Hanging Up

“This is her sister.” He has swung to the top of the jungle gym and is shouting to the entire playground. I smile, nodding at everyone. My father turns his head toward me sharply. “What’s your name?”

“He’s always been like that,” says Joe, who is packing.

“True.”

“But now he’s senile. If you could see his brain, I’m sure it would look like Swiss cheese.” He smiles, pleased at the notion of my father’s brain with gigantic holes in it. “Of course, it’s the holes that make Swiss cheese interesting. Although Swiss cheese can never really be interesting. Like your father.”

Joe does three half-hour shows a week for National Public Radio. What that means to me, married to him, is that at any moment some idea takes hold, like this mini-essay on Swiss cheese, and then he’s no longer talking to me but experimenting with an idea that, in some form or another, may end up on the air. His show, USA from Here, features oddballs. Joe spins their lives into tales.

He loves it. He was spinning tales before he was on the radio. He grew up in New Hampshire, in a small town, a place where it was safe to be curious. His parents still live there contentedly, in an 1846 white clapboard house with vines of roses encircling the windows and a weathervane standing at the peak of its shingled roof. Joe could always tell which way the wind was blowing.

With the confidence of the truly secure, Joe does not pay tremendous attention to how or what he packs—except for his tape recorder, which is always carefully snapped into its leather case and stashed in the small zippered pouch on his hanging bag. Clothes are selected almost at random: the first shirt his hand touches in the drawer, the pair of pants nearest the closet door. Our bathroom is full of duplicates and triplicates of things Joe forgot and had to buy on the road.

“My father’s interesting,” I protest.

“You’re praising your father? He’s not dead yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, when Nixon died, they turned him into a hero. Revisionist history. But your father’s not dead.”

“He’s dying.”

“He’s not dying and he’s not interesting.” Joe talks to me as if he were correcting my wrong answer to a test question. “Mainly he’s trouble.”

“You pack like a complete slob.” I say this with a smile that I tack on after I hear myself speak. It doesn’t fool Joe.

“What is this about?”

“You always get there and don’t have what you need, that’s all.”

“So I buy it. Or don’t.”

“Right. Forget it.” I go look in the mirror. Is this new haircut weird, or is it my imagination? My hair is short around my ears, then takes a two-inch drop in the back. It looks like upstairs, downstairs. “If my father is senile, why does he know how to upset me? Do people always get senile in character?”

“Ask Jesse. That sounds like something he’d have an opinion on.” Joe zips his bag, folds it in two, and starts buckling the sides.

“Why? Because you don’t want to talk to me?”

He stops buckling and stands up straight. He pushes his glasses back on his nose. It’s a remarkably aggressive gesture for being so simple. Casual, affable Joe is deceptive this way. He uses his index finger and pushes the glasses back firmly, and it is now immensely clear that he’s looking at me piercingly, and not just with two eyes but with four. “That is not what I mean, Eve. The reason you should ask Jesse is, he has an opinion on everything. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your sense of humor?”