Hanging Up. Delia Ephron
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of Jeannie, and his show was similar. It was about this town where a husband lived with the ghost of his dead wife, and you knew when she was around because you could see the couch cushions in their house getting punched and puffed, and a vacuum cleaner moving back and forth across the carpet.
My father settled in on the living room couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. I couldn’t decide where to sit. The logical place, the chair directly across, was where Mom had always situated herself when we had company. I noticed one of my father’s tennis shoes was untied. “How’s school?” he asked.
“Fine. What did you tell Esther about Mom?” A picture on the wall was lopsided. I straightened it.
“Oh, nothing. I just said she went down in that crash over Denver.”
“What crash over Denver?”
“Kid, you heard it here first. People always think they remember plane crashes, even when they didn’t take place. Or maybe they did. You think we know about every plane crash?”
“But Mom’s not dead.”
“She’s in Big Bear, it’s the same thing.”
I laughed.
“See, I can make you laugh, can’t I? Your old man’s still got it.”
“Have you seen Maddy lately?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Your sister’s a bitch. I’m her father. I can say it.”
“It doesn’t seem too horrible here.” I was in my room that night unpacking while I talked on the phone to Georgia. “The only thing in the refrigerator is iced tea, which he didn’t make, and packets of soy sauce, but I don’t see why Maddy had to move out. She probably wanted an excuse.” It was nine in L.A., midnight in New York. I could hear Georgia yawn. “Why don’t you and Richard come out for Christmas?”
“What? Next week?” She sounded incredulous. “First of all, Richard works nonstop. Lawyers kill themselves. Besides, coming there could be a disaster for me. I’ve been assigned to Makeup. At Mademoiselle, Makeup is the fast track. Remember my friend Ursula? She went to the dentist, and when she came back, she’d been transferred to Health, a dead end.”
I could hear Georgia moving around as we talked. “What are you doing?”
“Getting out my clothes for tomorrow.”
Georgia always made a “flat man” on the floor, putting her clothes in the shape of a body. She even placed earrings approximately where the earlobes would be. “Do you wear base?” she asked.
“No.”
“That’s good. I thought it was bad, but it turns out to be good. You want to show your natural skin color as much as possible even if it’s blotchy. Yellow covers red, did you know that?”
“I had no idea. What does it mean?”
“It means if you have a big red nose, you put yellow makeup on it. You know what your nose is like when you have a cold, Evie.”
I checked my nose in the mirror. It was a nice pinkish white. When I was eleven and Georgia was fifteen, she had informed me that my skin was the color of a scallop—an insult with so much power I think about it every time I see my reflection. In truth, my skin is my best feature: clear, fair, delicate. “It’s like porcelain,” I had shouted back at her. This was a description I had picked up from a romance novel. But she was right about my nose: it did turn bright red when I was sniffly.
“You’re not going to believe this, but Dad’s dating Esther with the nails from Dr. Seymour’s.”
“Esther?” Georgia was appalled. “After Mom, he’s dating Esther?”
“I know.” We contemplated the comedown of it. “Does Mom miss us?”
“I doubt it. Do you miss her?”
“No. I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like something’s wrong.”
“In the house?”
“Maybe. No, with me.”
“You might need analysis.” Through the phone I heard a doorbell. “That must be Richard,” said Georgia. “He doesn’t have his key. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I sat cross-legged on the bed with the phone in front of me. It was silent in the house, more dead than quiet. I couldn’t hear the TV, which my father almost never turned off now. I wondered if I should buy a Christmas tree tomorrow and get out all the ornaments. That would be so weird.
I spotted my tennis racquet propped against the wall. The wooden kind nobody has anymore. I got off the bed and picked it up. I switched my grip a few times from forehand to backhand.
I did a service swing: dropped the racquet down, then lifted it high, a big stretch, dropped it behind my back and circled, then up again, and snapped it down. Wrist action. I repeated this a second time, trying to make the racquet hit my nose. I couldn’t. My father got the strangest injuries. His accidents were impossible to replicate. There was a knock on the door. “Eve?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
He came in, in his blue pajamas, and stood there, filling up the space. I could smell scotch. He smelled like Mom. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
“Not really. Why don’t you call Esther?” He swayed gently from side to side. “What about your friends?” I threw out a few names, people he and Mom had seen regularly.
“That’s couple stuff.” His eyes became watery. “I can’t sleep without her.”
“Yeah.” I started thinking about my dorm room, wishing myself there. “Where do you want to go?”
“Does it matter?” The odor of scotch was really strong. I considered not breathing. Get out, Dad, get out, please. “Let’s just drive, okay, Evie?”
“Okay, get dressed. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
I drove around Los Angeles while he slept stretched across the backseat, snoring loudly. Listening to these noisy wheezes over and over and over, I felt like a victim of this water torture Georgia had told me about in which a man had to lie under a leaky faucet and after a while just waiting for the next drop to fall drove him mad. I tried to blot Dad out by reciting poems that I’d memorized in the fifth grade. “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!” “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day.” As I tried to blanket my brain with them, my father snorted, a sound so sudden and gigantic that he woke up sputtering. He took a moment to orient himself. I watched in the rearview mirror while he jerked his head, looking out one window, then the other, before crashing back down on the seat. And the snores began anew.
Eventually I drove home and parked in the driveway. It took me a while to get out because I tried to open the car door silently so I wouldn’t wake him. Probably nothing could have awakened him, but I didn’t want to find out.
These drives became a routine.
I stopped sleeping and lay in bed each night waiting to hear his footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I didn’t want him to surprise me.
“Move in with us,” said Maddy, who was calling from her neighborhood taco stand. I was lying in bed with the phone receiver tucked between the pillow and my ear.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“He’s so lonely. It would hurt his feelings.” I was listening for his footsteps then, dreading to hear them. “Where did all his friends go? Did he dump them or vice versa?”
“Probably vice versa. He’s a drunk, Evie. He drinks scotch. Who drinks that anymore? Isaac says Dad should smoke dope. Then he