ULTIMATES

ULTIMATES

Watching his grandson wore on him.  The boy couldn’t be talked to, and he lacked the patience.  He lacked the patience for everything connected with his daughter and her son.  She would come and leave him and go off.  Where she went and what she did he never wanted to hear.  This was partly because of the outlandish way she kept herself and partly because of her attitude.  Her pink-dyed hair spiked on her head, she knew he didn’t approve of her, so she made her life incomprehensible to fend him off. 

     It worked, of course, though he had his suspicions about the things she did.  She would drive up with the boy and, breathless and hurried, drag him out of the car by the hand and deposit him in her father’s living room along with his things.  Someone was always waiting in the car, so she would have an excuse to rush out, with never a word to her father.  He would watch from the bedroom window and shake his head.  He felt an obligation, in spite of her.  So he tried.  What else could he do? 

     He could never work out a routine once the boy was left in the house.  It was as though his daughter had wound him up and set him loose on the living room floor.  As soon as the front door closed behind her, the agony would begin. 

     First, the crying, which could endure for hours and which, when it did, would make him feel like he was going mad.  Then would follow the nervous twitching and dancing around the house.  In this state the boy would tear to pieces a magazine or newspaper if one was within reach.  The look on his face while doing it frightened his grandfather. 

     If there was nothing to tear, the boy would then bounce around the rooms, overturning, toppling, tossing, kicking, pulling, destroying whatever he could.  Once, when the boy stopped beside the drapes in the living room, his grandfather could see the image taking shape in his mind, and he reached down and caught him by the back of his trousers and lifted him away. 

     It wouldn’t have been so bad if the boy had let him get close, let him comfort him, feed him, talk to him.  But the boy felt too much resentment for that.  Although it was understandable-after all, the boy wanted to be with his mother, not his grandfather--this resentment had, nevertheless, a profound affect on the grandfather.  It kept him from loving the boy.  His feelings for him were a product of effort and were never spontaneous.  He would tell himself the boy was his only grandchild and that he needed understanding, considering his crazy mother.  He also frequently reminded himself that the boy had really only this one relation with a stabilizing figure.  He felt nothing genuine for the boy except, perhaps, irritation and, on occasion, anger.   

     On this morning, instead of letting the boy tear up the house, he had taken him outside.  It was a warm, calm Saturday morning, and he thought he might let the boy run and play until he tired, then make lunch and try to have a talk with him.  Sometimes he did manage to get the boy to talk.  He would listen and nod and smile, mystified, trying to be encouraging.  He was mystified because he couldn’t decipher the boy’s words.  Talking should be as natural as breathing for him by now.  But his speech was impeded by interfering emotions that caused him to tremble and stutter and make his words sound like his mouth was full of nuts.  He couldn’t understand anything the boy said. 

     Outside, on the lawn behind the house, the boy was his usual self, a bundle of nerves.  He kicked at the pebbles in the garden path and filled his pockets with them.  Then he ran to the birdbath and dropped the pebbles in, taking them from his pockets in little handfuls.  Then he ran to the carrot bed and tried to pull up the carrots, and when this turned out to be too hard, he ran to the bed of zinnias and tore off their blossoms.  These he threw into the cultivated soil and kicked at to make them roll.  Then he chased the birds, and, when a squirrel came along the fence, he ran back to the path for more pebbles, which he threw at the squirrel.  His grandfather watched him racing wildly and excitedly, and when he tried to take the boy’s hand to slow him down and talk to him, the boy began to cry.

     He let him go and stood in the grass fighting his own impulses.  When the boy began to kick the tree behind the garage, he decided he had to do something—for everyone’s sake: the boy’s, his daughter’s, and, most of all, his own.  As he watched him kick the tree over and over again, a thought took shape in him.  The only way to reach the boy is through his mother.  She is the one who needs to be reformed.  “Reformed?” he thought.  Lacking a mother as she did growing up, he realized that she needed more truly to be “formed.”  This was his fault, he knew.  But having failed at first, he must seize the opportunity to try again.    

     She came in the late afternoon, looking haggard.  He didn’t want to ask what she had been doing, partly because he knew she wouldn’t tell, and partly because he suspected, from the look of her, that she had been doing drugs and sleeping with somebody.  Her pink spiky hair was flattened on one side of her head, and her clothes had that look of having been slept in.  She was only eighteen, a high school dropout, working for minimum wage and spending more, much more, than she earned.  So he said nothing.

     She came into the living room and began picking up her son’s things, stuffing them into the blue canvas bag she unzippered—his blanket, which he wouldn’t nap without, his books, which were scattered all over the room, his spill-free drinking cup, his cap, the plastic bag with his wet underwear—all the while calling to him irritatedly and impatiently.  But he wasn’t coming, which was unusual, because he always couldn’t wait for her to come and helped her pick up to get out to the car faster.   

     “Davey’s not here,” her father said.  He had been standing in the hallway where it opened onto the living room, his arms crossed, silently watching her pick up.

     “Where is he?” she asked, surprised, her whole body expressing ill will and, he could see, alarm.

     “He’s all right, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, knowing that she wasn’t thinking that at all.  The alarm he could see in her face had more to do with him.

     They hadn’t exchanged words in weeks.  The circumstances of their last conversation—if it could be called that—involved a raging tirade.  He had tried to speak with her then about his suspicions regarding her use of drugs.  He regretted it, but the incident ended with their establishing a kind of truce.  Either she would continue to take Davey to him or she would take him somewhere else, depending on whether he stayed out of her life or not.  He feared where else she might take the boy, so he reluctantly agreed to keep his nose out of her life.

She manipulated him like that.  He knew it was bad for both of them for him to let her get away with it, but he wasn’t ready to face the consequences of an out-and-out rift.  Davey was not yet four years old.  There was still time for him, even if the mother was beyond hope. 

     “I mean, Where is he,” she demanded.

     “He’s safe,” he said calmly.  “We need to talk, and I didn’t want him here to witness another one of your rages.  He’s screwed up enough.”

     He expected her to fly into a rage at that.  He had braced himself, but she calmed instead, and the look of alarm settled into serenity.  She stepped over to the sofa, dropped into it, closed her eyes, and rested back into the cushions.  He looked at her.  What a strange creature, he thought.  With her pink hair and the light green long-sleeved blouse worn unbuttoned over a flamingo-colored tee-shirt, she looked like something out of a comic book.  He was, sometimes, afraid of her.  She had a power over him she knew how to use to pry from him whatever she wanted.  As he looked at her, he tried to put away that feeling.  He called her, to himself when he needed to brace himself to confront her, “my little necromanceress.”  Usually, saying that tamed her weirdness, and he could get on with what he had to say.

     As he stood across the room staring at her, she opened her eyes.  “Talk.  You’re the one who wants to talk, so talk,” she said, resignedly, and closed her eyes again. 

     She seemed calm and reasonable, which threw him off, since he had been preparing all afternoon to deal with her usual outbursts of rage.  He wondered what was the matter.  Something must be up with her.  He felt immediately a sense of caution, as though her calmness were a stratagem to make her rage, when it did burst out, all the more terrifying.  Or, perhaps, he thought, she was still under the influence of whatever drug she had been using.  That might explain it.  Or maybe something had happened today.

     “Are you all right?  You don’t seem yourself today.”

     “Is that what you want to talk about?  I thought you wanted to talk about Davey.”

     “I didn’t say,” he said defensively.  “I said we needed to talk.  I didn’t say about what.”

     He was still staring at her from across the room, trying to fill time, his sense of caution telling him to go slow.  He thought, “Why should I feel so frightened of her?  She’s my daughter, she’s still a kid.”  But the incongruity of their father-daughter relationship only magnified his sense of dread.

     “I don’t want to talk.  I want to get Davey and go.”

     She didn’t, however, make any motion to get up, and her voice was still calm and reasonable.

     “I want to talk about you,” he said, trying to seem sympathetic, to seem fatherly without being despotic.

     She put her hands to the sides of her head and bowed over and begun to sway side to side.

     “Not now, not now, not now,” she chanted monotonically.  Then she looked up at him, her eyes watering, “I don’t want to talk.  Do we have to?”

     She seemed so unlike herself, so childish, he felt a pull in his chest.

     “Don’t you think we need to?” he asked her, “You look like, like, like you’re not your usual self.”

     “I’m not,” she confessed. 

     He felt safe approaching her after that admission, which was such a rarity in their efforts to talk to one another that he grew emboldened.  He came across the room and said, “Tell me.”

     He could see the resistance, the habit of five years of estrangement, she was trying to overcome.  He didn’t know what to say.  He felt if he said anything, she would laps into her sarcastic and aggrieved manner, which ruined all his efforts to talk with her.

     Finally, she rested back and, looking away, said,

“After I took Jen to work, I spent the whole day at mom’s grave.  I’m washed out.  I don’t have any tears left.  I sat in the car and fell asleep—you know, it was warm—and when I woke, I had just time to go pick up Jen and take her home.  I’m not feeling very good.  I wasn’t looking forward to picking up Davey.  When I get him home, he drains me of all my energy, and I don’t have any for him now.”

     He looked at her silently for a long time.  She had closed her eyes again.  His first impulse was not to believe her.  Her mother died when she was four years old, and she had no memory of her.  Why would she even visit the grave, no less spend the day there?  But she did look spent. 

     “Why?” he said, uncertainly, unsure how to respond.

     “Why, what?” she replied. 

     “Why did you spend the day at mom’s grave?”

     “I needed to.  I’ve done it before.  It helps me.”

     “I didn’t know you went there.”  He was dumbfounded.  “I go there every once in a while, too.  If I knew, we could have gone together.  That would have been something we might have shared.”

     “I wouldn’t have gone with you. . . ,” her hatred welled up as her voice dropped on the “you.”  She couldn’t speak to finish her thought.

     And he, too, was speechless.  Her face had contorted so while she paused, he was frightened.  This was something genuinely new, this discovery of her going to her mother’s grave.  What did it mean?  She sat back and closed her eyes again, and he once again stared at her.  He had crossed the room and stood close to her, and here she was, two steps away, hating him, filling him with surprise and dread, yet calm at the same time, actually talkative.  He wanted to touch her, to stroke her arm, rub her back, perhaps kiss her cheek.  It had been a long time since he had had those feelings.  But he was unable to.  Since her thirteenth year, they had not got along.  Yes, he said to himself, it was exactly in that year that things had changed between them.  He could only remember a normal, loving father-child relationship before that time.  He didn’t hate his daughter.  She hated him.  He thought he needed to say so.

     “Why do you hate me?” he said, trying to keep his voice from showing what he was feeling.

     “I can’t do this,” she said, getting agitated and rising from the sofa.  “I have to leave.  Keep Davey here overnight.  I’ll come back tomorrow.  I’ll come back.”

     “Wait, wait, Chantey,” he shouted, as she raced across the living room and pulled open the front door. 

     He reached her before she could step out and grabbed her arm and held on to it, gently but firmly.  She let herself be held and stood quietly, unprotestingly, at the open door.

     “You can, you can do this,” he said, close to her for the first time.  He could smell her.  She smelled of cigarette smoke and old laundry, as though she had taken her green blouse out of the hamper to wear today. 

     He let go of her arm to see if she would flee through the door.  He decided he would let her go if she did.  But he had a feeling she wouldn’t. 

     She just stood there, her back to him, one hand holding the door open, the other hanging now at her side.  He said to her, finally, his mouth close to her ear, “Come inside and sit again.  I want you to.  I don’t want to fight.”

     She turned her head and looked at him.  She seemed suspended between the two motions—fleeing out the door and returning to the sofa, and he could see her struggling with what to do.  So he tried to help. 

     “Come,” he said.  “I’ll make you some chocolate milk.  Would you like it warm or cold?”

     “Cold,” she said, her face hard as stone, which unsettled him.  She saw she had that affect on him.  She always knew she had.  It was one of those things she could not explain, one of the many things that drove her away.  She put her two hands to the sides of her head and ruffled up the spiky hair, turned back into the living room, and dropped again onto the couch. 

     “I’ll fix us both a glass,” he said, trying to be calm.

He returned with a glass in each hand and a heavy heart.  He had been thinking.  After Davey was born there were moments when he and Chantey could talk, could sit together in the living room without railing at each other.  He would hold the baby and she would laugh and look proud.  Her hair was long then, dark and glossy, and she had a fullness in her face and a glow that made her seem happy.  It lasted a tremblingly brief time.  There was no man in Chantey’s life then—or boy, for she was still a child herself, only fourteen when she got pregnant.  She depended on him for everything.  It was then he took advantage of an early retirement opportunity.  He had envisioned the two of them raising the child, and with him at home, he hoped she would go back to school.  There was a year when life was pure hell, the year before she knew she was pregnant.  After the baby, they seemed almost to have forgot that time.  It didn’t last. 

     He handed her one of the glasses of chocolate milk, which she reached up to take with a false smile.  It irritated him.  There were many things about her that irritated him, but that smile always provoked him into a senseless fit, which caused him to say things he knew would offend and hurt.  She did it, he knew, because she knew the effect it would have on him.  He didn’t want to lose his temper now, so he muttered, “My little necromanceress,” turned away from her, and walked to the arm chair across from the sofa. 

     He sat down and sipped from his glass and watched her sip from hers.  She looked at him warily over the rim of the glass as she sipped.  They sat like that for a time.  Her pink spiky hair and comic book clothes made him wonder what kind of people she hung around with.  How could he have imagined when she was a baby what she would be like now?

     “What do you want to talk about?” she asked, finally, her glass of milk finished.

     “A lot of things,” he said, thoughtfully, calmly.  “I want to know all about you, what you do every day after you drop Davey off, who you’re friends are, what plans you have for your future, for Davey’s future.  I want to know everything,” he said, smiling.  “But not now.  For now, I think you should take some time while Davey is not here to rest, maybe even take a nap.  I would like you to stay for dinner.  We can fetch Davey and have dinner all together.  What do you say?  Get some sleep, and I’ll wake you when dinner is ready?”

     “I don’t want to sleep.  I’m all slept out.  I slept in the car, don’t you listen to me?” she snapped harshly. 

     “You said before you needed to go to mom’s grave,” he said, changing the subject.  “Why?  Why did you need to go there?”

     “What’s it to you?” she said defensively, irritatedly. 

     “Well,” he said, trying to choose his words, so as not to provoke her.  He knew if he said he cared about her and was worried, she would fly into an angry fit.  The one thing he couldn’t do was show his fatherly feelings for her.  She exploited them well enough when it came to his taking care of Davey and to getting money from him when she was desperate.  But she wouldn’t let him exploit them when it came to asking for anything in return. 

     “Well,” he said, “I go there for a lot of reasons.  Sometimes I go when I’m feeling down.  Being there helps.  You seem pretty down now.  I just thought maybe you go there for the same reason.”

     Almost, she seemed to melt.  Her shoulders drooped and her face softened, and he could see her turn inward. 

     “Mom was the only person I could really talk to,” he said, reminiscently.  “After she died, I had no one.  And since then, I never. . . .”  He paused and stared across the room, thinking.  She looked at where he gazed, a little freaked, as though he was seeing her mother.  “I never tried to find anyone,” he continued. 

     “That was your mistake,” she said, her mood changing that quickly.  “I don’t really give a damn.  Do we have to talk about this?”

     He looked at her sternly.  Her rejection of him was so complete that he despaired.  Sometimes he wanted to slap her.  He never did that.  He never gave in to the impulse to wreak violence upon her.  But he did give in to the rage she made him feel by telling her what he thought.  But he held back, now.  They had been talking for fifteen minutes or so, and that in itself was something of a triumph.  He didn’t want to disrupt what they were slowly building.

     “You look unhappy,” he said, rolling the empty glass between the palms of his hands, not looking at her.  “You said you had been crying.”  He didn’t push this any further, fearing her reaction to his concern.  He hoped she would just pick up on it.  But she didn’t say anything.  She was looking over her right shoulder, he being in the chair at her left.  Because the windows in the living room faced west, he kept the drapes pulled closed against the sun in the summertime, so it was dim, the only light coming from the kitchen window.

     “Do you still have that eight-by-ten picture of mom I gave you?” he asked, after a while.  He had rested back into the chair again and sunk into other thoughts.  If she wouldn’t talk about what was making her unhappy, just keeping her talking might help. 

     “You didn’t give it to me.  I took it off your dresser,” she snapped hatefully.

     “So, so, yes,” he said.  “I let you have it, though, didn’t I?  I didn’t stop you.”

     She was quiet again, and there was a moment when it looked like she was going to cry.  He sighed.  It was time, now, he thought, to leave her alone.  He would keep his peace, having tried.  Either she would end this communion between them, or she would continue it.  He was feeling drained already.  What did he want? he asked himself as he stared across the room.  Did he want her to move back home?  She was such a drain on him.  Could he live with her in the house?  Would it last more than a few days?  It wouldn’t work, he knew that. 

     So what did he want?  He wanted her to look normal, to have a normal relationship with him, to be a normal mother.  Normality.  That’s what he wanted, for his peace of mind.  But that wasn’t going to happen.  He knew it.  So what did he want?  Maybe just for her to hug him, and say, “I love you,” and smile a genuine smile when she came and went.  After all, he was her father, isn’t that how fathers should be treated?  That wasn’t going to happen, either.  And that wasn’t what he really wanted, anyway.  He wanted her to get a grip on herself, to take charge of her life, to plan for both her own and her son’s futures, to be responsible, for God’s sake to wash out that stupid pink from her hair!

     When he looked at her again, she was wiping tears from her cheeks.  She was all drooped in the sofa and her chest was heaving.  He said nothing.  He wanted to go to her and put his arm around her, but he resisted the impulse.  There was no surer way to stop what was coming than to do that.  So he looked away and held his silence. 

     “I got pregnant again,” she said finally, her voice sounding meek and sad.  She stiffened herself then and raised her shoulders, looking directly at him, waiting for him to say something.  She had put on that air of defiance which she knew provoked him.  But he had only looked back at her. 

     He knew nothing of her living arrangements, who she lived with, if anyone, whether she was seeing and sleeping with one man or several—nothing.  She deliberately kept him ignorant of her life, and he was afraid to respond to her for fear he would say something that would inadvertently judge her.  So he just tried to look sympathetic. 

     “I couldn’t tell you,” she said, having turned perceptibly pale.  “I wanted to,” she added, breathless, “but I couldn’t.  I felt like I was on a train that was going faster and faster everyday and it was heading straight for a cliff.” 

     He was crushed.  She couldn’t have said anything that would have crushed him more than that.  She wanted to tell him but was unable to!  That was a terrible judgment, and for a moment his own chest heaved, and he hung his head. 

     “No! No!” she shouted, as she saw him cave in on himself.  She had become animated.  “It’s not you, it’s not you,” she pleaded.  He was doubled over in the chair, his face in his hands.  She got up and crossed the room and knelt beside him and put her hand on his back.

     “Listen,” she said,  “the reason I went to mom’s grave is because last week I miscarried and I freaked out over it.  I only just found out I was pregnant!  And then that happened.  So I went to the grave.  I wanted to get it all out of my system, you know?  To cry it out and go home done with it.  But it didn’t work that way.  I feel worse.  I don’t know how I feel.  I’m dumb and numb.  Do you know what that’s like?”

     He looked into her face.  “I know.”

     She rose then, and he noticed a look in her face he hadn’t seen before—it was a woman’s look, a knowing look, such as he recalled seeing in his wife’s face after those moments when ultimates intruded upon them.  He rose himself and said, “I’ll get Davey.  We should have him with us, don’t you think?  You can decide later if you want to take him home or leave him here.”

     She nodded OK.