In the Shadow of Alabama Read online

  * * *

  The cabdriver recognizes my New York accent right away, because he is from the Bronx. His name is Jerry and he has a gray ponytail, and steel-framed glasses, and he tells me he plays in a rock band called the Dry Gulches. He plans to do it full-time as soon as he saves enough money from driving the cab. I just listen as he tells me about the songs he has written: “Our Love Has Dry Heat” and “The Desert Rocks.”

  “You get the play on words?” he asks, looking at me from his rearview mirror. I nod. “You like music?” he asks.

  “Love music,” I answer. “Used to play the piano.” Then I stop myself. There is no use talking about the piano.

  Finally he asks me what I’m doing in Phoenix.

  “My father is dying,” I tell him and he grows silent.

  “My father died last year,” he finally says. “He was in the Bronx, but I didn’t go back to see him. We never got along. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  * * *

  I search my handbag at the front gates of my mother’s condo, under a cold, pale lemon puddle of light, and find the key to let myself into the complex, then lumber along the gravel path that winds past the pool, the clubhouse, the laundry rooms. I pass under jacaranda trees, their fragrant clusters strewing delicate lavender lace across the walkway as if I were a bride. Actually, the crunchway, since the plastic wheels of my suitcases are rapidly being consumed by the tiny red pieces of gravel from the little path. First casualty of my trip.

  * * *

  You would think that Sandra could have left the front door open, or at least turned the light on, and be waiting there for me with a warm, sisterly greeting, but the light is off and the door is locked. Typical of Sandra to bolt things down, worried, most likely, that a serial killer was coincidentally arriving at precisely the same time I was expected.

  I ring the bell—I am never going to find the right key in the dark—and wait. I knock and wait some more. I hear a faint stir inside. I knock again and call out Sandra’s name.

  The peephole opens with a grating slowness.

  “Mom?” I call through the door. “Sandra?”

  Sandra cannot bring herself to open the door just yet, without making thoroughly sure that the serial killer isn’t imitating my voice.

  “Who is it?” she asks.

  “Ted Bundy.”

  “Who?”

  “For God’s sake,” I yell. “Open the damn door. It’s me.”

  The door cracks open, then she fumbles with the screen door, which is also bolted shut. The light is still off. It stays off while she fiddles with the lock. She finally swings the door open, and a puff of stale, superheated air from the dim interior pushes out to greet me.

  * * *

  Sandra’s hair is a silver-white pageboy, and she has gotten fat. Very, very fat. I am sad for her, but happy for me, because I had grown up under her constant scrutiny. I never wore enough makeup to suit her. I never wore the right clothes. My haircut gave my head a funny shape. She so wanted me to be the perfect sister, the perfect daughter, so that I, too, could be loved. I give her an appreciative hug. It’s like hugging the Michelin Man.

  “Well, don’t you look tremendous!” I say, laughing to myself at the old joke, then I feel guilty. It wasn’t very nice of me, and I feel bad about it. Luckily, Sandra doesn’t get it.

  “I take care of myself,” she replies loftily, scanning my jeans and T-shirt. “I would never allow myself to look like a farmer.” Heavy meaning, there. I zip open my suitcase and she spies the bagels and grabs them, sniffs at the knishes and corned beef, and admires the cake before whisking it all away into my mother’s refrigerator, then disappears without another word.

  “Hi, Mom.” I poke my head into the kitchen, where my mother is sitting at the small, old gray Formica table with its red and yellow boomerang pattern. She is sipping a glass of milk, her mouth set in a line.

  “It’s after nine o’clock,” she accuses by way of greeting. “I wanted to get to bed early, but I had to stay up for you.” Her white hair is pinned up in big, navy blue bobby pins, and there is a slightly wounded tone in her voice. “You always get in late,” she adds, as though I was a misbehaving adolescent, taking my sweet time coming home from a date in New York. Out of habit, I almost apologize, then think, it had been a twelve-hour trip, including the three-hour layover in Chicago, due to a bad thunderstorm—as if the city’s legendary wind wasn’t daunting enough—and an additional hour and a half of praying for a cab at Sky Harbor. I decide against an apology and bend down to give her a kiss on her thin, wrinkled, shar-pei cheek.

  “I brought you the Avon you wanted,” I say, putting a plastic grocery bag filled with little bottles of Skin So Soft on the table as a peace offering. They didn’t fit in my big suitcase, and I had to bring twelve bottles, three ounces each. Even though they were the right size, the quantity had barely gotten through security. I had to convince the guards that terrorists are not interested in dewy skin.

  “I asked you for this two months ago,” she replies, not even glancing at the bag. “I already bought something else.”

  I change the subject. “How’s Dad doing?”

  “He could die tonight,” she replies. “At least Sandra got here in time.”

  “So very true,” I agree, but I am thinking that if my father hasn’t passed yet, then I got here in time, as well, but I refrain from pointing this out.

  Sandra returns to the kitchen, now dressed in turquoise flannel pajamas. She starts rolling her hair into big pink foam curlers. “I hope you don’t mind if I take the couch,” she announces, “because I have a sensitive back. You can have the gold recliner.”

  “It hasn’t reclined since 1975,” I start protesting. “How am I supposed to sleep sitting straight up? Why can’t one of us sleep with Mom?” I mean Sandra, of course.

  “Never mind,” my mother announces, rising slowly from her chair. Her frail body has long yielded to the pull of gravity, leaving her spine hunched, like a broken bird. “I’m sleeping alone. I can’t fall asleep when anyone is in bed with me.” She grabs the bag of Avon and clutches it to her chest.

  “What about when Dad was home?” I ask.

  “I never slept,” she replies.

  “You were married fifty-five years and you never slept?” I ask, incredulous, watching her shuffle toward the bedroom.

  “Not one wink,” she says and vanishes into the dark.

  * * *

  I call home; there is no answer. I call David’s office; there is no answer. Then his cell, which is apparently turned off, and I leave a brief message. It is early evening in New York, and I wonder if he’s eating dinner. Alone.

  Sandra is curled up on the couch with the only extra blanket and watches me set up the gold chair for sleeping. “I’m sorry. I have to take care of my back,” she says. “Luckily you’re athletic with the horses and all. You can tolerate sitting up and sleeping.” She yawns. “And there’s always a hotel.”

  I must admit, the first thing I did, even before booking my flight, was check hotels, but apparently the entire city of Phoenix was booked or grossly overpriced. “Yeah.” I snort. “At six hundred dollars per night to start.” I open my suitcase and pull out a shortie nightshirt.

  “NASCAR,” calls my mother from the bedroom. “They always have NASCAR in February.” We were at the beginning of May.

  “You’re going to sleep in that?” Sandra gestures to my shirt. “It’s so short. What happens if people see you?”

  “That’s why they have crowd control,” I say. “To keep the paparazzi out of the living room.” I point to her flannel pajamas. “Why would you need a blanket if you’re sleeping in those?” The air feels even hotter than when I arrived. “Maybe we could put on the air-conditioning?”

  “Mom doesn’t like air-conditioning,” Sandra replies. “That’s why they left New York, remember? To get away from the cold? And I’m quite comfortable, thank you, because my body has adapted to heat.�
� She stretches out and yawns.

  Her body has apparently adapted to a variety of things, I think, like her intake of several thousand extra calories a day. But is it really possible to adapt to temperatures this high? It’s early May, and tomorrow’s forecast is for 112 degrees in the shade of what my mother likes to call “dry heat,” which means 200 degrees in my mother’s apartment as the dry heat keeps accumulating. We are going to turn into sun-dried tomatoes.

  “Dry heat” is my mother’s favorite expression. It might even be the Arizona state motto, although we all know that “dry heat” is a euphemism for having to open your car doors with oven mitts and then sitting on two bath towels placed over the car upholstery so that your nylon panties don’t bond to your ass.

  I stuff some of my clothes into a pillowcase, make a futile attempt to fluff it up, then try to settle my body into an old imprint of my mother’s spine in the gold recliner that doesn’t recline and which should be renamed the Golden Upright. Sandra is stretched out on the couch, her head on the only extra pillow. There are a few cartons stacked right next to Sandra’s suitcase. I can’t help but notice that some of my father’s things are already packed. His shoes are in plastic bags, tucked neatly over slacks, a few old sweaters are rolled into corners. It seems Sandra has already decided what she will take of his, has already taken possession of his memories.

  “What are you going to do with all of Dad’s things?” I ask her, curious.

  “e-Bay,” she says. “I think they’re vintage. Is there something of his you want?”

  There is nothing of his that I want. We drowse in the quiet heat.

  “Doesn’t Mom look old?” I whisper across the darkness to my sister. “Is she okay? She’s getting—she seems—a little—crankier than usual?”

  “Yeah, well, almost ninety-one,” Sandra whispers back. “Besides, she’s never been, you know, June Cleaver.”

  We laugh over this. It’s true my mother was born without the regular allotment of maternal nurturing, but I was sensing something else. “She just seems a little”—I wasn’t really sure—“maybe—not as ‘with it.’ She got the month mixed up.”

  “She thought I was her old hairdresser when I first arrived,” Sandra says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, feeling guilty that Sandra always visits our parents, faithfully, twice a year, two weeks each time. She really is a good daughter. The good daughter.

  She plumps up her pillow and settles under the blanket. “Get some sleep, because Mom has the alarm set for four in the morning.”

  My mother has always gotten up at four in the morning to prepare for the day’s outings. Even if it was just to the supermarket.

  “I like to get there when the food is fresh,” she would always say.

  “But hospital visiting hours aren’t until eight,” I point out to Sandra.

  “Please humor her.” Sandra reaches over to the lamp next to the couch. “She’s worried we won’t get a chance to see him alive,” she says. “She wants us to wake up early so we can be on standby.”

  “Why do we have to be on standby in the kitchen? Why can’t we be on standby right here, sleeping next to the kitchen?” I protest, then stop. “How is he really doing?”

  “His color was good when we left,” Sandra replies, her voice suddenly sounding very tired. “Oh, Rachel, I know how you feel about him, but it’s time to forgive and forget. Why don’t you go along with things? Just this time. Mom is worried that he’ll die alone.”

  There is a snap of the switch, and the room goes dark.

  “No, no one should die alone,” I murmur. “But it’s just that Mom doesn’t seem very glad to see me. And he never—oh—I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  But Sandra’s snores already fill the room.

  Chapter 4

  All veterans hospitals smell the same: of Pine-Sol and sour old men who shuffle the halls in gray bedroom slippers and pale blue–striped robes. This is not my first veterans hospital visit. I am a veteran of veterans hospitals. Before my parents retired to Phoenix, they lived near me in New York, and my father was frequently admitted for tune-ups and tests and minor health skirmishes. I always visited him out of a sense of duty.

  “I don’t want anyone here.” He would wave me off as soon as I walked into his room. “Imagine! They threatened me—if I don’t let them do all their tests, they’ll discontinue my benefits! Why do I have to prove anything, when anybody can see that I’m a very sick man? I’m signing myself out as soon as I can.”

  There was an inherent lack of logic in that reasoning, but I never pointed it out to him. I only know that he had considered himself on the brink of death since 1945, long before I was born, although, as far as I could see, there was nothing wrong with him except terminal anger. He was always bitterly complaining about “them”: that vast, nebulous conspiracy of government, doctors, motor vehicle clerks, nurses, slow traffic lights, packaged foods, the pharmaceutical industry, and the idiots who couldn’t make shoelaces or light bulbs that lasted. I spent a lifetime listening to him grumble, and my hospital visits were spent listening to him contradict his nurses, refuse medicine, and argue over the necessity of every procedure, while loudly questioning both the medical and mental competency of all of his doctors and nurses. I would stare out his window, at the men and half-men who sat in the sun in the garden below, graciously accepting their loss of limbs and minds, and wonder why I had bothered to come.

  * * *

  I am wondering again now why I had come, as my mother leads the way down a blue-gray hallway, really too frail to walk that far with her Quasimodo spine and spindly legs. Sandra, my mother’s firstborn, is right next to her, her hair in big, bouffant silver waves, and dressed in a shapeless navy blue Walmart pantsuit, high fashion, apparently, in her neighborhood in Atlanta. She is holding my mother’s arm with a certain self-importance. “I’ll walk with Mom,” she had said, sliding her own arm between my mother and me, obviously outranking me as First Daughter-in-Command. I study the back of her head, the cement-perfect silver hair, and think, she needs this. She thinks this is how happy families proceed, the older child with the parent, the kid sister following. So I bring up the rear, wishing the visit was already over and we were heading the other way.

  An elderly, skeletal, gray-skinned man dressed in a maroon-striped robe passes us from behind. Every few steps, he leaps the length of a floor tile.

  “That’s the Jumping Man,” my mother whispers. “First he walks, then he jumps. Does it all the time.”

  He leaps next to us and we watch him. One, two, three, leap. I’m annoyed to find myself counting the tiles along with him: one, two, three, leap.

  Another old man, blue-striped robe and black-stained corduroy slippers, comes toward us. He stops and salutes smartly. Feeling gracious, we smile and salute back. He stops and stands there, grinning broadly, and pees in his pants, leaving a pungent yellow puddle that spreads across the floor as we pass. The Jumping Man doesn’t even break stride as he jumps the puddle and turns the corner, walking and jumping over invisible land mines from years past. The Saluting Man stands at attention, grinning and saluting and peeing on himself.

  * * *

  My father’s room is at the end of the corridor. He is lying in bed, consumed by his bedclothes. He is thin with regulation pallor, tousled white hair. He is wearing his hearing aid, but his thick glasses are on the gray metal stand next to his bed. He is busily trying to pull out his IV, despite the commands of the nurse next to him that he leave it alone. He doesn’t look like he is at death’s door. He doesn’t even look like he is in death’s neighborhood. I feel a flash of annoyance. All this way from New York, mares foaling left and right, stuck on a chapter in my new book, all to watch him argue with his nurse. Again.

  “I don’t want it,” he croaks, trying to pull away the nurse’s hand, but there is no strength behind his protests.

  “Mr. Fleischer,” she leans over and says loudly into his hearing aid, “you got to lea
ve it in. That, or I have to tie your hands.”

  He delivers what used to be his coup de grâce. “Then I’ll sign myself out.” He coughs hard. “I’ll be gone by this afternoon.”

  “I’m overjoyed,” says the nurse, giving us a wink, though I suspect she means it. “They can’t let you out soon enough, far as I’m concerned, but the IV stays in.” She sails out the door.

  My mother goes over and gives my father a kiss on his cheek, which he wipes off. Even now, he garners enough strength for that.

  “Hi, Dad,” Sandra and I say in unison.

  “Have candy.” He points to a small basket of hard candy that sits next to his glasses, then his hand drops to his side, weakened by this exertion. Sandra picks up the box to inspect it, then obediently takes a handful of pale pink hard candy wrapped in cellophane, to supplement the chocolate caramels she has been chewing on since she got up this morning. “Hand me one,” my father orders.

  “Nothing by mouth for you,” my mother warns him. “You’ll choke again.”

  “How are you feeling, Dad?” I ask. I’m not sure he hears me. Most likely he has his hearing aid turned off, as he usually does.

  “Have candy,” my father replies.

  “They’re from the Jewish War Veterans,” my mother explains to us, pointing to the candy. “Only ones to send him anything.”

  “They’re from the Jewish War Veterans,” my father repeats. “Only ones to send me anything.” I stand by the foot of his bed, wondering if the remark about the candy is meant as a rebuke to me. I hadn’t sent anything except myself. I walk to his side and give him a kiss. He wipes it off.

  “Ruth, sign me out,” he says to my mother, and turns his face away from us. The visit is over.

  * * *

  The nurse is waiting for us in the hallway. “You have to convince him,” she says to my mother. “He has a pulse of forty-six and it’s dropping. He can’t live long with those numbers. Everybody gets pacemakers. Tell him that it’s not a big deal.”