Things Unsaid: A Novel (2 page)

She couldn’t get Mike’s words out of her head:
“Think of your family.”
But she had two families. Which one came first? Her tenure battle at Stanford had ended in termination. Her book,
The Narcissistic Mother
, was at risk. It would be more difficult to find a publisher now that she had lost her university affiliation. The Palo Alto school system paid such low wages that she couldn’t afford to take an unpaid leave to complete her book. But she was the eldest child. Mommy’s little helper. She had always liked doing the right thing, feeling needed. Maybe it was attributable to her Catholic upbringing and her Buddhist sense of karma and obligation.

Her parents had chosen SafeHarbour in Mukilteo—“good meeting place” in the Snohomish tribal language—themselves. Mukilteo had turned out to be a better place for the white settlers than for the Native Americans who had been cheated out of their land. Still circling the wagons. Her mother said she felt cheated, too.

Her mother dangled an unfiltered cigarette from her mouth, stained teeth exposed, lip curled. “Anyway, you haven’t been out here for years,” she said.

“What are you talking about, Mother? I fly out from Carmel almost every year in October, for your birthday or for Father’s Day. Don’t you remember?” Was her mother’s memory fading? Jules watched her rummage through her purse, taking everything out again. “Goddamn it. I can’t even find a cigarette in this thing. Maybe what I need is a drink instead.” Jules wondered if her mother really did forget where she placed things these days. As opposed to just pretending. This new mother frightened her even more than the one from her childhood.

Jules placed her tote bag on the floor next to the sofa. An hour’s worth of photocopied material from the library peeked out the top. Information on bankruptcy, consolidating debt, and credit counseling she had found for this visit. She had also gone online and discovered support groups for children of aging parents.

From inside his study, her father’s keyboard clicked slowly and methodically, like a military march for miniature plebes, required but tedious. She watched through the door as her father scanned a printout. She noticed a slight tremor in his right hand.
Parkinson’s?
She edged into the study.

“Dad, we need to talk about your stock portfolio,” she said, her voice sounding like a scared child’s.

Her father, smiling, gave her a kiss. “You’re my little researcher.” He passed her an Excel spreadsheet with his investments, including cost basis and return on investment. She pored through the figures.

“You two eggheads,” her mother interrupted, stepping abruptly into her father’s small office. Jules looked down at the graphs. “We’re going to be thrown out on the street, aren’t we?” her mother asked, lips tight. “Unless our Jules helps us. Those brainy types—they always know the right thing to do.”

Her father’s smile disappeared. “Andrew and Joanne have to pitch in, too. But I have a plan—to buy penny stocks with our Social Security. My broker warns me to avoid penny stocks, but I know better. Besides, Jules and Mike will have college tuition for Zoë soon.”

“Andrew has too many financial obligations of his own with three—or is it four?—kids,” her mother said, frowning. “So does Joanne, with her two daughters. Jules has only one child to think about.”

“Hmm. Uh, check the answering machine, Aida. I think Joanne called and left a message,” her father suggested, ignoring her mother’s comment.

“Guess she can’t get enough of me. Thinking of my birthday.” Her mother looked pleased.

“Yeah, yeah,” her dad said. “Birthdays just remind us that our lives are shorter than the year before. I think I’ll take a short nap. Sleep is practicing for death. Wake me up, if you can, in half an hour.”

Jules watched as her bent-over father, so curved in that he looked like a giant prawn, dragged himself off to the master bedroom with his file folders. A malodorous trace followed behind him, musty and dusty like their dogwood curtains. Jules sighed. She had hoped that on this trip, for once, they could have a good time.

“I got your text, Jules,” Mike said on the phone before dinner. “Our savings have almost run out. Soon we won’t be able to pay our mortgage. To say nothing of Zoë’s college fund. Those selfish sons of bitches!”

He always said things like this. Again and again. Jules didn’t like feeling defensive, but she did. “I know I enable them. What I really want to do is scream at them. Make them remember to take their pills. Report them to DMV for refusing to turn in their driver’s licenses. I feel like I may strangle my mother. But I
need
to help them. They’re my parents. After all they have done for me, they can’t be thrown out on the street. We can help Zoë later. Her whole life’s ahead of her.”

“After all they have done for you? Are you serious? Just listen to yourself! You have to let go,” Mike said as her head throbbed. “Be realistic.
We
are what matters now. Choose: our future or theirs.”

“Is it really possible to turn away from those who brought you into the world?” They had had this conversation—or was it an argument?—so many times. Normally they had it at night, in bed, and she would snuggle into Mike’s warm back, feeling how the muscles in his upper shoulders—between the blades—always and inevitably tightened. Jules now imagined him clenching his teeth, jaw set, on the other end of the phone.

“You’re stuck. It’s time to get unstuck. Before it’s too late. Too late for us. Too late for our daughter.”

“Mike—”

“They can move in with Joanne,” he pushed on. “Sell all that unnecessary bling-bling of your mother’s, and stop acting like the sky’s the limit. Remember what they have done.”

Jules felt her ears clamp down, like she was listening to a foreign language she didn’t quite understand and felt overwhelmed by.

“You see their aging as if it were ours. Admit it. But we don’t have to have their future, unless you make it so.”

Jules heard the exasperation in her husband’s voice.
Am I stuck with my parents?
She shuddered. She wished Zoë and Mike were with her—as a buffer, like a downy-soft comforter.

Mike clicked off without saying good-bye.

“S
houldn’t I be able to do what I want on my birthday?”

Jules hadn’t slept well. She felt drained. Her younger sister, Joanne, had spent hours planning the celebration for their mother’s eightieth birthday, but their brother, Andrew, had refused to fly out to Washington. Too busy with his own family in Vermont.

“You know, your brother didn’t forget,” her mother said with a lightness and satisfaction in her voice that Jules felt was reserved only for Andrew. “ ‘Happy Birthday,’ he sang in his lovely baritone voice over the phone. Gets that from yours truly, you know. He
is
my special boy.” She turned to Jules as if she needed her verification.

Her mother became visibly calmer just talking about Andrew. Jules nodded. “Well, happy birthday to you, Mother,” she muttered sleepily, not fully awake yet, pecking her mother on the cheek. She sniffed a mixture of single malt whiskey tinged with tobacco. A familiar smell. Her mother stooped over and poured coffee from a stained and chipped coffeemaker. It wasn’t an espresso maker, just a plug-in pot in the shape of a red drip coffeemaker, only boiling water for instant coffee …
Pretend coffee
, Jules thought.

A caffeine jolt from Instant Folgers and Sugar Pops were how her mother jump-started her day. Next came her cigarettes, more caffeine, and pretty glasses. Jules’s own drug of choice was her ongoing manuscript for her book. Her mother never understood that. Called her too academic, as if it were an insult.

Her mother pushed the Our Lady of Sorrows coffee mug at her. The Folgers looked muddy.

“Couldn’t you pretend to enjoy visiting your parents?” her mother asked again, with what looked like a sincere expression on her face. “Nothing wrong with pretending; with keeping up appearances,” she grumbled, staring into Jules’s eyes as she puffed. “Pretending is what manners are all about.”

But I am pretending. Pretending that we are a family
.

Her mother’s upper lip tightened. Vertical creases made her thin lips pucker and disappear around the cigarette they held. They contracted and expanded as she talked, almost dropping the embers. “You could be so pretty, you know.”

Garnet-red lip marks circled the filter ends of at least a dozen cigarette stubs lying at odd angles in the glass ashtray. Traces of past generations of tobacco were scratched deep into the ashtray’s bottom. Jules daughter, Zoë, when she was three, had been startled by those ruby-red lips, afraid they were bleeding. They were the same ruby-red color Jules had always associated with Dorothy’s shoes from
The Wizard of Oz
. When she was a girl, her mom’s red lips had seemed magical and beautiful.

The apartment door flew open, like the prophet Elijah at Passover swooping in.

“Let’s light birthday candles! Stick them in a cupcake or something,” her sister Joanne shouted as she rushed in to hug their mother, her two teenage daughters behind her. “Yoo-hoo, Jules, my favorite sister.” Joanne smiled and hugged her. Jules felt lucky having a younger sister, felt her body soften just having her there.

“Even the sunshine’s going to cooperate for your birthday, Mom. Why don’t we have a birthday picnic out in the garden? It’s such a lovely garden. And I brought some light snacks. We can spread out an old bedspread on the grass like old times at Lake Tamsin when we were little. I bet Sarah and Megan would love that, don’t you think?” Joanne turned towards her daughters.

Sarah, silvery-blue glitter on her eyelids, wore a pale pink, ruffled organza dress; she looked like a little Christmas angel. “Grandma,” she said, “you’re the only beautiful one here.”

Jules’s mother smiled.

How does she know exactly what to say?
Jules wondered. But her mother was different as a grandma, more like the mama she had had fun with when she was her nieces’ age.

“I don’t feel like it,” her mother said, her smile quickly disappearing. “Who wants to celebrate being eighty years old, anyway?”

“Let’s go to the mall after our picnic, Grandma,” Megan begged. “Oh, please. Pretty please.”

“Great! Fresh air and a picnic to celebrate, then!” Jules started to slip on her rain jacket, the wrong type of jacket for this sunshine. She remembered long walks to the Girl Scout center with her mother as their Brownie leader. All the Brownies had so much fun with her mother in those days. Jules had felt so proud. How all the Brownies loved her mother, who was a joyful whirlwind, then had let them decorate their hair like Christmas tree ornaments and then had them spin like gyroscopes. So much fun, glitter and sticky glue in their hair, little prisms of light bouncing off the walls like rainbows.

Zipping up her jacket very slowly, flipping the hood up, Jules heard her mother’s tread behind her, and one foot sounded like it was dragging a bit. She wanted to hold her mother’s arm to steady her. Hesitating, Jules turned to see Sarah and Megan each grab one of their grandma’s elbows in delight before she had a chance.

Jules pressed the down button again as they waited for the elevator. Her nieces whispered and giggled beside her. Most of the residents were too immobile to use the elevator without assistance. Jules watched her mother, who was now sullen, still as a mannequin.

“Well, it’s the birthday girl,” the handsome, dark-haired doorman, no more than twenty-five, said in his warm, melodious voice—the kind you would hear from the cute lion or bear cub in an animated Pixar film—when they entered the lobby. Jules inspected his navy-blue blazer with its pseudo–family crest as he opened the front door for them.

Her mother’s face relaxed, looking younger in a way that no facelift could effect. “Oh, I didn’t want anyone to know it’s my birthday today,” she said, face shiny and beaming, as she started walking more energetically. But by the time they reached the sidewalk, out of sight of the doorman, her simmering resentment and grievances had returned.

After spreading out an old bedspread in the garden behind SafeHarbour, the girls laid out tea sandwiches and drinks.