Exley, p.11
Exley, page 11
Because it was crowded. Full of people who seemed normal enough except for one or two things that made them much different. It was like walking through a mall in a foreign country. I was happy to have a guide. I followed J. as she snaked in and out of the crowd. The hallway was in a U shape. She walked down one side of the hallway, around the curve of the U, then stopped at the second door. I stopped a few steps behind her, because now that we were here, I wasn’t sure she’d really want me to come in. But she turned and waved at me to come on. So I did.
This is what I saw. I saw J.’s father lying belly-down on the table. The table was on wheels and was next to J.’s father’s bed, which was also on wheels. J.’s father was more or less as old as my dad. He was unshaven. When my dad didn’t shave, he looked tough; J.’s father just looked dirty, even in the eyes, which were pale, pale blue and watery. Maybe because of the pain. Because J.’s father wasn’t alone. There was another guy, a nurse or a therapist, leaning over J.’s father, rotating his stumps. I don’t know how else to say it. He took J.’s father’s left stump in both his hands, rotated it clockwise a few times, then counterclockwise a few times. Then he put the left stump on the table, lifted the right one, and did the same. The stumps were wrapped in Ace bandages. I had two thoughts. First was, Thank God my dad isn’t as bad off as J.’s dad. And second: I wonder what his stumps look like under the bandages. I was staring at the bandages when J.’s father looked in my direction and caught me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. That startled the therapist. He dropped J.’s father’s right stump and looked at me. His eyes were a much darker blue, much more alert, much less watery. He had a crew cut, and his arms had muscles you could see even when he was just standing there and not doing anything physical. He looked more like a soldier than J.’s father did.
“Hey, J.,” the therapist said, like they were buddies. But J. didn’t say anything back, which told me they weren’t. She walked over and kissed her dad on the top of the head and said, “Hi, Daddy.” J.’s father turned his head to the right and smiled up at J., then looked at me and smiled, but the smile was different. Once, at school, I’d heard a kid griping about losing his baseball glove. In the middle of the gripe, another smaller kid walked by, a baseball glove tucked under his arm. The bigger kid smiled at the smaller kid like J.’s father smiled at me. The therapist was watching all this, but he clearly didn’t know what to make of it or me. “Hey,” he said to me.
“Hey,” I said back. The therapist seemed to want more from me than just that, though, so I also said, “I’m Miller Le Ray. J. and I are in advanced reading together. My dad is on the first floor.”
“Gotcha,” the therapist said.
“Knock, knock,” J.’s father said to me. His voice was rough and dry. I wondered when the last time he’d talked to someone was. I wondered if someone would even want to talk to him. His face was angry and tense.
“Daddy,” J. said.
“Excuse me?” I said. I mean, I knew what to say next, except I couldn’t imagine that’s what J.’s father wanted me to say next. But he did.
“As in the joke,” he said. “Knock, knock.”
“Daddy,” J. said. This was clearly something her dad did — told knock-knock jokes to strangers — and I wasn’t sure if J. was mad or just pretending to be mad. She rolled her eyes at him, then at me, and so I knew she was just pretending.
“Who’s there?” I said.
“9/11.”
“9/11 who?”
An expression washed over J.’s father’s face — not outrage, but sadness and disappointment. Just like that, he became a totally different guy, in the face. He probably would have been a great actor if he hadn’t been missing both his legs. “You said you’d never forget,” he whispered. Then he laughed. It was the kind of joke the teller had to laugh at, because he couldn’t be sure anyone else would. J. didn’t laugh; maybe she’d already heard the joke. She did smile in kind of an “Oh, Daddy” way. I might have laughed if I knew J.’s father better and had been expecting the joke or something like it. But I didn’t, so I didn’t. The therapist sure didn’t seem to think it was funny, though. He put his hands on J.’s father’s stumps. His face looked determined. His biceps went to attention and stayed there, quivering. “Ready?” he said.
“Hell, no,” J.’s father said. But the therapist went back to rotating his stumps anyway.
I LEFT J.’s father’s room then and went out into the hall. J. followed me.
“Well,” she said, smiling, “that’s my dad.”
“I liked his joke.”
“Yeah,” J. said, rolling her eyes again, pretending to be sheepish. “He thinks he’s a card.”
“The therapist didn’t think he was a card.”
“The therapist is a” — and I could see J. struggling to come up with a word bad enough to describe the therapist that wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t say it. I’d never heard J. say a bad word in the two months I’d known her — “dick wad,” she finally said. I laughed because I could tell that she had never used the words before and had probably only read them scrawled in the bathroom or on the bus. She pronounced “wad” like it rhymed with “sad.” I suddenly liked her a lot. I looked at her closely; I guess I’d never done that before. She was pretty. She wasn’t pretty like K. or Mother. But she was very pretty, even with the scar. I wondered, for the first time, where she’d gotten it. It looked like what happened when you fall asleep on the couch and the cushion leaves a mark on your cheek. Except that mark goes away, and hers obviously hadn’t.
“So,” she said, “can we go see your dad now?”
“What?” I said. “No.” I must have said “No” louder than I’d meant to, because J. took a step back. “I mean, you can’t.”
“Why not?” J. said. When she was with her dad, I’d kept waiting for her to touch her scar. She hadn’t, but she was touching it now. I felt bad that I was making her feel worse than her dad, who didn’t have any legs. But I didn’t want her to see my dad, not before I saw him myself. If I could be sure he would be doing better than the day before, if he was talking and stuff like that, then it would be different. But there was something in Mrs. C.’s “Oh, he’s still kicking!” that worried me. Suppose my dad was the same as when I’d left him the day before? Suppose he was worse? Suppose he was worse than J.’s father, who had no legs but who could at least tell jokes? Suppose he was just lying there? It wasn’t that I was ashamed of my dad; I was ashamed of myself, for not finding Exley yet, for not being able to help my dad yet. I made up my mind then that I didn’t want anyone to see my dad until I found Exley, which meant that the next person to see my dad besides me would have to be Exley. But I couldn’t tell J. all that, and so I said, “He’s not allowed visitors except for family.”
“Is he OK?”
“Oh, he’s OK,” I said. “He’s getting better. I’m sure you can come see him soon. Maybe in a week.”
“My dad might not be here in a week,” J. said. For a second I thought J. was saying that her dad might be dead in a week. But then I realized she meant they might let him leave the VA hospital and go home. Her face was shining now, and she’d stopped touching her zipper scar. I could tell she had stopped thinking about me and my dad and was thinking about hers again. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” she said, and then went back into her dad’s room.
AFTER THAT, I went to see my dad. The first floor was much quieter than the second, and I realized that’s what the first floor was for: for patients who didn’t make much noise. I walked into my dad’s room. The lights were dim. The Dixie cups were gone, which worried me a lot. My dad was still sleeping, and not kicking at all. Unlike J.’s father, he’d been shaved again. I wondered if they shaved everyone who couldn’t tell them he didn’t want to be shaved. I sat down next to my dad, put the back of my hand on his forehead. He’d always done that when I was sick and he wanted to see how hot I was. His forehead wasn’t slick anymore, but it was still cool. I wondered if he liked my hand there, whether it felt good, or whether it bugged him. Then I wondered if he felt anything at all, and if he didn’t, why did I even bother putting my hand on his forehead? So I took my hand away. But once you stop wondering about someone, it’s hard to stop yourself. And so I wondered how well I really knew my dad anymore. Do you miss having a beard, I wondered, or are you the kind of guy now who likes to shave, or at least likes to be shaved? What about the guy who punched Harold: would you be proud of me for not kicking him in the face, or would you be disappointed? Are you more like the Exley who wouldn’t hit kids, or like the Exley who hit a black guy and a white guy for walking together, the Exley who fantasized about hitting women, the Exley Mother hates so much? Or is it possible to be one and not the other? And what about K.: if I told you I’d been to her home and eaten her cookies, what would you say? Why did you leave us, Dad? Why did you join the army and go to Iraq? Why, after writing me that one letter, didn’t you write me again? What kind of dad are you? Are you the kind of dad who just lies there in your bed and doesn’t say anything to me, or are you the kind of dad who tells me knock-knock jokes? If you don’t wake up, would you mind, or even know, if I’d spent more time with J.’s father and less with you?
And then I felt terrible. I put my hand on my dad’s forehead again and told him I was sorry. I told him I was sorry for wishing he’d be more like J.’s dad, and I told him I was sorry for not finding Exley yet, too. Whenever I apologized to my dad before he went to Iraq, he always said, “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about, bud. You’re just a kid.” This was always why I apologized in the first place: so that he’d tell me I didn’t have to. This was why I said I was sorry in the hospital, too: so that he’d wake up and tell me I didn’t have to be. Please, I told my dad in my head, please wake up and tell me I don’t have to be sorry. But he didn’t, and I was.
Finally, I opened up the copy of A Fan’s Notes I’d brought with me and began reading it out loud. My dad didn’t wake up, but I kept reading it anyway. I read it OK. I didn’t sound like Exley, but I didn’t sound bad. Then I came to the part after Exley thinks he’s having a heart attack, but before Freddy takes him to the hospital, where he finds out he’s not. “You son of a bitch!” Exley said to himself. “I want to live!” I choked up a little when I read that. Because I realized that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want my dad to tell knock-knock jokes. I just wanted my dad to say what Exley had said and mean it. I wanted him to say, You son of a bitch! I want to live! But he wasn’t saying that; he was still sleeping. So I said it for him, and to him. “You son of a bitch!” I said. “I want you to live!” I kept saying it, over and over, louder and louder, until I hoped he got the message. Someone else on the floor might have gotten the message, too: I could hear shushing sounds coming from the hallway. So I lowered my voice and read the rest of chapter 1. When I was done, I left the book on the table. Then I kissed my dad good night, told him I loved him, and went home.
I Go to Bed without My Supper
I got home after Mother. It was around five o’clock. I walked into the kitchen. Her work clothes were everywhere: her suit jacket was crumpled in a ball on the floor by the stove; her shoes were lying sideways next to the fridge, where she’d kicked them. Her briefcase was on the counter. It was brown leather and had big dents and rips from where Mother had banged it against something.
Let me tell you about Mother’s job.
Mother was a lawyer who brought charges against soldiers who hurt their wives. Or husbands, I guess. But as far as I knew, Mother had never brought charges against someone who had hurt her husband. She had an office inside Fort Drum, but she didn’t work for the army, exactly. The government made the army set up an office and put someone like Mother in charge of it. It was clear, from what Mother had said, that the army didn’t want her or her office there. But they paid her salary anyway. Or the government did, because they paid for the army. It was confusing, at least to me. Maybe even to Mother. Maybe that’s why she was so angry all the time after work.
Mother stomped into the kitchen while I was still staring at her work things. She was wearing a gray T-shirt that said CORNELL — she’d gone to law school there — and no shoes, but she still had on her black pinstriped work pants. My dad always complained that even when Mother was home, some part of her was still at work. Maybe that explained the pants.
“It’s just unbelievable,” she said. This meant Mother was on a tear. I was glad. If she was on a tear, then maybe she wouldn’t ask why I was getting home after her, and where I’d been all afternoon.
“What is?” I said. But Mother didn’t answer. She opened a cabinet door, pulled out a pot, filled it with water, put it on the stove, and turned on the gas. Then she got out a glass and went to the liquor cabinet. This was just a regular cabinet in the kitchen where she happened to keep her liquor. It didn’t have a lock on it or anything. She pulled out her bottle of Early Times and filled half the glass with it. Then she drank half of what she’d poured.
“How am I supposed to run an office with only one person?” she said. She was a little breathless, maybe from the Early Times.
“I don’t know,” I said. I knew Mother used to work with another lawyer, but I didn’t know anything about him except that he was a him and had been fired or quit or something a little less than a year ago. Anyway, he wasn’t there anymore, which meant Mother was the only lawyer in her office.
“It’s garbage,” Mother said. “It means for a year I’ve been working two people’s cases instead of one.”
“Like what kind of cases?” I asked. Because I was interested. I’d never told Mother this, but I sometimes wondered if I might want to be a lawyer.
Mother reached back, yanked the rubber band off her hair. The hair fell to her shoulders and she mussed it up with the hand that wasn’t holding her drink. “This morning, I met with this woman with her head wrapped up. She had a concussion. This afternoon I met with the little fucker she’s married to. He was a big little fucker. His hand was in a cast. He’d broken it on her head.” Mother didn’t sound angry when she said this, though. She wasn’t like most people, who swore when they were angry. Mother only swore when she was tired. My dad also always said about Mother’s job, “Carrie, I don’t know how you do it.” I didn’t know, either. Which made me think I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. Being a lawyer meant you got tired. I never got tired reading. My eyes sometimes did, but I didn’t. “The thing is,” Mother said, “she doesn’t want to press charges.” Mother paused and nodded, as if she was hearing a voice in her head. “Because women are fucking stupid,” she said, as if the voice had asked her, Why?
The water in the pot started boiling. Mother finished the rest of her drink, put the glass on the counter, went to the cabinet, pulled out a box of macaroni, and dumped some of it in the pot. Her back was to me; she seemed to be looking at something in the pot. Suddenly she turned and asked, “Why did you get home so late today?”
“Huh?” I said.
“You got home after I did,” Mother said. Her eyes were narrow; her hands were on her hips. “Where were you this afternoon?”
I tried to think fast. I couldn’t say I was at Harold’s, studying, because that’s what I told Mother I was doing every Tuesday night, when I was teaching my dad’s class at the college. I couldn’t tell her the whole truth — that I’d been visiting my dad at the VA hospital — because she would say I was making it up, just like I’d made up my dad’s letter, just like I’d made up my dad going to Iraq in the first place, just like I was behind the phone call she got from the VA hospital two weeks ago. So I decided to tell a lie that, if I’d said it the day before, would have been the truth. “I was at the doctor’s,” I said.
Mother was still squinting at me. I didn’t say I’d been at Dr. Pahnee’s because she didn’t know about Dr. Pahnee; as far as Mother knew, I was still seeing the first doctor. They were in the same practice, and so Mother wrote the checks out to the same place. After I made the first doctor refer me to Dr. Pahnee, I’d asked Dr. Pahnee if I should tell Mother I’d switched doctors. “Better not tell her,” Dr. Pahnee had said. So I hadn’t. “But you see him on Wednesdays,” she said.
“He said I could see him other times, too,” I said. “Whenever I needed to.”
Mother walked over to me and squatted. She used to do this when I was younger, and smaller, so she could be at eye level with me. Except I was bigger now, so her eyes looked right into my chin. This seemed to surprise her, and she stood up straight, which was probably more comfortable for both of us.
“Why did you need to see him today?” she asked. Her voice was full of concern, and in it I heard an opportunity. I didn’t think I could ask Mother what I wanted to, which was: You know my dad went to Iraq. Why won’t you say so? You got a call from the VA hospital. Why won’t you tell me you got that call? Why don’t you believe that he’s there? Why don’t you go visit him? Because if I asked these direct questions, Mother would be able to say that she didn’t know any of that, and that neither did I, and I should stop making things up. So I decided to try something else.
“I just had a question,” I said. “And I needed the doctor to answer it.”
“Did he?”
“He told me he wasn’t the one who should answer the question,” I said. “He said you should.”
“Answer what question?”
I drew a breath and said, “Why couldn’t my dad have gone to Iraq?”
I thought Mother was standing straight before. But she somehow straightened up even more. She put her hands back on her hips. She became more like a mother, in other words. I didn’t like the change, and I don’t think Mother liked it, either: she had a pained look on her face, like she was preparing to swallow something gross. I sometimes wondered if Mother actually wasn’t a “Mother,” not really, except for the times my dad and I made her into one. “Miller,” she said, “we’ve talked about this.”
