“Facebook Summer”
By Andy Hurvitz
It began, as most events do nowadays, inside a mall.
I was eating lunch with my elderly Aunt Norma at the Olive Garden in Woodland Hills, CA. It was her 85th birthday and I had taken her out. I had not seen her for many months, and her sweet green eyes and regal disposition were often teary eyed. She was lonely and I was her only suitor.
We never discussed important things or personal things, only the breezy amusements that never touched on pain or loss or my hidden homosexuality. “So how are your parents doing?” she asked. My father Lester, is her brother.
These parents of mine were also old, but they were living back in Fawnwood, New Jersey, in lush surroundings, near a quiet lake, not far from Manhattan, in a part of the country of old stone walls, rolling hills and Dutch barns. My dad was slowly dying of an incurable illness. Only his speech and ability to walk were affected.
I answered Aunt Norma in an upbeat, Southern California brightly newscasterish tone. “I think they are doing pretty well. Considering,” I said.
“Any chance they want to move to Los Angeles?” she asked.
“Not if they can avoid it,” I said.
Fifteen years earlier I had moved out to California, partially to avoid living near my mother. To have her faraway was some sort of sabbatical to me, a respite free of guilt, sadness and the implication that I had failed because I wasn’t married with children.
Ten years earlier, my younger brother Charlie moved out here and took a quick, sharp ascent up the Hollywood ladder of fame and success. He married a Persian Jewish girl, they have two kids, and moved to a 10 bedroom house in Tarzana.
“Don’t your folks miss you guys and their grandchildren?” she asked.
The waitress brought a large breadbasket full of buttery garlic rolls. I went to grab one just as my vibrating mobile phone started dancing in my right pants pocket.
“Aaron?” the voice asked.
“Yes, this is Aaron,” I said.
“This is Mrs. Glenn. I’m a neighbor of your parents. Your mother fell and broke her hip. I’m here looking after your father. He is OK.”
I hung up. I called my brother Charlie who didn’t answer. I knew I would be on plane to New Jersey within 24 hours.
Marching Orders
I am mostly an unemployed writer. Though I try and work, my one big stumbling block in life has been the inability to choose one goal and try and reach it. My entire adulthood has been stuck in a kind of adolescence of confusion about how to earn money.
Charlie called me, barking orders from his Prius.
“You have to go back. Mom is in surgery tomorrow and if you could be there by Wednesday it would be a major help. I’ve got to be in Montreal to shoot a pilot. I can wire you two grand. Call my assistant Melanie and tell her what flight you want to take.”
I had hoped that I would never see the day when I might have to come back to New Jersey to close up my parents’ lives.
That day had arrived.
Tragedy in Lush Surroundings
I had mythologized my time 30 years earlier in Northern New Jersey. In my imagination, I was still 17 years old, and in the summer I would swim in the cool lakes up near Bear Mountain and eat corn-on-the-cob and white peaches from Van Every Farms.
But that was 30 years ago. When we arrived there in 1979, the street was a dead end, surrounded by acres of woods and an adjacent azalea farm.
In 2003, a developer purchased the woods and bulldozed the trees and built those grotesque, ornate houses of no particular style, obese giants with protruding garages, circular driveways, double entry doorways, hanging chandeliers and SUV’s parked in front.
The quiet street was destroyed. It became a traffic artery of speeding women in sunglasses and Bluetooth headsets followed by Mexican workers whose high-pitched gas blowers and gaseous lawn mowers fouled the hot summer air.
The Day I Arrived
I landed at Newark Airport and a limo brought me to 12 Fawn Lane.
My dad was sitting in a wheelchair in the kitchen. Mrs. Glenn, 85 and widowed, was nervously setting out bagels and cream cheese in front of him when I walked into the house early Saturday night. Her husband of 50 years had just died earlier that year.
“Thank God you’re here Aaron,” she said.
The kitchen countertop was covered with newspapers, magazines, paper, binders, pens, Stickies. My parents saved everything and thus were at a loss to find anything.
Mrs. Glenn had been here setting up house and barely holding onto her sanity. She couldn’t wait to leave. “Your mother’s hospital room is on this piece of paper. She is in Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. Room #405. Don’t call her tonight. She is sleeping. I think the surgery went well.”
I dropped my suitcase on the kitchen floor. My father smiled at me and spoke in his disarthic, slurred English.
“Good to see you Aaron. It’s good to have you home,” he said.
Mrs. Glenn walked over to the front door. “I’m down the street if you need me,” she said.
Ataxia
My father couldn’t walk up the stairs alone. He could climb each one, but when he reached the top, it was a precarious and risky moment, as he stumbled to put himself on solid footing, grabbing onto the walls and the railing and reaching for the metal walker.
It had been a gradual breakdown in his health. For years, he had epilepsy, and then about age 70, it seemed that his speech was slurring. He would walk, and then suddenly lose his balance. But he never believed that he was becoming disabled. He held onto my mother for balance, literally grabbing her arms to right himself.
There was no admission that he needed a cane. But when it became impossible for him to stand alone, he was beyond the help of a single steel pole. Now he needed the double stabilizing walker, and soon the walker itself was inadequate for his declining mobility. He was destined for the wheelchair, for that time when one’s aloneness was dependant on the generosity and assistance of others.
He could not push his muscles to urinate and need to self-catheterize with a lubricated plastic tube that he precariously inserted into his penis when he needed to expel. He carried his “plumbing” as he called it, in a brown purse that hung on the back of the wheelchair.
All these health crises transpired in New Jersey while we children lived in California. So every visit back home became a re-education in the transformation of our father. It was not just aging, it was the evaporation of power, of control, of his self-actualization slipping away. The all knowing, reassuring man who had created us and cared for us, was gone. He now basically was an infant whose very survival was in our hands.
The doctors at Columbia, the ones at Rutgers, the others at UCLA, none of them could diagnose anything specific. They called it Ataxia, but there was no medication, no surgery, no real certainty about how to defeat this insidious vandal of my father’s central nervous system.
I brought my suitcase upstairs and put it into one of the three empty bedrooms that once were full of young and courageous and impetuous people. I collapsed on a dusty comforter covered bed set under a window open to a dark night of humming crickets.
I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, tears falling down my face, moistening the pillowcase.
Home Care
“I’m getting you some home care worker. They are going to start tomorrow,” Charlie said.
He was calling from Vancouver, the city he flew to after Montreal. “We are just taking few days off and Sarah came here to stay with me,” he said. “We ate at this awesome sushi restaurant on the water.”
Charlie was hiring a home service that he found online to come into the house to cook meals, to look after my father so I could “have some free time so you don’t go nuts”. It was $2,000 a week and Charlie was paying for it.
It was peculiar to me, a 45 year-old man, to be back in the place I had lived in during my late teens and early 20s. This was the house I came back to during summer vacations in college. This was the house I escaped from when my mother vomited after I confessed to her that I preferred to sleep with men.
But that was 20 years ago.
Rewind.
Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.
A time.
Back in space.
Before the Internet.
Before mobile phones.
Before I had gray hair.
My father was in his bedroom. He walked from the iron posted bed and used his walker to navigate himself into the bathroom. This is also when he sometimes remembered to put his dentures into his mouth. But most mornings, he dressed and brushed his teeth, self-catheterized himself, and then made his way down the long hallway, down 13 stairs, along the central first floor hall and into the kitchen, where he sat down to his usual breakfast of Cheerios, banana, wheat germ and lactose free milk.
A fat Peruvian woman, Berta, came to work. She had remedial English skills but seemed genuine. I struggled to translate my bad Spanish and asked her to make coffee, to help my father upstairs, to give him a shower and assist him with getting dressed. She annoyed my father by shadowing him at his every turn, by waiting outside the bathroom door when he took a shit. “Get out of here!” he shouted and she smiled because she couldn’t understand what he was yelling.
I was living in a nursing home, working as a nurse, a cook, a maid. It was summer. The house was not air-conditioned and my physical endurance toughened as I began to run up and down the stairs to retrieve my father’s dentures, or if I heard a thump on the floor and he had fallen out of bed.
I came to the house weighing 175 pounds, 5′9. Four months later I was 162. But that is getting ahead of myself.
Fawnwood Manor
Most of my life I have known my mother as a dark haired woman, but when I saw her at Fawnwood Manor Rehabilitation Facility, she has patch of white hair and was sitting in bed that she was too weak to climb out of.
Charlie had flown in from Houston, after his Vancouver and Montreal trips, to see about how the family was doing. He was on his mobile phone, talking to a realtor because he was determined to use this time to make my parents sell their home.
“So we are in agreement that they have to move?” he said. I agreed but inside I was not in agreement. The whole world I had believed in, the quiet house near the greatest city in the world, was going to be sold, and my dream of inheriting a lovely home was no more.
My mom had been through her surgery already, and her hip was somehow screwed back together. Her right leg was swollen. And when the nurses lifted her into a hydraulic four-wheeled scale, her water-bloated weight had increased 20 pounds above normal.
Mom had been immobile and there was a fear that perhaps a clot might form. The physician on duty prescribed a blood thinner, but my brother frantically believed she should be taken back to the hospital for a scan. She steadfastly refused to be taken by ambulance back to the rotten medical center.
“I’m not going! They said I was OK here!” she said.
“Mom, it’s for your own good,” Charlie yelled.
“No. I trust that I am fine here. I’m not going to the hospital,” she said.
Stephanie Romm
A blonde, middle-aged lady with a strong Long Island accent, her hair scented with Donna Karan perfume, and a beautiful diamond ring on her left finger. This was Stephanie Romm, the best-paid realtor in Fawnwood.
She drove up to our house and met my brother and I on the front porch. “Hello, howawya?” she asked.
She had been circling around my parents for a year, salivating eagerly and awaiting the day when the old and decrepit might finally put the house on the market. We were there to tell her that we wanted to sell, and that my parents would be agreeable to selling, but that my mom, from her rehab bed, would set the final price.
“Your parents have a lovely home. The bathrooms are old. The kitchen needs remodeling. I think six-ninety-nine is good. A house just like your parents sold on Old Kinderkamack Lane near the Old Mill for six-ninety-four. But it had air-conditioning,” she said.
Charlie looked at me. “I think that price sounds good. What we need is to get everything in writing and then I can show it to my attorney and hopefully we can get this thing moving.”
On the Front Porch
With my mother in rehab, and my father at home, I couldn’t go out.
I would bring my laptop outside, sit on the front porch wicker chair, and log onto Facebook.
Charlie had set up my parent’s house so that everything was wireless. For this act alone, I was quite grateful. For I literally had nobody to socialize with except my Facebook contacts.
It was strange to see people who were now in their early forties, people I had previously known as young singles living in Manhattan, who now had children and wrinkles.
This was my summer of solitude, punctuated by visits to the rehab center, oriented towards the care of old and disabled people. And yet, here, online, was Facebook where every summer weekend would see the addition of new photo albums like “Amazing Summer Weekend” and “Casper’s 8th Birthday Party”.
They were swimming and smiling, drinking martinis, boating, water skiing, eating cake. These Facebook friends of mine sent hourly updates, updates I could read about after I brought my father his dentures, or drove to the rehab center to deliver my mother fresh underwear. Verbs were expunged, the noun was the action, and I was seeing it online:
“LINDA IS CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT!”
“MARTIN IS BUENOS AIRES VACATION!”
“STEVEN IS GYM THEN DRINKS IN TRIBECA!”
“RICH IS NEW CONDOMINIUM WITH RACHEL LOVING IT!”
There is a modern myth that our Internet has made privacy impossible, that who we are and where we go, and where we’ve been are now public.
But I learned that what we show matters more than who we are. Facebook is not a secret look inside a secret world, it’s anybody’s presentation of what reality they want other people to see.
I was not yet old or sick. But I was surrounded, by these aged and ill humans, and saw that a more youthful time of blithe indifference and ungrateful blessings might end abruptly. The walker by the stairs, the wheelchair at the kitchen table, the bottles of medication on the counter, the nurses aides, the home health care workers, the eyeglasses, canes, and urine scented air decorated a home that once recklessly entertained lives full of motion and passion, procreation and intoxication.
The air was hot and still this Facebook summer. And the only young and beautiful life was online, in my laptop.
“SAM IS SUSHI IN THE HAMPTONS WITH BEN, BILL AND DYLAN!”
“GINA IS RAIN AND RUNNING AND GETTING IN SHAPE FOR THE MARATHON!”
“PATRICK IS BROOKLYN BRIDGE CHAMPAGNE AND 10TH ANNIVERSARY KISS WITH CYNTHIA!”
“GLOTTY IS LOVE WITH SPRINKLES AND SEX AND MIMOSAS!”
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