31
I stopped in to see my father a few days later. The house was cleaner, but his cheeks had stubble, and most of the food I had brought on the previous visit sat untouched in the refrigerator, looking distinctly worse for wear. “Papa, what have you been eating?”
He looked away guiltily, and for the first time, I saw the resemblance between him and Robbie.
“Papa?” When he didn’t reply, I opened the freezer, which was full of Swanson TV dinners. I sighed. “What did you do before Mama?”
He looked down at the newspaper in front of him. “I ate at diners a lot,” he mumbled.
“At least that’s real food. Are you doing that at all?”
He shook his head. “It’s too embarrassing.”
“Eating at a diner?”
Finally he raised his eyes to mine. “You don’t understand,” he said sadly.
I came and sat across from him at the kitchen table, reaching over to put a hand on top of his. “What’s embarrassing, Papa?”
“I thought—I thought if I went to the club that she would at least talk to me, not make a scene.”
I started to say that if he thought that, he didn’t know my mother. But he looked so miserable and suddenly so old. And as I studied this man, who had been my childhood knight in shining armor, slaying the dragons of Congress to make a better world for me and my children, I realized he and I knew two very different sides of the same woman. I knew the one who raised her voice and dragged me out of the Woodies makeup department to avoid tarnishing her image. He knew the woman who did everything she could to make his life comfortable. Who would never make a scene that could cause people to talk about him.
She was the same wife I had been. Until we’d both had enough.
“Oh, Papa.” I sighed. “Okay, step one is you have to learn how to take care of yourself. It’s good that Rosa is cleaning the house, but Mama doesn’t want to come running back to take care of you.”
“But she always took care of me.”
“She didn’t,” I said gently. “You got on just fine before you met her.”
“I was a young man then.”
“Then just give up completely,” I said, throwing my hands up. “It doesn’t sound like you want a wife. It sounds like you want a mother.”
I instantly regretted my harsh words. This was a man who had stood up to Joseph McCarthy when everyone else was too terrified to stop him. A man who dined with presidents, and even with Queen Elizabeth, at the White House. Larger than life in every way imaginable.
And yet he crumpled beneath the weight of my judgment.
I didn’t know if he was actually crying. I hoped not. My heart couldn’t take it. But his face was in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you have to realize, her sole purpose in life isn’t to make you more comfortable. And I think you started taking her for granted.”
He looked up at me, his eyes shining but his face mercifully free of tears. “I never did.”
“Do you know that she wants to travel?”
“We travel every summer.”
I shook my head. “A week in the Catskills with her sister isn’t what she meant.”
“We went to Chicago.”
Keeping my cool was becoming a struggle. “That was ten years ago, Papa. And entirely because it was where the National Convention was.”
“So if I book a trip to Florida, she’ll come home?”
For the first time, I really saw what she meant when she said she was invisible. “No. Booking a trip to Florida will push her further away.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
I counted to ten in my head. And I thought dealing with two children under six was frustrating. “She wants to feel like she matters. Like you hear her. Like you care what she wants.”
“I give her everything she wants. The house, the car, the handbags—what more could she want?”
I held up a hand to stop him. “She wants you to ask her what she wants and then really listen and work to make it happen. I don’t think she gives a fig about the handbags or the car. She wants you to ask her what she’d like to do instead of you just going to the park to play checkers.”
He was silent for a little while. “And you think that will make her come home?”
Another deep breath. “No. We’re past that now. I think you need to show her you can be self-sufficient. That she’d be coming back because you miss her , not the things she did for you. What do you miss beyond her running the house?”
He thought for enough time that I was worried that was all there was in their relationship. And if so, she would be living with me until one of us died—and it was a toss-up whether that would be me from exasperation or her from me losing my mind and pulling a Lizzie Borden.
“Her laugh,” he said. “It’s the most infectious laugh in the world.” A shorter pause. “The way she can make absolutely anyone feel comfortable, from the president to the most unfortunate constituent. The way a whole room would light up when she came in. She knows the right thing to do in every single situation. Nothing fazes her. Ever. She just does what needs to be done. The way her pillow smelled. I used to wake up before my alarm and roll over onto her pillow and doze back off.”
A memory hit me, so strong I could feel it, of coming into their room in the middle of the night after a bad dream. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. But I crawled into the bed, on my mother’s side, and she wrapped an arm around me, still mostly asleep, and kissed my hair. I knew that smell. It was the smell of comfort. Of safety. Of unconditional love.
Awake, she smelled of Chanel No. 5. But snuggling into her in bed was the scent of the innocence of childhood.
“That’s—that’s a good start,” I said, uncharacteristically choked up. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. If I missed something so bizarre, she was living in my guest room—though I didn’t think she would welcome a middle-of-the-night visit to cuddle some twenty-two years later.
But now wasn’t the time for sappy emotions. It was a time for action.
“Step one, you’re going to shave. And get a haircut. And wear matching clothes. I’m going to make you some food you can reheat, but then ... Let me think, not this week, but next, I’m going to come over after work one day and teach you how to cook something.”
“Cook?”
“Something simple, Papa. We’re not going straight to soufflés. But she needs to see that you aren’t a giant child and that you can take care of yourself.”
He puffed up at the insult, a wounded expression across his face. “Beverly Ann Gel—”
“Do you want my help or not?”
He sank back into his seat. “Go on.”
“Then ... well ... you’re going to need to make some kind of big gesture.”
“Like flowers?”
“Flowers? That’s your idea of a grand gesture?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know what yet. But I’ll work on it.” I glanced down at my bare wrist and reached for his arm, only to find it watchless as well. “Where’s your watch?”
“I don’t know,” he said mournfully.
As much as it pained me to think such disloyal thoughts about my own father, had I been my mother, I likely would have left too. Instead, I turned and looked at the kitchen clock. “I need to get home. Tomorrow, you shower, shave, and get your hair cut.”
He nodded and agreed, and I leaned down to kiss his prickly cheek before I left. “Do you remember what you used to say to me when I was little and would have a problem? There’s nothing—”
“—we can’t solve if we work together,” he finished.
“You do your part,” I said, “and we’ll figure this one out too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He stood to walk me out, and I noticed his feet were bare. “What happened to your socks?”
It took me a moment to recognize the look on his face as shame. “They’re all pink,” he said. “I did what you told me with the washing machine, but now all my undershirts and shorts and socks are pink.”
“Did you separate out all the whites and colors?”
“I did. Then I put them in the washing machine.”
“Together?”
“Well, I only have one washing machine.”
I honestly wasn’t sure which was the more herculean task: winning a Senate race against an established candidate or reuniting my parents. After this visit, I was leaning toward the latter.