In the Shadow of Alabama Read online

  “He doesn’t want one, and I won’t let anyone force one on him against his will,” says my mother, as if she’s defending him from evil.

  “Mom!” I say, shocked at her words. “No one’s forcing him. They just want to help him.”

  “He’s in serious heart failure, and he’s going into kidney failure,” the nurse warns. “Let me page the doctor. He really wants to speak to you.”

  “He could die, Mom, if you don’t make him get the operation,” Sandra says, sucking hard on a candy.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” my mother says, scowling at all of us. “Why should some doctor make a profit on your father’s health?”

  “You think his doctor is just waiting to buy tickets to Tahiti the minute he finishes operating?” I say, not all that surprised that she has adopted my father’s stubborn-over-the-wrong-things approach to life, his paranoia. What do psychologists call this? Folie à deux? But refusing medical treatment strikes me as the wrong thing to bond over.

  “They admitted him because he kept fainting,” the nurse reminds her. “And I know for a fact that his cardiologist called him at home every day last week to warn him how sick he was. His heart is barely able to beat.”

  “You want me to talk to him?” I ask my mother.

  “Stay out of this,” she replies. “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “I thought you did.” I turn to Sandra for confirmation, but she is staring off somewhere over the nurse’s head, her blue eyes vacant and distant.

  “He doesn’t want a pacemaker,” my mother says loftily. “He feels it’s experimental. He doesn’t want anyone experimenting on him.”

  Sandra has returned to earth, and I send her an eye signal that tells her I can’t believe what I’m hearing. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head in agreement. I am pleased that for this moment, we have connected over something, and I feel the flash of a union with her. Maybe together we can fix this.

  “You have to convince him,” Sandra says to my mother. “And Rachel is here to help you make the right decisions.”

  I try to do my part. “Once they fix him up, Dad can be up and around in a few days,” I say. “And be back to his old self.” Then I wonder if that was really any help, since his old self wasn’t all that fun to live with.

  “The procedure hasn’t been experimental since the fifties,” the nurse adds. “Everybody gets pacemakers now.”

  My mother shrugs. “He doesn’t want one.” She turns away, leaving the nurse standing there with an incredulous expression on her face. I am embarrassed to be related to such ignorance. Sandra and I follow my mother down the hall, neither of us able to think of anything else to say. We pass another man whose eerie blue-gray complexion matches the walls.

  “That’s the Blue Man,” my mother says matter-of-factly. “Your father says the doctors did that to him.”

  * * *

  The scorching morning sun is crisping my cheeks as we walk to the car. We pass a sprinkling of men in the uniform of old age: white hair, bent bodies, vacant eyes, walking with canes or wheeling their chairs up and down the walkways. Some of them are having meaningful conversations with the jacaranda trees, some of them are napping in the full blaze of sun, in danger of getting more desiccated than they already are. Then there is a contingent of shockingly young men, sleeves or pants pinned up in lieu of a missing limb—bandaged, wounded, metallic structures replacing appendages—with faces that haven’t finished maturing but look very old. They talk to each other in loud, joshing voices about their time in the service, but there is underlying pain in their eyes that they do not speak of.

  “I don’t understand,” I say to my mother. “You can make him have the operation, can’t you? Don’t you have power of attorney or something?”

  “He’s doing all right without it,” she says.

  “He’s not doing all right. He’ll die without it,” I reply, startled by the anger in my voice, and I look to Sandra for reinforcement but she is rooting around in her purse for more caramels. She has been taking them, two at a time, like tranquilizers. My mother doesn’t answer. We reach the rental car.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” Sandra suggests, having run out of candy. Normally highly opinionated, she is looking sad and surprisingly quiet. Except when I offer to drive. She quickly finds her voice to announce she couldn’t possibly let me behind the wheel, because I only have a New York license, then drops into the driver’s seat before I can defend myself. Apparently New York drivers aren’t as savvy as drivers from Georgia and could never handle the downtown Phoenix traffic.

  Okay, I do have two speeding tickets.

  * * *

  Sandra’s cell phone goes off during her dessert of chocolate-ripple ice cream covered with a mound of whipped cream, nuts, and chocolate-caramel sauce, the only thing she hasn’t complained about during lunch. “Yes,” she says, “this is his daughter. I’ll tell my mother.”

  My mother gets on the phone and listens. We watch her expression for some clue to the conversation, but she listens passively. A few minutes pass. “No,” she says into the phone. “No.” She listens some more. “Oh,” she says, “then go ahead,” reluctantly giving permission for them to finally try a pacemaker. I know it is a last-ditch, and most likely futile, effort.

  We have to return to the hospital.

  * * *

  Dying is not a direct action. Like a plane in turbulence, people dip and dive, maybe hit a smooth spot and recover a little, before the flight ends.

  My father has worsened considerably. He has oxygen tubes, more IVs. His eyes are closed. The nurse fiddles with the line going into his arm, then purses her lips in what I feel is disapproval of us, then steps aside. I am not part of their craziness, I want to shout, but I just solemnly move next to my father’s bed.

  My mother takes his hand. There are pinched-looking white scars discoloring the back of his hand that have been there as long as I can remember. They run up his arm, over his shoulder, crisscross down his back, lie in patches that wrap around his legs. He never mentioned where he got them. Now they barely contrast with his pale, pale skin. I stand there, wondering if I really am witnessing his death, and I am afraid. Despite all his claims to terrible illnesses and all his obstinate arguments against getting treated for them, he had reached ninety with nothing more than an age-weakened heart that could have readily been repaired. I stand next to his bed, resenting that he has chosen to die from sheer perverse stubbornness. There is nothing left of him but anger and spite.

  Sandra goes to his bedside and kisses his face. “I love you,” she whispers, but his hearing aid is on the bed stand next to him; he is beyond hearing. My mother pulls a chair up next to the bed, sits in it, and puts her head down against his face. Reluctantly, I move closer and take his other hand, which is already cold and literally deadweight. The machines show an array of bright green lines, measuring what is left of his life. The heart line is barely moving. If there was a clock line, it would show no time left. No time at all.

  I study his face, still set in angry, obstinate lines. Or maybe I am just reading the past. But he is dying, and this is not the time to think like that. I should say something to him. Somehow, I feel I should exonerate him for being so mulishly enraged at things no one could understand or fix. There is so much wrong between us, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. This is my last chance. My very last chance. There are longer and longer pauses between the beeps. What point could I possibly make to him while he lies on his deathbed? It’s all over. Death will make the final point.

  I bend to him to kiss his face and wonder what I can say, what will mean anything to him. I try to summon something, a feeling. There is nothing inside of me. I do it for my mother, this gesture of affection, and because it’s the right thing to do. I do it because no one should take leave of their life feeling unaccompanied and unloved. I do it for Sandra, because she says I should forgive and forget. She apparently has, though I can’t and never will. I lean close to his
face to kiss it, but stop just above his graying cheek. I take a deep breath, then whisper a lie, for my mother, for Sandra.

  Maybe a little bit for him.

  “I love you, Dad,” I whisper.

  And maybe a little bit for me.

  Chapter 5

  There is a black woman at my father’s graveside. She is standing off to the side, her face even and solemn, not showing grief, just attentive. She is well-dressed in a tailored beige jacket and skirt and beige pumps, carrying a brown and black leather Prada bag, in contrast to my mother, who is wearing an orange-and tan-flowered blouse, a turquoise sweater, olive-green slacks, and pink canvas shoes, looking for all the world like an envoy from Rainbow Brite.

  * * *

  “Don’t you have something darker?” I had asked my mother while we were dressing for the funeral, although I know wearing dark colors in the early Arizona summer is an invitation to instant heatstroke. I really meant, “Don’t you have something dignified and funereal, something that actually matches?”

  “Leave Mom alone,” Sandra intervened. “She looks fine. We don’t have to dress like we’re walking down Fifth Avenue. It’s a private funeral.” I noticed that Sandra was wearing a black cotton pantsuit that could almost pass for sweats, her face set off by flamboyant Tammy Faye eyes and watermelon-pink lips, and I wondered where, at what point in our lives, did our fashion sense diverge so drastically. I never wore much makeup and had brought my old standby, a navy Armani suit, a veteran of many client dinners in New York City with David. I thought it would be both somber and appropriate, but Sandra cast an appraising eye over my outfit, scanned my hair and face, wrinkled her nose, and turned to the hallway mirror to run a comb through her gray-white hair.

  “You should do something about your hair,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was talking to herself in the mirror. But she was directing her comments to me. “You’re getting gray at the temples. No wonder David won’t marry you. You don’t look like a lawyer’s wife.” I knew exactly what she was referring to. My hand flew to the gray streaks at my temples that I had been debating about coloring. I wish I could make myself pay more attention to these kinds of details, but they always seem to slip past me. I let the remark about David slip by me, too. This is Sandra, she needs to do this. She needs me to be perfect. She released a tornado of hair spray in the direction of her head. “Luckily, I don’t have to dye my hair anymore.”

  “You don’t?” I tightened my jaw in an effort to keep it from dropping.

  “Look at how perfect the color is. Champagne blond! I stopped dyeing it years ago when I realized that it was keeping the color.”

  I stared at her hair in amazement. Keeping what color? Her hair was nearly white. How could she see champagne blond where I saw white?

  “Yep,” she said, giving her hair a final misting. “I’m very lucky.” Then she pointed to my face. “Now, what about makeup? I can help you put some on.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” I waved her off. “A little lipstick is enough for me. But don’t you think Mom should wear something less colorful? She looks like she’s ready for a playdate at the Crayola factory.”

  “It’s the grief,” said Sandra. She stepped back to give me a last once-over. “I don’t know why you insist on no makeup; you look like a farmhand.”

  I guessed she thought Armani was now designing farm wear, but today was not the day to bicker. I gave her a patient smile. “Well, I do own a horse farm.”

  “There’s nothing wrong in owning one.” She snapped her large makeup bag closed and replenished her caramels from a newly purchased three-pound bag that was now residing in the kitchen. “You just don’t have to look like you work on one.”

  * * *

  We are waiting at the veterans cemetery in Phoenix. It is on Cave Creek Road. There is only me, Sandra, our mother, my uncle Bob, and this black woman. The sun is burning down on acres of flat, hard-packed pink gravel, reflecting off the small bronze grave markers like lasers. We are waiting for the rabbi, who just arrived, to start. We are wondering whether anyone else is going to pay their respects. David couldn’t get away from his law practice, some kind of big merger going on, though I knew that was just a convenient excuse. He was not fond of my father, who is, after all, not even his father-in-law. My father frequently liked to point this fact out to him over the years. They weren’t the least bit related, and it was a good thing, my father would add, because he hated lawyers. His anti-lawyer rants were second-favorite only to anti-doctor rants.

  Harrison, Sandra’s husband, also soured by frequent shouting matches with my father, elected to stay home, as well. He is a businessman who had wisely kept his actual business very vague, so my father was quite thrown off, and hated him only for the sheer pleasure of it.

  We are waiting for someone else to come, anyone, to stand with us under the blazing scorch, and share a little in our loss. Not my father’s family. His only living sister is in her nineties and speaks exclusively to the goldfish in her bedroom at her nursing home. No one from my mother’s family, either, except her brother, my beloved uncle Bob, since my father had alienated everyone else.

  “I don’t think anyone’s coming,” I whisper to Sandra. “We should just get on with the service.”

  She turns one shoulder forward, away from me, indicating that she disagrees, that she wants to wait a little more, because who knows how many busloads of close friends and admirers will arrive any minute now. Our mother is staring sleepily ahead—the rabbi, sweltering in a black business suit, is looking pitifully at us for consent to continue. One hundred and thirteen degrees of dry heat should be reason enough to proceed, I think. My father had been an active member of several veterans organizations, and it appears none of them thought to send a representative. I’m guessing because his personality was legendary. Get on with it, I say silently, before we dry up like tumbleweeds and blow out of here.

  At first I had been annoyed that my father had chosen the veterans cemetery in Arizona. He was a native New Yorker, and his entire family is buried in the ancient, small gnarled cemeteries of Brooklyn. Things could have been arranged. But he had chosen this place, this burnt-out, parched land, with its thick, spiky green saguaro cactuses that resemble giant hands giving the middle finger to the arid landscape. And then I realize—and have to suppress a giggle—that the cactus was the perfect representation of his entire life’s philosophy. Embittered, prickly, flipping the bird to the world.

  “Go ahead,” says my mother, her voice tight with disappointment that there are only a few of us here.

  The rabbi looks around and observes aloud that we don’t have a minyan, ten people, to officially be able to pray the Kaddish, the Mourner’s Prayer, but he raises his book and begins anyway.

  Yit’ gadal v’yit’kadash

  Sh’mei raba

  May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.

  We mutter “amen.”

  A white van pulls up and three people get out. A heavy blond woman in a navy-blue-skirt-white-shirt-blue-jacket sort of uniform, a bugler, and another man, in matching clothing, the patches on their shirts inscribed with Jewish War Veterans. They march to the rabbi’s side. You are late, I think. It’s too late for everything.

  “So sorry,” the blonde says regretfully to my mother. “We had to wait for the van.” My mother gives her a wan smile. The rabbi resumes the prayers. The cacti—are they cacti when they are in plural?—continue their irreverence.

  B’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei

  In the world that He created as He willed.

  We are going to die at the graveside from the sun, from the intense, penetrating, broiling heat that is grilling its way through my clothing, through my skin, maybe even bleaching my bones by now. Our brains are going to fry and addle; our faces are going to get twenty years’ worth of UV damage in half an hour and we will leave here looking like the Crypt Keeper. The rabbi is interrupted again by a small military bus that pulls up behind the van. He stop
s and waits. This is going to drag on forever and ever and we are going to melt into our shoes and evaporate à la the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t think I can survive the relentless heat another second.

  Seven soldiers march off the bus, rifles at their side. They stand at stiff attention, holding the American flag. Waiting. I smile to myself. Between them and the Jewish war vets, we now have a motley minyan, of sorts.

  My mother glances at the soldiers. “Oh, Marty,” she whispers my father’s name. I think she is remembering him young and in uniform. Suddenly I get tears in my eyes. Suddenly I see my father as one of them, a young soldier, sharp and ready. I focus on his flag-draped coffin, and stare down at the stars. Whatever happened to that young man?

  He is dead. My father is dead. I turn the phrase over several times in my mind to absorb its significance.

  I try to concentrate on the dull intonation of the rabbi, who didn’t know my father, who doesn’t know us, and who is sweating profusely while saying something patriotic and correctly comforting without any expression whatsoever. He races through the Hebrew prayers and the black woman is punctuating it with a soft “Mmm-mmm, amen, brother.” I don’t recognize this woman at all. Maybe someone from the VA hospital? Maybe one of the nurses? I chide myself for first thinking this woman is a nurse. Maybe my father’s doctor? The one who had called him every day to plead for his life? I keep thinking that she stands out like the white horse in a herd, except it’s opposite, the only black person at my father’s funeral. Even the seven uniformed soldiers are white. My mother and me and Sandra, Uncle Bob, the rabbi, and the honor guard are all white, white, white.

  The guns go off, sharp reports explode against our ears, and my heart jumps against my chest. Three volleys, their shots echo over the flat red-pink gravel, echoing across the open plains, across the flat metal grave markers, over the heads of the fuck-you saguaro cactus, echoing to the mountains, before dying away. In one smooth motion, the soldiers unhook the American flag from the simple pine coffin, flip it into sharp triangles, slip it into a plastic envelope, and present it to my mother with a stiff salute. One of them raises a trumpet to his lips. No, I think. Please don’t do that.