Sept. 26: I just sit around and eat people

2/26/09

“Do you have any dessert?” Dad asks as soon as I walk into his apartment. It’s only 4pm and I haven’t even started cooking dinner yet. “We’ll have dessert later,” I tell him, “After dinner.” I can tell he’s still focused on dessert, so I tell him what I’m going to be making. “We’re having oranges in a caramel and rum sauce, over vanilla ice cream.” He's thrilled

“Do you know where the witches are?” Dad asks, just as Brianna, a pagan, opens the door. “Everywhere,” she tells him. I have no idea where the question came from, but he seems satisfied with the answer.

While I’m cooking, Kate S. and Brianna watch the BBC. The trouble is,Dad can’t follow most TV, though he tries. He winds up having to ask what’s going on, and it’s way too complicated for them to explain. For the rest of their visit, he stays pretty quiet.

Once they leave, he’s back in his down mood. “Who did me in?” he asks. Later, he gets discouraged with his halting efforts at conversation. “What’s the sense of talking?” he asks. “We like talking to you, Dad,” I say. “Yeah, but I don’t enjoy talking to other people.” I wonder what other people he means. He has been growing more and more silent recently, a jarring contrast from my younger days when he used to expound endlessly about history and archaeology, oblivious to the fact that my mother and I were nearing catatonia. When she got fed up, my mother would amuse herself by making faces at him, knowing that he couldn’t see well enough to notice.

“I’m all through,” he says. “I can’t do anything more, I just sit around and eat people.” The amusement I would usually derive from this sentence fades into the general gloomy mood of the evening.

Finally, I decide to distract him with a cigar. Dad rarely smokes cigars spontaneously anymore, but if you offer him one, he is pleased. I’m the “cigar person” because Marie doesn’t like their smell and Kate S. has asthma. Even though I’ve never smoked one, I now go through the whole ritual of removing the plastic covering and the paper band, and cutting off one end. Dad used to bite off the end, but I can’t bring myself to do that. Once I get the cigar ready, he puts it in his mouth and I fetch the hidden matches and light it while he puffs. It was awkward at first, but we’ve got it all nicely choreographed by now. When he’s done, he announces “finished, finished, finis.” It’s the first French I’ve heard him use in quite a while. Even though they say first and second languages are stored differently in the brain, they both seem to be fading now.

I look up and see Dad’s face strangely contorted. “Dad, what are you doing?” I ask, alarmed. “Making faces,” he replies. I’m relieved. Silly Dad is back.

On my way out he says, “you live a lofty life.”