Unmoored

“There is absolutely no chance you are going to win, you know,” my husband says when he notices I’ve bought another lottery ticket.

“Yes there is! Someone has to win. Why not me?”

Of course, luck has nothing to do with it. I know it’s all about being good enough, pretty enough, humble enough. If I can just please God enough... I catch myself thinking. Then, Wait a minute. I pull that thought out with my magic wand and put it in my Pensieve: a device used by Dumbledore to sift through the patterns of thought and distortion that move like clouds through the field. He and Harry (and I) watch my strange thought spin — round and round the edges. I put my hand in and thought fluff clings to my skin like cotton candy clinging to a cone.

I pull my hand out and wipe it clean on a balled-up tissue and hide it in my purse. What I mean is, I scribble the thought in a notebook to think about later.

—

In 1969, when my parents bought the house next door, they paid $19,000 for a farmhouse cape on a half-acre lot. Three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a sun room. Thirty-five years later, Mom tells me, “They’re listing it at $850,000.”

“Wow. How much of that will Dad get?”

Mom blinks. Takes a breath.

Esther answers for her. “Your father can’t have this money,” she says. Esther is my mother’s psychiatrist — and her sort of best friend. When she speaks, my mother goes quiet. She always does. “After their debts are paid,” Esther says, “your mother needs every penny just to live.”

I turn back to Mom. “You can’t leave Dad with nothing! Didn’t he pay for the house? Isn’t it half his?”

“Well, yes,” Mom says. “It is. And I would like to give him something...”

“I don’t think you understand what’s going on, Amy.” Esther’s voice is careful, measured. “Your father is going to die. His organs are shutting down. As his spine twists, he’ll develop increased numbness and increasingly reduced capacity. He will probably lose control of his bladder and bowel function. Eventually, the kidneys will begin to shut down. After that, it will be a quick decline to the end. He needs to be in a nursing home.”

I feel seasick. Unmoored. We are all going to die. Why terrify me like this?

“I know it sounds heartless,” Mom says. “But I can’t take care of him anymore and he refuses to get help. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Your father will outlive us all,” Esther says. “He’ll stay alive on pure stubbornness.”

“Well, if that’s true,” I say, “he’s going to need money to live on.”

“Then you girls should give him some money. Your mother needs hers to survive.”

—

All the way home, I play the scene over in my mind. Each time, this weird laugh kind of burps out of me. A burp laugh of the ridiculous and absurd bubbling up like I’ve drunk too much soda. I think about what it will cost and I burp laugh. An apartment with Olga? A full time aide? Groceries. Utilities. Burpity burp. Laughity laugh.

“We girls” don’t have this kind of money. My husband and I both work more than full time. We have a son in college a daughter soon to follow. Since 1998, we have rented — not because we couldn’t find a house to buy, but because we were spending what would have been the mortgage on Waldorf tuition.

Jen has a pre-schooler and a full-time job and an apartment in the city. Beth’s working full time stage crew at the opera and selling her beautiful sculpture out of her studio. We’re all artists, making it work the way artists make it work. There is no cushion. There is just us, scrappy and inventive, doing what we can, which is what we have always done. And it’s okay, I think. It’s okay but wow.¹

—

“Mom can’t give you any of the money from the house sale.”

Dad’s face goes still. “Nothing?” he asks. “She said that?”

I nod. “She’ll help with expenses if you need it. But the money needs to go in the bank — toward her new place.”

“I didn’t… I didn’t expect that.” He blinks. Shifts in his chair. “I thought she’d give me something to live on.”

“She says it’s time for you to move to a nursing home. She says she told you this herself.”

“She did. I know she feels that way. But I’m…” He pauses. “This took me by surprise.”

And then — just a few beats pass — his expression clears.

“Okay,” he says. “I guess it’s time to win the lottery.”

—

I’m still driving home, turning this over in my mind, when I switch on the radio just as Leonard Lopate asks: “What are the odds of winning the lottery?”

Once Dad told me a secret his brother Vernon — a physicist, a genius, the kind of man who worked on the first atomic bomb — had shared. A secret he’d never questioned and never forgotten: always buy just one ticket. Because the odds don’t change. No matter how many tickets you buy, it’s always the same chance of winning.

I have never called in to a radio show before but… well, what are the odds? I pick up my cell phone and dial.

The call screener answers. I tell her I’m from New Jersey even though I’m from New York. I tell her about Uncle Vernon, the physicist, the one ticket, the odds that never change. “That’s good,” she says. “That will work.” She tells me to turn off my car radio so there’s no feedback. “You’re going on the air.”

“What? When?” I ask. But she’s already put me on hold.

I pull over and park in front of the Vitamin Shoppe on Route 17, trying to figure out what to say. Through the cell phone, I can hear the program — Lopate and his guest, a mathematician, talking with other callers. And as I listen, I realize: I already know the answer. It’s a stupid question. And that’s when —

“Amy, from New Jersey, you’re on the air!”

I stumble through it. “I’m not sure any more…” The same story I told the screener clearly, I now tell in a klutzy, much less interesting way. “My father told me… is this right… how can this be right…”

“It’s not right,” the mathematician tells me. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“How could it?” Lopate asks. “Anyone can see that...”

I hang up without further discussion and sit in the Vitamin Shoppe parking lot, humiliated — sobbing. Shaking. Of course it’s not right. Anyone can see that. Of course.

—

This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter, Have I done enough? is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.

Photo by Volodymyr Proskurovskyi on Unsplash

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What I didn’t know then that I know now: Later, when Dad is in the nursing home, I will run up thousands of dollars in credit card debt to make sure someone is there a couple of times a week so Dad can go to the computer lab and pick up his emails. So he can stop by the canteen and buy peanut M&Ms with the petty cash account that Beth set up for him. I will hire a second aide to sit with him at lunch and another one at dinner because otherwise, Dad sits alone, unable to lift a spoon to his mouth and no one feeds him. I will do this because there is no other way and because he is my father and because that is what you do.