Lithium for Medea

3

“Go see your father,” Francine said to the mirror, making her eyes big, making her mouth red. “It’s a bad night. The night before the hospital. I’ll check him in tomorrow.”

“You will?”

“Of course.” Her tone was sharp and offended. She stared at me. “Do you actually think I’d let the old man die alone? After what he did for me?” My mother shook her head. “He took me off the streets. The bars with pimps and hookers. The hunger. The last foster family the state sent me to had three sons-in-law. It wasn’t a family. It was two solid months at a gang bang.”

My mother looked pale and tired. Her face was drawn tight and strained. Her skin seemed too thin. The proposed star of her new series had broken both legs in a car crash. He might never walk again. Her private secretary had eloped without giving two weeks notice. The calls were piled up, a stack of small square yellow slips. New York. Newspapers. San Francisco. London. Boston. Chicago. She tapped her fingers against the stack of paper.

“Kid, you don’t know what bonds are,” Francine pronounced. “I’ve loved that man for thirty years. He’s been a father and a lover to me, a husband and a friend.” Francine studied me as if I were oddly out of proportion, as if I had a scar or birthmark she had never seen before.

“You look terrible. Go clean yourself up before you see him.”

In my mother’s bathroom, with the special imported large round mirror bordered by fist-sized coral-colored sea shells, I improvised. I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the bathtub, tied my arm off with my mother’s bathrobe belt and shot up. I put the needle away. I stood up and the dull haze lifted. The room sparkled gold and radiant, seething and alive. The room was composed entirely of tiny orangy bulbs like brain cells. Each was distinct, each blinked open and closed. Within my body, a billion cells moaned, oh, thank you, thank you. I brushed my long hair. I ran the cold-water tap and patted cold water against my cheeks and forehead.

“You look much better,” my mother observed.

The telephone rang. Francine was leaning on one elbow. She didn’t seem to be looking at anything, not her face in the globe of mirror or even her tan and cream walls in the distance. She held the telephone receiver absently, running her fingertips across a stack of papers. She seemed exhausted. And part of me wanted to scream, Francine, Mother, abandoned, victorious, montage of babble, travel, swish of silk and hissing, the snake beneath the rock, absolved, holy asp, slow down, slow down.

“Yeah, I read the script.” Pause. “You make the whole world sound like poison. Can’t you find something pretty?” Pause. “How the fuck would I know? The Huntington Gardens? A new seal at Marineland? The goddamned sailboats?” my mother was saying as I closed her front door.

I drove to my father’s house, the house where we had once lived together as a family. Once this house was my anchor, unchanging. Once my world was neatly contained between Pico, Olympic and Santa Monica boulevards. I knew the special seasons of West Los Angeles, seasons of white hot or stinging red at Christmas, lights strung on poles, glitter in the palms and the shopwindows brushed with machine frost. Dusks were a cold splinter at my back as I walked home from the school bus, the deformed sun dissolving above me and spitting sick orange blood on the pavement, the poinsettias, and the cats just fed and exiled to side streets with trimmed bushes.

Slowly I walked up the small hill, a hump struggling from the curb and covered with the thinning ivy my father planted. I glanced at the rounded sides of orange tiles on the low-domed garage roof. The roof was jammed with old newspapers, red rubber bands strangling their throats. They were tossed there by little boys on bicycles who knew better than to stop. Watch out for them, the neighbors cautioned, their midnight shouting, the sounds of things breaking. They’re not our kind. Be careful.

I followed the narrow gorge of steep cement carved between house and ivy to the sliding glass back door. There had been long bad years, when my father was draped in a silence, when he sat alone, strangely fermenting. The years when he seemed to suck in all the air around him and give birth to vacuums, to cursing, my mother and father fighting, my father with the veins in his neck throbbing and his fist balled up tight and breaking a window.

There were the bad years, waiting for my mother to come home from work, the sound of her high heels on sun-baked cement, her arms wrapped around folders, free-lance assignments. She would pull the glass doors apart and sink into the closest chair, exhausted, pouring Scotch and eating scrambled eggs alone. My father would be watching baseball or hockey on television. My mother would run a hot bath. Basketball would become boxing. Francine would pull the covers over her bony shoulders.

I would wake to breaking and shrieking, my mother screaming and packing a suitcase at midnight. She was a pale shape by lamplight, crying, crumpled on the stubby wet grass in front of the house. A lone car passed near her head. My father would go down to the curb and bring her back.

I looked at the house. It seemed innocuous by dusk. The shame was covered with fresh pastel paint. The hate was covered with fresh pastel paint. My father would sit in his piece of fenced patio, silent and impossible as the banana plants along the back hedge.

This was the house my mother found. She collected the down payment and promised them anything, everything, after the orphanages, the cold stoops and red bricks of slums in winter. After the hospitals, this house, my mother and father together. And my father was master at last, with built-in barbecue, rain-birds and leaves to sweep. A man of property in a land of second chances.

I walked through the backyard. Absently, as if taking inventory, I noted the firm new branches on the peach tree. Lilies pushed up by the side gate. He had cut the apricot tree back. The branches looked blank and stripped, almost amputated.

I knocked against the sliding glass back door. I could see the whole back part of the house through the glass. After the divorce, after Francine moved herself to Beverly Hills, my father had redecorated. He took the collected sports paraphernalia from forty years out of boxes in closets and put them on view. Francine had always insisted on plain off-white walls. My father hadn’t repainted. He’d simply tacked up an additional layer. The walls disappeared behind red and green and yellow pennants, framed ticket stubs from World Series games, Super Bowl games, basketball play-offs, horse charts from newspapers and photographs from magazines.

The room that had once been my bedroom was now my father’s racing room. The walls were entirely covered with enlarged photographs of my father’s favorite horses — Swaps, Omaha, Native Diver, Round Table and Secretariat. My father had bought a desk for the room. He sat there at night, studying his form sheet for the next day. He could still feel my presence there and I had always brought him luck. And it is true that when my father and I go to the race track together, to Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Del Mar, we often win.

“I could of got a Ph.D. for the time I’ve spent studying this crap,” my father once observed, puffing a cigar and glancing up from his form sheet.

“Some life,” Francine used to accuse him. “You taught that kid to read a form sheet instead of fairy tales.”

While I do know how to read a form sheet, to look for the horse’s past performances, his works, the company he’s raced with, if he’s slipping in class or moving up, the distance of the race, the kind of track, the jockey, the horse’s condition and breeding, I pick horses purely by intuition. I look for horses that have my initials or names that seem relevant to my life. I have never told this to my father because, after the serious training he gave me, it would disappoint him. My father’s forte is middle-range horses. He’s a master of six-to-one shots, eight-to-one shots. I pick them longer, twenty to one, twenty-five to one. My father doesn’t know how I come up with them. He’s afraid to ask.

Once at Del Mar, the summer my parents broke up, I won a three-thousand-dollar Exacta by picking Heartbreak and Mom’s New Place.

I slid the glass door open. My father was lying on the kitchen floor. At first I thought he was already dead. He heard me and pushed himself up slowly on one elbow. The veins in his neck throbbed. He was breathless. He looked almost delirious.

“I’m going to die, I know it,” my father said. He looked as if he were drowning. He had been crying. His eyes were the yellow of a cornered cat. His eyes were full and restless as a river moments before a flood.

“I’m dying. I can feel it.” His hands were fists. He was a bird with a broken wing beating the heavy useless blank sides of a day.

“Don’t quit, Daddy,” I said. “Even money says you’ll make it. Those are the best odds we’ve looked at in years. And you licked this same field before. Remember?”

Suddenly he seemed very small and old, bent, shriveled. I thought, you can’t die. And something inside me was aching, was breaking. If you die, they’ll call me a woman, not a girl. And I’m not ready, Daddy. I’m not ready for that at all.

“I’m cursed,” my father said.

I nodded my head. Horse players are notoriously superstitious. They see omens. Even my father, who is strictly a form-sheet player and denigrates those who bet on the basis of names, numbers or colors, won’t change his clothing when he’s winning. When he’s on a hot streak he will sit in precisely the same spot at the track and make his bets at the same window.

“I should have known. I was four grand up on the Santa Anita meet. I had a twenty-seven-to-one shot last week. Two sixteen-to-one shots. I should have known,” my father said.

We were sitting on the sofa in the living room. My father was drinking bourbon. He had killed nearly half the bottle.

The first time my father got cancer I was six years old. Overnight the world changed. One day my father simply stopped going to work. His big brown toolbox sat unused in the narrow tile hallway. It just sat there day after day like a big brown sore. My father stopped eating dinner. He lay in bed. He whispered with my mother.

That was the year I was learning colors at school. On Monday we learned red. We drew apples and crayoned them in. Mother didn’t have time to look at my apples.

“Apples?” My mother laughed. A strange harsh sound, not like her. “You want red. Red is blood. You’ll see plenty of that soon.” Could she have said that?

Friday we learned white and black. The neighbor boy across the street was vying for the gold star with me. We were throwing rocks down by the train station. He leaned over and whispered, “Your father’s dying.”

My father stopped driving his car. Now he sat in Mommy’s seat, leaning against the window while she drove him away every afternoon. He was taking cobalt treatments at the hospital. He was only the second one in Philadelphia to get his throat blown up by a cobalt gun. And what was cobalt? It was a kind of blue, a kind of blue you wore inside. A blue that made my father push his plate of steaming food to the floor and rasp, “Everything tastes like garbage.”

I watched my father fill his glass with bourbon. After what seemed like a long time I said, “Daddy, I need a philosophy for all this.” I was aware, painfully, achingly aware, that my father and I might never speak to one another again.

“Life’s a grab bag,” my father said. “It’s all a matter of chance. Take it off the top and don’t look back. There are no guarantees. It’s all a photo finish. You know what separates a hero from a bum? Inches. A nose under the wire.”

Was he offering me his particular brand of Zen? I thought of all the years between the cancers, years my father spent content in his special solitude. He would stand at dusk watering the backyard, wrapped in his own personal communion with peach blossoms and twilight. He watched each sunset carefully, individually. For twenty years he lived waiting for the wild cells to come again, that black invasion. The ambush at the turn in the road.

“What are you thinking?” I would ask my father as he stood with his hose pointed at the roots of the apricot tree. Francine would be at a film premiere. Francine would be out of town on business or at a budget meeting.

“I’m thinking that shit always comes back. Sooner or later.” My father would sometimes say.

Now my father looked at me. His face seemed to be slowly collapsing. Then he glanced at his watch. He turned on the television. The UCLA Bruins were playing the Washington Huskies. Dogs versus bears. Godzilla versus Mothra. God, it was all falling apart.

“I want to tell you something about your mother,” my father said during the first commercial. Young men washed in the ecstasy of macho male companionship rode a jeep through barren country and embraced at a bar piled up with beer cans. “You only go around once,” the announcer said. I thought, if this is a cosmic connection, I am grossly unprepared.

“I’m hip to Francine,” my father said. “I knew it couldn’t go on forever. I was thirty-five. She was some sixteen-year-old street kid. Crazy. Talking about poetry. Talking about communists. Running around in black tights, some kind of beatnik. Hanging out in the Village. I knew she wasn’t playing with a full deck. And skinny. She had malnutrition. She was six months away from a whorehouse. But I don’t blame her, dig?” My father looked at me hard.

“We were gamblers,” my father said. “I got sick and it changed the whole balance. Your mother has a father thing. Some complex from being deserted. The welfare people were sending her to a Park Avenue psychiatrist when I met her.” My father lit a cigar. He smoked it slowly, savoring it.

“She had talent. I always knew that. So she went out. She took a flier and won big. Still, for such a big winner she’s really pathetic.” My father puffed his cigar. “Tell her that for me, too. If I don’t get off that operating table tomorrow, tell her. You got it?”

My father wasn’t pouring bourbon anymore. He was drinking it straight from the bottle. “Look at that,” my father said softly, with something like awe. “First Goodrich, then Alcindor, Walton, and now this.” My father took another puff on his cigar. “This is a dynasty. This is poetry.”

“Daddy,” I began, reaching for something.

I remembered the last night in Philadelphia before the surgery for the first cancer. My father took me to see The Ten Commandments. He would get up every ten minutes to go to the men’s room. Then he would return and hold my hand in the movie theater darkness. Years later I realized he was leaving to cough blood in the lobby. Cancer had pushed its special hard fabric, its whirlpool of black marbles, those wild cells, into a strange, strangling vegetation. Roots and claws planted themselves deep in his throat. Pieces grew in his cheek and tongue. Now it was happening again.

“Listen, kid. Don’t plan on me for the play-offs.”

I stayed with my father until he fell asleep on the sofa. I covered him with a blanket. I touched his hand in the darkness. It felt already bony and thin. The night was horrible. The whole world had started spinning in a fast silvery arc and I was being propelled out in a vast circle, absolutely blind.