62
PARTISAN REVIEW
He throws his hands up and makes pouting gestures and acts as if his
integrity bas been besmirched. Of course, she doesn't care. She is a coarse,
uncaring woman, made up to be the height of decorum and fashion.
I hear them now as I try to sort out where I got tbis hideous emo–
tional tick and who landed me with tbat embarrassment. Now that tbey
are both dead, what I am is what's left of them, them arguing, whining,
farring. You open your eyes in the morning and your father is in the
shower farring to wake the neighborhood and you go next and there is
his smell and you think "son-of-a-smelly-bitch" only to discover half a
century later in your own bathroom, in your own shower, in your own
mornings, that very same smell, and it's not him-it's you . That's what
you get. You get everything from them you always hated, everything
you always tried to get away from, even the smells, even the damn
smells.
When my mother was dying of bone cancer and I had survived to live
more years than Christ, we had to go one day with my father to some
clinic where he was having tests. When she was dying he did everything
for her, he gave her shots, he tended, he carried and drove. Then one day
she is lying in bed and she hears in the bathroom-thud! Thud! It 's him,
he's fainted. He is lying blue on the co ld tiles. She's too weak now to get
out of bed. She calls him: "Max!" Thank God it lasts on ly a few sec–
onds; he comes back.
When I arrive she says to me, "What wi ll happen to me?
If
he is not
all right, what will happen to me?"
For some reason we a ll go to this clinic. I go along to push her in the
wheelchair while he has his tests. She won't stay in the car; we have to
go with him to the doctor's office. It's on the third floor. This is one of
these new buildings, only doctors, upstairs are the offices and scattered
throughout, the x-ray people, the blood people, and so on.
We follow him to the third floor, but then he has to go across the hall
for test number eight and downstairs for test number one hundred and
all of a sudden we've lost him. My mother is in the wheelchair, I'm push–
ing, and my father is gone.
"Go in," she says to me, with a desperation
r
have never seen in her.
"Where is he? Where is he? Go in and find him."
The hall is cinder block and institutional lighting. She is a little dis–
integrating woman in a wheelchair. I think,
1
can't leave her alone in this
hallway!
But I do and go in search of him.
When I return to my mother she is whimpering, "What will happen
to me? What will happen to me?"
