"Why don't you ever do anything you say you'll do'! He slams his fist onto the table and I jump. "I got a phone call today that the phone bill hasn't been paid again. Do I need to take over the bills now, too?

"Stop it, would you? I do what I say!" I could feel my throat tightening around stifled words I want to scream. "You can't say I don't do anything I say I'll do."

"Oh, let's not get caught up in that semantic crap. You don't do what you say and you know it."

"Yes I do! I can't even talk to you when you get like this. Look, I'm sorry the bill wasn't paid. I'll pay it, alright?

"I already did. You know, you're such a child. I can't depend on you for anything and I'm sick of it."

"Stop it". Now I scream it. My hands are shaking and all I want to do is to throw something across the room. "I don't deserve this. I missed a bill but it doesn't ive you license to talk to me like this." Tears break through the barriers and stream down both cheeks. "I'm leaving now. I'll pay the bill tomorrow".

"Sure, leave like you always do - just like your mother."

The slam of the door, my reply.

She books the flight not quite sure if she'll actually leave, working hard to turn joy into nonchalance. She isn't alone completely. Her boyfriend is away from home but his constant phone calls make his presence felt.

"We can’t do this, not now," he says.

"I know," she replies, wanting to mean it - wanting more than anything else to please him.

She makes the flight and is picked up by her mother, light cramps accompanying her during the drive to the house where she grew up.

"Don’t do it". She hears the thought like a voice. Was this the voice hidden in the cramps? The sound invades all her thoughts and even as she sits with her mother at home, and then later in the waiting room, she ignores it.The little pill the nurse gives her doesn't even silence it completely, only the anesthesia does.

When she awakes it is another voice she hears; her unborn child asking, "why did you kill me?"

I open my eyes and try to place the sound. Bump. Slide-bump. Slide-bump. Slide-bump. Eleven of them and then the familiar squeak of the front door. It’s suitcases being brought outside after being dragged down the stairs by my mother, to weak to lift them and too independent to ask for help from my father. The sound begins again.

I smile like it’s Christmas morning and bolt upright, alive with anticipation. Excited feet meet carpet and I rush to my dresser where my clothes have been neatly folded for 3 days. It seems I’m in my clothes in practically one move and racing to landing I catch luggage disappearing behind a closing front door.

I spy through the front window that my mother, who had been packing the car has had to get my father after all because all the luggage wasn’t fitting right. My dad has removed what luggage was in there and now refills the trunk in a more logical configuration, making sure to glance over at my mother several times, with eyes narrowed, until he’s sure she’s seen him. I stay inside wrapped in darkness behind the piano. I don’t say anything when he returns and stomps back upstairs. He hasn’t seen me. I’m glad.

We’re going to Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, our yearly family vacation destination, except my father isn’t going with us. He never does. It’s more like our everyone-but-my father family vacation destination. I don’t know why dad doesn’t come with us or why my mother never urges him to join us. When I do ask her if dad can come she squints her eyes and asks sharply why I’m not just thankful to be going at all. She plays the guilt card like a pro and I usually drop it after that.
"You know the restaurant is open this week and your dad can’t just leave it. You know your father. Someone might try to rip him off on a food delivery." She rolls her eyes and smirks and I know I’m supposed to say something like "yah, I know" and chuckle about his paranoia but I don’t say anything or change my expression.

After an awkward silence she adds, "Besides dad is going to paint the house yellow while we’re away. I think you’ll like the colour, sort of like the yellow in your room. It will be done by the time we get back." It’s all the explanation I’m going to get. I’m relieved when she asks me to wake up my sisters.
I think about what she said and try to understand but it doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, after all it’s a chance to go on vacation, stay in a hotel, swim in a huge pool with a slide, and if we’re lucky hang out on a balcony overlooking the pool instead of the parking lot. Mostly, it’s a chance to be a real family. I’ve come to realize he’s just not supposed to join us and I’m not supposed to ask.

My mother is the one who plans our vacations and always chooses times when the restaurant is still be open. She could choose different weeks, at least that’s what dad told me. The restaurant does close for two weeks every summer. She could choose those weeks. No matter what my mother says we all secretly blame her for leaving dad out of the plan and confess to each other in conspiratorial whispers how mean it is of her.

In a little while, after we’ve finished blowing kisses to my dad from the car windows and the house is too far behind to see if he’s still watching, my sisters and I will look from one to the other silently acknowledging that it’s wrong that he’s not here.

My older sister told me it’s really because mom doesn’t want to have to sleep in the same bed as dad and that’s why he’s never invited because they’d have to sleep in the same bed. It sort of makes sense because she did make him move out of their bedroom a long time ago and now has their big bed all to herself.

All I know is that dad now sleeps in the half room, mom got their big bad and we only go on vacations with my mother.

The half-room is the one my sister and I used as a homework room after the addition was put on. There is only room for a single bed a desk and a dresser. I nicknamed it the dungeon and my sisters and I sometimes snicker that the queen has sent the king to the dungeon as punishment. We never name the crime.

I peek in sometimes to see how dreary the room looks because I’m so amazed at how different it is from when my sister and I shared it. Circles of tape once secured our art creations to the walls, leaving few empty places. When the addition was finished we moved our desks and creations in to our own rooms and no longer needed the half-room. Chipped paint, the only evidence of masterpieces once attached there. Bright yellow smiley faces still cling to spots here and there along the pink window trim. I don’t know why I feel the need to sneak a look into the dungeon or why I’d keep doing it when it always makes me sad.

Besides the bare, tortured walls dirty clothes now lie in a heap under the window where my desk once was. I’m embarrassed to see my father’s underwear lying on the top. The room smells exactly as I imagine a dungeon might smell with stale air and a sour odor like hair in need of washing. It’s dark like a dungeon, too, with only one small window that never gets direct sun because of the large trees behind the house.

The smell, the laundry: these reinforce for me that mom isn’t taking good enough care of dad and I’ve begun to assume that when they yell at each - when I climb out of bed to put my ear to the carpet, straining to catch the gist of the argument floating up through the floor boards, that the argument is probably my mom’s fault. Most mornings I come downstairs to see that my dad has slept on the couch again. Only recently have I realized he sleeps in his clothes.

Yesterday I sneaked into his room when I knew he’d be at the restaurant and began rummaging through his desk. I found this photo of my dad looking much thinner than he does now and staring contentedly out of the picture. He was sitting on top of my grandmother’s fence and the muscles on his forearms were strained, like he was trying not to fall off. He had written with thick marker in his left-handed, all capital style, "how young I look". He really did, too, like another person almost, except that it was still his face and hair and slouching shoulders.

It wasn’t the thinner physique however, that made him look like a different person. It was his eyes. They were the same intelligent, questioning eyes I recognized but they weren’t yet cynical. The light had not yet retreated from them. They still looked hopeful and alive, like he still saw it all as worthwhile. To his words I wanted to add, "and how happy".

I sneaked the picture out of the room to show my sisters and we passed it between us, studying it again and again, amazed at how much he’d changed. None of us mentioned his eyes.

Copyright © 2004 Pamela Hamilton

In sickness and in health
My footsteps, hard and even, echo through the hallway, announcing my arrival, as I climb the white marble stairs to the third floor where my grandmother lives. The stairs have been polished to the point of being slippery and I imagine the sting I’d feel if I fell on them. I wonder how my grandmother manages to check her mailbox each day without falling.

I knock and wait, imaging my grandmother's feet shuffling over creaks and carpet as she approaches the door. I wonder if she’s heard me and am about to knock again when I hear the unlatching of locks and latches. She never uses the door’s lookout hole so I wonder what good all those locks and latches do when she just opens the door, anyway. I can’t wait to see her face.

Directly across the hall from my grandmother’s apartment used to live my grandmother's friend, Vera, who went home one night from my grandmother's apartment saying she was tired and thought she'd turn in early. She died that very night in her sleep. That was four years ago. It was my grandmother who discovered Vera's body the next morning after she hadn't arrived for morning tea. I hope my grandmother will tell me the story at some point during today's visit as she does during almost all of our visits. She tells it as if I’ve never heard it before and each time I hear it I’m as fascinated by the story as I am by her face when she tells it - somewhere between shock and divulging a secret. She always ends with "her toes were so cold". I don't care that I've already heard it a hundred times, I want to hear it again just to see my grandmother's expression when she says that. I feel more like a friend than a granddaughter at that moment and I’m proud she’s decided to divulge her secret to me.

I never tell my grandmother that it wasn't the fact that poor Vera died suddenly in her sleep that I think is so tragic but that she spent the five years prior to her death acting as the primary care giver to her feeble husband who was 20 years her senior. In fact, it seems to me she spent most of her adult life taking care of him in one way or another: first as his secretary, then as his wife and stepmother to his children and finally, as his sole care provider after a stroke that took away his ability walk and severely diminished his ability to talk. Within two weeks of Vera's death one of his daughter's moved him into a nursing home.

The last time I visited my grandmother I did tell her that I secretly blamed Vera’s family for her death, for not moving her husband into a nursing home sooner. What she told me surprised me and taught me an important lesson about marriage. It turns out that Vera had refused to have him moved into a nursing home and, against her step-children’s wishes, chose to take care of him herself rather than hire a visiting nurse. Vera’s step-children actually helped her as much as they could but she did the daily work of washing him, changing his bed pan, dressing and undressing him, patiently listening to him as he tried to communicate his thoughts , repeating her own so he’d understand, and probably the most important, holding his hand. That’s the one thing that amazes my grandmother the most: when she visited Vera and her husband at their apartment she’d watch Vera take a seat by her husband and take his hand in hers and they’d sit there like that the entire visit. Vera spent the last five years of her life doing exactly what she wanted to be doing - loving her husband.

I figure my grandmother will talk about her beloved Tom, my grandfather, who died three years ago. She still hasn't forgiven herself for putting him into a nursing home when she could no longer care for him herself. Maybe she compares herself to Vera and regrets not keeping him at home but the truth is she couldn’t keep him home any longer. I’m sure she understands this on some level.

She’ll probably repeat the story to me about the premonition she felt the day my grandfather went out for a walk to buy stamps on an unusually foggy day and how she had warned him that if he went out in the fog something awful would happen. The 20-yr.-old girl whose car hit him was appropriately distraught over the incident and stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. She even called periodically to see how he was doing, which lasted for about a year. I can’t blame her for moving on.

My grandfather's body was never the same after the accident. A brittle diabetic, his bones just never healed completely, the broken hip and femur never again able to support his weight without aid. I remember how he'd walk for hours supporting himself with two white-knuckled hands that gripped the wheeled walker. Into the kitchen and then back toward the foyer, one agonizing step after another, he’d walk this circuit in silence, his face grimacing with determination.

Whatever benefit it was to his legs was cancelled by the damage to both hands, which went completely numb, their nerves permanently damaged from practically carrying him through each painful step. My grandmother would shake her head in pity as she watched him travel back and forth and reminded him every now and then that she had warned him not to go out that day. I thought I detected an 'I told you so' sort of tone in her voice but it could have just been the continual shock of seeing him so debilitated. Maybe she said it like that because she was still trying to accept that the accident had happened at all, as if she was replaying the day in her mind. I never heard my grandfather respond. He just kept on walking. When he died I was glad to know he'd finally be free from the pain.

I imagine that today my grandmother will again cry when she talks about putting him into a nursing home. I will remind her how he hardly realized he was there because she so dutifully visited him every day, arriving in time for breakfast and leaving after 8pm at night. She’ll probably end the story the same way she always does, telling me that the heart and soul of marriage is the promise each person makes to the other. "In sickness and in health" she’ll tell me, adding, "when I married Tom I made him that promise."

And she kept it, just like Vera.

I received notice that my essay "With an inner critic like that" has been accepted by The WriteGallery (www.theWriteGallery.com) and will be posted in the online Winter 2004/2005 Literary Update in late January, 2005! Feel free to read it by clicking on the September link in the Archives section of my blog.