The Love of a Good Woman

the debate was over my father got up and turned off the television. He won’t watch a commercial unless Mrs. B. is there and speaks up in favor, saying she wants to see the cute kid with his front teeth out or the chicken chasing the thingamajig (she won’t try to say “ostrich,” or she can’t remember). Then whatever she enjoys is permitted, even dancing cornflakes, and he may say, “Well, in its own way it’s clever.” This I think is a kind of warning to me.
    What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon?
    “Aw, they’re just a couple of Americans.”
    I tried to open the conversation up a bit.
    “How do you mean?”
    When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don’t need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn’t need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a pair of big tobacco-stained teeth.
    “Just a couple of Americans,” he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.
    So we sit there not talking but not in silence because as you may recall he is a noisy breather. His breath gets dragged down stony alleys and through creaky gates. Then takes off into a bit of tweeting and gurgling as if there was some inhuman apparatus shut up in his chest. Plastic pipes and colored bubbles. You’re not supposed to take any notice, and I’ll soon be used to it. But it takes up a lot of space in a room. As he would anyway with his high hardstomach and long legs and his expression. What is that expression? It’s as if he’s got a list of offenses both remembered and anticipated and he’s letting it be known how his patience can be tried by what you know you do wrong but also by what you don’t even suspect. I think a lot of fathers and grandfathers strive for that look—even some who unlike him don’t have any authority outside of their own houses—but he’s the one who’s got it exactly permanently right.
    R. Lots for me to do here and no time to—as they say—mope. The waiting-room walls are scuffed all round where generations of patients have leaned their chairs back against them. The
Reader’s Digests
are in rags on the table. The patients’ files are in cardboard boxes under the examining table, and the wastebaskets—they’re wicker—are mangled all around the top as if eaten by rats. And in the house it’s no better. Cracks like brown hairs in the downstairs washbasin and a disconcerting spot of rust in the toilet. Well you must have noticed. It’s silly but the most disturbing thing I think is all the coupons and advertising flyers. They’re in drawers and stuck under saucers or lying around loose and the sales or discounts they’re advertising are weeks or months or years past.
    It isn’t that they’ve abdicated or aren’t trying. But everything is complicated. They send out the laundry, which is sensible, rather than having Mrs. B. still do it, but then my father can’t remember which day it’s due back and there’s this unholy fuss about will there be enough smocks etc. And Mrs. B. actually believes the laundry is cheating her and taking the time to rip off the name tapes and sew them onto inferior articles. So she argues with the deliveryman and says he comes here last on purpose and he probably does.
    Then the eaves need to be cleaned and Mrs. B.’s nephew issupposed to come and clean them, but he has put his back out so his son is coming. But his son has had to take over so many jobs that he’s behind etc., etc.
    My father calls this nephew’s son by the nephew’s name. He does this with everybody. He refers to stores and businesses in town by the name of the previous owner or even the owner before that. This is more than a simple lapse of memory; it’s something like arrogance. Putting himself beyond the need to keep such things straight. The need to notice changes. Or individuals.
    I asked what color of paint he’d like on the waiting-room walls. Light green, I said, or light yellow? He said, Who’s going to paint them?
    “I am.”
    “I never knew you were a painter.”
    “I’ve painted places I’ve lived in.”
    “Maybe so. But I haven’t seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you’re painting?”
    “I’ll do it on a Sunday.”
    “Some of them wouldn’t care for that when they heard about it.”
    “Are you kidding? In this day and age?”
    “It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.”
    Then I said I could do it at night, but he said