Another Broken Wizard Page 7

  “Maybe you should trade up,” Emily said, smirking.

  “They just look good on the outside,” Jeff said.

  “That’s why they keep the insides on the inside. I never heard of a sexy pair of lungs,” I said.

  “Or a sexy liver. Can you imagine? ‘Barb has a real knockout pair of kidneys on her.’ And ‘I could watch her spleen all day,’” Jeff laughed, free for a moment from the discomfort and suspicion that always showed too clearly in his face. And for a moment, I had my friend back.

  16.

  I dropped off Jeff and Emily and called Dad. He said he’d meet me at the rental car place at the airport in an hour. At Logan, I dropped off the gold rental car and complained to the rental car clerk about the broken radio. She gave me a break on the price. I found Dad’s SUV and we drove back to the Fountainhead.

  Whizzing down the Mass Pike, I closed my eyes and resumed an old prayer that I’d develop some consuming obsession, learn a foreign language, become an expert on Buddhism or the War of 1812, just about anything that would fill the empty days of Dad’s convalescence. Once we got to the apartment, Dad called and put me on his auto insurance.

  “That was more painful than the surgery will probably be. If you crash this one, I’ll revise my will and give it all to charity,” he said after he put down the receiver.

  “Dad, that’s a hell of a way to talk to the guy who’s going to be in charge of your meds.”

  He laughed. I laughed. After spending most of our first two decades together somewhere between suspicion and hostility, the present situation was funny. Nothing was forgotten, some of it was forgiven, and we were in this mess together.

  “Seriously though, we let you wreck two cars. You’re over your limit already.”

  “I admit, one I did crash. But the engine seized on the other one. That wasn’t me.”

  “Because you did some crazy shit with it and tore open the oil pan.”

  “Mom might have done that, or the oil pan might have just been faulty. I’m just saying you can’t prove that I did anything, and we will never know.”

  I knew. I ripped it open driving in the Shrewsbury gravel pits with Jeff.

  From there, the night became less fun. Dad showed me where he kept his will, his long-term-care insurance papers, his living will, his prescriptions, his PIN numbers and the keys to his storage locker. A feeling of terrible acceleration—that it was all happening too fast—churned my insides. We sat on the couch and watched the news, then got a pay-per-view movie. The movie was a slight variation on the man-who-can-beat-up-all-other-men genre. A very slight variation. But the bad guys got theirs, and got it in a satisfying way. Dad got up and tossed me the remote.

  “You tired? Why are you going to bed so early?”

  “It’s going to take me a while to get to sleep. I figure I’d better start early.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “I mean, Jesus, people die during facelifts and tummy tucks. This is open heart surgery. I’m not exactly afraid, but I can tell that my thoughts are going to go around and around for a while.”

  “But you said this place does this surgery all the time,” I said, looking for some words to slow the acceleration.

  “I know. It’s routine. Just relax. It’ll be fine. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  Dad looked me in the eyes, nodded and went to his bedroom. I was twenty-nine and old enough to know what he was doing just then. He was being the man in the situation. I don’t know how he slept or if he slept. I only got two or three hours myself.

  Part Two—The King Philip Memorial Wing

  If Worcester folks from either 1848 or 1898—or 1948—could visit downtown Worcester today, their first question might be: Where is everybody?

  —Albert B. Southwick

  150 Years of Worcester: 1848 – 1998

  17.

  Tuesday, December 30

  That morning was a bleary exercise. I drank half a pot of coffee and kept asking Dad if he needed me to do anything. Coffee and dread propelled me. I’ve had dreams where I’m being led to my execution, and this felt a little like that. On the car ride to Newton, Dad kept bringing up new concerns, new chores. His friends would call, and I should call them back to tell them how the surgery went. I should call the rehab center and the people who would be putting rails up in the bathroom and hallways in his apartment, and the nursing service and so on.

  “After the divorce, first thing I did was to make sure I got long-term-care insurance through the Veterans Administration. They’re going to lose a fortune on me,” Dad said, trying to sound proud.

  I nodded and drove. Words were just out of reach.

  “And you better eat all that food you bought—I bought—at the supermarket. You got enough to last if we don’t meet until judgment day,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not going to fucking starve while I play nursemaid.”

  “You better eat all of it. Even if I die,” Dad said, coaxing a laugh.

  The hospital was a big institutional beige brick sprawl. I parked and we walked through the early-morning dimness and chill of the parking lot. The lobby was all beige walls with dark blue upholstery and wood accents. It was the embodiment of reassuring normalcy. We checked in and a woman who described herself as a concierge and took us into the hospital itself. There, the fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum in the glare of another routine emergency.

  Leaving us in a curtained-in room with a bed, Dad changed into a hospital gown and sat on the bed. A nurse came in, followed by the anesthesiologist, cardiologist, oncologist and surgeon. The nurse, a plump Italian woman in her early forties, stayed the duration. The doctors each had something to say, mostly hello. I already knew the gist—a lump they couldn’t identify—too close to the heart—cut through the sternum. I didn’t really want to hear the rest of it. It’s not like I was going to be called in to the operating room. I just gave them hard, clear looks as they spoke to Dad, to let them know they should take this surgery seriously, or else. It was all I could think to do.

  The whole thing ran more quickly than I’d expected, partly because we were in an operation-only wing of the hospital, and December 30th isn’t a popular day for that kind of thing.

  After the last doctor left, the nurse gave Dad a sedative. The gown and the fluorescent lights made him look pale and his growing relaxation worried me, irrationally. We looked at each other while the nurse fussed with tubes and wires and the curtains. By the time he got to the pre-op room, Dad was pretty out of it.

  “So do you live around here?” the nurse asked me, mostly to fill the silence.

  Her face seemed too lively, too expressive, like she was used to talking to children or retards.

  “No, I live in New York.”

  “New York City?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my God, I love New York. I was watching Flip This House, you ever watch that?”

  “No.”

  “The other night, this woman bought a little apartment in Manhattan for five hundred thousand dollars, then she re-did the kitchen, the bathroom, everything, repainted it, tore out the carpet, put in new floors. She sold it for over a million dollars. I couldn’t believe it.”

  I tried to tell her with my eyes that what I wished for most in the world was to wipe her name from the book of life. After a few minutes of silence, she showed me to the waiting area and said it would be few hours, at least five, before I could see him. They’d made the waiting room big enough for the emotions that would, inevitably and despite their best efforts, erupt there. It had indestructible blue furniture and bright wood walls, under kinder lighting. I sat in one of the armchairs, dazed by dread. The TVs that angled down from the upper corners of the room showed a bitchy old lady adjudicating the legal fallout of a failed relationship between two sub-morons.

  In the astonishingly uncomfortable blue arm chair, I discovered that I could not play along with the magazines and their cheery, advertiser-friendly, full-color neuroses. Maybe
Africa is a mess, maybe I do have bad body language, maybe western economies are facing a great depression, maybe I do have ten to twenty pounds of waste trapped in my colon, maybe I don’t know what she really wants, maybe the suits in my closet are a year out of date. But I had bigger fish to fry at the moment, and no way to fry them.

  There was a big Irish family on the other side of the waiting room, whispering to each other about the court show on the TVs. After an hour, I got up and just started walking until I was outside.

  18.

  I found Dad’s car, got in and started it. At the gate of the parking lot, it became clear that in the duress of the morning, I had lost the parking ticket. I explained my situation to the old whiskey-nosed Irish guy in the booth. Humorous and sports-related buttons covered his orange safety vest. When explaining my error didn’t work, I asked politely to be given a break. Then I inquired how well he understood what a fucking prick he was. When that didn’t work, I gave him twenty-five dollars. Injury loves insult, it seems.

  Growing up in Worcester, I didn’t really know much of Massachusetts east of Natick. So I followed the road I took to the hospital into Wellesley, a manicured suburb of Boston. I parked the SUV by the train stop and walked up to the main drag. Most of the shops catered to women in late middle age with too much time and money—expensive doodads to hang from your porch, set in your lawn or put on a coffee table, big hats, clothing for dogs, garish handbags and absurd jackets. I found a Starbucks and sipped my coffee among the soft music and pale wood walls until it occurred to me that it was more or less identical to the hospital waiting room I had fled.

  Back out on Main Street, I was too surly to be around old ladies, Korean college girls or the Saabs and Volvos that dominated the strip. I was about to go back to the car when I saw a bookstore. I checked the shelves, then asked if they had the book I was reading about Hadrian. They didn’t. I browsed the tables of cookbooks, TV-spinoff books, ghostwritten celebrity self-congratulations, and yes-you-can bullshit—all the blatant garbage that took the place of the book I wanted. I was about to exile myself back to Main Street, when, by the door, I saw a rack of books marked “Local Interest.” I only looked to stoke my growing furor, wryly wondering what it was that human house pets in a town like Wellesley could possibly be interested in. But I found a book about the history of Worcester. I flipped through it and saw a long chapter on King Philip’s War. There was a book about the war on the shelves as well. I bought both and left. The idea of having a few books to read in the hospital calmed my fury for the moment.

  Fists clenched and muttering, I was clearly not someone who belonged among the boutique shops, church spires and smug Colonial charm of Wellesley. Back at the hospital, they would be better prepared for the distraught, with closets full of tranquilizers, if it came to that. I walked back to where I parked.

  In the cold, pale sunlight, on the windshield of Dad’s SUV, something waited. It couldn’t be a ticket, because I remembered putting quarters in the meter, too many, actually. But there it was, a parking ticket. The text explained I had parked in the spot the wrong way. I looked left and right, then circled the car, to see if there was someone I could murder. Then I took a deep breath, tore up the ticket and gave the finger to anyone who might be spying from a nearby building, like a true Mass-hole. Maybe that’s how they get that way.

  19.

  Boredom had soaked into the Irish family in the waiting room. The clean-cut, red-haired, mid-twenties son in a polo shirt, the punked-out teenage daughter with dyed-black hair and dark circles under her eyes both flipped listlessly through magazines. The younger, redheaded kid played indifferently with the action figures in his lap. And the overweight, watchful and stern mother just stared off. The older son talked to the mother about getting coffee, who asked the other kids, who gave him a consensus. My cell phone said I had several hours to go. My brain wasn’t up for the trip to the 1600s that my new books required. I took deep a few breaths and closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, I saw the punky Irish girl was looking at me.

  With a smirk, I got up and charted a course for the hospital cafeteria. After getting lost more times than I’d like to admit, I found the half-empty cafeteria. I loaded up a tray with Swedish meatballs, fries and a donut and got a table by a window overlooking the whiskey-nosed parking lot attendant from earlier in the day. I watched him take tickets and give change from his booth. I wished him ill. I was down to a few fries and the donut when the punked-out teenager from the Irish family plopped down in the chair across from me.

  “So what’s your tragedy?” she asked, sipping her diet Coke provocatively through a straw.

  “No tragedy. I’m just here for the magazines and the food.”

  “My father is having part of a pig heart sewn onto his own heart because he ate like a pig all his life. Nobody but me thinks that’s ironic,” she said, her eyes darting around in their deep brown circles. She had a thick Massachusetts accent. Paht of a pig haht.

  “Huh. My dad’s having an anomalous mass removed from near his heart. We’ll see.”

  She smiled. It took the edge off my anger.

  “Where’s your mom?” she asked as if I was a child lost in the mall.

  “Divorced.”

  “And his family?”

  “His mother and father are dead. He has some half brothers and sisters that I never met. I don’t know if he told most of his friends. He doesn’t like to be a burden.”

  “What about to you?”

  Regarding her more closely, she wasn’t as young as she seemed at first, just skinny and dressed to dispute the claims of adulthood. Her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. She had a long, almost wolfish face. Compared to her ruddy, stocky brothers, she was definitely the mailman’s kid.

  “Just lucky. Any other unpleasant truths you think I’m overlooking? How about that my father could die in there? Oh wait, I already got that one.”

  “I’m just saying,” she said. Then she looked at me and things went quiet for a moment. “How about this place?”

  “It’s okay as far as these things go. You live around here?”

  “My parents and my little brother live in Sherborn. I live there too, sometimes. I’m going to Framingham State.”

  “Where’s Sherborn?”

  “It’s near Natick. How about you? Wait, can I guess?” she said, pulling up her chair and getting excited. It felt like someone had chosen to visit me in the land of the dead. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t want her to go.

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m going to say Brookline. I have a cousin there and that seems like where you live.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you dress like him, like a yuppie, but not. And you’re wicked sarcastic. Well? I’m right, right?”

  I paused for a minute and watched the long-coated doctors walk by behind her.

  “Actually, I live in New York. But I’m from Worcester. And I’m staying in Westborough while my dad recovers. That about covers it.”

  “New York, heh? Well, I still think I did a good job of guessing. I was just thinking of around here. I didn’t know I’d have to choose from the whole world,” she said, putting one hand over the bracelets on her other forearm, leaning forward and smiling.

  “No, you did alright. It’s not like you guessed I was from Leominster or something. By the way, my name is Jim.”

  “I’m Olive. It’s a pleasure,” she said. Uh pleashuh. She held out her hand and I shook it.

  She told me how her father’s surgery ruined her winter break, how lucky I was not to have to deal with my family right now, how exasperated doctors could sweep into the waiting room at any moment with news of our fathers’ deaths, how her mother kept losing her cool and making things worse, how the whole calm atmosphere of the hospital was a sick lie, and other impious things.

  “Fuckin’ Judge Judy and fuckin’ soap operas, how the hell is that supposed to help? And you can’t turn off the TVs if you want to. The nu
rses don’t even have the remote,” she said.

  “I know, and the fucking magazines. It’s like ‘well, they’re holding my dad’s ribcage open and cutting around his heart at this very moment. But I sure would like to know what Runners World has to say about the new Reeboks with the extra fucking springs inside.’”

  “Right, what the hell? God, why can’t you smoke in here? And that fucking wop nurse, I know that’s racist, I’m sorry, you’re not Italian are you?” Olive said in what seemed like one breath.

  “No, I think I had the same nurse, go ahead.”

  “My dad is already half unconscious. And my mom is barely holding it together. And the nurse starts talking about how her husband says that her plan to remodel the kitchen for the fourth time in six years is excessive and how she is trying to get him to see the light. No bullshit, those were the words she used.”

  “She talked to me about a TV show about remodeling.”

  Just then, Olive’s little brother came up to the table and started pulling on Olive’s black cardigan.

  “Mom wants you to come back,” he said, his eyes pinched half-shut between his bulbous cheeks and his bulbous forehead, all covered in freckles.

  “Is the surgery done? Did the doctor come out?”

  “No. She just wants you back.”

  I saw Olive pull a black ball point pen out of her sweater pocket and grab a napkin off the table. She started writing as she addressed her little brother.

  “Tell her I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “She said to come back now.”

  “Okay, I’m going. You are such a pain,” Olive said, folding and pushing the napkin to me, then getting up and leaving.

  I opened the napkin. It said probably more than it should have: “OLIVE FROM THE HOSPITAL” then a 508 phone number, then “SHHHH.” I stayed and finished my donut and watched whiskeynose work the sparse traffic.