Assisted Loving Read Online Free

it, as he possibly can. Maybe having no parents has also increased his need to be loved by as many strangers as possible. Is that why he talks to everyone and anyone he meets, even when they’re clearly not in the mood? He thinks it will make you happy every time he offers you something to drink or eat—the half a Little Debbie crumb cake from his overstuffed glove compartment, for instance, or the cocktail he’s invented of Amaretto and pineapple juice.
    Years ago, when I was well into my thirties, unemployed, uncoupled, and living with my parents for a summer that lasted way too long, I was so bored that I went out to the driveway one day and inventoried his accumulation in the Chrysler Valiant he was driving at the time. In the front seat, I found a typed deposition from his law office, brochures from his tennis club, a schedule for a Chilean airline—although as far as I knew he wasn’t planning to go to South America. Also: a scrap of paper from a Marriott (his favorite hotel chain) with some of his scrawl on it, an old wooden Wilson racket, and a visor from the tennis club at Century Village, the retirement community in Florida. There were tissues in a box marked up with more of his barely legible scrawl—notes for a legal case on one side and an idea for a song parody on the other. I found a worn paperback novel, The Rabbi , with a Nedick’s coupon inside, and a wall calendar from the dry cleaner. Instead of cigarette butts in the ashtray, there were bank deposit envelopes. And wedged in by the emergency brake handle—a plastic cup with pencils, asthma inhaler, reading glasses, and a potpourri of pills, coins, and postage stamps.
    I don’t know why I did this inventory. Maybe I thought that the best way to face what was disturbing me was to look straight at it. That summer I had been reading some short stories by Tennessee Williams, whose relationship with his father was also strained. “You will begin to forgive the world,” Williams wrote, “when you have forgiven your father.” It made sense but seemed an unattainable goal. But I kept trying. Anyway, it had been a clean moment for his car, I realize now. The worst may have been in the 1970s, when it smelled like decaying flesh. A veal chop had been rotting in his tennis bag.
    â€œLife with Joe is irritating, but never dull” is all my mother ever said.
    She would know. She was the one who had to put up with the dinner guests he brought home from the tennis court without giving her warning. She was the one who had to be delighted when, without so much as an advance conversation, he brought home a German shepherd puppy one year and a calico cat the next. And when there was a sale at the local dollar store, suddenly all kinds of things would be crowding her front porch. To this day he marks them with return-address labels, just in case someone feels inclined to steal his white plastic chair or cheap folding umbrella.
    My mother’s sisters, Phyllis and Bev, still remember witnessing the aftermath of an incident twenty years ago, when he pocketed a bar of soap from Aunt Bev’s condo in North Carolina. My mother chastised him gently for taking something that wasn’t his.
    â€œI’m warning you right now to leave me alone,” he told her.
    â€œI’ll buy you your own bar of soap, honey,” she said. “Just put it back.”
    â€œI’m going to divorce you, Ethel!” he roared as he stomped off to their car. Her two sisters watched with dropped jaws as she got in beside him. She was flushed with shame but stone-faced. He floored it in reverse and spun out of the parking lot, with my mother as his frightened hostage.
    â€œAll for nothing but a lousy bar of soap,” my aunt Phyllis told me.
    Maybe his hoarding of things, like his extreme friendliness, is also a result of the childhood. Finally, as an adult, he had a home and a car to call his own and colonize in his own way.