The Complete Collection. William Wharton

eyes moisten; she’s working up her ‘fight back at all costs’ look.

      ‘But how can I relax, Jacky? How can I possibly take care of your father? You know how he is.’

      ‘Don’t worry. We’re working things out. Dad’ll be able to take over when you come home. He made his own bed this morning and washed the dishes. I’m teaching him to cook. He’s watering the garden and keeping the lawn up. It’ll all work out fine.’

      Now she’s crying, crying mad.

      ‘Don’t tell me. You’ll go back to your beatnik life and Joan’s too busy with her own family. King Kong, the big-shot wop, will never let her come over more than once a week. He won’t even let her phone me, even though I pay so she can phone free. I know, don’t kid me!’

      I wait it out. Dad leans forward. He’s suffering seeing Mother cry; she doesn’t cry all that much.

      ‘Honest, Bette, you’ll see. I’m really trying; I’ll get on top of this. Don’t you worry; we’ll make out OK.’

      Pause for three seconds.

      ‘How long do you think it’ll be before you come home, Bette?’

      It’s not so much the question as the plaintive note in his voice. Mother shoots me one of the looks through tears.

      ‘Don’t worry, Dad! It’ll be a while yet. The doctor will tell us when she’s ready. It costs over two hundred dollars a day keeping Mom in this intensive care unit and they don’t hold people here any longer than they need to. When her heart’s settled down and is working better, they’ll move her to another part of the hospital, then home. We’ll set up our own private little hospital for her right there in the side bedroom.’

      Mother’s crying again.

      ‘I’d rather be dead than live like this. You mean all my life I’m going to be a cripple, a burden to everybody? It’s not fair. It’s not fair this should happen to me of all people. I’ve always taken care of myself, exercised, eaten a balanced diet with vitamins; everything, and all for nothing. It’s not fair.’

      This is so true. It’s never been any fun eating at our house. As kids, when we sat down to eat there’d be three vegetables with each meal. Not only that, we had to drink the pot liquor from those vegetables. I dreaded meals: string-bean juice, spinach juice, pea juice, carrot juice; we’d sit down and they’d be there, each in a separate glass. No matter what you did: salt, pepper, catsup; it all tasted like dishwater. Mother’d savor these juices as if they were the elixir of life; she was a big fan of Bernarr Macfadden. Dad never touched the stuff, and when Grandpop or Uncle Harry lived with us, they got off, too; but Joan and I were stuck.

      Then, every morning, we had to slug down cod-liver oil. I think if old Bernarr said cow pee was good for you, vitamin P, she’d run around behind cows with a cup. When we complained too much about the codliver oil, she got a brand with mint in it, like oily chewing gum. She’d hide it in orange juice, fat, minty globules of oil floating on top.

      Also there was brewer’s yeast. We had to take a slug of that every morning; the taste of rotted leaves and mold. This was supposed to have some other kind of vitamins in it. Mother knew about vitamins before they invented them. She ran her life, and ours, along the ‘live forever’ line. She was years ahead of her time. Now, with all the health food stores and health freaks, she’s actually more a hippy than I’ll ever be.

      She’s right, it isn’t fair. She’ll never accept. I know. Right now, in her mind, she’s figuring some way to lick this heart attack. And it doesn’t involve lying around in bed; that’s for damned sure. I can see her inventing some crazy exercise for the heart. It’s wonderful she has that kind of gumption but this time it can do her in.

      Dad and I get home in time for the soap operas. I go into the garden back room and collapse; the strain’s catching up with me. When I wake, I make more detailed lists for Dad. I break down a few jobs like cleaning the bathroom and defrosting the refrigerator.

      When the soaps are over, Dad takes me out to his greenhouse. He’s a great one for starting plants from tiny cuttings, especially plants that don’t flower. He has an enormous variety of fancy, many-colored leaf plants. He has Popsicle sticks stuck beside each one with the Latin name, the date and place he found it.

      It’s a genuine jungle. Dad’s always pinching cuttings of leaves or twigs from every interesting bush or plant he gets near. In Hawaii he must’ve snitched a hundred bits and pieces. He packed them in his suitcase with wet towels. I’m sure Mother wasn’t too enthusiastic but there’s no stopping him here. Then, somehow, he manages to grow plants from these tiny snips, sometimes only a leaf or a bit of stem.

      He’s rigged a unique sprinkler system in the greenhouse to give a fine spray. It’s tied into a humidity gauge so it turns on automatically, keeping the place jungle fresh. It even smells like a jungle; you almost expect to hear parrots or monkeys screeching in the top branches of his creeping vines. Dad spends a fair part of his free time in the greenhouse. He’s more at home there than in the house.

       Staking tomato plants, spindly, soft-haired, long-legged, easily bent or broken. Heavy with dark leaves, blossms and new rounding fruit. The strong green pungent smell surrounds me. I carefully lift and catch each sprawling branch, turning it gently to the warming sun, a joining of earth to sky.

      In the outside garden, Dad has avocado trees, three different varieties, so they almost always have avocados. There’s a lemon tree and what he calls his fruit-salad tree. This is a peach tree but he’s grafted onto it nectarine and apricot branches. The tree bears all these fruits simultaneously; it looks like something from Hieronymus Bosch.

      He also runs a small vegetable garden, with Swiss chard, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, carrots; easy crops. Dad keeps this garden just for fun, says all those things are cheaper to buy than to grow but he gets a kick bringing homegrown vegetables into the kitchen.

      After dinner, Marty calls. She’s just come back from her gynecologist and knows she’s pregnant. They’ve been trying for two years and she’s so excited she can hardly tell me. I’m ecstatic! I’m going to be a grandfather! I put Dad on the line so she can tell him, too. He holds the phone out from his ear, listens, grins and nods his head. He doesn’t say anything more than grunts of pleasure and uh-huhs but he’s smiling his head off. Tears well up in his eyes, then run down the outside of his cheeks. It must be great for him being a potential great-grandfather, to know it’s going on some more.

      We put the phone down and look at each other. We’re both smiling away and wiping tears. It’s a big moment, too deep for us to even talk about.

      Dad gets up and turns on the TV, but I don’t feel like watching Merv Griffin pretend he’s talking to us. I’m itching to move; I want to work off my swelling restlessness.

      ‘Come on, Dad; let’s go out and celebrate!’

      ‘What do you mean, out, Johnny?’

      ‘I know a place, Dad. It’s down in Venice and it’s called the Oar House. Let’s go there.’

      ‘What! The what?’

      I say it clearly and laugh.

      ‘The Oar House, Dad: oar, O—A—R.’

      The Santa Monica chamber of commerce made such a fuss they took down the sign. There’s only a giant pair of crossed oars over the door now.

      This place has wall-to-wall stereo vibrating like a discotheque but with a terrific selection of music; music from the twenties to Country Western, rock and electronic moanings. They sell a pitcher of beer for a dollar and a half with all the popcorn and peanuts you can eat. There’s a barrel filled with roasted peanuts in the shell and an ongoing popcorn machine. A guy could probably live on beer, popcorn and peanuts, plenty of protein, carbohydrates, and corn’s a vegetable.

      But the best thing is the walls and ceilings. They’re covered with planned graffiti, and plastered,