Joseph Bathanti
40 The Sun
March 2002
Photo: Harry Wilson
Your Mum And Dad
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.
— Philip Larkin
My parents hail from a generation who must arrive
at least an hour before every engagement, for whom being on
time is a divine mandate. Thus, we pull into the Charlotte
airport well before the departure time for their return flight
to Pittsburgh. They have been in North Carolina for two
weeks: their annual spring visit, during which they exchange
the routine of their household for the routine of ours. The
key difference, of course — the rarifying element — is that
our house has children, and my parents literally worship
children, especially their grandchildren.
The apprehension that attends the arrival of my parents
is like the buildup before a big game. Preparation is everything.
The practices are long and grueling. My wife, Joan, is head
coach and tactician. With her at the helm, we manage a
year’s worth of sprucing up and repairs in just a couple of
weeks. My mother is legendary for the antiseptic cleanliness
of her house, and it is apparently daunting for a wife to have
such a mother-in-law.
Joan storms through the house like Vince Lombardi,
and the boys and I have no choice but to do her bidding. I
console myself with the fact that these are things that have
to be done anyway — that should have been done long ago.
Closets and cabinets are cleaned out and rearranged, new
towels hung from the bathroom rods, new sheets put on the
guest bed. Garages and outbuildings are swept and tidied,
grass mowed, shrubs and spring flowers edged and mulched,
and a dogwood tree planted. There are numerous trips to
the county landfill.
This year, I rented a pressure washer and used the lethal
water jet to strip the old paint from the front porch. Then,
wearing a surgeon’s mask and dragging an extension cord
with a caged light bulb, I put two coats of toxic-smelling
barn red paint on it in the middle of the night. I also
troweled on roofing cement around the chimney flashing,
replaced the wooden steps on the back porch and coated
them with a mold retardant, bought primer and aluminum
paint and brushes for the outbuilding roofs, and pointed
up the brickwork around the outside vents. But, mercifully,
time ran out on me.
March 2002
The Sun 41
The final tasks prior to fetching my parents at the
airport were: rake out the fridge, clean the oven, scour
the bathrooms and kitchen, put a vase of fresh flowers on
the kitchen table and a pastel box of Kleenex in the guest
bathroom, vacuum, and clean out the car, which had already
been to the carwash. The house looked great: the new lamp
in the living room, the new carpet in the dining room, the
new bookshelves and carpets in the boys’ rooms, the new
tablecloth, the new throw rugs everywhere, the new hanging
baskets on the front porch, the new items I didn’t even
know were new. As I nosed the car toward Charlotte, Joan
admonished me not to let on — even remotely — to my
mother that she’d gone to any fuss whatsoever. Then, having
stayed up all night cleaning, she passed out.
My parents’ visit went very well, despite a rough
prelude: Shortly before they were to arrive, Uncle Dick, the
last of my mother’s brothers, had a heart attack. Early reports
were encouraging, but “it destroyed his body,” my mother
said, and he died just days later. So, after spending two days
at the hospital, three days at the funeral home, then the next
day attending both the funeral and my niece’s high-school
graduation, my mother and father boarded a plane for North
Carolina.
The second we had my parents buckled into our car at
the Charlotte airport, they fell asleep. When we finally got
home with them an hour later, we saw, parked in our front
yard, a yellow bulldozer and a backhoe. This, of all days, was
the day the county had chosen to bury new cable. Along
the edge of our freshly clipped emerald green lawn, they’d
gouged a ditch flanked by three-foot-high bunkers of red clay.
Our yard looked like a construction site.
First order of business, as always, was to inventory the
food my parents had hauled with them: salami, pepperoni,
olives, fontinella, Jarlsberg, provolone, Pecorino Romano,
pizzelles my mother had baked, and pizza shells and fresh
loaves of Italian bread from Rimini’s Bakery — which, my
father pointed out, had still been warm when he’d fetched
them at five o’clock that morning. We spread it all out on
the kitchen table and sat down and ate, even though dinner
was not far off. Whatever the kids wanted, we said yes to.
Watching them eat gives my parents so much pleasure that
it borders on the pathological. “God love their little hearts,”
my father said, gazing at his grandsons’ bulging jaws.
As if in ecclesiastical response, my mother intoned,
“God love them both,” and dropped more cookies on their
plates.
After eating, the kids came to our bedroom — temporarily Grammy and Pap’s room — for their presents: books,
balls, Legos, clothes. There was another round of kisses and
embraces. We all knew that this was really the best part of
their stay, and we hung on to its perfection as long as we
could.
Leaving my parents to settle in, I heard them talking
behind the door to the bedroom. I couldn’t make out any
words, just the sound of their voices, pleasant and tired, the
42 The Sun
March 2002
way they used to sound to me as a child, and for a moment I
felt that same ineffable sense of well-being and safety. A little
later, I tiptoed back in to get some jeans out of the closet and
found them napping on top of the bedspread, lying on their
sides like babies, their open suitcases resting side by side in a
corner, their prescription bottles regimented on the dresser,
my father’s razor on a folded white washcloth next to a can
of Right Guard. On the wall above my mother’s head was
her framed high-school-graduation portrait, taken in 1936.
In it, she is indisputably beautiful. I looked down on her as
she stirred, a handkerchief clutched in one hand.
At supper — the traditional first-night pizzas — we
chatted a bit about Uncle Dick. I looked for signs of strain,
but my mother seemed fine, if tired. I had to hand it to her:
she’s tough. A funeral and a commencement both in one
day, and then a plane ride the very next morning.
Somehow, we got to talking about Jimmy Longo, a
neighborhood character who used to pick up and deliver our
dry-cleaning back in Pittsburgh. We had a few laughs at his
expense, and then I related a story he’d told me the last time
I’d seen him: Jimmy was bowling, and he set his styrofoam
cup of coffee down on a bench. A “great big black guy” —
the fact that the guy was black being the coup de grâce
for Jimmy — accidentally sat on it. The story itself wasn’t
funny, but the way Jimmy related it, deadpan and with a
little bitterness over the lost cup of coffee, was hilarious. I
did my best to imitate his voice, the way he repeated phrases
— “I mean, Jesus Christ, he sat right on the goddamn cup of
coffee” — a hand flying up every few seconds to demonstrate
his outrage.
As my mother laughed, something misfired in her
circuitry. One eye closed. A silver asterisk fizzled in the other
before that lid, too, fluttered and fell, and her head lolled
back.
My mother is dying, I thought. I both knew this to be true
and was utterly detached and able to accept it: not scared,
not frantic — though by now we were all calling her name,
hailing her back from wherever she’d gone.
My father was slapping her hand. “Rose! Rose!” he
barked, more scared than I’d ever seen him.
Part of me was already picking through the bones of
what this would mean to me for the rest of my life: how
I’d killed my mother, made her laugh until she died. I had
pushed her to this, on such a night, in front of my family, my
children. My childhood nightmare had come true, like some
twisted fairy tale: the bad boy who killed his mother.
See, see, my mother was saying to me from beyond the
grave, I warned you. You’ve never known when to let up.
I hope it was my voice that summoned her, my tenderly
inflected, urgent “Mother” that brought her back to us. She
opened her eyes and looked at me as if I’d awakened her
from a spell. I was at her side, holding her hand, which I
lifted and kissed quite unconsciously, the very image of the
loving son.
By now, Joan had dialed 911, though my mother was
protesting that she was “fine” and didn’t “need any 911.” The
rescue squad arrived in a hoopla of lights and sirens. The
dogs went crazy. I waited for the emts at the door. Two of
them turned out to be ex-students of mine, a benefit — and
a hazard — of teaching at a small college in a small town. I
introduced them to my mother, who eyed them imperiously.
She was fine, as she had said more than once, and did not
appreciate any of this. It was then that I finally thought to
pry the traumatized, bug-eyed children from their seats and
shoo them off to play.
Everything checked out, and my mother was pronounced
ok. Probably hyperventilated was all, said the emts, but a
little trip to the hospital wouldn’t hurt, just to make sure.
My mother put up her hand — a gesture built into the
family dna, meaning that all discussion has ended — and
said, “No.”
Joan and I walked the emts to the door and thanked
them. As I shook hands with one, he said, “I had the hardest
time in your class. You don’t give A’s, do you?”
When we returned to the dining room, my mother was
clearing the table, and my father looked as if he had just lost
an argument.
After the children were in bed, we ended the night in
front of the television. My parents have been visiting now
since 1976, and every year we go through the same discussion
about what channels we do and do not get. Since my wife
and I do not subscribe to cable and its smorgasbord of useless
programming, we receive, alas, only the big-three networks,
and our reception is rather tenuous as a result of our choice
to live out in the country — another decision regarded as
dubious by Mom and Dad. When we ask them what they
would like to watch, they wistfully remark that we don’t
get Channels 2, 4, and 11, the Pittsburgh channels. This is
true, I say patiently, but we get the same network programs
(though only one station actually produces a clear picture).
We just have different numbers.
“We don’t have to watch anything,” my mother said,
sounding disappointed.
“If you were home, what would you be watching?” Joan
asked.
“You don’t have to watch it just because of us,” said my
mother. “Do they, Joe?”
“Nah, nah, we don’t care,” my dad said.
“Sure,” Joan said, “let’s watch something.”
We finally settled on one of the news magazine programs:
20/20, I think. One segment was about a kid who’d been
raped by his Little League coach, another was about genital
mutilation, and the last was a little treatise on masturbation.
My parents, as they fell asleep in their seats, tsked about what
a horrible world we live in. Every few minutes my mother
would snap out of her doze, find my father asleep on the
couch beside her, and indignantly nudge him awake before
nodding off again herself. But if we switched the tv off, it
was as if the Angelus had been rung in their ears: What
happened to the TV? In this absurdist manner, Joan and I were
held hostage night after night while my parents slept through
their favorite shows.
I’ve never seen the airport so crowded. My father
and I muscle into the long baggage-check line while my
wife, my two little sons, and my mother trail far behind. My
mother is all but crippled by arthritis — spinal stenosis, to
be precise. Even though she lives with constant pain, her
inner domineering force, the source of which the rest of us
can only guess at, will not allow her to admit it or accept
others’ help. When they catch up with us, however, I am
astonished to hear that my wife has somehow convinced
my mother to ride in a courtesy cart to the departure gate,
nearly half a mile away.
I stay close to my dad, like a bodyguard. Just yesterday,
my mother remarked to me that he is getting old. We were
pulling up the driveway from her hair appointment, and
my father, in t-shirt and shorts, was sitting in a chair in
front of our open garage, smiling, my boys at his feet. I’d
imagined him healthy and vigorous until my mother made
her observation — very matter-of-fact, yet with a note of
wonder and tenderness in her voice. After she said this,
I’d swear she tailed off into a wistful internal monologue,
replete with images of their genesis as lovers. But they are
clearly not young lovers any longer, and I suspect my mother’s
pronouncement was commentary on her own mortality,
as well. Still, she looks good, younger than her seventyseven years. For her, looking younger is a great virtue, an
accomplishment of intrinsic worth.
My dad, pushing eighty-one, looks good, too. Today he
wears a cap, a plaid shirt, khakis, and a very stylish pair of
Nikes. He chews gum and rattles his change. I’ll be glad to
look like him when I’m eighty-one. In the past few years, he
has walked out of two surgeries — albeit on crutches — to
repair a ruptured Achilles tendon and to reconstruct a knee.
But my mother is right; he is getting old, and I stay close to
him now at the airport because there is literally less of him.
I am larger than my father: taller, broader, stronger, faster.
This is, of course, inevitable, a fact of life, but this inversion
of the old father-son paradigm requires some adjustments on
my part. As I watch my father hand his tickets to the young
baggage clerk, I am watching myself.
(end of excerpt)
March 2002
The Sun 43