Dad. William Wharton

He insists I leave the kitchen and he’ll finish; his first housework, breakfast dishes for two.

      I start sweeping. There’s a vacuum cleaner but I prefer sweeping. I find a broom in the heater closet, and begin on the back bedroom. Mother’s an every-day-vacuum person. The rugs are going to have a slight change in treatment.

      I sweep everything into piles. When I have enough to make a pile, I concentrate it, then move on. This is a four-pile house. Our apartment in Paris in a three-pile place, the boat a two-piler. The mill’s a one-piler, or I can make it two, depending on how dirty things are. Everything gets dirtier down there but it’s earth dirt, not soot or grime the way it is in Paris. The dirt here is between the two, but definitely four piles.

      I look for Dad, expecting to find him out in the garden or greenhouse. But he’s still in the kitchen washing dishes, with intense, inner concentration. I wonder where his mind is.

       Down by the well, a small bird flits its tail and takes off with a dropping upturn as I lean, lowering my pail into the water.

      I sneak up and watch, he’s taking each dish and examining it minutely for dirt, then washing off a spot at a time. If he had a micrometer, a centrifuge and a sterilizer he’d be happier. He’s scraping away as if he’s trying to rub off the flower pattern. When he’s satisfied they’re clean, he dips them in and out of the rinse water at least ten times.

      The thing is, he’s getting a kick out of it, water play. He’s enjoying washing dishes, playing with hot and cold water.

      Dad can get super perfectionist over almost anything. I know I’ll go crazy if I watch too long. This has always been one of Mom’s laments. There’s a lot of her in me, and I don’t want to believe it.

      Her claim is she needs to do everything herself because Dad drives her crazy making mountains out of molehills. It could be he still knows something about joy, while Mom and I are only getting through things. I back out of the kitchen.

      Sometimes Mother calls Dad ‘Kid Kilowatt’. That’s one of her favorite titles. Another is ‘Mr Fixit’. He’s also ‘Jack-of-all-trades’.

      Finally, Dad thinks the dishes are done. They’re clean enough for a TV ad but it hasn’t occurred to him that other things are usually classified under wash the dishes. These are the small, important jobs marking the difference between someone who’s been around a kitchen and someone who hasn’t. I’ve watched this with our children growing up and with various friends who’ve passed through our lives.

      They say they’ll ‘do’ the dishes and that’s it. They ‘do’ the dishes. Everything else is left. They might not even wash the pots. They definitely will not wipe off the stove or clean the sink, wipe off the surfaces of tables, cabinets. They won’t put things away; butter, salt, pepper, spices, cutting boards. One young woman left the dirty water in our sink. She was twenty-five years old and wanted desperately to get married. After this scene I had trouble working up much sympathy; my own old-maidness got in the way.

      So I explain things to Dad. He follows everything I do, shaking his head in amazement.

      ‘Where did you learn all this, Johnny? In the army?’

      Anything I know Dad can’t account for, I learned in the army.

      ‘Yeah, maybe, Dad.’

      Sometimes now, I think of those poor officers and noncoms trying to keep things running with a mob of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old males. I go crazy with just one or two around the house. All the sweeping, bed-making, the KP we complained about, was only normal housekeeping.

      Now, don’t get me wrong, cleanliness may be next to godliness but it doesn’t mean much to me, and Vron is as casual about dirt as I am.

      But my mother is something else again. She’s the cleaning maniac. Dirt is the devil! She used to take a toothbrush, reserved for this, and clean out the cracks in our hardwood floors. According to her, they harbored (that’s the word) dirt and germs. In Philadelphia, we had a house with hardwood floors in every room except the kitchen and cellar. Once a month, Mother would scrape out the germ-harboring dirt. She’d keep it in a pile for us to admire when we came home, to see what we’d ‘tracked in’.

      Mom’s also a window nut. The windows are washed once a week, whether they need it or not. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to come within a foot of any window. If there were some danger I might breathe on a window or touch it, she’d panic. The slightest smudge and she’d be at it with Windex, a piece of newspaper and a soft rag.

      One of my great pleasures now is leaning against a window, pushing my nose close and making lip marks. I love to write on damp windows and draw pictures. All our kids are window smudgers and finger painters. Sometimes it gets hard to see out our windows.

      Still, even now, when I go close to a window, there’s a mother-barrier I need to crash. These little things clutter the soul.

      With the kitchen done, Dad and I sit down in the living room. He gets up to turn on the television but I ask him not to. In this house, if you sit in the living room, you turn on the TV the way you lock the door when you go to the bathroom.

      I’m not sure how to approach this; we’ve been carefully avoiding the subject all morning.

      ‘Look, Dad, you should know that Mother’s really sick.’

      He tenses. I watch his eyes. He’s looking at me and it’s pitiful; he’s preparing himself for the worst.

      ‘Is she still alive, Johnny?’

      ‘Sure she’s alive, Dad, but she’s had a heart attack, not a really serious one, but bad enough. Her heart’s never going to be the same. For instance, she can never work as hard as she used to.’

      He’s nodding his head. I can tell he’s not getting the message.

      ‘I always tell her she works too hard, Johnny. She works too hard.’

      ‘You’re right, Dad, and you’ll need to take on a lot of the work around here. I’ll teach you to do most of the light housework. Joan will come and do the heavy cleaning, washing, shopping, things like that, but the everyday stuff, cooking, picking up, simple housecleaning, you’ll have to take over.’

      He’s listening now, listening but still not comprehending.

      ‘Then, Dad, you’ll need to take care of Mother. You know how she is, she’ll kill herself if we’re not careful. You’ve got to watch over her.’

      He’s still nodding, not looking at me, looking down at the floor.

      ‘Yes, I can do that. You tell me what to do and how to do it, then I’ll do it, all right.’

      ‘First we’ll go see Mother this morning. Remember she’s sick, she doesn’t look so hot. The main thing is not to make her excited or worried. We need to convince her we’re getting along OK ourselves.’

      I look at him carefully. He’s hanging on to every word. I’m the captain giving orders.

      ‘You know, Dad, Mother’s convinced nobody can take care of you except her. We have to prove you can do it yourself.’

      Now he’s shaking his head back and forth, a slow no, holding in one of his fake laughs with his hand over his mouth.

      ‘That’s right, Johnny; that’s right; we’ll fool her.’

      Oh boy!

      Then I realize Dad’s dressed but he hasn’t washed. His pattern is broken or something, because normally he’s a very fastidious person. I imagine Mom would say, ‘Now you go wash up, Jack,’ and he’d wash himself. Then probably she’d say, ‘Now get yourself dressed.’ I haven’t been giving the right signals.

      So I tell him to get undressed again, go in and wash. After that, we’ll put on some good clothes and go to the hospital.

      ‘We’ll try to look nice because Mother likes to see you