He looks at the clock when I come in with his tray, but he doesn’t complain about how long it took me.
He sits up and puts the plate in his lap and says, “This is terrific.” He picks up one of the pink-gray tubes of pig intestine, dips it in the mound of ketchup, and raises it to his open mouth. It makes a pop as it splits between his teeth.
“You have yours already?”
I realize I’m hovering.
“No, I—”
“Want some?” He pushes his plate toward me.
“No, I don’t—” eat meat, I want to finish, but can anticipate the mockery too well. “Thanks anyway.”
He confuses me. He disgusts and compels me. I don’t want to stand and watch him eat three hot dogs (I had to use several different utensils to get them out of the package and in and out of the boiling water without having to touch them) and yet the sight of his fingers, the tip of a pencil embedded since kindergarten above the knuckle of his first finger, the long yellowing thumb steadying the plate, keeps me in place.
“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.” He says it in a bad New York accent. Noyvus. He points to the wooden chair in the corner. I pull it up to the bed.
He cleans the plate, then puts it on the bedside table. He lies back on his pillows.
“Dad, will you tell me what’s been going on here?”
He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”
I wait.
His eyes flash open. “Do you know what that ungrateful asshole brother of yours said to me?”
“No, but let’s start at the beginning. What happened with Catherine?”
He looks at me blankly for a moment, as if there’s only room for one enemy at a time in his head. Then he smiles before shaking his head again, even more slowly this time. “Now there’s a real beauty. There’s a real little cunt for you.”
“You had a big fight?”
“No we didn’t have a big fight.” He isn’t one for narrative unless it has a punch line. “She just took off and I said good riddance.”
“Were you home?” Did Catherine leave in the same way my mother had, on the sly, a note on the kitchen table? It seemed the only way.
“Yes. I was in the poolhouse. She drove right past me.”
“What time of day was it?”
“About nine in the morning.”
I figured she’d left in a drunken midnight rage, not on a sunny Saturday morning.
“She came crawling back, too, the next day. But I had a gun and told her to get off the property.”
“A gun?”
“Damn right.”
“A BB gun?” I try not to smile.
“If you aim it in the right place, that thing can do some damage.”
“Dad, you and Catherine have been together a long time.”
“Worst years of my life.”
“Really?”
“Well, some of the worst.”
“I’m going to talk to Catherine. I know you can work this—”
“If you do that—” he struggles to sit up and point a finger at me—”if you do that, if you go anywhere near her, I’ll call the police. You can get out of this house right now if that’s what your plan is. I want nothing, nothing to do with that woman, do you understand that?” His eyes are small and yellow.
“Yes,” I say thinly. The walls of my stomach begin to buckle. I feel myself rise, put back the chair, lift his plate, and move quickly out of the room and down to the kitchen. Over my shoulder, as smoothly as I can, I tell him to have a nap.
It’s been years since I’ve triggered my father’s temper. I learned my way around it long ago. I do not bring up politics, history, literature, lawyers — especially Jewish lawyers — or any other subject that can be linked, however loosely, to my mother. I do not tease, and I receive teasing with a smile; I keep my thoughts and opinions to a bare minimum. I ask questions. I make myself useful. I do not discuss my interests, my relationships, or my goals. He and Catherine find me dull company, and tease me for that as well, but it is a small price to pay for peace.
It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t want Catherine back. He’d wanted my mother back, or at least I thought he had. I have no Plan B.
I pick up the phone, the old one that’s always been there, with the long cord and rotary dial. Jonathan answers before the second ring.
“It’s just me.”
“Hey, just you.” His voice jiggles; he’s flopped on the bed and smashed a pillow beneath his head. He’s settling in for a long conversation. Suddenly I don’t have that in me. “So how is he?”
“He’s okay.” It feels like too much to explain: Garvey, the hospital, the loss of Plan A. “I miss you. I want to be on Paloma Street with you.”
“Nine and a half days. Here. I was just thinking of you. Listen to this. I’ve been reading Go Tell It on the Mountain again.” There’s a muffled scraping sound. “Okay, here it is.”
It’s a long quote and I try to concentrate, but the words just bounce off me.
“I like that,” I say when he’s done, but I don’t have anything more to say about it. “There are these plates here. I remember coming back from my grandparents’ that summer and seeing them in my kitchen: Catherine’s good china. The kids ate off of plastic, but Dad and Catherine always used these plates. She didn’t take them with her. She doesn’t seem to have taken much of anything. That’s probably a good sign, right?”
“You want her to come back?”
“It’s my father’s only hope, I think. He can’t cope alone.”
“How about some sort of housekeeper?”
“He doesn’t like people he doesn’t know.”
“Did you really come from the loins of this man?”
“Please don’t put it that way. How was class today?”
“Two more to go.”
“They’ll hand in their papers next week?” Once he got those papers and graded them, he could leave.
“Wednesday morning. You know, this Baldwin book probably means more to me than anything I’ve read in any philosophy class. Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.” It’s weird to hear his voice and the words Baldwin and philosophy and narrative coming through the same phone line we used to use for prank calls. Is John Wall there? Are any Walls there? Then what’s holding up your house?
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You okay, Dales?”
“I should probably go check on him.”
“You sure?”
I wish I hadn’t called so soon. It’s never a good idea to try and mix the world of my father with any other world. I’d learned that over and over. “I’ll call you when I get on the road again.”
“I love you,” he says. It sounds dutiful. But I know that’s the Doppler effect of being here in this house.
The minute I hang up I want to call back.
“Who was that?”
I flinch. He can really creep up on you when he wants to. “A friend of mine. She’s moving to California, too.” The impulse to lie is instinctive, like one of those desert cats hastily burying its kill in the sand.
He’s changed into bright red pants. His hair is damp, combed neatly in ridges. “When do you have to go?”
“The day after tomorrow. I have a professorship at Berkeley that starts in ten days.” I don’t know if Garvey mentioned this to him.
He moves past me to the door where the dogs are scraping to be let out. They move in a runnel of fur through the opening he makes. He stays looking out the screen door. The little dog remains beside him. He nudges her with the toe of his topsider. “Well, we don’t have a professorship, do we, Maybelle?”