Beaks Benedict
by
Ms. Gonick
Who
knew I wouldn’t meet my first man until I was in my late
forties? Not I. I thought that I’d met all kinds of them—I’d
even lived with a few—and that having entered the crone zone
(that one-way boulevard all women who don’t die first must
travel), I’d given them up for good. Ha! That’s like thinking
you’ve given up chocolate when all you ever tasted was carob. If
you don’t know what carob is, just ask a hippie. Don’t ask a
man, though. Do not ask Mack.
I was taking my
octogenarian parents out for their midmorning hobble the day we
met Mack just outside his ranch. I hadn’t even known they lived
near a ranch until I became their unqualified caregiver and sort
of moved myself into their house. That’s the joy of being a
writer; it’s a job you can fail at from anywhere. I didn’t even
need to bring my computer, just my toothbrush, notebook, and
hair shirt. Since caregiving is a job you can’t
succeed
at from anywhere
(Nature, let’s face it, is working against you), a hair shirt
makes the best uniform.
With a parent’s arm
hooked onto each elbow, I inched them slowly down the big road
that event-ually led to a T by a fence. When you’re over eighty
(or just new to the crone zone), it helps to have a destination
that precedes the big D, and for us it was the goats who lived
at (no pun intended) the end of the road. Since it helps to have
a purpose as well, I decreed ours to be bringing them lunch.
When she’s not working against you, Nature also works for you,
by providing odd animals for oldsters to feed. That was my
thinking, anyway. My dad was recovering from an obnoxious back
surgery, my mom from an even more obnoxious post-traumatic
stress disorder (she’d lost thirty pounds after driving her car
through a restaurant’s front window), and
my
purpose was to get
them to feel better fast. Or just to act as though they felt
better, so that I could.
“Yer gonna git yer
hand chewed off,” said a male voice as my father stuck the first
of his carrots into the lunatic face of a goat.
“I’d like to see
him try it!” retorted my father. He didn’t know who he was
talking to, but since when do retired attorneys care about that?
The point for them is the talking. No, in fact, the point is the
arguing. This was the itchiest hair on my shirt—
his constant
refuting of whatever I said, even if I just said, “Hello.”
“Naw. You gotta do
it like this,” said the voice, and that’s when I thought I saw
Yosemite Sam—a flesh-and-blood version—heading our way. Gently
but firmly, he broke the carrot into small pieces, flattened my
dad’s palm, and lay the pieces on it.
“This way he can
slurp it right up,” he explained.
The goat indeed
slurped it up.
“Kinda tickles,
don’t it?” he said.
Don’t it?
I thought.
But my father was
giggling. I mean it. Giggling.
“Wanna try it,
ma’am?” Yosemite said then to my mother. The sun on his belt
buckle blinded us both,
it being the size
of a Buick.
My mother, who says
no to everything always,
could not even
utter the word. She just backed away in testosterone horror. I
was afraid she was going to
fall down right
there, but Yosemite caught her up
by the waist.
“All righty, then,”
he said, with a nod. Then he turned this smile on me. “Kin I
borrow yer dad fer
a minute?”
“What for?” I asked
suspiciously.
“His name’s Harry,”
my mother said, finding her voice.
“Mine’s Mack,” he
replied. “Say, Harry, wanna come feed my horse?” He might as
well have asked if my dad wanted to visit Europe again, or go to
a strip club, or whatever it is that men over eighty still want
to do. Harry gave Mack his arm and they trundled uphill.
“Don’t hurt him!” I
yelled at their backs.
“Relax, daughter,”
he yelled.
Daughter?
“I’ll have him
back home in twenty.”
You arrogant twit,
I thought.
“You don’t know
where we live!” I yelled.
“Don’t Harry?” he
yelled.
Oh, right. I could
hear Harry already, starting to
tell Mack a
limerick, one that I’d heard maybe six thousand times, and I
was, I just realized, for once being spared. The next thing I
heard was Mack laughing, then this question shouted over his
shoulder: “You gals like fresh eggs?”
His shoulder, too,
was the size of a Buick. Both of them were. They were
frightening.
“Sure, who don’t?”
I shouted back.
“Fresh eggs,” mused
my mother, who’d not eaten breakfast since the day she’d made
headlines crashing into the restaurant. Its shattered window had
made so much noise raining down on her car she’d thought she’d
been caught in a spontaneous hailstorm—in Minnesota,
unfortunately, which is not where we live. Now she tugged at my
arm. “Is there bacon at home?” The last bacon she’d bought had
turned motley green, as had everything else in their fridge
before I’d tossed it in horror, except for the greens, which had
turned motley black. I told her I hadn’t bought bacon since.
“I’ve got some,”
yelled Mack from the top of the hill. I swear, I thought I had
just heard from God. And when I turned around and saw that Mack
had gotten Harry—Harry who’d been felled by sciatica and just
resurrected—on top of a horse, I knew that I had. Or from the
devil, depending on whether Harry fell off or not.
“Don’t look,” I
told my mother, and we both hobbled home. When I say Mack was
the first man I’d met, do I mean I don’t have a man for a
father? No, Harry’s a man, all right, but as a sports-phobic
Jewish lawyer violinist, he was never a man of American legend.
Or, if he was, it was not the same American legend evoked by
Mack’s double negatives and cowboy boots. Not that this legend
had ever attracted me; I thought it illiterate, uncultured,
and base and only
liked men who seemed, well, “evolved.” My father, for instance,
was too evolved
to bother with car
maintenance, which is why, before he gave me a car he no longer
drove, he didn’t get a mechanic to check it out first.
“Did you know this
car has almost no brakes left?”
a boy who was
driving it asked me.
“Oh,” I said. “Is
it supposed to?”
I should have
married that boy, whoever he was,
but I probably
thought he cared too much about car brakes to be a good match
for me. I wanted men to be handsome and word smart and to have,
like me,
a vacuum for
values. And so they did, which is why
it really wasn’t so
painful ending up all alone in the crone zone. Did I really miss
being with men who made fun of Anaïs Nincompoop’s husband
because they revered Henry Miller? No, I was better off sneaking
Ensure into piña coladas to keep my mother from wasting away and
playing Scrabble incessantly to keep my father from telling me
limericks. At least I was doing someone some good before I met
my own big D at the end of my personal crone zone. I’d even
rewritten my epitaph. Instead of saying, “She Loathed Henry
Miller,” it’d say: “She Drove Her Parents to Their Doctors’
Appointments.”
And that might help
make up for the rest of the mess.
How macho was Mack?
Macho enough to pick up my father’s forty-ton desk and move it
across the room without help. And then, after Harry decided the
first location really was better, to move it back without
showing impatience. Every time he went out of our house he took
the garbage out with him, and every time he came in he found
something to fix and then fixed it. He’d either been, or still
was, a trapper and skinner of bears, boxer and bouncer,
reform-school graduate turned rodeo cowboy, high-rise
construction worker, master carpenter, and search-and-rescue
team volunteer. He’d never heard of Shakespeare or Freud, never
mind that wuss, Henry Miller. Depending on the decade, he’d been
stabbed, beaten, pulverized, hospitalized, divorced, or
aban-doned, yet all of his daughters drove cars with good
brakes. He himself owned and drove about six hundred vehicles
(campers, horse trailers, motor-cycles, the inevitable pickup
truck), including an enormous red convertible Cadillac that
looked, when driven, like a traveling blood clot. Which sort of
made sense since that was the car Mack used to drive my parents
to their doctors’ appointments. Noting that I was a complete
nervous wreck, he thought I should sit in back with my mother
instead of up front, where, as soon as my father started a
limerick, I’d lose my mind and kill everyone.
I re-revised my
epitaph: “Mack Drove Her Parents to Their Doctors’ Appointments.
But Remember This: He Did It for Her.”
I was not one iota
attracted to him. His utter indifference to the written word not
only repulsed me, it scared me. Also, he was a born-again
Christian (Harry was the “first Jew” he’d ever met), and, dare
I say it, he’d
voted for Bush. Then there was the Yosemite Sam situation.
That’s how I still saw him: as a cartoon. Plus, he’d spent his
whole life with his face in the sun and looked, to me, like
Yosemite Senior.
I would just as
soon have kissed his heinous red rooster, the one responsible
for the fresh eggs that
he had, as
promised, brought back with Harry the first day we’d met.
“Fry ’em up,
daughter,” he’d said, indicating the sea of bacon grease he
already had sizzling in a pan on our stove. My parents were
conked out in the living room.
“Stop calling me
that,” I’d said in a snit, sure he’d just crippled my father for
life. Then I broke an egg open over the grease and screamed.
There were streaks of blood and a quasi-formed beak.
“Good God, it’s
Rosemary’s baby,” I said.
That’s when he’d
told me he was a Christian and preferred my not taking the
Lord’s name in vain.
“Shut up,” I said,
cracking another egg open, only to see more blood and beak. I
thanked God my mother was sleeping, because if she’d been
watching, her appetite would have been squelched for all time.
“Now what?” I said,
looking at Mack.
“Hard to say,” he
said, shrugging. “Beaks Benedict?”
It was the hardest
I’d ever laughed in that kitchen, except for the time my lentil
soup exploded because
I hadn’t covered
the blender, and then I’d been drunk on piña coladas. I loathe
all sports and outdoor endeavors, but he taught me to ride a
horse anyway. I guess I figured I was so old already that it
didn’t matter if it stepped on my head. What was I going
to miss? My own
future case of sciatica? Losing my license when I, too, drove
through a restaurant, except that I, having forgotten to marry
or have children, would then have to take the bus by myself,
where young thugs would thrash me with my own walker?
What was so bad
about the big D anyway? Mack seemed to have no problem with it.
He showed me, on horseback, where all the dead in his family
were buried, including three of his dogs. His living dog, Betty,
an Australian shepherd, was bouncing around us ecstatically.
“And Betty’s going
right here,” he said, pointing
to the tree under
which Betty’s mom was facing eternity. “Shh,” I said, pointing
to Betty, whose
ears were both up
and alert as she herded the daisies.
“Betty?” said Mack.
“Ah, she don’t know nothin’.”
“She
Don’t Know Nothin”,
I mused,
re-re-revising my epitaph. Or was it better to say: “She Didn’t
Know Nothin”? Or: “By the Time She Knew Somethin, It Was Too
Late”? It’s the ultimate writing assignment.
“What’s wrong?” he
asked me. “Why ain’tcha talkin’?” “I’m wondering what to put on
my tombstone. What are you going to put?”
“Thanks for a Great
Time,” he said.
Once, before Harry
got rid of his prostate cancer, my boyfriend, the one who liked
Henry Miller, had asked me, in all seriousness: “What
is
it exactly about
your dad having cancer that upsets you so much?”
Shall we pause a
moment to parse that sentence in hopes of understanding its
meaning? Note the italicized
is.
Note the adverb
exactly.
Note Mack pointing out his from his horse exactly where
they’d buried his
own dad a year ago.
“Sometimes I wish
he was back here beatin’ me up again,” he said.
Note the clarity in
that
crystalline sentence, the ability of the man who’d not been to
college to wrap both arms around contradiction. The only reason
I slept with him was that my mother and I had a fight about
flashlights. After their power went out in a rainstorm, I’d
bought two flashlights, one to put beside each of their beds. My
mother yelled at me for spending the money. “I have no need of
flashlights,” she said.
Maybe it was the
way she phrased it. Maybe it was my baby picture hanging over
her bed, the one where I looked like Harry S. Truman, destined
to be single forever, buying things for which no one had need.
Maybe it was just the word
need.
Whatever it was, I hurled the flashlight into a wall and then
stomped, like a teenager, out of the house. I went down the
road, took a right at the goats, a left at the gate, and found
Mack disinfecting the head of a mule who’d walked right into a
wall of her own. “My mother hates me,” I told him.
“No, she don’t,” he
said.
“Yeah, she do. I
threw a flashlight at her.”
He put a hand on my
shoulder. “Good girl,” he said. I still wasn’t attracted to
him, and when I saw the tattoos on his aqueduct biceps, I was
even less attracted than ever, but since compulsion follows
rules of its own, this did not interfere with the sex.
The sex—I’m too old
to talk about it. Suffice it to say that as soon as we “had” it,
or indeed “it” had us, he was the cutest, sweetest man in the
world, my first taste of chocolate after aeons of carob, my
first golden light after decades of darkness with educated men
who knew nothing from nothing.
I signed off as my
parents’ unqualified caregiver and signed on as their
unqualified caregiver slut. The hair shirt flew off, and on flew
the sundress, perfume, and mascara. I was a high school crone,
sneaking my boyfriend into my bedroom when my parents weren’t
looking, and for once I thanked God they were virtually deaf.
Did I worry that they’d fall on their heads while I was out with
Mack on a big bale of hay? I did not. I worried I’d fall on
my
head and meet
the big D before I was ready. Now that I had a real man to grow
old with, I hoped I’d never be ready. Unless he, too, was ready,
at which point I wanted us to slip under twin tombstones next to
all his dead dogs. I was utterly overtaken by tenderness for
him. You know what I mean: I wanted to see all his baby pictures
and suck all the poison from his turquoise tattoos. I even
stopped revising my epitaph.
If you’re looking
for a happy ending, read Sara Davidson’s novel
Cowboy.
I happened to, later, and I just about puked because its
epilogue (it was more of a rearranged memoir than novel) said
that five years later they—the writer and the cowboy with
nothing in common—were still together and happy. But I have an
epilogue, too: Five years later, after my
dad
got his turn at
crashing (and this time totaling) the car, I moved them into a
retirement home and returned to my own “home” back in the city.
Mack and I kept seeing each other, but since I was in love and
he, well, wasn’t, it began to be more torture than fun. Which
might be fine when you’re stupid and young but is arduous work
for a bona fide crone.
My parents like
where they’re living. Their meals are prepared for them, my mom
still has no appetite, and I cross the bay to have lunch with
them at least every Sunday. Sometimes Mack joins us and then
takes my father to Target. It’s not that he found somebody
“better” (well, probably it is, and I just don’t know it), but
that, despite his seeming invincibility, even he can’t stand
getting his life smashed again. But isn’t that what they all say
when, in the horrible parlance of that odious book, they’re
“just not that
into
you”?
I hate that
expression. I hate horses, too, now, every last one of them,
plus all mules and goats and chickens with beaks, but I can say
without flinching that I do still love Mack. So what if we have
nothing in common? I don’t think I even know what that means;
all I know is that, even now, just seeing him makes me feel
grateful and new. As for my epitaph, I’m no longer revising it;
I’m not even getting a tombstone. I’m going for cremation, first
chance I get, and my urn’s not going to say a damn thing.
