The old man sits there, slumped, on the old bed of his son. Next to him, a four-spring chest expander. It is his day off, Tuesday. The rain is tapering off. He can no longer hear the drops bouncing off the windowsill outside this little tiny window of this little room on the second floor of their humble home. The bed hasn't been used for nearly a year now. His son came back for Christmas but only to visit and then drove straight back to his dorm. Last week the old man finally took the sheets off, washed them, and stowed them away. Now he sat here, on raw mattress, he gives off a deep sigh. He is already in his early fifties but he has only started losing hair this past year. The toll of old age is taken very quickly. The lines on his face multiplied within the past few months, and even his eyebrows have begun to gray.
The room needs a fresh coat of paint. The ceiling paint is already peeling. But he and his wife can't afford it now that they have to contribute whatever they have for his tuition. But he isn't thinking about the paint, or any money. He usually frets about money because they are a poor immigrant family and no amount of hard work seems to bring enough money. He is grateful that his mother-in-law was also chipping in. But he isn't thinking about that either. He is sitting there, very still, more still than the windless outside, which is a small pedestrian street so no sound of car could be heard unless someone is honking from the street at the end, which itself is not a very used street. This is an immigrant community in the outskirts of an immigrant borough of New York City. He isn't thinking either about being an immigrant.
He is just thinking about his son. The chest expander lying like a corpse besides him is small, still shiny, mostly, only some parts not made from stainless steel are slightly rusted. On the cheaply carpeted floor lies the box from which he had taken out the expander.
His eyes, below those long, graying eyebrows, are nearly shut. But he is fully awake by the emotions that he is also trying to hold back. He wonders why his son doesn't call, and that when he calls him he always sounds very annoyed and short with him. He never complained, but the weight of the hurt has been growing.
He rubs his knuckles, which are also getting drier, permanently, after each winter, especially after the winter that had just passed. He remembers being younger. He remembers the days when he was taking his son to different places, both in the old country and here in the frightfully new one. He remembers giving his son a million pieces of advice on how to be a man. In reality, he realized now, he was trying to have someone listen to him brag about things he had no one else to tell to. But that is all right, because that's one of the reasons we have children, to expound our ideas on them, who are just blank sheets of paper waiting for the strokes of our pens. He isn't sure if he had been selfish, but he is seeking secretly, but as customarily, a reason to explain his suffering. He had suffered from starvation, humiliation, and all sorts of inhuman fears, but the most poignant and present pain is from his son. They've lived together for 18 years, and in this 19th year they had been apart.
A crow swooped in front of the tiny window and croaked. He is awaken from the pool of his own self-pity. He notices the old, small TV on his left. His son no longer watched TV in the living room during his four years in high school. He always ran up to his room as soon as coming back from school. What he did up here no one knew, but the old man knew he watched TV sometimes, not much. He knew because when he came up to notify him that dinner was ready, sometimes he heard the TV running, sometimes it was completely quiet, sometimes on the phone. Those four years, he understood little by little, had already started the distance between them. The curtain had been drawn between them, and he no longer knew anything about his son's life, not his friends, his girlfriends, not even his grades. Therefore it was an immense relief to him that after nearly four years of being in the dark about his sons school performance, his son showed him the letters of acceptance to all the Ivy League schools.
But somehow, that was just one star shining in an otherwise pitch dark sky. He wanted to connect with his son all those years that he only could verbalize to himself now that had already pushed his son away. That was what the chest expander was for. All his son's life the old man told him how to be strong, how to never cry, never let small things get in the way of a man's ambitions, never settle for less. He tried to get him to read stories about heroes, men who could defeat nature, and other examples of virility. But it was obvious that his son could only excel in school, which was paramount to his future but, as he had asked his son one day, "What if you're in an earthquake, how will you lift yourself out of the rubble?"
So one day he decided to make his son physically stronger. He bought him this chest expander from the humble store where he worked (and got an employee's discount).
"What is this?"
"You grip one hand on each handle and just pull," he said as he demonstrated.
He had worked in various manual labor jobs over the years they had lived in this country. Though he was past his primes, past being a middle-aged man, he had enough muscles on that shrinking body to easily expand the four springs to the length of his arms. And he did so effortlessly, though part of this was theatrical to show the teenager what a man should look like pulling the expander. After he slowly let the expander return to its resting position, he noticed, to his dismay, that his son was not impressed and showed little enthusiasm. It was the same lack of enthusiasm he found when he urged his son to take up swimming because "What if one day you fall in the river or the sea?"
He was exasperated. He wanted to make his son try it in front of him, to extract that enthusiasm as he saw fit. But he knew he could no longer do that. The blank sheet of paper on which he had scribbled his ideas about the world is no longer blank and whose scribbles were no longer only his. He realized when his son started his first days in high school that he could never make his son do anything anymore.
So he smiled, as he often did to diffuse any awkward situation, and reminded his son, "This is all you need to get some muscles on your chest. That way you can fend for yourself if someone tries to beat you up."
Yes, someone did try to beat him up. That day when his son returned with a bloody mouth he was heart broken and infuriated. Being an immigrant was the lowest class in America, he believed, and all the more reason to be physically stronger. He never forgot his son's face that day, and the pain he had to endure the weeks after as the wound inside his mouth slowly healed.
He put the chest expander back in the box and handed to his son. They never look at each other in the eyes, as the tradition dictates, but the teenager thanked him. But the old man doubts that the boy had ever even taken the thing out of the box. He found it in the closet inside the box, still wrapped in the cheap paper. He had taken it out just now and caressed it, as if it were something alive, letting the box fall off his tired knees. And then he let the chest expander rest by his side.
But now that the crow had woken him up, he takes another look at the chest expander. He touches it again and the coldness of the stainless steel startles him. As if he were an automaton, he gets up, leaves the box on the floor, the cold metal piece on the naked mattress, turns off the light, and closes the door behind him, shut.
