Vista Del Mar by Neal Snidow

Author:Neal Snidow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028067
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

AFTER A WHILE, it was time to take Father to the doctor. He didn’t hurt as much now although the hip was still a little jumpy. But the Advil was working; it seemed miraculous that he could move at all. He sat quietly in the car while we drove to the medical center, a complex of chocolate-colored stucco and smoked windows fitted into a lot created by the intersection of Hawthorne Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway. The marine layer broke into tatters above the sighing overpass, throwing a breezy sunshine down onto the medical center parking and its boxed pittosporums. Inside all was plush carpet, Executive Suites wallpaper, bronze accents, ferns, and Muzak. Patients and their families sat in small, isolated groups speaking quietly in Spanish and English. Dressed nicely for the doctor, Father cheerfully greeted all and sundry from his wheelchair. There was something about its awkwardness, the way it thrust him into social spaces and made people notice that seemed to please him. After an X-ray, we were directed to the elevator where we would rise to the doctor’s examining room floor.

As we waited in the plush quiet, I saw that in the wheelchair, in his V-necked pullover and tan Levi’s, his white hair nicely combed, his neat brown running shoes, under the canned spots recessed in the ceiling, Father was crying, tears running freely down his face. He blinked at his tears as I asked him what was wrong. “Oh,” he said. “I’m just thinking of all the things you have to go through.”

I knelt by the chair. I had a strong feeling that some long, deep-running cycle was being accomplished, something of which the pain of the inflamed nerve was only a part; he had spent a terrible day moving himself to the center of the family against Mother’s perpetual occupation of that space, and this is what it had taken—a Herculean effort composed of pain and its exploitation. But he had a great need to be at the center of whatever we were; something old had been pushing at him. Childhood was never far from either Mother or Father, for her a dark jagged presence, for him, an agonizing absence. Somewhere he was perpetually at a winter evening in Virginia in 1933, the snowy night his eldest and most gifted brother, an artist and musician, had died in an auto wreck, a drunken truck driver catching him on a blind corner of a mountain road, and as the parents went out into the night to identify the body, Father disassembled the young man’s drum set and moved it into the attic so that the sight of it would not bring more pain to his parents when they returned. Now, like his dead brother, he had moved to the center, so very painfully; and here he was in his wheelchair.

By the time the doctor entered the exam room, Father had regained his composure; he told the story of his trauma, injecting a small joke here and there in his usual way.

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