Eating Heaven (15 page)

“Benny,” I whisper, touch his shoulder. It’s warm through the thin fabric.

He snorts, half wakes. “Mmph, mm hmm, okay,” he mumbles, then rolls over and falls back to sleep.

Later, when I’m struggling to find a comfortable position on the old sofa bed, horizontal bars digging into my shoulder blades, my lower spine, and then my shins when I roll over, the reality of my situation is suddenly all too clear. This isn’t the time to be thinking about myself, drooling over a guy six years younger than I am who could have his pick of any thin twenty-something in that beautiful-people crowd. He’s a nice guy. Okay, a really nice guy. That doesn’t mean anything other than he’s a nice guy.

And I have more important things to attend to.

“What were you thinking?” Anne says in her judgmental-older-sibling tone. I press the cell phone closer to my ear so that her voice doesn’t leak into the quiet kitchen where Benny and I are each having coffee and pretending to eat Special K. “I mean, it’s not like you have an obli—”

“Don’t.” I cut her off, glance at Benny, but he’s scanning the want ads, reading glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose. “It’s fine.”

“He’s right there.”

“Yes.”

“God. Tell him hello.”

I lower the mouthpiece. “Anne says hi, Uncle Benny.”

He looks over his glasses at me for a too-long moment. “Tell Miss Annabelle hello.” She doesn’t ask to speak with him.

“Anyway,” I say into the phone, “what’s going on there? What’s happening with the case?”

She sighs. “In two months I get to testify before the grand jury. Until then, who knows? I haven’t been charged with anything, and I don’t think they could make anything stick, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The other partners don’t want me to contact any of my clients.” She’s silent for some time, and I resist the urge to tell her everything will be fine. Clearly, it won’t. Finally, she sighs again. “I’m hamstrung. I feel like I’m just rotting in a jail cell until the public execution.”

“Why don’t you come home for a while?”

Benny’s eyebrows rise, then fall, although he never looks up.

“Home?” she says, as though it’s a foreign word.

“My apartment’s available.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s so far away.”

“Exactly. Maybe your fan club won’t find you.” God, what if they did? What would they do to my lovely little neighborhood? What would the Nguyens think?

“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I can’t imagine trying to run my life from Portland.” She says “Portland” the way other people say “Podunk,” or “Bumfuck,” but I’m relieved.

“Anyway,” she says, “there are fewer of them out there lately. I think I’m boring them to tears. If I stay in here long enough, maybe they’ll just go away.”

This sentence runs through my head as I clean up the breakfast dishes, as I dress and start making a list for the day. Such a pathetically passive statement—maybe if I just wait long enough, it will all work out—and such a familiar concept. Is this what I’ve been doing? Waiting
for something good to happen? What if it never does? Do I want to be forty and still waiting? Fifty, sixty?

I think of Benny’s life, Mom’s. They’re always doing something, even now, not waiting for it to happen. Throwing parties, redecorating houses in my mother’s case. Having an affair. At least they pursued the thing they thought would make them happy. What am I doing besides waiting for life to work out? Hiding, waiting to die? Where is the strong young girl who can skin the cat twenty times in a row, pick berries until her fingers are purple, get excited about a book written a hundred years ago?

I call PanAsia and get a message: Do I want to make a reservation?

I don’t know what I want, and that’s the whole problem. I hang up without leaving a message.

In the car, on the way to Benny’s appointment with Dr. Krall, I want to reopen the conversation from yesterday with Benny, glean a little more information about how exactly he came into our lives. He looks stronger, drumming his fingers on the console. His ring finger bears a naked white strip of skin for the first time since he married Yolanda in 1976.

“You took off your ring,” I blurt before I can stop myself. Benny and Yolanda are only legally separated, and I’m pretty sure he’s always thought they’d get back together.

He curls his hands into his lap, turns his head to the window. “Yup.”

I turn the wheel hand over hand until we are out on Boones Ferry Road, heading west toward the highway. “You’re okay? With that, I mean?”

“It’s time.”

“She take off hers?” I didn’t even notice.

He nods. Surely, she won’t divorce him. Not now.

“Uncle Benny?”

He turns to me. What am I about to ask?

“Would you ever want to . . . I don’t know. Just talk about it all? All the stuff that we never talk about?” My heart is pounding. The ramp for I-5 is just ahead. I turn on my blinker. Benny is quiet.

“Or, or not, of course,” I say, hugging the curve of white stripe on the highway entrance, noticing how the green of the tall grass just beyond it is the color of unripe bananas.

“You want a deathbed confession or something?” he says. He sounds angry, and it stuns me. He’s never been mad at me before. Maybe annoyed, but this is different.

“Ben. Of course not. I just thought you might like to talk about . . . stuff.”

He harrumphs, sits back, folds his arms. We’re silent for a good ten minutes until the exit for Providence Medical Center comes into view. I flip the turn signal and it ticks like a clock. I try not to take it personally. Maybe the tumors affect more than his memory.

We veer down the exit ramp, toward the massive complex that is hospital and doctor’s offices, parking lots and hundreds of cars, all carrying someone who must need to be here for whatever reason, but few of them good.

Benny clears his throat, rubs the raw white strip on his finger. “Honey, don’t pay any attention to me. I’m just a crotchety old fart, like you always say.”

“It’s okay,” I say, but I’m surprised at how hurt I feel.

“No,” he says. “No, it’s not, but there are just some things I figure it does no good to talk about. Like my son-of-a-bitch father always said, only pansy-ass whiners cry over spilt milk.”

Even though I hate Dr. Krall, I have to admit his office is strangely pleasant. Low lighting, muted colors, and comfortable seating, including a few easy chairs. I guide Benny toward one by a massive fish tank and sit next to him on a leather couch. “Wow, some place, huh?” I say, and Benny nods, already mesmerized by the slow-motion purples and oranges of the tropical fish. I’ve read just one page of the latest
New Yorker
short story when a nurse-uniformed woman walks toward us. “Mr. Sloan? The doctor is ready for you. Do you need some help?”

He makes no move to stand on his own, just nods and mumbles, “Yes’m.”

As she helps him from the chair, I concentrate instead on the smooth
glide and quick dart of fish, the waving sea plants and bubbles rising. I wish he’d said no, tried again to get up on his own. If he loses that annoying independent streak of his, what will he have left to fight with?

The two of them disappear down the hallway and around a corner. I move over to the easy chair, feel the warmth of Benny’s body beneath me, watch the fish until I can’t control my eyelids any longer. I’m going to have to do something about Benny’s sofa bed if I want to get any sleep from here on out.

Ruthann’s minivan is at the curb when we pull into Benny’s driveway. The air is misty but warming up, muggy and close. A light layer of moisture coats my forehead, my upper lip, the back of my neck. I slide out from behind the wheel, walk toward her car. She’s shuffling paperwork in her lap and eating an orange as if it were an apple, biting right through the skin.

I lean in to talk to her through the open window. “Are we late? Have you been waiting long?”

“The first person you should worry about is your uncle,” she says without looking up. Her short hair is the color of old pennies, her hands freckled and blue-veined on the white paper. “Doesn’t he need help getting out of the car?”

Of course he does, but I didn’t think about it. It’s so hard to get used to all of this. “I was just—”

“Take care of him first. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I walk back to my car, perspiration now dampening my back and underarms, along my bra band. Why does she always make me feel like such an idiot?

Benny’s opened the passenger’s door and swung his legs around. He braces himself on the doorframe and scoots forward, feet finding the ground.

“You don’t need me, do you?” I say, standing close in case he pitches too far forward. “You’ve got this nailed.”

“I don’t know about that,” he says, breath heavy with exertion. He leans toward the door, grunts, and slides his full weight to his feet. He just about has it when Ruthann’s car door slams.

“What are you doing?” she says, striding toward us.

“He’s okay.”

“Not if he falls and breaks something,” she says, pushing past me.

“Don’t yell at Ellie,” Benny says. “And don’t treat me like I can’t do anything. I’m just about up.”

Ruthann leans in and pulls him to his feet. “I’m sure you can do it, Benny, but my job is to make sure you don’t end up lying in bed with a broken hip and bedsores and pneumonia, okay? Be patient—you’ll be able to get around by yourself again soon enough.” She gives him a stern look. “You big show-off.”

He chuckles and lets her guide him up the sidewalk to the front door. I stand by the car, hot and clammy and feeling like I just got in trouble with my mother.

Ruthann’s head pops out of the front door. “Aren’t you coming in?”

I shake my head. “I’m going to go pick up my stuff.”

“Back by two?”

I look at my watch. It’s already twelve thirty. “That doesn’t really give me—”

“Two thirty? Three? I can do three.” Her face softens and she looks behind her, then steps outside and walks down the path. “Look, I know you were trying to do what’s best for him. It’s just that that might be different from what he wants.”

“I don’t understand that,” I say, feeling stubborn, childish. “If he’s . . . you know, if he doesn’t have much time, anyway, what can it hurt? Shouldn’t he just be happy?”

“Yes. Absolutely. And I happen to think happy includes being as physically well as possible. He breaks a hip, cracks a vertebra, he’s not going to be happy for the time he has left. Trust me. Okay?”

I nod, knowing my face is bright pink. “I don’t know how to do any of this.”

“Nobody does,” she says, “until they have to.”

It’s been seven years since I lugged my belongings up the stairs to my apartment, and now I’m not finding it any easier lugging them down. I
must have thrown away the boxes for my computer, so I gather the keyboard, mouse, and monitor together in my arms, cables and wires springing out like Medusa’s head. If I unplug them, I’ll never figure out how to make it all work again. Next it’s the KitchenAid, the food processor, my largest Dutch oven and favorite skillet, two saucepans. The gallon tin of good olive oil, vinegars and specialty condiments and sauces crammed into shopping bags. I can buy the more traditional staples to use at Benny’s, but these things cost too much to replace.

Buddy strolls through my legs in a figure eight as I throw clothes into a suitcase. Sweats, khakis, T-shirts, sweaters. It’s a tricky time of year to figure out what to wear. It could be a pleasant 65 degrees one day and bone-chilling the next, but it will certainly be wet for some time yet, so I throw my various raincoats on top: the light one, the warm one, the semidressy one, just in case. I leave the heavy parka in the closet for next winter. Native Portlanders like to say summer begins in July, and it’s mostly true. I shouldn’t have to worry about hot weather for at least a couple of months.

I’ve got everything in the car except Buddy when I realize I need her food and bowls and the faux-sheepskin bed I bought her. Toys, scratching post, her favorite blanket to keep her happy in the foreign environment.

What about me? What do I need to keep me happy? I wander through my apartment, Buddy in my arms, purring. Not long ago, the answer to that question would have been cookies, pasta—anything with enough substance to trick my neurotransmitters into telling me I was sated. Without my appetite, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I am. My mother would say I was a good girl, the way she used to when I’d actually pass on seconds at dinner, or leave half a bowl of ice cream uneaten.

Maybe that’s what I want: to be good—good enough to take care of Benny. I know it’s ridiculous, like something out of a TV movie, but maybe if I were just good enough . . .

“Jesus,” I sputter, then throw back my head and yell: “This is too damn hard!” Buddy springs from my arms to the floor.

Outside, it’s started to rain—not drizzle, not showers, but full-bore rain—and I quickly stuff the remaining items onto the backseat. Just one more trip back up the stairs for Buddy.

“Hallo!” Across the street, Irina Ivanova is waving from beneath the umbrella I bought for her, her little girl standing and holding on to one of her legs.