Patricia Gaffney (26 page)

“B
eautiful
afternoon.” Cottie puts her head back to catch the sun, slipping her arm through mine. The sidewalk’s narrow; pedestrians have to go around us, but we don’t care. We’re in a good mood, we feel entitled. “What should we do now?” she asks. “Do you have to get back?”

“I’ve got the whole day.”

“Let’s go in here.”

Treasures and Things, Dolley’s antique store. A hundred percent Things, in my experience, but I stop in all the time anyway. Must be because I’m an optimist.

“Are these tacky?” I hold up salt and pepper shakers shaped like cows standing on their hind legs.

“Definitely.”

Mr. McDorn, who owns the place, is a nice man, but he’s usually too busy talking your ear off to do anything as dull as dust or straighten up or put price tags on things. It’s like your dotty old grandmother’s attic: no rhyme or reason, not to mention an asthmatic’s nightmare.

“I wonder if Shevlin could use this.” Cottie fingers a metal contraption, some sort of tool, evidently, since it’s in the store’s loosely gathered tool section.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I’m not just sure. Something for cows?”

“Maybe Owen could use it, then.”

“Or it might be a trap.”

“You mean, a trick?”

She gives me an amused look. “No, honey, a trap. For some poor animal.”

“Oh.” Before my eyes, the metal contraption becomes hideously ugly. I’m glad when Cottie puts it down and moves on.

We wander around, picking up and putting down, admiring, making cracks. Mr. McDorn waylays us in the particularly decrepit used-book section, where I hang back and eventually drift away, letting Cottie tackle him; she’s known him longer, she can handle his barrage of words better. He must be lonesome, I always think, and let him go on for as long as he likes. Cottie’s perfectly sweet but also brisk; soon we’re out and on the street, and I don’t even feel guilty for not buying anything.

Cottie has to pick up a prescription at the drugstore. While I wait, I buy hand cream on sale. Part of my arsenal for the nightly lube job: moisturizer, lip balm, body lotion, hand lotion, foot cream. It’s a wonder I don’t slide out of the bed. It’s our hormones drying up, apparently. “Wait’ll you’re my age,” I heard a woman say to her friend on the subway. “Wait till sex is painful.” Not “uncomfortable” she said “painful.” Can that be true? If so, talking about it must be the last taboo. Next time sex comes up in conversation, I’ll ask Cottie; she’ll give me the true story.

The drab, run-down Madison Theater keeps an unpredictable schedule. “Look,” Cottie says as we stroll by the streaky ticket booth, “something’s playing.” True: About a dozen teenagers are loafing in line for tickets to see a romantic comedy I read a snide review of about six weeks ago. Cottie and I look at each other.

“Want to go?”

“If we don’t, we’ll just have to go home.”

“I’ll call Shevlin.”

The theater smells like butter and wet wool. We take seats on the aisle three-quarters of the way down without asking each other if that’s all right. As soon as we’re seated and comfortable, the lights go out, as if the projectionist has been waiting for us. “
Excellent
idea,” I murmur as the credits roll. We bump shoulders conspiratorially.

How many movies have I seen with my mother? Or Chloe? I like going to movies with them more than anyone else, more than with the closest friend, more than with Andrew. Even the lamest film is bearable if I’m with Chloe—if I was with Mama; in fact, a terrible movie is better than a mediocre one, because then we can make cracks, be sarcastic, make it a competitive sport, our wit against the film’s inanity.

This one is fairly inane. The hero’s moroseness is supposed to attract the bubbly heroine, but that seems unlikely. All they could possibly see in each other is amazing facial perfection.

My mother took me to see
Annie Hall
when it first came out. Of course we both loved it. I didn’t understand all of what
bittersweet
meant until then, and it hit me hard. I was glad to have my mother with me. The film seemed so modern, and she was so old-fashioned. Or no-fashioned; she was just Ma, my often-resisted, occasionally appreciated buffer between childhood and adulthood. We talked about the movie all afternoon, afterward. She understood better than I did why I loved Annie, why she was the first grown-up role model I ever had, not the Bionic Woman or Hayley Mills or whoever. (The second was Vanessa Redgrave in
Julia.
)

I was thinking about that experience, which seemed even more complicated in retrospect, all mixed up with my fear of growing up and a ferocious impatience to get on with it, not to mention figuring out what kind of woman I wanted to be—when I took Chloe to see
Amelie.
It was R-rated, but I had a feeling it would be appropriate for her and it was. What a tender, intoxicating, romantic film. I adored it, the daydream quality, Amelie’s exquisite shyness, and her impishness, the wonderful
Frenchness
of it all. Chloe and I got ice cream afterward, our habit, and talked over the movie. She thought it was okay.
Okay?
I was still in a happy haze. “It was a little too much, Mom. Like a Disney movie.” She was fourteen; she still had braces on her teeth, she still had freckles. “It was more a fairy tale than a real story. I mean, what was she so
afraid
of?”

It’s disappointing when your child doesn’t agree with you, especially when you know you’re right, but it’s also hugely exciting. Discussing that film defined our differences in a way nothing quite had before, and never so easily or naturally. I loved my daughter even more, if that was possible, for who she was, who I could see her becoming. And I like to think she added a little bit of ballast to her already crowded cargo hold of tolerant affection for Mom.

What’s this? I’m not paying much attention to this movie, but sometime after the beautiful lovers break up and before they will, I’m certain, get back together, I begin to weep.

Quietly, thank God. Silent tears slipping down, wetting my hands in my lap. The screen is a complete blur. This will stop in a moment, I assure myself, reaching for a tissue in my purse. I mop my eyes surreptitiously, facing away so Cottie won’t notice.

But a second later it starts again. This time there’s no stopping it, and when Cottie slips her arm through mine, I start to cry in earnest. It’s an embarrassing, unexplainable lapse. And strange, because the tears came so much sooner than the emotion that provoked them. Whatever it is. The usual, I suppose. Loss. I feel incomplete. I’m missing.

I glance at Cottie, try to speak, apologize—she’s got tears in
her
eyes. Is it sympathy for me, or could she be thinking of her mother, gone but still deeply missed after fifty years? Or of her daughter, who flies in and out of her life at random intervals, uncatchable as a butterfly?

I lean my head on her shoulder. It comforts both of us, I think. Onscreen, the morose lover convinces the poignantly brokenhearted but still effervescent heroine that they belong together. Yes, well. Get it while you can, children. Don’t look ahead. There’s no percentage in knowing what’s coming, because you can’t prepare for it. And once it happens, there’s nothing to do but endure.

“I could’ve driven you home,” I tell Cottie while we wait in front of the theater for Shevlin to pick her up. At five o’clock, the sun is a glowing ball just starting to sink over the mountain. My mountain. A flock of starlings falls like a net over the mansard roof of the bank across the way, rises up, falls back again.

“I know,” Cottie says, “but this is fine. He likes to do it.”

I imagine he does. It’s so sweet. I wouldn’t dream of asking Andrew to drive me somewhere or pick me up. Is that another loss? What a mood I’m in. “Well, Cottie, what can I say. I’m sorry for being a noodlehead.”

“Now, don’t say that.”

“I don’t even know what was the matter with me.”

“Sometimes we just need a good cry.”

“Usually not in a public place, though.”

“When I was going through the change, I cried through the whole funeral service of a man I never met in my life.”

“Oh, I do that all the time.”

We sling our arms around each other and watch cars stop and go at the intersection, Dolley’s rush hour in full swing.

“Well, I’m not one to go around cheering people up,” she says.

“I think you are.”

“Bad things are bad things. And they always hit when you least expect them—for some reason, whoever’s in charge made that a rule.”

Maybe she isn’t one to go around cheering people up.

“Life’s nothing but saying good-bye, if you care to look at it that way.”

“Oh God,” I say with a shiver. “I don’t.”

“Me, either, but sometimes you can’t see any alternative.”

“So then what do you do?”

“What I do is try to stick myself into it more. If I’m the one who has to let go, then I try to
do
it, not have it
done
to me. It doesn’t hurt as much that way, plus you can learn something in the process.”

“I guess.”

“Not that learning something does you any good next time. You think it will, but it doesn’t. Oh, honey, we just have to go through it all.”

Shevlin’s truck pulls up to the curb. Despite the fine weather, he’s got the earflaps down on his old green cap. I’m not sorry to see him; I don’t want any more of Cottie’s hard wisdom right now.

“Did I make you feel sad?” Worry lines crease her face. “Lord help us, that’s the last thing I meant to do.”

“You didn’t.”

“Anyway, I forgot the main thing.”

She’s become very dear to me, I realize, her long, thick-skinned face, the way it breaks up and shines when she smiles. Her unvarying kindness to me. “What’s the main thing?” I ask.

“The main thing…” She spreads her arms wide, pulling out the blue wool of her cardigan like benevolent bat wings. “The main thing is we’re here right now, alive and kicking. What a shame to waste a minute because it won’t last. You can’t stop change, so you might as well give it a big hug and get on with it.” She salutes me, then hauls herself up into her husband’s Ford F-150. The muffler’s bad. Roaring off down Madison Street, they sound like reckless teenagers in a hot rod.

Reaching for the car keys in my coat pocket, I pull out something wrapped in paper—and smile, because I know what’s inside before I open it. A couple of cows standing on their hind legs.

F
ive whole hours in the house by herself—a record for Sock, who’s wild to see me. A quick survey of the downstairs reveals no damage; it’s either upstairs or my dog has turned into an angel. We put off finding out by taking the flashlight and walking down to the road.

It’s too early for crickets, or if it’s not, I can’t hear them over the tree frogs. Sock is fearful of the dark, sticks with me instead of exploring the woods this far from the house, but I’m not. I only take the flashlight so I won’t trip over a rock or a rut. Nothing spooks me; I never have crazy thoughts about bears or snakes or depraved mountain men. I’m a hundred times warier about being out alone at night in D.C. than here.

“Hi, Ma.” Instead of a star, I see her in the moon tonight, a kind-faced half-moon wearing a patient smile. “Cottie and I had a nice time today. You don’t feel replaced or anything, do you? Because that would be…that would be nuts.”

Sock and I stop fifty feet from the road—I’m still nervous about her and cars, plus I don’t care for us to be picked out by anyone’s headlights at night. It’s quiet though; not a single car passes as we stand in the shadowy lane, the flashlight off, sniffing the air and listening to night sounds.

“Mama? I wish…”

The dog and I start back for the cabin.

“I wish I’d been better. Andrew says no, but I think I could’ve been a better daughter if I’d had time. If I’d just thought. I’m so sorry about Mr. Dreessen. I wish you were here, so I could tell you. I miss you, Mama, and I can’t seem to…”

I pick up a stick on the side of the drive, use it for a walking stick until Sock takes it from me. I didn’t even know how sick my mother was. When she called to say she couldn’t come up for her graduation, Chloe was disappointed but not devastated. They weren’t as close as they could’ve been—that’s another one of my regrets. They should’ve seen each other more often. They should’ve loved each other as much as I loved them.

The hospital called two days later. Mama had had a heart attack in the night. She’d managed to call 911. I can’t bear to think of that, her fear and pain, how alone she must’ve felt, dialing the ambulance by herself. I should’ve tried harder to make her move up here. I was halfhearted about that. Self-involved.

She died in the hospital. I was in the air—they told me what time, and I figured out I was eating mini pretzels and drinking orange juice when my mother died. This is the part I can’t let go, it’s like a burn wound that will not heal. I couldn’t have saved her, but I could have held her hand so she wouldn’t have been alone when she left. That’s all I wish. That we could’ve been together when it was her time.

M
ama had beautiful skin—I have my father’s dry, Irish skin. I skip the nightly lube job, though, despite having a new jar of hand cream. Too tired; going to bed early.