“You can’t stand here, Pop. Not for two hours.” The elevator door has opened, and my father is refusing to get in. It’s the back elevator at the hospital, the one usually reserved for doctors, in a dank corner of hallway removed from the usual bustle of gift shop and cafeteria with their familiar smells of roses and coffee and French fries. They’re doing some kind of work on the elevators up front, the ones we usually ride for our visits; we arrived today to doors yawning open revealing greasy workmen in dark interiors. So we’re back here with the sour medicinal smells, my foot planted over an unpleasant brown smear on the linoleum that might be blood, I don’t want Pop to see.
“Mom’s waiting,” I remind my father. She expects us at five to feed her her dinner, what little she’ll eat, a bit of pudding and maybe some soup if it’s chicken. I meant to pick up matzah ball soup at the deli, having failed to plan ahead for homemade, but got hung up at the office and knew Pop would be waiting for me on his doorstep. We stay every night until “Jeopardy,” by which time he and Mom have both nodded off and I have to lever him up from his chair for the ride back to the empty house where he swears he never sleeps a wink.
“You go,” he says, flapping a hand in my direction.
“You’re going to stand here?” I repeat. “For two hours?” I lower my voice when a doctor in green pushes past us just as the elevator door closes, then pounds on the call button and rushes for the stairs.
“What are you yelling?” my father says.
“I’m not yelling.” I make my voice breathy like a whisper but loud enough for him to hear. He doesn’t put in the hearing aids without Mom to remind him, yet he remembers to dress carefully to please her. Today he looks dapper in navy blazer and khaki trousers. Dapper as long as you don’t look too close, the pants a little short so you see a good inch of white sock between cuff and shoe, something he never would have tolerated in his prime, and the jacket hanging long and loose on his shrunken frame like a hand-me-down from his own father. On the lapel, he’s pinned a bar of colorful stripes that I’ve never seen before – a medal? – some token from the war, the big one, WWII.
This is something new. He never used to talk about the war, and lately he can’t seem to stop. As if it were yesterday. Joe and Mike and someone named Heshie from the old neighborhood, he tosses their names into conversation like I know them. Mike is the funny one, and poor Heshie is allergic to potatoes, although it’s unclear from Pop’s rambling stories whether those potatoes are served on tin plates in the army mess or whether Pop and Joe and Mike and Heshie are on their own, scrabbling for abandoned vegetables in the hard dirt of the French countryside, hiding from the Krauts in some farmer’s murky root cellar.
The other new thing is the cane, a sturdy brown stick with old-fashioned curved top. All you’d need is a straw boater and Pop could do a soft-shoe in a 1920s musical, until you notice how heavily he leans on that cane, gripping with both hands, knobby knuckles disguising the strong fingers that once taught me how to handle a yo-yo, a protractor, a steering wheel.
The elevator has returned, and I find myself grabbing his arm. Maybe physical force will get his attention, this father who never raised a hand to me as a child. But his feet are firmly planted in a tripod with the cane, so only his upper body cants towards the open elevator. When a middle aged couple rounds the corner, I let go, and he straightens up. “Go away,” he says. “Leave me alone.”
The couple approaches with a silver it’s-a-boy balloon floating playfully above their heads. The grandparents, I think, while here am I, still the daughter. Yet they look in better shape than me, the wife with her stylish jeans and clickety-clack high heels. They take one look at us then think better of the elevator and opt for the stairs. As the husband, still strong despite salt-and-pepper hair, swings open the heavy stairwell door, the wife glances back at Pop and me over her shoulder and unexpectedly releases her grip on the balloon, which threatens to drift out of reach towards the double-high hospital ceiling. But the husband, obviously fit from the gym, snatches it back with a quick, graceful leap, then laughingly grabs his wife’s hand as they disappear behind the stairwell door, which swings shut with an airy swoosh.
For a moment I see us as she must have seen us, a poor old man and an abusive not-so-young-herself daughter trying to shoulder him into the elevator against his will like a kidnapper in a B-movie thriller. Right now they could be headed to the nurses’ station on the next floor to report us or even picking up a house phone to call security.
I consider the stairs myself, but Mom’s on the third floor, and I doubt Pop could make it, even if I could figure out how to pull and push at the same time. Besides, it’s the stairs Pop ought to hate, not the elevator. When it’s not the war he’s talking about lately, it’s his childhood in the city, a fifth floor walkup with three brothers sharing a bed and making up games involving stones and dark stairwells. One of the brothers, Uncle Louie, once tumbled backwards down a whole flight and ended up in the hospital in traction. The way Pop sometimes tells the story, he was safe inside the apartment when he heard Uncle Phillie out in the hall hollering for help. Other times, Pop recounts standing at the top watching Louie fly head-over-heels, the bones of his spine skipping from step to step. If anyone pushed anyone in the stairwell that day, Pop’s not telling.
“I’ll be fine here,” Pop says. “You’ll come back for me.”
“Goddamn it, Pop!” I lose it, and he stumbles backwards, so I think I’ve scared him. But the wall catches him, and he leans against it as if settling in for a good long rest, his shoulders hunched and his eyes averted from mine.
What is it about the elevator, this elevator, that never bothered him on the elevators in the spacious lobby up front? What is he remembering? What is he afraid of?
If Mom were here, she’d know how to soothe him out of whatever state he’s in. A word or a touch from Mom, and he’s docile as a child. She’s the sturdy rope that tethers him to the present, always ready to remind him of a grandchild’s name or whether it’s turn-right-for-the-supermarket or left-for-the-movie-theater whenever he threatens to float off to some earlier, more welcoming decade.
I have vague memories of my grandfather like this, Pop’s father who came to live with us when I was a kid – after Pop’s mother died – but didn’t survive the year without her. They called it getting older back then, words of respect, as if a man who’d worked hard all his life was finally entitled to take it easy and let others pay attention. My mother, of course, didn’t have an office to go to, and if Grandpa was another babe on her hands for a few months, so she’d bake cookies with him like she used to with us kids and change diapers without complaint. I didn’t realize what it must have cost her, never gave it a thought until now.
Three times the elevator has come and gone, the last time rising from the bowels of the building with food carts laden with tin-covered dinner trays. One of the pink-smocked aids will be settling Mom’s tray onto her rolling table, maybe forgetting to roll it close enough for her to reach. “There goes Mom’s dinner,” I say when that last elevator passes us by, but Pop stands his ground, acting like he hasn’t heard. Where is Mom when I need her? And where am I when she needs me?
Next person down the hall is a boy clumping on crutches, alone and couldn’t be older than ten, wearing saggy jeans with legs so wide I can’t tell if there’s a cast underneath. I imagine his mother outside parking the car, having instructed him to wait. Maybe she’ll round the corner any minute now with an unruly toddler dragging behind. Now I’m the one who has to decide how to judge what I’m seeing. Speak to this boy or mind my own business? Help or interfere?
I’m still debating, when the bell chimes to announce the arrival of the next elevator and Pop nods approvingly as two young nurses step out, smelling of ammonia and Juicy Fruit, then tips his head towards the boy and says spryly, “After you,” as if this were the most normal thing to say on the most normal of all days. The boy sets his crutches and swings himself forward like he knows where he’s going and isn’t afraid to go there.
So I follow without asking questions as they board the elevator, where Pop turns again to the boy. “Floor please?” he says, removing one hand from its grip on the cane to graze his fingers over the panel of buttons. “Second floor, overcoats. Third floor, men’s suits. Fourth floor, ladies’ lingerie, woo-hoo!”
The boy’s eyes meet Pop’s, and they share a laugh, Pop and this kid who’s probably never laid eyes on an elevator operator. I catch a reflection of the upturned corners of my own mouth as the shiny steel doors slide shut and the elevator begins to rise. At least I recognize this Pop and his same old routine, the one that used to make me grimace every time we rode an elevator together when I was once a kid.
Elizabeth Edelglass has won the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review and the Lilith short story contest. Other publication credits include American Literary Review, Passages North, and New Haven Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best New American Voices, and she has been a Fiction Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. “Floating Away” is part of a collection of linked stories about a Jewish American family advancing from the immigrant experience in 1924 Newark to assimilated lives in post-9/11 Connecticut, with travels along the way to the Midwest, California, and Hasidic Brooklyn. Edelglass lives in Connecticut, where she is the Director of the Department of Jewish Education Library of Greater New Haven.