Page 14 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

Joanna dislikes office holiday parties, but this year had decided to attend in the interest of survival. She had volunteered to bring a simple dessert: brownie squares with almond slivers, now sitting dry and untouched on her Victorian Art Deco serving platter. Last night she had over-baked them.
Everyone is here, milling around in an olive-drab, fluorescent-lit conference room cheered up by silver streamers, red poinsettias and inoffensive holiday music from someone’s phone. The four other mar- keting directors are here, standing with plastic wine glasses in a selfie huddle, while Joanna’s boss stalks around in stilettos past windows that offer a view
of the treeless city scene below, evenly strung with miniature white lights.
People Joanna knows only by face, who flesh out the department, are here, gushing compliments about each other’s clothes or speaking in hushed tones about business. Joanna had gone along and dressed to impress in a cranberry Lycra maxi skirt, which accen- tuates areas she would as soon hide. The slit on one side reveals a thick calf, a swollen ankle. Despite a lot of fussing before the mirror that morning, the cowl of her white angora sweater hadn’t fallen correctly: her neck was still visible, so she had resorted to a cran- berry scarf that now strikes her as superfluous, like a wattle. She feels out of place. Most of the women and men are much younger than she, married or engaged or shacked up with someone.
Out-of-place is also where she resides most week- ends. Weekdays, she lives in her two-bedroom condo, surrounded by pines, with her college-age son, Scott, a biochemistry major, and her cockatiel, Lyra, a beauty of white and smoke-colored feathers with just a paintbrush tip’s worth of yellow around her crest. On Friday evenings Joanna travels to her ninety-year- old father, who lives an hour away in a shoreline Cape with gently decomposing shingles.
Her father has a form of dementia. Several months ago, she had placed him on the waiting list for a memory unit in her town, a safe harbor in constant demand. In the meantime, she’d hired a twenty-four- hour companion for weekdays, and Joanna gives herself to her father’s weekends, feeling large and lost in her childhood twin bed surrounded by organdy ruffles. But through the holidays, the companion is on vacation, so Joanna has her father all fourteen days. It may be his last Christmas.
She had decided to shelter him in her home during this time, despite her fulltime schedule. This is pos- sible only because the adult daycare people agreed
to shuttle her father from and to her condo, in a little bus driven by a leprechaun-faced man who enjoys telling riddles. That her father likes him is all that matters. On Saturday, Scott had driven his grand- father to the condo in his messy VW and had given
up his bedroom, for which Joanna feels guilty. The arrangement has also been hard on Lyra, who doesn’t tolerate strangers well.
But keeping her father with her over the hiatus saves Joanna two one-hour drives a day on the interstate, boxed in by kamikaze tractor-trailers.
In other ways, her compact life edges along between unseen forces that can swerve and jackknife at any moment. Last night, her father had interrupted her baking with a plea for Joanna’s step-mother, who’d died the year before. “Where is she anyway?” he’d asked peevishly. “I need to tell her something.” In Joanna’s attempts to distract her father, she’d dis- tracted herself from the brownies. Too late, she’d removed a parched brown turf from the oven.
This morning her father had refused to get dressed and she’d been forced to send him off to daycare
in his tartan flannel pajamas and a pair of running shoes that Joanna had to tie. Helping him on with his winter jacket, fearful of being late to work, Joanna had been a little forceful with one sleeve. Her father had made a series of gasping, whinnying noises. “For crying out loud,” he’d exclaimed again and again in
a high-pitched wail, and it had continued as he was being escorted to the bus by Scott, who loped sheep- ishly along, matching his gait to his grandfather’s shuffle. From the window, Joanna had watched them anxiously, the studious son she’s proud of, with his scant beard and profuse brown hair, leaning down to help her father, wearing his World War Two veterans cap. When the bus door opened, the frown on her father’s face had transposed into a beam of happi- ness. He had climbed the stairs, handed up by Scott, but powered by the love of riddles, Joanna thought. Relieved, she’d returned to the hall mirror to adjust her superfluous scarf, avoiding the sight of her face, which lately always looks worried, she has noticed, or angry or simply exhausted. She is one of those tall women who ducks her head.
Someone had lined up desk swivel chairs along one
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Hard Evidence
doretta Wildes