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After Mama died, Daddy stopped washing his ears. I keep trying to understand why he did, and perhaps it is only coincidence -- the rest of him is clean enough. He stopped smoking the day we all dispersed after the funeral; forty years, and he stopped just like that. And, in fact, the house is tidier than when Mama lived there. But when I go to visit him, I've learned to slip some wet wipes into my pocket so I can unobtrusively wipe the greasy residue off the telephone receiver before placing it up to my head.
It feels too disgusting to bring up to him. I think Frost's definition of home should be modified to read "Home is where, when you do something disgusting, someone else will clean it up." But I'm being glib. After Mama died, our family has held together by the frailest of cords, and anything like intimacy, the kind of intimacy involved in telling each other unvarnished truths, is a risk to be taken only when absolutely essential.
I did tell him, when he refused to let a doctor look at the mole on his back which had turned black and was oozing every time he moved -- I told him if he had cancer and it metastasized because of his apathy I would put him in a hospice. I would visit but I wouldn't take care of him. I can't believe, now, I found the courage to face his sad brown eyes and say something so awful. I was pushed into it by my best friend, Holly, who said he had no right to ask me to keep changing his bandages if he was willing to die without a fight, and I had no right to say I loved him if I kept my own limits from him. After I said this to him, gave him all the money I had on me to pay for a clinic visit, and drove back home, he went to the doctor. It was cancer but they caught it in time, and keep catching all the dozens more that are springing up on his arms, chest and neck -- thirty years working out under the sun, usually without a shirt, has made of his aging flesh a mushroom bed for unusual growths.
Daddy asked us kids if we'd agree to a Baptist minister for Mama's funeral. I knew Mama would hate it -- she believed in reincarnation and thought Jesus was a nice Jewish boy who was trying to bring social change into public attention, sort of a historical Abbie Hoffman -- but Mama had also always insisted funerals were for the benefit of the living, not the dead, so I said okay and got my brothers to grunt acquiescence. Daddy found a preacher who was as eager to please us as he was to convert souls, Brother Dwayne, but the guy could never get it straight that Daddy's name was Harold. Sure enough, during the eulogy he constantly referred to Daddy as Howard.
The first time he did it, there was general confusion and a couple of giggles from the quick-witted. The second time, pretty much everyone connected that he was speaking of Daddy, not some secret longtime paramour of Mama's, and the laughter, though muffled, was widespread. My little brother Bill, already as big as a refrigerator and dangerous as a wounded Rottweiler in his grief, leaned forward in the front pew and fiercely whispered "Harold". Brother Dwayne was thrown off his stride -- he clearly didn't understand Bill. The next time he brought up Howard, nobody could hold back, including me -- I guffawed through my tears. Brother Dwayne looked wretched, and when Bill, with clenched jaw and fists, exploded into that incomprehensible hiss again, Brother Dwayne flinched backward. After that, we listened intently, caught up in the game, waiting for the next Howard. Later my cousin Florence Lou said she'd never laughed so hard at a funeral. Mama would have loved it.
The day after we buried her, Daddy asked me if I'd clear her things out of their bedroom. He said he couldn't sleep in there, and he couldn't do it himself. I don't think the assumption was that he was somehow closer to her than I was -- everybody knew I was her favorite, privy to her deepest thoughts and dreams, had been for years. Rather, I was the girl, and now, at 28, was being asked to play the part Mama had left vacant. I said yes, out of pity for him. If I'd known how hard it was going to be, I'd have pitied myself more and demanded he share the job.
Still, it's something women do that makes us stronger -- we don't wash the dead any more, but we wash their clothes to give away to strangers; we hold their eyeglasses, familiar as their faces, and try to figure out something to do with them besides throw them away; we empty out purses we were never allowed into while they were alive, destroying forever an order that made sense to one beloved mind. In the bottom of one drawer, under a pile of recipes cut out from the paper, I found three receipts from a motel in Gainesville. The dates on them were in the spring of 1972, when Daddy had been selling mobile homes in Gainesville, an hour's drive from where we lived then. I remembered sometimes he didn't come home at night -- I always thought he bunked down in one of the trailers -- but I kept going over the receipts, trying to figure out why Mama had not only saved them, but hidden them. Then I noticed the occupancy line, filled with the number 2. Well, shit. Somehow I wasn't surprised, Daddy having an affair, but was he really stupid enough to have left these where Mama could find them? And why didn't she confront him, like she did about everything else? Questions never to be answered. In the end, I threw them out, too. He'd have to find his own peace with what he did, and with her ghost.
Mama always told me I was conceived on October 25th, their seventh wedding anniversary. They'd been trying to have a second child all that time -- they each wanted a girl, had wanted a girl the first time around. I tell you here and now, knowing all my life I was wanted has made the chief difference between me and my brothers, has set me apart more than gender or birth order. Anyhow, they went out that night to dinner, dancing, got a little tiddly, came home and made love. Not the next morning, but the morning after, Mama said she threw up her coffee, before she'd even finished her first cigarette. (Yeah, 2 packs and 15 cups a day -- in those days, prenatal care meant eating lots of bananas and using Preparation H.) I don't know if this story is true -- can you get morning sickness this fast? She said she told Daddy that night, and they picked out my name, just a girl's name, not a boy's. I grew up knowing my existence was connected to their having sex. I didn't like it much, to tell the truth, but I didn't like Mama's long descriptions of her infamous glass stomach either.
So, was Mama's well- documented queasiness the reason why Daddy's ears stayed clean (or else) while she was around? Or was it part of that body love people can have who have been together for a long time, not being sure where one leaves off and the other begins? Daddy used to sit down on the floor at Mama' s feet in the evenings and rub the calves of her legs for hours, when she was having the terrible pains which were, too late, diagnosed as blood clots. After they went to bed, did she wash his ears for him? I remember, as a preschooler, Daddy cleaning our ears for us with Q- tips and baby oil. We'd lay our heads on his thigh, smelling khaki and tobacco, and close our eyes in ecstasy. He was gentle, and would remind several times to be very still. He was, in fact, gentler than Mama. Mama had a surgeon's approach to inanimate objects and
children's bodies. If we couldn't get a jar open, sure, we'd go to her: Her powerful hands practically ripped the lid from the glass. But if we needed a bobo tended, a splinter removed, a knot untied, we tried Daddy first.
Likewise, if we wanted a rest, we'd hunt for Daddy. He was always ready to nap. Just put him on a couch in front of a TV, and he was out. We'd fight over who got to spoon in front of him, his arm lightly draped over us, his snore ruffling our hair in the back. I'd give a lot to feel that safe again.
In the last decade, I've become bigger than he is. When I have bags to carry in from the car, I give him the bulky but light stuff, so it looks like he's loaded down, and I try not to exhale audibly as I haul up the big satchel of books and the main suitcase. It's a sham he's never questioned. His arms are pocked with purple scars from the nevi they keep freezing off him, and his hair is so much like Granddad's before he died, a white shock standing almost straight up, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart from behind. He's got those old man ears, huge, flat, convoluted appendages, and maybe it's just the increased surface area producing more wax.
He said he felt Mama's ghost one time, about a week after she died. He was standing on the back porch in the late afternoon, where they used to sit and smoke at sunset, and he was wondering how he was going to make it. Suddenly he could smell her, and feel something close to the skin on his arms like the sensation of a body standing right there. He came back in the house crying. That was the day he told me he believed us kids would rather it have been him that died than her. I still am sick with shame that I didn't answer. I couldn't bring myself to lie to him.
Now, after ten years of him being all I've got, we've worked out a closeness we would never have achieved if Mama were around. She was the family center, the sluice through which all our currents were directed. It's been a shock to learn a conduit can also be a separator. I can't clean his ears for him; some things can only go from parent to child and not back the other way. But I'd like to be able to tell him, "I'm glad, now, it's you here. I'm glad you're alive."
