Stephen Dixon - Time to Go

That was his father those last years, now he’s with his daughter.

With both of them he always carried a book to read in the park. And the shopping bag and now the canvas bag. She’s so much easier to take care of than he was. Maybe cleaning up his father prepared him for cleaning up his daughter. Some men flinch at their child’s feces, not so much the piss, but he went right at it from the start. And just taking care of him — feeding, washing, wheeling — might have been a preparation too. His brother said that when he had to change his daughters when they shit, he tied a handkerchief around his nose, dabbed it with after-shave lotion, put on disposable plastic gloves and held his breath throughout most of it, but he still gagged every time Will gagged the first few times with his father and a few times after when his bowel movements were especially messy or large, but his reaction to his daughter’s excrement isn’t much different if she pisses or shits. He checks her diapers every half an hour if she’s awake and he’s alone with her. If she’s wet or has shit he tends to it methodically, even if he has to change her on a changing pad on top of a park bench; though her shit is more difficult to take care of, as he has to shake and rub it off the diaper in a flushing toilet bowl and then squeeze the diaper with the same hand so it doesn’t drip.

He kneels in front of her and checks her diaper. “You dry, honey, you dry,” in the black dialect he often affects when he tells her this. She’s looking at his hand inside her diaper and then turns her head back to the workers and machines doing street repairs. “Ah my little chee-choo,” and kisses the top of her head and smooths back her hair. Her eyes look up at him, blink from sun. She twists around as if she’s going to suddenly get cranky, which she does sometimes when the sun’s in her eyes or he’s wheeling her and stops awhile.

He gets behind the stroller and wheels her. He feels sad again because of the way she looks from behind. Humpbacked, strapped in — he should have pulled down the bunched-up clothing underneath. He still could but she’ll get cranky again if he stops and maybe cry. Get so cranky he might have to hold her the rest of the way to the mall and then inside. Maybe he didn’t pull the clothing down because something in him is enjoying the sadness. And the baseball cap. He should have bought a sun bonnet instead. For one thing, it can be tied under her chin so she can’t take it off. So far today she hasn’t, but she likes to drop it on the ground and a few times he had to go a block back to find it. The cap looks like the kind a child wears who’s recovering from a brain operation — that could also be the cause of sadness. They’re almost at the mall. Skim milk, Similac, cottage cheese, yogurt, other things — some of them not food — he should have made a list as his wife said. But what he forgets today he’ll get tomorrow when he wheels her there. He doesn’t mind going to it. It’s a cheerful enough place and designed with some expense involved and with a little style. Small, as malls go, with several services they use, since it’s the closest shopping center or really shopping anything to their street. Dry cleaners-tailor where one can also get keys made. Stationer, classical record store, drugstore, twin movie theaters they’ve never gone to because they don’t trust anyone to babysit yet and a restaurant they’ll never go to because it’s an all-you-can-eat place for $4.79. And an optician he did use when his daughter twisted is glasses’ temples out of shape. She loves to grab glasses off of faces and has a grip that’s not easy to break. But he’s sad. The similarities, etcetera. Her back and his. His father was round-shouldered, probably from bending over patients for fifty years. And while he’s thinking about which mall entrance to use, he starts to cry. He did all he possibly could for him but it wasn’t enough. His penitent look whenever Will rushed out of the apartment shouting “I’ve got to take a walk around the block.” He takes out a handkerchief and wipes his eyes. And as long as it’s out, leans over the stroller to see if he can do anything for his daughter with it and wipes the little drool at the side of her mouth. He couldn’t have done more for him. It just wasn’t possible at the time. Still, he did a lot. His daughter he does more for than he maybe should. Maybe it’d be better to let her be more independent — try things out more — than he does. But he loves holding her, doing all these things for her, feels awful and sometimes unreasonably irresponsible when she falls or pulls something down on herself and is hurt. He liked doing many things for his father also, and by doing them helping out his mother with him, but it was so much tougher.

He’s all right now, not crying, eyes dried, and wheels her inside the mall to the photo shop. He says to the salesperson “Excuse me, but I think my prints are ready,” and holds out his stub. She looks at it, doesn’t take it, says “Last name?” he says “Taub,” and she goes through a box of envelopes and pulls one out. She rings up $8.28 on the cash register, he gives her a ten and she gives him the envelope and change. The shop seems hot and he looks down. His daughter’s sleeping. He wheels her into the public corridor where it’s cooler, parks the stroller along a wall so nobody will run over it and takes the prints out of the envelope. His wife took them all. It’s still too warm for his daughter and he very carefully, since she can use the nap, unzips her jogging jacket and takes off the cap. Two are of him holding her. He doesn’t look good in photos anymore. He used to be considered good-looking, but he’s got too jowly, put on too much weight, lost too much hair, even the neck flesh has loosened. He’s going to tell his wife “No more photos of me in any pose.” She’ll say something like “Not even with your daughter? She’ll want them when she’s older and your mother likes to get them now.” “I just don’t want to be photographed. Pictures of people should be taken of the very interesting, pretty or young.” He doesn’t necessarily believe that but if he has to he’s going to say it. He doesn’t like to look this old or bad. If he has to he’s going to say that too.

The rest of the thirty or so photos are of his daughter alone, in the baseball cap with the peak snapped up, with the peak down but in back, reaching for the tail of one of the cats, three of her sleeping outside in the stroller with the baby blanket up to her neck, about ten of them with her grandmother — his wife’s mother: grabbing for her glasses, snagging them, waving them in the air, hugging them to her chest, two of her sucking on one of the temples’ ends, several with her grandmother trying to get the glasses back, one of her holding his daughter with one arm while lowering herself to pick the glasses off the ground, another of her putting them back on and his daughter reaching for them. There aren’t any of his wife because her mother says she doesn’t know how to take pictures and Will didn’t go with them on that walk. He’s not going to tell his wife that while he was wheeling his daughter to the mall he thought about his father — that it started when he looked down at her from behind. He doesn’t think she’ll like him comparing their daughter to his father. From everything she’s heard about him, and most of these things were told by Will and his brother and mother and others in a flattering or at least nondisparaging way—”He had a good sense of humor though maybe he told the same joke or made the same sardonic riposte too many times”; “He didn’t take guff from anyone unless there was some money to be made”; “He was a happy-go-lucky guy so long as things were going his way”; “People confided in him and came to him for advice, though a lot of it was on how to get away with something they didn’t earn or deserve”; “He liked to pair off his unmarried patients, but got a little miffed if in the end there wasn’t something like a new suit in it for him”; “He was a devoted son and brother”; “He was a diamond in the rough”; “His friends usually came before his family”; “He truly believed that it mostly wasn’t what you know but who you know”; “He loved to beat the system, often just for the fun of it, and to pull the wool over what he thought were pompous people’s eyes”; “Maybe because of the poor home and tough environment and times he came out of, but he was what you’d consider cheap, when it wasn’t throwing around money for show, and also felt he had to keep working till he dropped, ten hours a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year”—she doesn’t think he was a very tender, sensitive, scrupulous, well-meaning, fatherly man. But it’ll be more the morbidness of the comparisons that’ll annoy her. Healthy young child, sick old man. That he has to think morbidly. That these rather than healthier ideas come to him when he’s wheeling their daughter. He still might tell her. At the dinner table tonight or after they shut the bedroom light and are about to fall asleep. During these times he often doesn’t know what he’s going to say to her. The dinner talk sometimes comes because he can’t stand the silence there too long so he’ll reflect on the interesting events that happened or sights he saw or thoughts that occurred to him that day. And in bed late at night because he’s just too sleepy to restrain himself, so things he never thinks he’ll tell her will suddenly pop out.