Residential Developments

It was a neighbor who contacted me, purportedly out of the goodness of her heart.  The poor woman was my father’s emergency contact. I didn’t bother entertaining the thought of whatever Dad had ensnared her in, I just listened to what she had to say.  I found the earnestness in her voice funny, a genuine concern for a man I had once seen animatedly hump one of those novelty blow-up whiskey bottles they have in the windows of liquor stores.  He had recently returned from the hospital, Margaret said. Her name was Margaret. He had fallen and suffered a stroke.

“Would I come look after him?” she asked.

Even though I only lived in Philadelphia, a bit less than a three hour drive, I had not been to his house.  He’d been there maybe ten years. He moved into it sometime after my mother died, I suppose to escape the associations the former one brought up, not that he would ever admit or attempt to articulate experiencing something so abstract. 

My mother’s funeral was the last time I had seen him, before that it was probably another two years.  I remember thinking he had shrunken a bit, and that his skin had loosened. He seemed smaller altogether, though who’s to say this wasn’t due to my own aging, my own bodily development.  My sister didn’t come down, and I couldn’t blame her. I immediately regretted it myself. The only visitors were a few old ladies, members of the parish.

“What about Cecilia and Bob,” I asked Dad, referring to my mother’s sister and her husband.  “Where are they?”

“Didn’t feel like dealing with her,” he said in practiced earnestness.  “I think I have enough on my plate, don’t you?”

What the fuck did that mean?

“Do they even know?” I asked.  He didn’t respond. I wanted to spit in his face, which was, to my constant chagrin, above my own.  The man was 6’ 2”.

I spent the weekend following the funeral in my childhood home.  The color of the walls was an ugly yellow, and the only thing on the wall of my old room was a Star Wars poster some relative had given me in middle school.  I think I was probably too depressed to ever turn it into my own space, to put up band posters and things like that, the sort of things you see in bedrooms of teenagers on TV.   

Something I missed about living outside of the city was the sound bugs made at night, especially in the summer and early autumn.  It was September but still warm most days. That day it had been hot. As my mother had been lowered into the ground, my profuse sweating seemed to be a socially acceptable substitute to the more expected crying, as no one else was crying.  I still felt guilt, maybe shame, in not feeling more.

The rest of the weekend I mostly avoided Dad.  We would sit down in the morning with coffee. He would look at the paper and I would look at him, waiting to be incensed at some trite take on a current event as he talked passively aloud.  I didn’t want to speak about what was going on but it angered me anyway that he didn’t even make an attempt. That he was talking at me instead of talking to me.

When I left the house I would just drive around, stop at a Krauszer’s for donuts and cigarettes, maybe more coffee.  Lower Pokesta, NJ was an endless winding loop of the same house, with a few exceptions, like my family’s Victorian. The house I would care for him in ten years later was another of these suburban cookie cutter places.  I found their sterility comforting.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral,” Jordan had said, before lifting a rolling paper to his mouth to seal a joint.  He had The Office playing, muted with subtitles, on an old big screen TV set in the corner of the room, several feet away, oriented forty-five degrees from where we sat.  I sat slouched on an upright recliner and he was rotating idly on a computer chair in front of his desk.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, looking down at the fake leather arm I was prodding with my thumb.  I meant what I said. My eyes flittered between the sofa arm and the joint he was smoothing out and sucking on in a way that could only be described as sexual.  His eyes drifted toward the TV set and he let out an exhalation, laughing about something on the show which I did not catch as I wasn’t paying attention. When he noticed me staring at him I shot him a dirty look, not because I was offended he was laughing but because I sensed the opportunity.  His eyes went to the floor shamefully and I imagined he thought I found his levity offensive in the face of my purported grief. When would he light the fucking joint?

If a cop pulled me over I could tell them that my mother had just passed, that barely 24 hours had transpired since I had watched her body descend into the dirt as some hymnal music played from a boombox brought by the minister.  The whiskey was fighting me. Stomach acid sloshed up and down my esophagus and pooled now and then in my mouth. I was driving fine, though. An old CD of Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, which I had taken from my bedroom, was blasting on the stereo.

“Wil,” Jenna said, shouted, almost yelled, over the squall.  “What’s the rush?”

I had become so lost in my own train of thought that I almost forgot she was sitting in the passenger.  Which was hard to imagine considering my motives for meeting her in the first place, that, as soon as I found out about my mother’s death, and the fact that I would be back in Lower Pokesta, I began thinking about Jenna.

“Where are we going, Wil?”

“It’s funny me driving you around, huh,” I said.  There were trees overhanging the road a bit.  I had no idea where we were exactly.

“Wilfred,” she said, “where are we going?”

I peeked over at her a few times, intermittently taking my eyes off the road.  She was not unattractive in high school, though she was a bit bigger. Now she was slender, and her face and body had become more defined with age.  She was a woman. I wondered if I was a man, or at least if I appeared as one. In the rearview all I noticed were signs of wear and sleeplessness and a general lack of self-attention: bags under my eyes, my unibrow coming back in, acne speckled in an asymmetrical pattern across my face and the wispy hair beneath my nose which I had left completely unchecked.  When she caught me looking over I put on a big affected smile.

“Just pretend it’s a David Lynch movie and this is the part where it’s a continuous shot of the unfolding highway.”

“Whatever, Wil,” she said.  She slumped back in her seat, looking exhausted.

I felt some kind of anxiety building up inside of me, probably because she had stopped talking.  I pulled over to the side of the road. She didn’t seem to react much. I climbed over the center console and pinned her thighs down with my own folded legs.  Then she started jerking, and pushing against my chest.

“Fuck you.  Fuck you. What the fuck, get off me you shithead.”

I grabbed both of her arms then pinned them to the back of the seat, above her head, with my forearm.  As I moved my free hand under her blouse, I lost my balance and my other arm slipped, which is when she rammed her elbow into the side of my head, knocking loose a crown on one of my molars.

She jerked the passenger door open and nearly fell out.

I played the part of the nurse for my father in earnest.  I got instructions from the hospital over the phone. I fed him that sludge they feed to the infirmed, which was canned and not unlike cat food.  I had to put it in a blender and add water, then slosh it into his mouth and rub his throat like a dog. For the first day or two I even helped him to the bathroom.  I would steady him against the wall, pull his pants down and seat him. Sometimes I had to adjust his penis so that his stream of urine would not hit the edge of the toilet seat and spray everywhere.  I disliked that part a lot. Two days of touching my father’s penis would turn out to be enough for me. After that I let the waste collect in his pants. If I spent more of my time in town in the house, with him, I’m sure the sight and smell would have bothered me.  I think if I spent more time there than I did I probably would have thought to buy adult diapers. At the end of the day I would throw away the soiled pants. He had many pairs. The showerhead was detachable and I found that useful in cleaning him. The doctor on the phone had recommended some stretches and exercises, which I did not bother with.

In my free time, or I suppose you could say the time I spent ignoring him, I drove.  I could drive for hours, smoking cigarettes and listening to music. Now and then I would get fast food and eat it without parking.  It was freeing, driving in places like this, and I realized I had missed it. Well, missed is the wrong word, because I never had my license when I lived here—I didn’t get it until college. 

Besides driving around, there wasn’t much to do, but I was glad to have some time off work, and to be away from the city.  Jordan had moved to Denver, and I hadn’t talked to him in some time. I thought about calling Jenna, in fact I regularly found myself staring at her contact in my phone, one finger hovering over the call button.  Something held me back from actually calling her, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

I followed my father out onto his porch.  It was the first time I had seen him walk on his own all week.  I pantomimed like I was spotting him, then I pulled back, like a parent teaching their child to ride a bike without training wheels.  I never learned to ride a bike. A lot of people ride bikes in Philly.

My father curved his head enough to see, from his peripheral, that I was not behind him.  I was standing in the doorway, keeping the screen half open with my foot, looking through him at that half-constructed house across the street.  Its plastic coverings lilted in the wind like tree parts. Across my dad’s face spread terror.

The girl I had been seeing back in Philadelphia bicycled a lot.  She barely used her car, but somehow I had managed to skirt the fact that I didn’t know how to ride a bike for the 8 or so months we were dating. 

My embarrassment about not being able to bike was so great that by the end of our time together she was under the impression that I thought less of her for biking.  I know this because she shouted something to this effect at me, and I shouted back, laying into the idea, because it was simpler than coming up with a lie of my own.  I told her an attempt at an active lifestyle was, unfortunately, well out of her wheelhouse. Then she threw my Playstation down a stairwell.

Still only a few feet ahead of me, my father’s legs started wobbling, then buckling.  He grappled the railing, and, for reasons unknown to me, he moved towards the steps instead of lowering himself onto the porch.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, “I’m not going to help you.”

Dad began moving down the stairs sideways, making his way down about one step, and then half another, before his legs finally gave out.  Or maybe he lost confidence in himself. He came down pretty fast, I think, and began to howl a bit as he wiggled on the steps. 

I was mostly focused on the house across the street, to be honest.  I moved forward and sat down on the top step, about a foot from where his head was.  I dug my pack of cigarettes from my front left pocket and lit one. It was cool and breezy out and I wished I was wearing a flannel or a sweater instead of just a t-shirt. 

Dad caterwauled. 

Like the house itself, the foliage around it was also in its infancy.  The trees were young and sticklike in contrast to the outlying forest. I must have found something beautiful about it.

To my right was a cul-de-sac, to which the street owed its quietness.  To my left was Margaret’s house. In fact, I could make her out behind a bay window.  She was standing and, I assumed, staring. Maybe Dad was being too loud. I waved but she didn’t wave back.  Instead she stepped back, her form recessing in my vision, then she turned around and walked until I lost her to her home.