Milk (4 page)

Her table manners were flawless.

Then, there were the things left behind when she died, which themselves seem like memories. Items sorted through by my father, some kept, others discarded—no particular logic to what was saved or not. A few dresses in the closet, some shoes: flats in different colors, with a T-strap over the instep. Specially made for her, my father said; she had difficulties with her feet.

Costume jewelry. Chunky beads, clip-on earrings, pins. An empty striped hatbox. A notebook on Japanese flower arranging, from a class she took once, plus a few black metal trays, heavy as skillets, affixed with sharp metal combs onto which I would sometimes, in an attempt to reach my mother, impale a few select flowers, anchored by dark green modeling clay and smooth black stones.

Her recipe box. Her linens, an array of tablecloths, placemats, napkins, guest towels, all folded and starched into packages with cardboard on the back, clear plastic in front, a slip of paper with the contents listed neatly in her handwriting. The linens, her crystal and silver, went to me since I was her daughter. I used to pore over the stuff as a child, trying to find clues about her, occasionally coming across a slip of paper I hadn't seen before that might say, in her own handwriting, “silver melon pitcher.”

Two cabinets, each with a delicate brass lock. One is the liquor cabinet; the other, a cabinet in the bathroom, well stocked with bottles of prescriptions long gone bad.

This last item exists because of her death: a package of condolence letters sent to my father, tied with string and kept in the bottom drawer of a chest standing in our living room. As a child, each time I read the letters—a secret project, my father didn't know—I had to redo the string so that in the end it became tangled and knotted.

T
HREE

St. Nicholas
…

It's morning and I'm at my Powerbook, a whole day ahead of me, trying to get caught up with work before meeting Gregg for dinner tonight. “You pick the restaurant,” he said when I got up my nerve and called him again. “The Peppermill,” I said. Did it even exist anymore? The sort of place boys take their prom dates.

St. Nick winks
…

My mother's braces. I keep seeing them. It's like this whenever I hear something new about her, something I didn't know before. As if she's here again, walking the earth, close to me—as close as I'll get.

St. Nick is a jolly old …

Here is my least favorite catalog, Meadowlark, with insipid rhyming verse at the top of each page. Verse that I make up. About Christmas, spring or summer. Flowers, sailboats, the wonders of grandma and grandpa; the advertising director fed-exes me a list of subjects to write about, along with photos, layouts, product information. I fax or fed-ex back to them the copy I've written; it no longer pays to do it in-house, companies say. Not enough work for one person in-house, so they contract with me or other freelancers, many of whom have their specialties now that catalogs are so endemic. Gadgets, housewares and bedding, books, gardening. I specialize in children's clothing and toys, although I still do some women's clothing and another catalog that sells safety products.

Of all my catalogs, Meadowlark is the most frou-frou. No playclothes here—only elaborate dresses for girls, matching rompers for their baby sisters, with maybe a sailor suit or a nerdy jacket and bow tie for the one or two boys who appear in Meadowlark's pages.

Santa Claus, his nose like a cherry …

Screw S.C. I attempt product descriptions instead, paging through the file folder of photographs the advertising director has sent, along with the accompanying list of product information, details that today swim before my eyes: shirred waists and ecru lace collars and triple choir collars, enamel buttons, grosgrain ribbons, jewel necklines and pink satin rosebuds, eyelet flounce hems and memory hats.

I pause at a photo of a girl in a velvet dress, but it's not her dress that stops me (venise lace collar, basque waist, taffeta underskirt)—it's her braces; braces again, my mother's braces floating before me.

“What?” I say aloud, irritated. “What is it now?”

As though I'm talking to
her
. Something I haven't done since childhood when I used to pray to her instead of God.

I look at the photograph again, unusual in that I've never seen a girl model with braces, certainly not in Meadowlark which is far from progressive,
i.e
., nothing but the most Aryan of children. This must be their idea of using a challenged child, when most catalogs nowadays will show a child in a wheelchair.

Luxurious emerald velvet
, I begin. Didn't I write this about a similar dress last year? No way to check since my file of old catalogs is back in Colorado. I flip down the lid of my Powerbook, considering the list of adjectives I keep there, taped on.
Vintage, charming, classic, sporty, jaunty, romantic, lavish, fresh, crisp, dainty, whimsical, sweet, delectable, timeless
—

I tap in
Timeless emerald velvet
. No.
Timeless velvet
—?
Velvet is timeless
.… A
dress of emerald velvet is timeless, a holiday classic
.

Try again.

Destined to be a treasured heirloom, this holiday dress of emerald velvet features a venise lace collar, basque waist and scalloped taffeta underskirt
.

There. I'm too exhausted to write about the back of the dress, for now. Usually I can write this stuff in my sleep. It doesn't help that I left my thesaurus in Colorado and I'll have to buy another here. Damn it. I go up to the menu and under File, I hit Save, then Quit.

A drive, a little drive is what I need.

The residents of the Alta Vista crowd the window to watch me put the car in reverse.

I drive to my father's house, down the Arroyo Parkway, cutting over to Garfield (with the same old Speed Checked by Radar sign—as I child I believed planes flew overhead, that as long as there wasn't a plane overhead, you could speed).

A modest ranch of dour color with a finicky dicondra lawn, this house is worth, ironically, half a million dollars now just because it's in San Marino. It was Dorinne's house originally. Over the years I persisted in thinking of it as hers, my father as a kind of lodger there. Once she died several years ago he decided to stay—it was near the Y, he reasoned, so he could swim and use the weight room. Actually, he swims at the Valley Hunt Club—the pool at the Y, he says, is not very clean, not very
nice
, my father's most serviceable word. The real reason Dad stayed in Dorinne's house, I believe, is that moving frightened him. Moving houses, that is; offices are different. In fact, he's acquired a taste for moving offices, studying the classifieds for a deal, the smallest, cheapest office possible. But moving houses? He hasn't had much practice: he moved straight from his mother's house to the one he and my mother built, then, more than twenty years later, on to Dorinne's.

I ring the doorbell. I don't have a key and never have had one, even during my brief uncomfortable stays here (the term ‘stay of execution' comes to mind), when I was a teen.

No answer. I fight back ivy and shrubs to peer in his windows. No sign of Dad, he must be at his office. Probably walked there, something he wouldn't dream of doing before the cataract. I get back in my car and drive the route my father would walk and sure enough, there he is on the west side of Garfield, in navy blue canvas tennis shoes and a business suit.

I roll down the window. “Dad!” I call. I honk. “Dad! DAD! DAD!”

No choice but to tail him to his office. His stride is that of a diligent schoolboy's—he actually looks right and left at every driveway—and I wonder, as I always do, what he thinks about. Death? He does seem unusually concerned about it—all the letters he's sent Corb and me in the last year, for example, about his own death someday. “I have a living will (copy enclosed), so when the time comes, pull the plug.” “A salesman came in here the other day to try and sell me death taxes. I said I have them already, thank you very much.” “As for arrangements, do what you want, but no funerals!” I've always found this amusing, as if he anticipated having several. He's a stickler on the point of funerals. “They're a waste of money and a lot of people you don't even know show up.” If other people have difficulty discussing old age, terminal illness and death, it's the one subject my father can be open about. “I want to be cremated and, please, no fancy containers for the ashes. A box will do. Frankly, I don't even care if you save them, you can throw them away for all I care, but I suppose you need to put something under the marker.” It's the details of death he can discuss, the “arrangements”—estate taxes, wills, burial plots, headstones, letters of condolence—not the meaning of death or the emotional implications.

Finally I catch up to him, heading up the stairs to his office.

“Dad? Dad!”

“Oh—what?” He has such a bright, happy, glazed expression, dewy-eyed. He can't really be thinking about death, estate taxes, can he? “Theo!”

“Dad, I've been driving after you for blocks hollering. Didn't you hear me?” I find myself talking loudly in case he is hard of hearing.

“No, no. I didn't. What is it, is something wrong?” he says.

“Nothing's wrong, Dad.” Nothing more wrong than it was the other day when I saw him, that is—failed marriage, no place to live, about to embark on an adulterous relationship, my period suspiciously late. My baby, if I am to have a baby, folded inside me like a traveling cup. “Dad, why didn't you tell me about your cataract?”

“I thought I did tell you.”

“You didn't, Dad. It's like when you had high blood pressure. You didn't tell me about that either.”

We've reached the door of his office. “Won't you come in?” he asks. He turns on the lights, all of them, including the fluorescents overhead.

“Is that why you brought in all these lamps?” I count six of them.

“Yes.”

“Corb says you're considering an operation.”

“Yes.” As though this is extremely hush-hush information.

“When are you planning on doing that?”

“It's outpatient now, you know.”

“So Corb explained. Why are you waiting?”

“I can walk to the store,” he says defensively. “I can walk to the office.”

“Have you set a date for the operation, Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“Will you now that I'm in town? Dad, I'm doing nothing here. I can help you. I can drive you. I can take care of you after the operation.”

Fear crosses his face. “That's not necessary, it's outpatient—”

“I know that.”

“Only a couple of days of recovery.”

“I know.”

“I'll give it some thought,” he says.

“Will you call and make an appointment with the doctor so we can get this thing rolling?”

He gazes at the wall, as though contemplating the view out a window—if there were windows here.

“Are you afraid, Dad?” I say.

“Me? No.”

But he is. For all his detailed plans about death, he's afraid of it, not afraid of death perhaps, but of what precedes it, helplessness and degeneration.

“I just don't understand why you don't get this taken care of, Dad. Especially now that I'm here.”

“Won't you sit down?” He's bringing around his office chair, evidently for that purpose. “I have something I want to talk to you about, too, since you're here.”

The chair stays empty. I cross my arms.

“Jackson called me last night,” he says.

“Oh.”

“He said he didn't know where you were and did I happen to know?”

I don't say anything.

He raises his voice. “Do you mean to tell me you didn't let your husband know you were coming out here?”

“My husband,” I say. “My
estranged
husband.”

“Nonetheless. He sounded so worried, Theo. He said he called all your friends and nobody knew where you were. He even called the police!”

“He knew I was leaving. He saw me walk out the door.”

“He didn't know you were leaving the state!”

I try to imagine Jackson on the phone to the police. About me. It's almost comic for some reason, Jackson, the very picture of reason, upset on the phone, maybe even hysterical.

“Well, are you planning on calling him?”

I fling up my hands. “I guess. Sometime. He knows I'm here, Dad, he knows I'm okay.”

“But he wants to talk to you, Theo, not me.”

“I know.”

“You need to talk to your husband.”

“I said I
know
.”

“What in the world happened between you two that you can't even talk to him?”

I shrug.

“I see you're still unwilling to discuss this,” he says.

I nod, a bare flicker of a nod.

He opens a drawer for no apparent purpose and shuts it carefully. “Well,” he says, “I haven't anything else.” His way of saying our visit is over for now. He waits for me to go through the motions of leaving. I can't. Too close to tears.

“Shouldn't you be getting on?” he says.

“If you call about your cataract, I'll call Jackson.”

He compresses his lips, as if considering how to trump me in bridge. “All right,” he says.

F
OUR

Jackson and I met at a dairy farm in France five years ago. It was an old, yellow, moldering set of buildings that centuries ago had been a monastery, now housing a family and their dairy farm on one side and a Chambre d'Hôte on the other. Rooms for rent. Rooms that overlooked the pasture where the family—a man, woman and two children—all wearing rubber boots, drove the cows back and forth several times a day with sticks and the help of a dog. Idyllically beautiful, this farm, wildflowers, green grass you just knew made for sweet milk, and the monastery itself, mystical and eerie, creaking with history, although this didn't seem to faze the family much. Like all Europeans they were used to living right alongside history, as they clumped around in their rubber boots and smiled at the silly, fawning Americans—secretly laughing at us, no doubt, as we stepped around cow paddies trying to take pictures.