After Visiting Friends (28 page)

Sometimes my mother would accuse her.

“Knock it off, Mom. He’s got to eat his own food.”

My grandmother would look at her. “What? I ain’t doing nothing. We’re just visiting.”

Now, all I want is for her to eat. To take my food.

A nurse enters and smiles. She feels for my grandmother’s pulse, stares at her wristwatch.
When she finishes, she reaches in the drawer and unwraps what looks like a lollipop
a doctor would give
to soothe a fearful child. It is a small, moist pink sponge on a plastic stick. The
nurse traces the thin shape of my grandmother’s withered lips, then dabs her little
tongue.

The nurse leaves.

I kiss my grandmother’s soft cheeks, pull the afghan tight to her chin. Tuck her in.

#  #  #

I make plans to travel to Tiffin the following Saturday. Bobbie’s sister-in-law Teresa
tells me that she has a wedding to attend that evening, but she’s free for lunch.
I buy a plane ticket to Cleveland, map my route. I figure it’s a two-hour drive from
the airport.

#

My mother calls. I’m on the Ohio Turnpike. It’s Saturday, 8 a.m.

“They had a hard time finding Gramma’s blood pressure. She’s asleep. Or unconscious.
I don’t know which. The hospice lady said she’s not in pain. But.” She pauses. “I
figure you’d want to come.”

There’s clatter from the tollbooth and I can’t hear well. After the gate lifts, I
pull along the ditch.

“What’s that noise?” she asks.

“Change,” I say.

“Where are you?”

“Ohio. Some reporting for work. A story.”

“What do you think?” she says.

I look at my watch.

“Let me start driving,” I say. “I can be there in four or five hours.”

“I thought you could fly.”

“By the time I get to the airport and return the car, it’ll be three hours. And who
knows if I can get a flight. I’ll call when I get close.”

#

I’m just outside South Bend.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“She just died. I was hoping she was waiting for you.”

#

Ninety minutes later. I find my mother at a playground near my brother’s house. She’s
taken the kids out to play. I see her in the distance, across a wide field. She’s
sitting on a merry-go-round. My youngest niece, Beatrix, the four-year-old, pushes
the merry-go-round, and my mother, a white sweater hanging from her shoulders, sits
alone, watching the ground move beneath her. Every so often her feet tap the ground.
She’s helping my niece keep the wheel turning. Each time she revolves toward me I
wave, but she does not see me. It does not feel right to shout to her. It’s not until
I’m on the edge of the playground that my mother sees me. She drags her heel, stops
the merry-go-round. A shaky line in the dirt.

“I’m sorry, Michael.”

“I’m sorry for you, Mom.”

“It’s okay.”

She stands up and I hug her. She hugs me back. Her body stiff.

#

The undertaker asks if we want an open casket or closed.

My mother looks to my brother and me.

“It’s your decision,” my brother says to her.

“Gramma always cared so much about her appearance,” my mother says. “She didn’t look
like herself at the end. She had lost so much weight.”

From behind his desk, the undertaker smiles that kind of smile that’s supposed to
say, “But of course, we . . .
understand
.”

He says, “If you bring in a photo, we can match her. We have ways of”—and here he
touches his cheek with the backs of his fingers, almost like he is caressing himself,
appreciating his own softness—“plumping. Preserving. We can . . . restore her.”

“No,” my mother says. “Closed.”

#

My mother and I clean out my grandmother’s room. Outside her door, still frozen in
time, the Ferris wheel.

My mother opens her closet.

“What do you think of this?” she says.

She points at the blouse and pants that my grandmother wore to her ninety-fifth-birthday
party.

I nod.

“We’ll drop it at the funeral home.”

On her nightstand is a handful of those pink sponge-swabs, still wrapped in plastic.

My mother is in a corner, holding my grandmother’s walker and her cane, sort of testing
them out. Leaning on them.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“I was thinking we should take these, in case we ever need them.”

“Mom, if you ever need one, I’ll buy one for you. We’re not reusing her walker.”

My mother lets out a small laugh and shakes her head. “What was I thinking?”

#

I don’t give her closed casket a second thought until the wake.

I know she’s dead. But part of me believes that she’s not. Not if I cannot see the
body.

Another box, closed.

People are arriving. My brother and his wife come first, with the
kids, Glenn and Eleanor and Beatrix. Twelve, eight, and four years old. My nephew
has homework to do and the only place we can find for him to spread out is a small
table at the back of the parlor. He sits there like an apprentice scrivener, and every
so often someone asks him what he’s doing. “Language and math,” he tells them. “We’re
learning about infinitives. I also have a lot of problems of division to solve. I’ve
been having trouble remembering to carry the remainder.”

#

The funeral. There’s maybe forty people. The church, so empty. The downside of a long
life: so few friends left to mourn you, to witness you home.

My brother and I give eulogies. My mother tells us she cannot. “The ‘petition-the-Lord’
thing,” she says. “I’ll do that instead.”

#

I drive us home from Resurrection. My mother and Brooke and me. At the gate to the
cemetery, waiting for a break in traffic, I think: At last my grandmother is where
she wants to be. Next to him. Her little Franta.

GRAVE 4

LOT 13

BLOCK 21

SECTION 59

#

As we approach home, we pass a meadow and some woods. Standing quiet in the lowering
sun are twenty, maybe thirty deer.

“Lookit,” Brooke says. “Let’s stop.”

We sit on the side of the road, watching, none of us speaking. Every so often another
one or two emerge from the woods on the far edge of the meadow.

Then my mother says, “Where’s the Ritz?”

She’d packed snacks—Ritz crackers, a tin of Planters, bottles of water. “It’s going
to be a long day,” she said in the morning, before we left her house for the funeral
home. “It’s good to have something to keep our energy up.”

From the backseat, Brooke hands her a sleeve of crackers sealed in brown wax paper.

My mother opens the door and the next thing I know, she’s walking into the field.

She clutches the crackers in her outstretched arm, like she’s a missionary holding
her crucifix aloft, approaching wary natives on the riverbank, her birch-bark canoe
put ashore behind her. The deer go on eating. My mother walks toward a large buck
in the center of the herd, his head crowned with a broad rack of antlers. He lifts
his head and considers her. My mother stands less than an antler’s worth away. My
mother looks at him and then opens her tube of crackers and places one in her palm.
The buck shifts toward her, lowers his head, and slowly, gently, nuzzles the cracker
from my mother’s hand. He chews it, orangey flakes falling from his wet black lips.
My mother reaches out and touches the thick of his neck. The buck is motionless as
she strokes him, softly. And then my mother offers up to him another cracker and once
again he eats from her palm. My mother looks back toward us, a smile on her face.

Other deer start to move toward her.

Brooke says, “I think you better go help your mother.”

I go to my mother like a man navigating a minefield. I don’t want to spook them.

By the time I get to my mother, the deer have formed a soft circle around her. But
they’re polite. Standing there, waiting patiently for a Ritz. My mother beams.

“Take some, Mike,” and she gives me a fistful.

I start to hand out the crackers. Wet tongues snatch them from my hand. When we’re
out of crackers, my mother says to the deer, “Sorry, guys. Holy Communion is over.”

From her wax paper sleeve she shakes the crumbs into her palm, scatters the remains
over the meadow.

#

Later the night of the funeral, I find my mother sitting in her Solitaire Chair in
the kitchen, papers in her hand.

“Well, that’s odd,” she says. “Take a look at Cause of Death.”

She hands me my grandmother’s death certificate.

“How did you get this?” I say.

“They gave it to me at the funeral home this morning. They do that for you.”

Under
CAUSE(S) OF DEATH
the medical examiner has written

1. Anorexia

2. Dementia

“What do you think of that?” she says, looking to me.

“I guess it’s the truth,” I say. “She didn’t want to eat anymore.”

She folds the paper and returns it to the envelope. This is what we should have done
with my father’s death certificate all those years ago: sit around the kitchen table,
pass it around, discuss it.

#  #  #

The next week, I return to Ohio. Bobbie’s sister-in-law Teresa tells me to meet her
at a strip mall on the edge of Tiffin. “There’s a coffee place there,” she writes
in her e-mail. “You’ll see it.”

But outside town, I get lost. And my cell phone gets no coverage. I find myself on
a street that dead-ends at a railroad track. There’s a little building. Tate’s Chainsaw
& Small Engine. A deer hide is stretched and drying near the door. I knock to ask
directions. No answer. Finally, a watchman tells me how to find what I’m looking for.

#

The only people in the place are a man and a woman at a table in the window.

“Teresa?”

“You must be Michael.”

I tell them I’m sorry I’m late.

“That’s okay,” Teresa says. “Tim decided to come. I’m glad he did.”

They’re in their early fifties. He has short sandy hair, close-cut. He leans on the
table, and his forearms, exposed by the pushed-up sleeves on his OSU sweatshirt, are
powerful. She sits beside him, her hand on top of his. Her hair is reddish brown and
wavy. She’s wearing a faded sweatshirt from Put-in-Bay, Ohio. “The Key West of the
North,” it says. Around her neck there’s a small metal pendant, electro-engraved with
a portrait of a young boy.

I tell them my story.

Teresa says, “We were thinking you might be his son.”

I tell them that I came because I want to know who Bobbie was. “What can you tell
me about her?”

She had blue eyes. She was tall and skinny. What was she—five feet eight, maybe? She
loved animals, but she was allergic to cats. She looked like Meryl Streep. Or sometimes
Audrey Hepburn? She smoked like a chimney. Never dated much in high school. She was
devoted to her mother. Called several times a week. She loved jewelry. She was a bad
driver. When she was sixteen, she broke her father’s shoulder in a car accident. She
had a bubbly personality. Her father was very protective of her. She loved to travel.

“Did she ever talk about that night?”

“Never,” Teresa says. “It was just understood that we could never ask her about her
personal life. And we certainly knew we could never ask her about that night. When
I came into the family, Tim’s mother took me aside and told me what had happened.
She told me it upset Bobbie very much and that we just didn’t talk about it. I don’t
think Bobbie’s father even knew.”

“My mother never told him,” Tim says. “He was very protective of Bobbie. He had a
hard time with the idea of her going off to college.”

Teresa reaches down to a scratched-up plastic shopping bag sitting at her feet.

“I made this for my kids, so that they would know their aunt Bobbie. I thought maybe
it’d help you.”

Another scrapbook. Inside, photos of Bobbie as a teenager, her hair flipped like that
of a girl screaming for the Beatles at Shea. A letter of acceptance to Ohio State.
A letter inviting her an interview with the
Sun-Times
.

“She traveled the world,” Teresa says. “That’s what she did, since she didn’t have
a family. But you know what? You won’t find any photos of her enjoying herself. Just
photos of monuments. She said she didn’t have any photos of herself because, once,
she gave her camera to a man on the street to take her picture, and he ran away with
it. She never trusted anyone again.”

Page after page of old greeting cards.

“The Hesses are big on those,” Teresa says. “Bobbie once told me, ‘Our family makes
a big deal out of remembering.’ What’s funny: She died on November third, and the
next day in the mail I got her trick-or-treat card.”

There’s a photo of Bobbie’s apartment building.

Teresa says, “After Bobbie died, it fell to us to pack her up.”

“Took us ten days,” Tim says. “My mom said, ‘Be sure you get the violin.’ When Bobbie
was a little girl, my mom had a small violin made for her, and Bobbie still had it,
hanging on the wall.”

“Every room had bookshelves,” Teresa says, “and they were all
filled—doubled up. You’d pull a book out, and there’d be another book hidden behind
it. She collected first editions. Mysteries especially. Did you know she wrote a column
for the paper where she reviewed mysteries? ‘Book ’Em, Bobbie!,’ it was called. And
then there were the teddy bears. She had at least fifty or sixty teddy bears.”

They show me a photo of Bobbie surrounded by family. It’s Christmas and she wears
a sweater with a large tree sewn onto it. Teresa points at the people in the photo,
tells me who they are. Her finger comes to a teenage boy and she goes quiet. She looks
to her husband.

“This is hard,” she says. “That’s my little Zach. My baby. Eight months after Bobbie
died, he was riding his moped and got hit by a car. He was medevaced off the road.”
Tears form in her eyes. “We think he was dead even then.”