Once a week or so, if I found a quiet moment, I’d pick up the phone and
dial the number for our apartment on Euclid. If my father was working early
shifts, I could catch him in the late afternoon, sitting—or so I imagined—with his
legs up in his reclining chair in our living room, watching TV, and waiting for
my mom to get home from work. In the evenings, it was usually my mother who
picked up the phone. I narrated my college life in exacting detail to both my
parents like a homesteader dutifully providing dispatches from the frontier. I
spilled every observation I had—from how I didn’t like my French professor to
the antics of the little kids in my after-school program to the fact that Suzanne
and I had a dedicated, mutual crush on an African American engineering student
with transfixing green eyes who, even though we doggedly shadowed his every
move, seemed to barely know we were alive.
My dad chuckled at my stories. “Is that right?” he’d say. And, “How about
that?” And, “Maybe that engineer-boy doesn’t deserve either one of you girls.”
When I was done talking, he ran through the news from home. Dandy and
Grandma had moved back to Dandy’s hometown of Georgetown, South
Carolina, and Grandma, he reported, was finding herself a bit lonely. He
described how my mother was working overtime trying to care for Robbie, who
was now in her seventies, widowed, and struggling with an array of health issues.
He never mentioned his own struggles, but I knew they were there. At one point
when Craig had a home basketball game on a Saturday, my parents drove all the
way to Princeton to see it, and I got my first look at their shifting reality—at
what never got said on the phone. After pulling into the vast parking lot outside
Jadwin Gym, my father reluctantly slid into a wheelchair and allowed my mother
to push him inside.
I almost didn’t want to see what was happening to my father. I couldn’t bear
it. I’d done some research on multiple sclerosis in the Princeton library,
photocopying medical journal articles to send to my parents. I’d tried to insist that
they call a specialist or sign Dad up for some physical therapy, but they—my dad,
primarily—didn’t want to hear any of it. For all the hours we spent talking on the
phone while I was at college, his health was the one topic he wouldn’t touch.
If I asked how he was feeling, the answer was always “I feel good.” And that
would be that.
I let his voice be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying
only good humor and softness and just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it
were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always enough. Before hanging up, he