As I walked out to the lobby to meet Bobby, that’s what stuck with me: persistent problems demand extraordinary measures. That, and the image of a dog, your common retriever, effortlessly manipulating a human tool with his clumsy paws, steadying the rotating can with a single extended toenail.
twenty-four
Bobby pulled up alone. He was wearing a pair of pleated khaki slacks, a green golf shirt and elaborate running shoes, and looked like someone he’d hire to spray insecticide on the lawn. The air conditioning in the car was going full blast and it chilled the evaporating sweat off my arms fast enough to make me swoon.
“Bobby!” I said. “It’s great to see you.”
“Good!” He patted my leg, just above the knee, then used the same hand to scratch his nose. He pulled out onto the road and pointed us toward Bridgewater proper. “So!” he said, frowning. “A conference, eh?”
“My editor thought it would be a good idea.”
“Sure, sure. Cartoons and all.”
“You bet.”
There was a tape playing on the radio of some New Age music accompanied by the sound, alternately, of crashing waves, a rainforest and wind. It was like being whisked from Nantucket to Borneo to the Canadian prairie, over and over. With growing horror, I realized that we had already exhausted our supply of conversation, and I fell into a mild panic. “What’s this music?” I asked Bobby, whom I had never known to listen to any music at all.
“This? Oh, my, uh, doctor recommended it. Because I get a little tense. While driving.”
“Of course.”
“I have another one. Whale song. Pretty serious stuff.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. I noticed the cassette box lying nearby and picked it up. It was by a man named Benni Magnussen, who was pictured on the cover: long, permed blond hair and a placid Scandinavian smile. He looked slightly depraved. Bobby and I spoke at once, for perhaps the first time ever.
“You first,” I said.
“Oh no, you.”
“Well, I was just going to ask about Nancy and Sam. Are they doing well? How is Nancy’s pregnancy?”
“They are fine,” he said, frowning. “Nancy went to her female doctor last week and everything is checking out okay. Sam is a real dear.” I saw his fingers uncoiling, coiling again around the wheel.
“And you?”
“I am also fine.”
“No, I mean what were you going to say?”
He started. His hair, always the same length, was very still, cupping his head in thick combed waves. It was beginning to go gray and I was pleased to see that he wasn’t coloring it. “I…well…I talked to Mal yesterday.”
“Ah.”
“He says Mom isn’t doing very well.” He looked at me now, his small eyes pleading.
“I suppose she isn’t.”
“So I guess you see her…often,” he said.
“Fairly. Not enough, I guess.”
He pushed out a theatrical sigh. “Well, enough, not enough. I wonder if she really wants to see us, being so, well…You know how she is.”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted. “What do you mean?”
He sniffed and turned his head to the side window, and I could see the neat wide V his hair made as it tapered down his neck. I bet he got it cut about once a week, and I could see him, rigid in the chair, his eyes squeezed shut, surrounded by the sound of electric clippers and hit radio. “I mean,” he began, then started over: “I mean, maybe it upsets her too much, seeing all of us. I wonder if perhaps it might be best not to be bothering her all the time. She has everything she needs.”
I opened and closed the empty, pristine ashtray. “Actually,” I said, “Pierce and I are talking about bringing her home. So she can spend her last days there, with us.”
“Oh, no no no!” said Bobby, keening over the sound of Benni Magnussen’s crashing waves. “I’d advise you very strongly against that. You don’t know what you’re getting into, there.”
“Well, I’d at least like to wait until after I get through with my cartooning classes. I’ll have more time when—”
“No, I mean not at all.” He was all business now, his voice taut with authority. “I think it’s a terrible idea. She cannot get adequate medical care at home. She will die in misery, in pain.”
“It’s not like we’re going to just dump her on the sofa and leave her there, Bobby.”
“Of course not. For God’s sake.” He shook his head.
“We have some idea.”
He turned to me, angry. “Do you know you’ll have to do things like treat bedsores? You’ll have to take her to the toilet and, and wipe her?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, and I’m sure you’re going to do all that.”
Suddenly I was on the defensive. “Of course we will, if we bring her home. And you too, maybe. It’s our responsibility.”
“It’s the responsibility of medical professionals!” he said, jabbing his finger at the windshield with each word. “That is what we pay them for! That is their job!” After this, he had to take a moment to catch his breath. The tape switched from Waves to Wind, and he lunged for the player and jabbed at the eject button. The tape Heimliched out onto the floor. Neither of us touched it.
* * *
Samantha was standing in the middle of the yard, staring at the ground. She didn’t look up when we pulled in. Bobby took a deep breath before he opened the car door, then stood up and yelled “Hi, sweetie!” in a frantic falsetto. It was as if he had been taught to greet children by a shrink who had never met any. Nevertheless Sam raised her head and smiled. “Hello Daddy. Hello Uncle Tim.”
“Hey, Sam,” I said.
Bobby walked to her and spread his arms. Samantha wrapped hers around his flat, sad ass. The yard, a vast slathering of fresh-cut green, dwarfed them, and they looked like lovers lost in the desert, dying of thirst. They parted. “Whatcha got there, sweetheart?”
“Nothing.”
“No, on the ground there, honey.”
“I was just looking.”
“I mean what were you looking at exactly?” He pulled his pants legs up half an inch and crouched on the ground. He ran his hand through the grass.
“Nothing.”
Bobby sighed, then stood up. I followed him to the unadorned cement porch, where he pulled out a set of keys. “She won’t tell me,” he said under his breath. “She never tells me anything.”
I was surprised to find Nancy at home, not twenty feet from the door. Bobby closed it behind him and locked it. “Hi!” he called out to her, too loud.
“Hello,” she said. She was chopping something in the kitchen. “Hello, Tim.”
“Hey, Nancy,” I said, and then to Bobby, “Does Sam have a door key?”
“We all do.”
“You keep it locked even when you’re home?” Their house was deep in the suburbs, a white ranch-style at the end of a long white gravel drive.
“You never know when the crazies will pop up.”
He went to Nancy and kissed her cheek, and then turned his head so that she could kiss his. She did. Bobby and I sat down at the kitchen table, where two bottles of Miller High Life were waiting. Bobby cracked the cap on one of the bottles, then got up from his chair, opened a cabinet, pressed the foot pedal on a pink trash can lined with a plastic bag, and threw the cap in. I opened my own beer and stashed the cap in my pants pocket.
“So,” Bobby said. “What’re we having?”
“Roast,” Nancy told him.
“I mean what veggie.”
“Corn.”
“I love corn.” He took a swig of beer.
“Please remember to cut Sam’s off the cob, Robert. I don’t want to have to remind you at the table. Sam doesn’t like to be talked about like that.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Okay, sure, I won’t forget.”