The New Yorker Stories (79 page)

M
y mother does not remember being invited to my first wedding. This comes up in conversation when I pick her up from the lab, where blood has been drawn to see how she’s doing on her medication. She’s sitting in an orange plastic chair, giving the man next to her advice I’m not sure he asked for about how to fill out forms on a clipboard. Apparently, before I arrived, she told him that she had not been invited to either of my weddings.

“I don’t know why you sent me to have my blood drawn,” she says.

“The doctor asked me to make an appointment. I did not send you.”

“Well, you were late. I sat there waiting and waiting.”

“You showed up an hour before your appointment, Ma. That’s why you were there so long. I arrived fifteen minutes after the nurse called me.” It’s my authoritative but cajoling voice. One tone negates the other and nothing much gets communicated.

“You sound like Perry Mason,” she says.

“Ma, there’s a person trying to get around you.”

“Well, I’m very sorry if I’m holding anyone up. They can just honk and get into the other lane.”

A woman hurries around my mother in the hospital corridor, narrowly missing an oncoming wheelchair brigade: four chairs, taking up most of the hallway.

“She drives a sports car, that one,” my mother says. “You can always tell. But look at the size of her. How does she fit in the car?”

I decide to ignore her. She has on dangling hoop earrings, and there’s a scratch on her forehead and a Band-Aid on her cheekbone. Her face looks a little like an obstacle course. “Who is going to get our car for us?” she asks.

“Who do you think? Sit in the lobby, and I’ll turn in to the driveway.”

“A car makes you think about the future all the time, doesn’t it?” she says. “You have to do all that imagining: how you’ll get out of the garage and into your lane and how you’ll deal with all the traffic, and then one time, remember, just as you got to the driveway a man and a woman stood smack in the center, arguing, and they wouldn’t move so you could pull in.”

“My life is a delight,” I say.

“I don’t think your new job agrees with you. You’re such a beautiful seamstress—a real, old-fashioned talent—and what do you do but work on computers and leave that lovely house in the country and drive into this . . . this crap five days a week.”

“Thank you, Ma, for expressing even more eloquently than I—”

“Did you finish those swordfish costumes?”

“Starfish. I was tired, and I watched TV last night. Now, if you sit in that chair over there you’ll see me pull in. It’s windy. I don’t want you standing outside.”

“You always have some reason why I can’t be outside. You’re afraid of the bees, aren’t you? After that bee stung your toe when you were raking, you got desperate about yellow jackets—that’s what they’re called. You shouldn’t have had on sandals when you were raking. Wear your hiking boots when you rake leaves, if you can’t find another husband to do it for you.”

“Please stop lecturing me and—”

“Get your car! What’s the worst that can happen? I have to stand up for a few minutes? It’s not like I’m one of those guards outside Buckingham Palace who has to look straight ahead until he loses consciousness.”

“Okay. You can stand here and I’ll pull in.”

“What car do you have?”

“The same car I always have.”

“If I don’t come out, come in for me.”

“Well, of course, Ma. But why wouldn’t you come out?”

“SUVs can block your view. They drive right up, like they own the curb. They’ve got those tinted windows like Liz Taylor might be inside, or a gangster. That lovely man from Brunei—why did I say that? I must have been thinking of the Sultan of Brunei. Anyway, that man I was talking to said that in New York City he was getting out of a cab at a hotel at the same exact moment that Elizabeth Taylor got out of a limousine. He said she just kept handing little dogs out the door to everybody. The doorman. The bellhop. Her hairdresser had one under each arm. But they weren’t hers—they were his own dogs! He didn’t have a free hand to help Elizabeth Taylor. So that desperate man—”

“Ma, we’ve got to get going.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“You hate elevators. The last time we tried that, you wouldn’t walk—”

“Well, the stairs didn’t kill me, did they?”

“I wasn’t parked five flights up. Look, just stand by the window and—”

“I know what’s happening. You’re telling me over and over!”

I raise my hands and drop them. “See you soon,” I say.

“Is it the green car? The black car that I always think is green?”

“Yes, Ma. My only car.”

“Well, you don’t have to say it like that. I hope you never know what it’s like to have small confusions about things. I understand that your car is black. It’s when it’s in strong sun that it looks a little green.”

“Back in five,” I say, and enter the revolving door. A man ahead of me, with both arms in casts, pushes on the glass with his forehead. We’re out in a few seconds. Then he turns and looks at me, his face crimson.

“I didn’t know if I pushed, whether it might make the door go too fast,” I say.

“I figured there was an explanation,” he says dully, and walks away.

The fat woman who passed us in the hallway is waiting on the sidewalk for the light to change, chatting on her cell phone. When the light blinks green, she moves forward with her head turned to the side, as if the phone clamped to her ear were leading her. She has on an ill-fitting blazer and one of those long skirts that everybody wears, with sensible shoes and a teeny purse dangling over her shoulder. “Right behind you,” my mother says distinctly, catching up with me halfway to the opposite curb.

“Ma, there’s an elevator.”

“You do enough things for your mother! It’s desperate of you to do this on your lunch hour. Does picking me up mean you won’t get any food? Now that you can see I’m fine, you could send me home in a cab.”

“No, no, it’s no problem. But last night you asked me to drop you at the hairdresser. Wasn’t that where you wanted to go?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s today.”

“Yes. The appointment is in fifteen minutes. With Eloise.”

“I wouldn’t want to be named for somebody who caused a commotion at the Plaza. Would you?”

“No. Ma, why don’t you wait by the ticket booth, and when I drive—”

“You’re full of ideas! Why won’t you just let me go to the car with you?”

“In an elevator? You’re going to get in an elevator? All right. Fine with me.”

“It isn’t one of those glass ones, is it?”

“It does have one glass wall.”

“I’ll be like those other women, then. The ones who’ve hit the glass ceiling.”

“Here we are.”

“It has a funny smell. I’ll sit in a chair and wait for you.”

“Ma, that’s back across the street. You’re here now. I can introduce you to the guy over there in the booth, who collects the money. Or you can just take a deep breath and ride up with me. Okay?”

A man inside the elevator, wearing a suit, holds the door open. “Thank you,” I say. “Ma?”

“I like your suggestion about going to that chapel,” she says. “Pick me up there.”

The man continues to hold the door with his shoulder, his eyes cast down.

“Not a chapel, a booth. Right there? That’s where you’ll be?”

“Yes. Over there with that man.”

“You see the man—” I step off the elevator and the doors close behind me.

“I did see him. He said that his son was getting married in Las Vegas. And I said, ‘I never got to go to my daughter’s weddings.’ And he said, ‘How many weddings did she have?’ and of course I answered honestly. So he said, ‘How did that make you feel?’ and I said that a dog was at one of them.”

“That was the wedding you came to. My first wedding. You don’t remember putting a bow on Ebeneezer’s neck? It was your idea.” I take her arm and guide her toward the elevator.

“Yes, I took it off a beautiful floral display that was meant to be inside the church, but you and that man wouldn’t go inside. There was no flat place to stand. If you were a woman wearing heels, there was no place to stand anywhere, and it was going to rain.”

“It was a sunny day.”

“I don’t remember that. Did Grandma make your dress?”

“No. She offered, but I wore a dress we bought in London.”

“That was just desperate. It must have broken her heart.”

“Her arthritis was so bad she could hardly hold a pen, let alone a needle.”

“You must have broken her heart.”

“Well, Ma, this isn’t getting us to the car. What’s the plan?”

“The Marshall Plan.”

“What?”

“The Marshall Plan. People of my generation don’t scoff at that.”

“Ma, maybe we’d better give standing by the booth another try. You don’t even have to speak to the man. Will you do it?”

“Do you have some objection if I get on the elevator with you?”

“No, but this time if you say you’re going to do it you have to do it. We can’t have people holding doors open all day. People need to get where they’re going.”

“Listen to the things you say! They’re so obvious, I don’t know why you say them.”

She is looking through her purse. Just below the top of her head, I can see her scalp through her hair. “Ma,” I say.

“Yes, yes, coming,” she says. “I thought I might have the card with that hairstylist’s name.”

“It’s Eloise.”

“Thank you, dear. Why didn’t you say so before?”

I call my brother, Tim. “She’s worse,” I say. “If you want to visit her while she’s still more or less with it, I’d suggest you book a flight.”

“You don’t know,” he says. “The fight for tenure. How much rides on this one article.”

“Tim. As your sister. I’m not talking about your problems, I’m—”

“She’s been going downhill for some time. And God bless you for taking care of her! She’s a wonderful woman. And I give you all the credit. You’re a patient person.”

“Tim. She’s losing it by the day. If you care—if you care, see her now.”

“Let’s be honest: I don’t have deep feelings, and I wasn’t her favorite. That was the problem with René: Did I have any deep feelings? I mean, kudos! Kudos to you! Do you have any understanding of why Mom and Dad got together? He was a recluse, and she was such a party animal. She never understood a person turning to books for serious study, did she? Did she? Maybe I’d be the last to know.”

“Tim, I suggest you visit before Christmas.”

“That sounds more than a little ominous. May I say that? You call when I’ve just gotten home from a day I couldn’t paraphrase, and you tell me—as you have so many times—that she’s about to die, or lose her marbles entirely, and then you say—”

“Take care, Tim,” I say, and hang up.

I drive to my mother’s apartment to kill time while she gets her hair done, and go into the living room and see that the plants need watering. Two are new arrivals, plants that friends brought her when she was in the hospital, having her foot operated on: a kalanchoe and a miniature chrysanthemum. I rinse out the mug she probably had her morning coffee in and fill it under the faucet. I douse the plants, refilling the mug twice. My brother is rethinking Wordsworth at a university in Ohio, and for years I have been back in this small town in Virginia where we grew up, looking out for our mother. Kudos, as he would say.

“Okay,” the doctor says. “We’ve known the time was coming. It will be much better if she’s in an environment where her needs are met. I’m only talking about assisted living. If it will help, I’m happy to meet with her and explain that things have reached a point where she needs a more comprehensive support system.”

“She’ll say no.”

“Regardless,” he says. “You and I know that if there was a fire she wouldn’t be capable of processing the necessity of getting out. Does she eat dinner? We can’t say for sure that she eats, now, can we? She needs to maintain her caloric intake. We want to allow her to avail herself of resources structured so that she can best meet her own needs.”

“She’ll say no,” I say again.

“May I suggest that you let Tim operate as a support system?”

“Forget him. He’s already been denied tenure twice.”

“Be that as it may, if your brother knows she’s not eating—”

“Do you know she’s not eating?”

“Let’s say she’s not eating,” he says. “It’s a slippery slope.”

“Pretending that I have my brother as a ‘support system’ has no basis in reality. You want me to admit that she’s thin? Okay. She’s thin.”

“Please grant my point, without—”

“Why? Because you’re a doctor? Because you’re pissed off that she misbehaved at some cashier’s stand in a parking lot?”

“You told me she pulled the fire alarm,” he says. “She’s out of control! Face it.”

“I’m not sure,” I say, my voice quivering.

“I am. I’ve known you forever. I remember your mother making chocolate-chip cookies, my father always going to your house to see if she’d made the damned cookies. I know how difficult it is when a parent isn’t able to take care of himself. My father lived in my house, and Donna took care of him in a way I can never thank her enough for, until he . . . well, until he died.”

“Tim wants me to move her to a cheap nursing home in Ohio.”

“Out of the question.”

“Right. She hasn’t come to the point where she needs to go to Ohio. On the other hand, we should put her in the slammer here.”

“The slammer. We can’t have a serious discussion if you pretend we’re talking to each other in a comic strip.”

I bring my knees to my forehead, clasp my legs, and press the kneecaps hard into my eyes.

“I understand from Dr. Milrus that you’re having a difficult time,” the therapist says. Her office is windowless, the chairs cheerfully mismatched. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

“Well, my mother had a stroke a year ago. It did something. . . . Not that she didn’t have some confusions before, but after the stroke she thought my brother was ten years old. She still sometimes says things about him that I can’t make any sense of, unless I remember that she often, really quite often, thinks he’s still ten. She also believes that I’m sixty. I mean, she thinks I’m only fourteen years younger than she is! And, to her, that’s proof that my father had another family. Our family was an afterthought, my father had had another family, and I’m a child of the first marriage. I’m sixty years old, whereas she herself was only seventy-four when she had the stroke and fell over on the golf course.”