Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

Have You No Shame?: Part 2

No matter what he actually looks like, my image of my father remains unchanged from my nursery school drawings: an enormous striped tie obscuring most of his body, the scribbled pompom of black hair, a wide mouth stretched into a smile.

 It was late when he picked me up that night, so I’m sure he wasn’t wearing a tie; the black hair had long since turned to white, and he certainly wasn’t smiling with all that was going on, but in my memory a more accurate image does not exist.

 We greeted each other, more or less in silence.

 He hugged me fiercely at the baggage claim and I hugged him back, dreading the telltale tremble of his thin shoulders that would be the only sign that he was crying, silently, into my neck.

 I had felt it only a handful of times before—when they left me alone in my dorm at college, for example; but it never failed to send chills down my spine, the sudden, inescapable knowledge that my father was not a crayoned portrait fastened to the refrigerator with a magnet, but a human being with feelings.

 Thankfully, this time, the tremble did not come.        

“She’s actually stabilized,” he said, looking away from me at a family in matching Huskers sweatshirts embracing in happy reunion.

“It’s quite something.

Her numbers were dropping and dropping, and suddenly they started to go back up.

I mean, when we called you at first we didn’t she’d make it through the night, but now…”

I heaved my bag off the carousel. 

“Do they think she might still make it?”

He shrugged. 

“I don’t…well, she’s stable anyway.

We’ll see.”

My mother was waiting at home, with my sister who had flown in without mishap from Los Angeles the day before.

She had moved to L.A. several months earlier after graduating from college, and it seemed that every time I had seen her since her skin was tanner and her hair was blonder, giving her the look of my cherished Malibu Barbie; that is, before having all her hair shaved off during her tragic sting in a Barbie prisoner of war camp.

We ate desultory meal of warmed-over salmon with a few limp vegetables while my mother brought me up to speed on what had happened.

Grandma was hanging on; it seemed the real trouble spots were the weekends, when A-team medical workers were off and the burn unit was staffed by an assortment of students, interns and orderlies known to unplug a ventilator or two while mopping.

“The other night,” my father said, shaking his head in wonderment, “my mother was flat-lining, and this nineteen-year-old nursing student kind of wanders in, with her tongue hanging out,” here he cocked his head and made a gibbering noise with his lips, to indicate a total retard, “and just stares at the goddamn monitor like it’s a time machine.”

“Why a time machine?” my mother asked.

“Was Christopher Lloyd there?”

We laughed, far more than the joke deserved.

The hospital did not allow visitors until 2 p.m.

My sister had borrowed Grandma’s car, so we went to Target, had a sandwich, drove around for a few hours, listening to Li’l Kim.

Vestiges of our grandmother were all over; a print smock slung over her box of brushes and glazes for ceramics, uneaten candies melted in the sun and congealed over the drink holder like a thick volcanic crust, the wadded up Kleenex that she would pick off of the floor and hand to us saying, “It’s clean!”