Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston

every moment. One morning about three weeks into this purgatory, they came to me and suggested that I insist on surgery. They said that Dad was dying. It was true that his skin had fallen away from his bones. I could see the outline of his skeleton on the pillow. And so the doctors operated again; having cut him from breastbone to groin, they now cut him again from side to side.
    If I could have sacrificed a part of my own body to help my father, I would have without question. To watch him undergo the often painful indignities of the various medical procedures was horrendous. One morning I walked into the ICU as the doctors were suctioning his chest. The panic in Dad’s eyes stopped me short in the hallway outside his room, and I felt my own heart constrict at the sight of it.
    When Dad came off the feeding tube, we worked hard on getting him to eat. His appetite was almost nonexistent anyway. When I went to his hospital room the first morning, they were allowing him to drink fluids after a full three weeks without any food or beverage. A slow-moving nurse was stirring liquid in a plastic cup. “What’s that?” I asked.
    “I’m just stirring the bubbles out of the 7Up,” she said. From that moment, I set up a virtual juice bar in his room. It is extraordinary to me that the importance of nutrition is still so largely unaddressed in hospitals in America.
    One day my voice joined the chorus of others, and I said, “You have to eat, Dad.”
    He stopped me cold. “Anjel,” he said, “please don’t ask me again. The consistency of the jelly is unflinching.” After that, I prepared some fresh fruit jelly to take to him for lunch; they had told me he was not yet ready for solid foods.
    When he was finally allowed to get out of bed, Dad would make us walk up and down the corridors at Cedars, assessing the donor art. It is strange for me to think that so many years before I met the sculptor Robert Graham, Dad was, even then, absorbing his drawings on the walls of the hospital.
    After Dad was on the road to recovery, all of his astute characteristics came back into play. He would be in a penetrating, inquiring state of mind, which always threw me into apprehension, because I would have to tell him what I was thinking and what I was up to. I always felt put on the spot. I’d talked to a therapist about my inability to calm my fears when I went to visit Dad, and she said, “Why don’t you just go in and say nothing until he does? See what happens.” Although I was nervous, it seemed like a good idea.
    I sat by his hospital bed, and he told me stories. I hadn’tcome in with my whole defense on my lips, and surprisingly, it felt great. After this, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll ask him about the time he confronted me about dancing suggestively—doing what he called ‘the bumps.’ ” So I said, “Remember the bumps, Dad?”
    “The bumps?” he said. “What do you mean?”
    And I said, “Yes, Dad, remember the bumps, when I was fourteen and you slapped me in the face?”
    He said, “Honey. That wasn’t the bumps. That was about you being belligerent because you didn’t want to go to l’École du Louvre.” He’d entirely rewritten the scenario.
    A few years earlier, I had cut out a picture of First Lady Betty Ford at the Republican National Convention, with the caption “ BETTY BUMP —Mrs. Ford dancing the bump with TV personality Tony Orlando at Uptown Theater in Kansas City.” I kept that picture forever, but I never had the courage to show it to Dad.
    Danny and I were seated on either side of Dad’s hospital bed one evening. Dad was lying back on the pillows, inhaling oxygen through a green plastic tube. We were exhausted after another weeklong intensive fight for his survival but relieved that he still had the will to go on. The room was quiet and dark but for the sound of his labored, vaporous breathing.
    Dad broke the silence. “When I was your age, I was just like both of you. I could stay up all