Lion Eats Elder

My father took us. Sunday morning bike rides in Central Park, when the roads were closed to traffic. We headed east on the 102nd Street traverse, lined with giant cypresses and yellow poplars, cool and leafy even in the heat of the summer. Then north up the hill, standing on pedals pumping and weaving till we reached the top, where we collapsed in the grass. Flat on our backs, my brother and I named the clouds drifting past tree limbs: dragons, thunderbolts, elephants, Thor. Rested, we’d coast downhill to the murky pond on the west side, off our bikes again looking for painted turtles and orange carp.

My mother didn’t bike, but all four of us went to the Washington Square Art Fair every year. We’d walk clockwise around the park, ice cream melting from our cones to our fists as we studied sculptures made from car mirrors and pipe cleaners and plastic combs. We saw paintings of flowers on fire escapes, the Brooklyn Bridge, graffiti-covered subway cars, water towers on rooftops, and things we could not recognize no matter how hard we stared. We saw the sun slide into the river, and took the Number 1 train uptown, home.

Weekends, my father let my mother sleep in. He took us across Riverside Drive to see the barges and tugboats and men fishing for eels. He took us for haircuts. We went to museums and ball games and movies. And he took me to the ER when I woke up screaming one morning because I couldn’t open my eyes. I heard the doctors say “conjunctivitis” and “harmless,” but I would not let my father put me down.

He took us to work, which was the ABC News studio, in the 1960s. Science correspondent Jules Bergman showed us full-sized models of Gemini space capsules suspended from the ceiling. Our elementary school classes came on field trips. Bergman demonstrated engines and control panels and the medical devices astronauts wore to monitor their vital signs in case anything went wrong. He simulated Gemini IV’s orbit for us, just as he had on the evening news. Above our heads, a figure in a spacesuit emerged from the capsule and tipped sideways out of the hatch. A flat silver cord billowed out behind him. In the darkened studio we watched and listened, heads tipped back, mouths slightly open.

My father took us to outer space, and now we’re taking him to the hospital for open heart surgery. It is not a fair exchange.

Five-thirty a.m. in the waiting room, the television blaring. My mother, brother, husband, and my father. A young couple with a sleeping toddler; two men sitting a couple of seats apart, crutches against the wall near one of them. Why is the television so loud?

What’s on: a jerky home video of a teenager getting jumped and beaten, alternating with weather, traffic, stock market, ads. Beating, weather, car ad, market report. Beating, traffic, weather, beating. Do people want to watch this? Did the kid in the video survive? What about this story could be good for anyone in this room?

I ask the man at the desk would it be possible to change the channel and turn down the sound.

“He asked for this channel,” the receptionist says. He’s looking at the man next to the crutches, who is asleep.

“Okay,” I start, trying to sound polite.

“What do you care?” he says. “You’re leaving in a minute anyway.”

I stare at him like the scum he is but keep my mouth shut. There’s too much noise in here already and we are all about to explode. My mother—who usually notices every single thing around her, from the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke to the small spot on the carpet that might be a crumb or a bug—my mother isn’t even aware of this exchange. I settle into the only chair where I can’t see the TV and try not to listen.

My father would not have put this story on the air. Film was expensive back when he produced the evening news—still a physical thing you had to bring to the studio to be processed, edited, and fit into the minimal time slot available. This was before digital film and computers. Before the internet, where someone posted this clip on YouTube. My father believed that just because you could show something did not automatically mean that you should. Who needed to see this footage? Not anyone who cares about the boy being beaten. Not anyone it might incite to revenge. Not anyone who knows what really happened: a boy on his way home from school was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A minute turns into fifteen, during which I think I hear the sound go down a bit. Then a smiling woman appears in the doorway, saying my father’s name as if it were a question. “You can all follow me,” she says, and we do, the first of many small marches we’ll make through hospital elevators and corridors. Four small pale people—the stooped, exhausted parents; the grim middle-aged son and daughter both with fists clenched, lips pursed—and my husband, built like a brick wall and looking like he wishes he could scoop us all up in his arms and take us out of this place.

My parents disappear behind a curtain, where my father is asked to change into a Johnny. Where does that name come from, I wonder. Either no one in earshot hears me, or knows, or cares.

They ask my father lots of questions to which they already know the answers, or he wouldn’t be here and about to have this surgery: name, age, date, condition, symptoms, medications. My mother offers up the neatly typed lists she was asked to bring, but the nurses want to hear the answers from him. Is this to make sure they have the right patient? To make sure the patient is in his right mind?

He’s hard of hearing, so there’s a lot of “What?” The questions all have to get asked at least twice. There’s no place to sit in this admitting room, so my brother and husband and I lean against the wall, trying to stay out of the way. Behind another curtain, mostly closed, we see the young family from the first waiting room. It’s the little girl who’s in the hospital gown.

Without warning, without noise for there is no door to open or close, my father rolls out on a stretcher.

“Here we go,” an orderly says, stopping next to us.

“Be good,” my mother says. I want to kiss him but it feels wrong to be more emotional than my mother. They take him away.

The family waiting area on the mezzanine is a wide open space full of couches and chairs arranged in clusters, to suggest intimacy and make it feel more like a living room. Someplace you might actually spend several hours by choice. This is not like the DMV or a deli counter, where you take a number and wait your turn. Here you wait, but how long is not connected to what time you got here. When you arrive, the person at the main desk tells you: Every procedure is different, every patient is different, sometimes there are complications, sometimes the doctor is just late. “Do we know if the procedure has even started yet?” I ask the woman at this desk. “We won’t know anything until the doctor calls,” she says, reaching for the ringing phone. We were told to expect at least six hours. We are in an information blackout, except for the board over this reception desk, with columns for patients’ name, location, status. Rodain, S, went into the OR at 6:48 a.m. First one in.

My mother has a pager like the ones they give you in crowded restaurants so you’ll know when your table is ready. “Your husband is ready, Mrs. Rodain.” Is this what they’ll say? Six hours from when? From 6:48? Does longer than six hours mean bad news?

We settle into the “Quiet Area,” scattering our belongings across several chairs and couches, creating a U-shaped fort around a coffee table. We will engage only with each other, and that’s hard enough. The perimeter will not be breached.

The Quiet Area is a corner away from the main desk and the television with closed captioning where people watch whatever is on and make their own noise, under-the-breath cheers or clucking of tongues at sports, reality shows, the news. The elevator opens nearby, but you quickly screen out those electronic tones it makes when the doors open or close. At least we are away from other people talking, crying, giving friends and family updates on their phones. The Quiet Area is for people avoiding things that annoy us so we can sleep, zone out, or concentrate on not turning into puddles of grief and fear.

My mother tries to work the free coffee machine in the corner. “Can somebody figure this out?” she asks. My brother leaps to read the instructions, studies, fails, declares the machine a piece of crap.

“We could go to the cafeteria,” I say.

My mother says, “Yes, let’s get some breakfast.”

I’m not thinking about food. I’m thinking about the incision they are cutting into my father’s chest. The rib spreaders they use to gain access. They are touching his heart. With gloved hands and sterile instruments. Probing. Evaluating valves, deciding whether to repair or replace, and with what.

My husband says, “I’ll watch our stuff.”

I toast a bagel to keep my mother company. My brother takes a hard-boiled egg, the smell of which almost makes me retch. I burn my bagel on purpose, creating a personal charcoal filter. In the seating area, hospital workers congregate at either end, near the televisions: one’s on Good Morning America, the other on some spy show with a woman climbing up the side of a building. We choose a long table under a row of windows facing grey, congested Madison Avenue. If my brother eats his egg, I don’t notice. The room is cold and hard—metal and Formica. We chew fast and head back to the relative warmth of our encampment in the family waiting room. My husband goes for coffee, maybe a walk. The rest of us read the paper, but I can’t get past the first sentence of any story. I need a reason for what I’m doing, a purpose that isn’t just passing the time. I pull a folder out of my bag, a report for a meeting I’m supposed to run next week. A meeting I may attend by phone, but I will attend, a plan predicated on the assumption that my father will be okay because this is the only acceptable assumption. He’s going to be fine, we all keep saying, and he probably will be. They wouldn’t undertake the surgery, raise hopes and expectations and risk the resources if they didn’t think they had a good chance of success. Still. The mortality rate for this surgery is fifteen percent, age being an important factor. My father is eighty-six.

The work I brought is busy work, counting and sorting types of things and the frequency with which they appear. My family around me reads, nods off, jerks awake, looks guilty, as if they were bad children caught sleeping in class. My own pencil drops from my hand. Somehow it is ten o’clock, eleven, almost noon. “We should get some lunch,” my mother says, but no one moves. One o’clock will be just over six hours.

The waiting room has gotten crowded. There are more names on the board, plus more people joining their families to hold vigil. Now, two animated women move into our area, seat themselves as far from us as possible, but make no attempt to keep their voices down. And no one can figure out how to work the free coffee dispenser. Not the man who says I’m good with machines, or the man who says I hate machines, or the man who asks Why is the coffee machine in the quiet area? “Oh for Christsake,” my mother says.

I slide closer to distract her from the newcomers, the noisemakers, herself.

“What’s this?” she asks, looking at the legal pad still in my hands.

“Work,” I say, flipping the page. “But this,” I say, drawing quickly. “This is important.” I make a large number sign: two vertical lines intersected by two horizontals.

“Tic Tac Toe,” my mother says.

I enter an X, then let her win.

She makes a new board and a new X; I draw a cat instead of an O. She draws a dog. I draw a fish to the right of the cat; next turn the fish gets a speech balloon and says “Help! I’m next to a hungry cat.” My mother smiles. Draws her own cat, which looks like the symbol hobos once used to identify homes where you could get a meal. She draws three more of these cats in a row and says “New game. What else you got?”

Hangman, I don’t say out loud. “Duck duck goose?”

“Hef,” she says. It’s a family word: feh backwards, same negative meaning.

“Anagrams,” I suggest.

“Too hard,” she says.

“Of our names,” I say. Nina Rodelle, I write. Irene LaLond. “And you,” I say, playing with the letters. My mother is Lion Eats Elder. My husband sounds like an unsavory pawnshop owner: Zedrrug Ihock. Rad Vidondia for my brother, who thinks word games are stupid so I don’t try very hard. I don’t do my father. He’s already being taken apart.

Lion Eats Elder says I need to stretch, goes for a walk with the pager. The rest of us watch a tall, striking woman exit the elevator, heading our way. She could have stepped out of a Brooks Brother catalog: dark trim suit, black pumps, smooth shoulder-length blond hair. Not like most people in the waiting room, who barely made it out of their pajamas. She walks purposefully toward us, as if she has news. No name tag or badge, but her destination is definitely us, our trio of suspended souls. Without breaking stride, she places a book on the table, amidst our bags and magazines and sweaters. And walks away as she arrived, without a word.

Julia Childs, my husband reads. My Life in France. We smile—he and my mother love cooking. My father and I, we like the results. Did this woman know the book would be appreciated? Did she see the newspaper open to the food section? Is she some angel of Mount Sinai hospital, performing today’s random mitzvah?

Eight hours after my father went into surgery, my mother’s cell phone rings. “Hello,” she says. Then “yes.” She is out of her seat and almost at the elevator, one quick move. “He’s out of surgery,” she tells us as we scramble to collect bags and coats and follow her.

“And?” I ask.

“Do we want to see him,” my mother says.

“He’s okay,” my husband says. “They don’t let you see them if something is wrong.”

A doctor meets us as we step off the elevator on the eighth floor. “Mrs. Rodain?” he asks. He talks to her, not us. “He’s asleep,” the doctor says. “He’ll be out all night; that’s normal. He’s on a breathing tube, that’s standard practice. You’ll see several tubes, actually: one draining the chest incision, one for the oxygen; a catheter. When he wakes, he’ll be uncomfortable.”

I want to ask questions, but I don’t know what they are. The doctor isn’t taking questions anyway. He won’t stop talking. Something about a separate procedure they’ll have to do, to reattach the pacemaker leads; he’s got temporary leads in now, they can’t do both procedures at the same time. They have to open him up again, I’m thinking.

“It will be local anesthesia,” the doctor says. “He won’t have to go under.”

Not under, but it’s not over, either.

The doctor is finally quiet.

“So it went well,” I say, because he hasn’t. He hasn’t said the procedure was successful or that my father did well. He probably can’t, or at least he’s not supposed to. These next hours are critical: complications could set in any time.

He made it through. That’s all we get. But it’s enough to let us leave, and sleep. What yesterday I would have called the sleep of the dead.