They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (16 page)

“It’s not a wedding,” Molly said.

“Never mind your sarcasm, Molly.”

“I know what you mean, Mom,” Danny said. “Sad, beautiful, Yiddish melodies.”

“Why not get a string quartet? They could wear white tie,” Molly muttered. “While you’re at it.”

For a fleeting moment Joy saw the string quartet, three men in evening dress and a woman in a black gown—the violist, probably—before the tone of Molly’s voice registered, and Joy began to cry.

Molly made up with her mother within minutes. Of course she did, and she didn’t need Freddie to open her eyes in that exaggerated way to get her to apologize, either, for heaven’s sake.

Joy was now in a terrible state, trying to decide whether or not to change funeral homes. Another friend had been to the rec-room funeral home and said it was lovely, the downstairs chapel in particular, all wood, like a Reform synagogue from the sixties.

She decided to move Aaron. They had been so happy on the West Side. When the Madison Avenue funeral home told her what they would charge even if the West Side funeral home came and got Aaron that afternoon, Joy said, “That’s highway robbery. I would not bury a fly at your funeral home,” and arrangements were made to strike camp and head to the West Side.

The funeral director on the West Side extolled the virtues of a nonprofit funeral home just as if he were selling them a fur coat. Ladies, ladies, he said, when Molly took Joy there to take a look, we will take care of everything. Our reputation is how we survive. A plain pine coffin? Of course, of course, every size, immediately available. A rabbi? Naturally a rabbi, and not just any rabbi, a wonderful man, tops, a top rabbi.

“It was very sudden,” Joy said, “and yet not sudden at all. Do you understand?”

The funeral director sighed and looked at that moment not like a funeral director or a furrier but like a human being. “I do,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.” He put his hand across the desk, across the price lists to be perused and the papers to be signed, and he patted Joy’s hand.

Her eyes full of tears, Joy gave a small smile. “You
will
have a coatrack,” she said, “in case it rains?”

25

Some people had implied, even said outright, that it would be a relief for Joy when Aaron died. Tactless, Molly had thought then. But now that her father was gone, she wondered. The stress of looking after Aaron had been so fierce. Without it, Joy seemed calmer, softer. Even on the phone from California, Molly could sense it, as if her mother’s voice, her whole temperament, were gently muted.

Daniel, who went to see Joy every day after work, confirmed this.

“How is she?” Molly asked him. She often called when she knew he would be at the apartment.

Daniel, phone to his ear, poked his mother, who sat beside him at the dining-room table. “Mom,” he said, “Molly wants to know how you are.”

“As well as can be expected,” said Joy.

He nodded. It had been three weeks. “As well as can be expected,” he said into the phone.

“Oh good!”

He wasn’t sure what was to be expected in three weeks, but he did not say that to Molly. It was hard for her, being so far away. It was hard for him, too, being so close.

Joy had been quiet in those three weeks. She didn’t complain. It was almost as if Aaron’s death were a liberation, once the funeral and all the hubbub associated with it were over, if a sad smile and general acquiescence to everything Daniel said or proposed meant liberation. He hoped it did. Yes, he was sure it did.

When he told his mother he had to get home, he saw her panic for a second. Then she said, “Off you go.”

“Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”

Joy looked confused, as if dinner were a rarely performed ritual.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Daniel said.

“Tomorrow?”

Joy shuffled in her slippers to the front door.

“Mom, are you okay? Really?” He held both her hands and kissed the top of her head from what appeared to him a great distance. She seemed to have decreased. Not just in height, but in volume.

“Absolutely.”

“Oh. Okay. Good. You’re a trooper.”

“Absolutely,” she said.

26

Molly called her mother every day, which was admirable, Freddie thought, and often inconvenient, happening when they both got home from work and should, theoretically, have been talking to each other. Freddie called her father, of course, but not as frequently. Often, when she did call, he wasn’t in his room. He was a social person and he had found several of the ladies of Green Garden willing to be social with him. Her father was so social, Freddie told Joy, that the social worker at Green Garden seemed to devote a good portion of her working life to him. So when Freddie got a call from the social worker telling her that Duncan was feuding with a woman in a room down the hall, Freddie was not surprised.

“He’s become verbally abusive,” the social worker said.

“Oh, that.” Freddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, he told me there’s a lady who shouts at him when he walks by her door.”

“His language is out of bounds.”

“Did he call her a crusty botch of nature? That was always one of his favorites.”

“I don’t think you understand how serious this is. It’s disturbing the entire facility.”

“But that’s from
Troilus and Cressida
.”

“It was very upsetting for Mrs. Barsky.”

“Mrs. Barsky?” Mrs. Barsky had been his regular dinner partner some weeks back. Now he was sharing his table with another lady. Freddie suggested to the social worker that this shift in dining companions might have something to do with the arguments, but the social worker kept coming back to her father’s elaborate curses.

“He called Mrs. Barsky the slander of her heavy mother’s womb and, let me see, I wrote it down somewhere, here it is: a swollen parcel of dropsies.”

“
Henry the Fourth
, Part I. You know that’s why I became a Shakespeare scholar? To keep up with him.”

“They’re revving up to kick him out. I can feel it,” she said later to Molly. “He’s making trouble again.”

“At least he enjoys himself.”

But when Molly spoke to Daniel that night, she said, “I know he has a good time, but still, I’m glad Mom’s not a sex maniac like Duncan. She’s so dignified. It does my heart good.”

“We’re lucky we have such a reasonable, levelheaded mother.”

“You’ve done so much, Daniel, to help her get to this point. Going over there every day and everything.”

“Well, so have you. You arranged for Wanda to stay on, you got the Life Alert, you took care of the banking stuff.”

They both smiled, thinking of their mother safe, clean, and comfortable in her apartment, her Life Alert wristband securely fastened.

27

Joy woke up and, as usual, Aaron was dead.

What was coming was clear to her, and it was a vast emptiness, a blank, much like the winter with its white horizon, dense and low, no distance to the sky at all. The emptiness was everywhere, in every room at every hour. She could feel it draining the life out of her until she, too, would be empty. In the shower, she cried because, there, no one could hear her, though she knew there was no one to hear her anywhere.

Molly had gotten her a medical-alert contraption that came with a wristband with a button on it. Sometimes she pushed the button by accident and a man’s voice from the machine asked her if she was all right. It was company.

Wanda stayed on, going home only on the weekends to tend to her alcoholic husband. She made breakfast for Joy. She practically fed it to her with a spoon. Wanda missed Aaron, too. Sometimes they cried together. Sometimes they cleaned drawers.

Walter appeared once to pick up a sweatshirt he’d left behind. He helped her change two burned-out lightbulbs in the kitchen ceiling fixture. He said he would come back and make Foo-foo for her one day. When he left, his absence was acute.

On the weekends, Elvira came at night. Joy would not stay alone. Alone was impossible, it made her shiver, it made her head swim, it made her heart pound, it made her knees buckle, it made her ears ring.

Her children lived in some other world, one that she could see but had left behind, like the wake of a ship. Their lives foamed and splashed while she hurtled forward, away from them, but toward nothing. Well, toward something, and they all knew what that something was.

There wasn’t enough money for Elvira or Wanda. She was spending like a drunken sailor, an old decrepit drunken sailor. The children offered to help pay, which was kind but humiliating. And she knew they couldn’t afford it. An archaeologist and an environmentalist? They were hanging on by a bourgeois thread. She understood she would have to stay alone eventually. She listened to the wind rattle the windows and knew she was abandoned. She told Molly and Daniel she would not be on the dole.

28

The first night alone was long and she paced from the living room to the bedroom in her nightgown, like a ghost, a skinny, crabby old ghost. The sirens wailed outside, and she paced and wept and took her own pulse and used the toilet and ate crackers and knew she would faint. She paced some more, and the streets became quiet, even the sirens stopped, and she took her pulse again, as if her pulse might account for the silence, and paced some more and waited.

What am I waiting for? she wondered. Whatever it was, it was crucial and elusive. She could hardly breathe. She tripped on the edge of the rug in the hall, but did not fall. She lay on the couch and cried, bitterly and loudly. “I don’t care who hears me,” she called out to the empty house.

29

In Los Angeles, it was January and it was springtime. Molly saw a hermit thrush. Hummingbirds flitted in and out of white flowers shaped like bells. Pink buds of jasmine hung over the fence ready to burst into bloom. At the beach, surfers slid into the waves with the garish sunset behind them. Finches began to sing. She took one class to Catalina each week to photograph a cave painting and map the area around it. They used a software program that had originally been developed by NASA for the study of photographs of Mars.

“Mars,” her mother said when Molly told her about the project. “Well, well. Digital tracing. Isn’t that nice.”

“I knew you’d be interested.”

“Oh, of course.”

Molly told her about the bits of ocher the digital tracing had connected, and if her mother sounded less enthusiastic than Molly had expected, Molly attributed that to the weather. The weather was terrible in New York. It snowed and the bitter wind blew, and Joy could not leave her building.

“Well, this will cheer you up, Mom. One of the grad students in engineering built a drone and we attached a 3-D camera and…”

Joy drifted from room to room, listening, aimless, trapped.

It wasn’t that Joy expected her daughter, and certainly not her son, to come live with her. They had their own lives, just as she had once had her own life. She did expect something from them, though, something they were not providing, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Danny was coming once a week for dinner now, Molly planned a trip to New York in the near future, and Joy waited eagerly for their visits. But visits predicted their own end, and an end to a visit meant she would be alone again.

There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, she thought, and wondered what it was.

She should have spent more time with her own mother. She should have moved in with her mother to take care of her, she saw that now. So what if her mother’s apartment had been an L-shaped studio? So what if her mother kept it at 102 degrees and could not stand the smell of any food cooking except white rice, and so what if she talked and talked and talked and lived in the past? Now that Joy was older, she understood her mother. It was
cold
, that was why the heat in the apartment was turned up so high. Her mother’s ceaseless talking was an
activity
, a way for her to be alive. As for living in the past, the past was all that was real.

Joy would move right in with her mother now, if she could. Daniel and Molly were not old enough, not lonely enough, not cold enough to understand. And what would they do with their wives? And how was it that she had a daughter and a son and they both had wives, anyway?

No one, not even an old lady, wants to live in someone else’s house. Both Molly and Daniel had asked her to move in with them, naturally, just as she had asked her own mother to move in with her. They were good, devoted children, just as she had been. They didn’t really mean it, just as she had not really meant it.

Rich or poor, her mother used to say, it’s better to have money.

Aaron, you were not a prince among men. You were not. You were a weak man. You squandered your fortune like a prince, but you were not a prince. She thought fondly of his affectations of dress, the tweed cap when other men wore brimmed hats, the custom-made English shirts and shoes. How handsome he was, his beard groomed, his hair tousled. It had been so long since she had thought of him as handsome. But now she had trouble picturing him when he hadn’t been handsome, when he’d grown bent and stiff and hollow, when his lips were chapped and his teeth dulled, when his eyes went blank, when his clothes devolved into the clothes of a small child, the elastic-waist sweatpants, the hooded sweatshirt that he could not zip himself. Those images were fading. Instead, she could feel her head on his shoulder and his hand running through her hair. She could hear his breath in her ear, feel it, soft and warm. As she tried to fall asleep each night, she saw him as she had first seen him, a young man with no beard, his eyes a watery blue, his jacket handmade in Scotland, she later discovered, his large hand held out as he asked her to dance.

The memories did not comfort her. They made her feel the years that had passed and that, like Aaron, would never return. They made her old. Sometimes, when she got up to go to the bathroom, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and thought it was her grandfather. All she had to do was spit some tobacco. The smell of her grandfather and his chewing tobacco came back to her, and she got back into bed, sleepless and sick to her stomach.