Tom. “Today her glasses, yesterday her mother’s wedding ring,” at which Clara’s eyes fall to Louisa’s right hand, where she always keeps her mother’s wedding ring, a silver antique with a wide band and intricate flowers that should one day be Clara’s. It’s not there; it’s gone.
Clara puts her hand on Tom’s arm in a comforting way, and says, “Don’t worry, Daddy. We’ll find them. They have to be around here somewhere.” This, too—losing things—is a side effect of the dementia.
We sit around the living room and force conversation. It’s awkward, all stilted and contrived. “How about those Cubs?” I ask of Tom, and someone mentions the weather. And then again there’s silence. Awkward and uncomfortable silence. I turn to Izzy for no other reason than to obliterate the silence, and ask how her sister is surviving college.
She smiles warmly and says, “She’s doing well. Thanks for asking.”
Izzy sits closely to Louisa’s side, her hand on the armrest of Louisa’s chair, ready and waiting to meet the woman’s every need. Louisa is in a daze, staring at some spot just beneath the curtain hem, her eyes bounding back and forth as if she’s got her eye on something, which she probably has. Something pretend.
“What’s she studying?” I ask, because the awkwardness of Tom and Louisa’s home is suffocating, and without some conversation to get us through the day, I might just choke and die. Also, it’s not that often that anyone talks to Izzy when we’re here. We tend to treat her as a home accessory or an appliance, maybe. It’s not intentional, and yet so many of our visits are gorged with updates on Louisa’s medical prognosis or whatever weird habit she’s recently picked up, that Izzy gets overlooked. She’s a pretty girl, a bit avant-garde, and if Connor were here, I’m guessing he’d have something offensive to say about the size of her hips. But I like her. Around her neck she wears a charm that bears her name, Izzy, which is genius if you ask me. Every time Louisa doesn’t know who she is, she just shows her the necklace.
Izzy smiles, clearly pleased that someone is talking to her. Her face softens, her eyes perk up. The silence must be painful for her as well, and while Clara, Maisie and I get to make a break for it soon, Izzy is stuck here all day, earning money to pay for someone else’s keep. “She just changed her major,” she says to me, “from chemistry to food science and nutrition. She wants to be a dietitian.”
“What does a dietitian do?” I ask, more for conversation’s sake than because I really care. She tells me how they work with people who want to lose weight, or those with food allergies, teenage girls with eating disorders, among other things. “Sounds like a worthwhile career. Helping people,” I tell her, “must run in the family,” and Izzy smiles sadly this time and says that they learned it from their mother, who was an active volunteer at a crisis hotline before she died, taking calls and talking people off the literal and proverbial edge. A suicide hotline, which is one of those things I’m only beginning to grasp—suicide—realizing how desperate a person would have to be to take their own life. There were recent times, as the dental practice drifted closer and closer to complete bankruptcy, that I paused to consider how better off Clara would be without me in her world. I’m not one of those grisly types consumed with death, but more of a realist. Without me weighing her down, Clara could find another husband in an instant, one who wouldn’t test her on the whole richer-or-poorer part of the wedding vows.
“She had a way with people,” Izzy confides, and the room turns quiet as a moment of silence passes for Izzy’s mother. “One conversation with her could change a person’s whole outlook on life,” she says, and I wonder what her mother looked like. I have half a mind to ask more—about her mother, her mother’s death, how difficult it would have been to have custody of a child when she was still a teenager herself—but Clara flashes me a dirty look, and I quickly change my mind.
Clara, nearly the entire time we’re here, doesn’t say a word. She’s silent, eyes moving back and forth between Tom and me or Izzy and me, landing occasionally on her mom, who also sits unspeaking. Not until later does Clara finally speak, when her father calls the two of us aside for a private conversation. I follow Clara to the kitchen, my hand on the small of her back.
“What is it, Daddy?” asks Clara, finally coming to life. She touches her father’s thin arm and asks if everything’s all right. Being an only child has its downsides. The fact that all issues concerning her parents—financial, medical and otherwise—fall in Clara’s lap is a heavy burden to bear.
“It’s your mother,” he says, which doesn’t surprise me in the least bit because it seems nearly every conversation with Tom involves some detail of what Louisa’s done since we’ve last seen her. There are the odd facets, the calling for a cat that no longer exists, the screaming in public, the purposeless walking around the house. Sometimes they have to do with Louisa’s medications or the details of an appointment with the neurologist or GP.
“What about her?” she asks Tom.
“She’s done something,” he says, and I can see the tension in his eyes, the shame. “A couple nights ago. Tuesday,” he explains. “Somehow or other she got ahold of the car keys,” he says, and already I know where this is going. He goes on to tell Clara and me how Izzy wasn’t home at the time—it was nearly bedtime, and so Tom had sent her home for the night—and he’d fallen asleep on the sofa. Late afternoons and evenings are always hardest on Louisa, when the confusion seems worst. It was nearing eight o’clock that night, and, thanks to Louisa’s intermittent sleep schedule, Tom was tired. She was restless all night, every night, stricken with insomnia, which meant that Tom also didn’t sleep. I could see it in his eyes. He was exhausted. “She thought she needed to make dinner,” he says, “but there was no milk. I don’t know what I was thinking leaving the car keys in my coat pocket, within reach,” he goes on, his words running over with shame and guilt, and Clara croons, “It’s okay, Daddy. It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault.”
As it turned out, Louisa managed to take the keys and walk right past Tom and outside. She managed to find her old car in the garage, one she hadn’t driven in years, get the keys in the ignition and put the car in Reverse. She managed to drive a block or two until she swerved, crashing into Ed Ramsey’s garbage bins that were lined up in preparation of garbage day. “Thank God no one was hurt,” he says. “Ed found her sitting there in the car, completely out of her mind. All she kept saying was that she needed milk, and so Ed thought for sure she was thirsty and brought her a glass of milk from inside while he waited for me to arrive. I should be mad at her—I could be mad at her. And yet she just can’t help herself,” he says.
“Oh, Daddy,” says Clara. It’s all she can say.
“Thank God no one was hurt,” he says again, and we all agree.
We’re standing two feet into the kitchen so that Louisa can’t hear. And yet we won’t leave Louisa and Maisie together unattended, not after what happened last time. I still can’t get the image out of my mind, Louisa coming after Maisie with a pair of scissors. It happened so fast.
It’s about that time that Maisie loses the ability to sit still and rises up from the sofa to do a series of poorly executed ballet leaps across the room. Tom, Clara and I step back into the living room to watch the performance, and Clara, clapping her hands at Maisie’s moves, says that Maisie has begun taking dance classes at one of the nearby studios on Tuesday afternoons. She goes on to tell them about the studio on the lower floor of an old refurbished furniture factory; about Maisie’s teacher, Miss Becca; about the fact that in Maisie’s class there are ten girls and one boy, a detail that Maisie repeats every time she comes home from class. She’s taken with his footless black tights and his white T-shirts, and the fact that he is a boy. Maisie has never seen a boy ballerina before. A danseur, it’s called, not a ballerina, which we only know because Clara searched the word on the internet. We’re sure Maisie has her first crush.
“Pretty soon,” says Tom, eyes focused on me, “you’ll have to step up and help out with these tasks, son.” Tom has called me son approximately four times in our marriage, and each came with a scolding, often directed at the amount of money we’ve invested in my practice. But this time, it’s my parenting of which he speaks, my perceived disinterest in taking Maisie to ballet. “With a new baby, everything will change. It won’t only be Clara and Maisie anymore. Clarabelle will have her hands full,” he says, and at this he winks in Clara’s direction, as if this conversation was preordained.
But Clara leaps to my defense. “Nick is so busy,” she tells him, “supporting our family,” and I die a little bit inside, wondering what Clara and her father would think if they knew the truth about my crumbling practice. “And besides,” she says, “he helps. He helps whenever he can.”
“You ever take Maisie to ballet?” he asks as Izzy hovers in the background, wishing like me that she could become one with the wallpaper and disappear. “Go with Clara to all those prenatal appointments?” and his insinuation that I’m an absentee father strikes a nerve with me because that’s the one thing in the world I never wanted to be: my own father, who always put his career before our family.
“I would like to,” I assert, but it’s a pathetic excuse. Clara comes to my aid again. “I love taking Maisie to ballet, Daddy,” she says. “Watching her with her friends. Dancing. Talking to the other mothers. It’s therapeutic,” she claims, “having other mothers to talk to. Parenthood can be lonely,” she says, and this is the first time she’s mentioned it before, the suggestion that at home alone with Maisie, she feels lonely. Alone. I reach out my hand to touch hers in a silent acknowledgment. I heard her; I will do better. I will make every attempt to be around more.
It’s the first time Louisa opens her mouth to speak.
“My Clara never could dance,” she says, her tone bitter and vitriolic. Except her eyes aren’t watching Clara, but rather Maisie as she leaps gracelessly around the room. “The poor thing,” she says. “So ungainly. She was born with two left feet. Clara,” she snaps then at Maisie as she leapfrogs across the room, more of a toad than a graceful ballerina, landing on the flats of her feet and losing balance, tumbling to the ground in a stop, drop and roll fashion. “Clara! Stop doing that, why don’t you. You look like a fool. Like a goddamn fool. Don’t you know you can’t dance worth a damn,” she growls, humiliating both Clara and Maisie at the same time.
Only one of them cries.
Before we leave, Tom calls Maisie to his side, and again leans down to her height, pressing his lips to her ear. More secrets. She giggles merrily, as he wipes a tear from her cheek, forgetting already about her sadness of only two moments ago. As he speaks, her eyes stray to mine, and she smiles. What’s this got to do with me? I wonder. What in the world is he saying to her about me?
In the car on the way home I try to talk to Clara about it. Maisie is in the back seat, reading a book, and the baby in my wife’s womb is punting her insides. Clara has her hands folded around her midsection and from time to time flinches in pain. I reach with a single hand to lay it on top of her own and ask, “Do you want to talk about it?” meaning her mother’s dance commentary, her father’s car keys, the neighbor’s upended garbage cans, the fact that no one ever ate the cinnamon crumb cake and that at home, being a stay-at-home mother, she’s lonely.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, though her hand binds to mine.
I try Maisie instead. “What did your grandfather say to you inside?” I ask.
Her leafy-green eyes peer up to mine. “When?” she asks—either naively or defiantly, I don’t know.
“When he leaned down and whispered in your ear. Just thirty seconds ago,” I tell her, and she’s quiet for a minute, but then she smiles and says, “Boppy said that secrets aren’t for sharing,” and focuses her attention out the window, already at the age of four, learning to tune out the sound of my voice.
“Look there,” she says. “An airplane’s in the sky.”
Both Clara and I look, but we see nothing.