31 -- Dinner at my place
For the second time in a week, the hospital beat Peggy in
waking me up, telling me I needed to pick up my uncle. So, when Peggy did call
finally shortly before noon, I told her I would not come to fix her car until
later.
I could not read her reaction when she said, “Okay,” then
hung up.
The trip west to Graystone was among one of the most
familiar of my life, and one deeply drenched in family history.
It was almost a religious experience, part of some
fundamental ritual and sacrifice I was destined from birth to make.
My uncle had been committed there several times during the
1980s, following in the footsteps of my mother, who had been committed numerous
times when I was a young child, and her grandfather had died there.
The trip only made my mood worse, and added to my confusion,
mixing up how I felt about one thing with how I felt about another.
The madness I’d seen in my uncle and mother was somehow
connected to the madness I saw in Peggy – with me, somehow, serving as the link
between them, an idea I hated.
The return trip felt as if I was still alone, my uncle
locked into his drug-induced calm. He always came out of it later with more
thoughts of suicide.
I kept telling myself I could make all this work for him,
and that somehow this time everything would be fine, the drugs would take, he
would break out of his cycle of depression. He would not need me to take care
of him anymore.
Yet, I knew none of this would happen and that my life, my
fate was somehow locked into his in ways I yet did not fully realize.
The phone was ringing when I got home with peggy asking if I
was all right, could I come over and see her, and help her with her car.
She sounded disappointed when I told her I ought not leave
my uncle alone for a couple of days.
“What if I come over there?” she asked. “Dinner maybe?”
“But you don’t like it here.”
“I ought to meet your uncle since you talk about him all the
time.”
“Do you want me to come pick you up?”
“No, I’ll get there,” she said, and after setting a time,
she hung up, not telling me just how she planned the trip.
I imagined the worst, but pushed the picture of Tom out of
my mind.
This time, I thought, I would make dinner. So, I left my
uncle to his own resources in his apartment next door and hurried over to the
bodega-like market next door to Mr. B’s strip club, a block away, returning
with an assortment of items I figured I knew how to cook.
I propped up my uncle in a corner of the kitchen then
proceeded to clean. He was about as helpful as a lamp. But he remained calm,
perhaps even entertained by my ritual.
Indeed, cleaning had always been a kind of therapy to me,
something incredibly symbolic in that by cleaning the exterior of my world, I
did the same internally.
Nothing, of course, would make either place worthy of Peggy.
But I hoped to clean the room and my head of things that might offend her
outright, and so result in a fight, looking to get back to what we had a few
months earlier, when everything seemed more innocent.
Peggy arrived around 5 p.m., showing up at my door dressed
in a New York Giants Jersey, a pair of jeans, and her pink Puma sneakers.
She didn’t say how she got there; I didn’t ask. But she
insisted on walking my dog “Spud-pup” before dinner, carefully avoiding the
place where we’d seen the dead squirrel the last time there.
The meal went better than I could have possibly imagined,
me, Peggy and my uncle seated at my table, plates of pasta steaming before us.
Even my uncle became more animated, seeming to appreciate food that had been
part of our lives in the old house, and sharing it with people who were not
inmates to some institution or total strangers. He didn’t say much, but his
eyes beamed when he looked at Peggy, who herself seemed at peace for the first
time in weeks.
I drove her home, but didn’t have time to go upstairs with
her since I desperately needed to get to work on time or risk yet another
scolding from my boss, who claimed my work habits at gone haywire.
But I did agree to meet her at her mother’s the following
day to help fix her car if I could.
“Please tell me the
car will be all right,” she said.
“I can’t say for sure.”
“Then lie to me,” she said. “I need you to lie to me about
it.”
“It will be fine,” I liked.
She gave me a weak smile, then got out of the car and made
her way back into the darkness of her building’s doorway as I drove away.
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