The room is oppressively warm. A floor lamp in the corner casts a warm, yellow, light across the warm, gray carpet and the warm brown of the coarsely woven sofa cushions. It is not the warmth of a fireside or the summer sun; it is warm like bathwater with dirt and hairs floating in it.
The therapist’s eyes are not warm, but they are not cold, either. Imagine that a man spends a long time staring at color swatches at Home Depot, looking for something airy and sophisticated to spruce up his living room. He lingers over a pale gold that would clash with the carpet, a breezy blue that is just a little too jarring, a sage green that he knows his wife would like but that overpowers him with a suffocating, aromatic waft of easter bunnies and lawn clippings and allergies. So he pulls a card from the very middle of the gray section, as flat and neutral as a sheet of slate. He then forgets about the card on the seat of his truck and eventually his kids sit on it and he leaves heavy tools and greasy McDonald’s bags sitting on top of it. Now imagine one of his kids digs that card up out of the wreckage one day, takes it inside and cuts out two circles. They draw a fat black dot in the middle of each one and paste them to the face of their least favorite stuffed animal- something that’s not supposed to be fuzzy, like a frog. The creases and grease stains give the paper circles a textured, luminescent quality that makes them look oddly, realistically like eyes.
Anyway, those slate gray eyes gaze in my direction but seem to land on an invisible wall that divides the room on the other side of the coffee table. I perch on the edge of the rough, brown couch cushions. I hate it when I sit down and my thighs spread out across the seat and stick together. So, I sit with my butt barely touching the couch and my knobby knees almost touching the coffee table and my chest thrust forward, my wiry arms crossed over it, my own eyes cast down. My parents allow their thighs to squish into the cushions, and the warmth of their bodies radiates like the light of the lamp and presses on me from either side.
On the coffee table in front of me sits a slice of pizza on a paper plate, which is cold. The cheese has solidified, but it still glistens with a greasy sheen. Slices of shriveled black olives and dry pepperoni stare at me with much greater intensity than the therapist does. My parents do not understand why I do not want the pizza.
“The brain function isn’t there,” the therapist explains.
After another half-hour of intense non-stares all around, I pick up the pizza by the very edge of the crust and bite into it. I feel the cold, greasy cheese slithering against the roof of my mouth, the pillowy crust enveloping my gums, a slice of olive releasing a pungent, salty juice that trickles down the back of my throat.
***
Five and a half years later, I sit at the picnic table on our back patio with my parents and Rachel. The air is warm here, too, filled with a heavy springtime smell that would make the man at Home Depot gag. The pan of stir fry in the middle of the table stopped sizzling a long time ago, however, and this time it is not my fault.
Finally, we hear a series of dull shuffles and clunks through the open doorway. A pale, quivering hand wraps itself around the frame, a mass of ragged gray curls pokes outside, and a pair of gray eyes peers from beneath. Unlike the therapist’s eyes, they are cool and washy, slipping past the table, the food and our faces like a puddle through cracks in the sidewalk. A chunky, plastic-soled sneaker hovers over the threshold and down, inch by inch. The other follows, limply. I pull out the bench that I’ve been sitting on and allow Aunt Tweet to shuffle sideways into position, scoot backward and sink lower in tiny increments until she can’t hold herself up any longer, at which point she falls the rest of the way to the seat. I scoot the bench forward and swing myself into place beside her.
Dad scoops up a spoonful of limp, brown peppers and onions and tips them onto Aunt Tweet’s plate. “That’s enough,” she says firmly. The only thing she seems able to say or do with conviction is to refuse food.
“Why does he listen to her?” I say to Rachel later, sprawled on the carpet in her room. “She can’t make decisions for herself.”