By Liz Roddin
PROMPT — What is Love?
He did love the sun at the end; it was October, and we had a lucky day – sunny and warm with just a little breeze. I helped him put a jacket on and wheeled him out onto the patio.
He wouldn’t look at me, and I had long since stopped trying to drum up conversation when he didn’t seem interested. The louder I’d drum, the more he would retreat; but sometimes, when I forced myself to keep quiet, he would emerge, turn toward me, ask a question, maybe two, and we would make some sort of connection.
He wouldn’t look and wouldn’t talk, but he would eat. Spoon by spoon, he was making a dent in the pint of Haagen Dazs butter pecan I’d brought. Almost begrudgingly, he’d open his mouth as I placed the spoon to his lips. We went on like that for 10 or 15 minutes, me spooning the ice cream into his mouth, him sitting and barely opening it, looking out into the garden, looking down, looking away. It wasn’t always like this. As he ate, I thought of other days.
I was swimming through his legs at West Neck Beach when I was six or seven.
It was a weekend, and I climbed in the truck to go on service calls with him when he went to fix someone’s air conditioning.
I was four or five, in the basement with him when he was getting ready to go hunting in Maine for a week. I was begging to go with him, so enamored of his company.
I was nine, and the doctor was setting my broken arm, the second one in four months. As he pushed and pulled to line up the fracture, Dad rushed out to the front porch. I thought nothing of it, but the doctor looked worried.
“Is he okay?” he asked my mother.
“He’s fine. He just can’t stand to see his little girl in pain.”
I was ten, and we were on our boat, and Dad and Mom were teaching me to water ski. I’d give him the signal, and he would open the engine just the right amount, but I fell every single time. It was a good thing they were patient teachers because it took me all summer to learn.
I was 14, and he sat down on my bed to tell me that he, like his dad who had died four years earlier, had diabetes. “Does that mean you’re gonna die?” I asked, crying. And he sat very close and explained that if he took care of himself, he could live for a long time.
We were saying goodbye when he and my mom took me to college. He hugged me and told me, “Don’t change.”
He was walking me down the aisle in my wedding dress, and he was smiling and holding on but not too tightly.
He was holding my hours-old son, and they were gazing into each other’s eyes. I was telling him maybe he’d like to bring his grandson hunting with him one day. He looked down then, something like the way he was today, and he said, “Yeah, but by the time he’s ready, I’ll be too old.”
He met me at the emergency room and said, “Mommy had a stroke, a bad one.” She lived only two weeks, leaving him on his own at 69. He managed quite a while, but time, diabetes, and some bad habits finally caught up with him.
Mouthful after mouthful, I thought of all the times he’d brought us to Carvel, Baskin Robbins, or Herman and Rey’s. He loved ice cream, and his four daughters all followed his lead. We loved it, too. Maybe it was because of the sweetness and the smooth consistency, but perhaps it was also because of the time we spent eating it together. He was always saying, “Someday, I’m gonna go into Baskin Robbins and get 31 scoops, one of each flavor.” He never actually did it, but that fantasy never died. Being allowed to take in a pint of Haagen Dazs at one sitting was the closest he ever got, and he could do that now, now that he had lost so much weight, now that he had an appetite for very little.
But today, he seemed to be eating his favorite flavor in spite of himself. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it, didn’t seem to be enjoying anything, yet ate the melting cream anyway. Better than nothing, I supposed. I read his silence as a sullen anger, a bitter disappointment that his life was ending, and here he was in the place he never wanted to go, a nursing home, sitting with one of the people he’d thought would take him in when he could no longer take care of himself.
On the day he was admitted to the nursing home, I had wheeled him outside to the garden, and he looked around, turned to me, and said, “You expect me to get used to this goddamned place?”
“Yes,” I answered, looking into his disbelieving eyes, exhausted. There was no good answer – not for him and not for me; it just was where we found ourselves. As I left that day, the receptionist said something consoling and friendly, and I blurted out, “This is the worst day of my life!” and left, sobbing. This was something my dad dreaded but never really anticipated, and I wondered if he would ever talk to my sisters or me again.
That had been three years earlier, and now he was a shell of even the guy he was when he was admitted. His memory, physical ability, and enthusiasm had all dwindled in those years. His heart was failing – as much emotionally as physically – and he was often withdrawn, angry, and perhaps anxious.
The pint of ice cream was getting low, and we still hadn’t spoken. As I spooned, I looked at his downcast eyes and decided I would say something. “I love you, Dad.”
“Huh?” His head lifted, and he leveled a stare at me.
“I LOVE YOU,” I mouthed. He saw it that time more than he heard it, and he looked down and ahead, staring. Ever so weakly, it appeared, the smallest of small closed-lip smiles. And his eyes somehow softened as his head ever so faintly nodded. And when he was ready for his next bite, he looked up into my eyes, relaxed his shoulders, and opened his mouth wide. Sitting in the warm sunshine, he ate the rest of the pint, and he began to talk to me, the anger somehow melted with the ice cream into our memories and our bond, how ever imperfect.
Liz Roddin is a a writer, wife, mom, and former tutor and teacher. She lives with her husband and their dog. Liz writes from Stony Brook, NY.
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