They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (22 page)

“I’m supposed to age in place,” she said to Danny.

“It’s a vacation, Mom, in a warm place with people who love you.”

“I don’t really need a wheelchair,” she said to the wheelchair man, turning, twisting her neck so she could see him. “My children are overly cautious.”

“They love you,” the man said.

“I’m going to stay with my daughter. In California.” She did not mention Freddie. Perhaps that was wrong, but she could not come up with a way to explain Freddie, not on the spur of the moment to the wheelchair man.

“That’s beautiful,” said the man.

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

Danny set off the beeping alarms as he went through security.

“Hips,” he said apologetically to the guard. “And knees.”

“I am free of prosthetics,” Joy said. “I am also free of most of my large bowel, my gallbladder, my uterus, ovaries, and appendix. I have my tonsils and most of my teeth. Check on your machine. You’ll see. Go ahead, check.”

39

When she had been in Los Angeles for three days, she knew two things for certain. One: she could not spend two months with her daughter. Two: she could not spend two months with her daughter in California. The California sun was blinding, much brighter than the friendly East Coast sun. This sun was used to shining on a desert, harsh and unrelenting.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Mom? Do you see why I love it here?”

“Very nice,” Joy said.

Then there was Molly herself, as bright and unrelenting as the sun. Every time Joy put a glass down, Molly picked it up and put it in the dishwasher. The temperature was constantly shifting, depending on where that sun was and at what angle it was hitting the house, and Joy put on and took off sweaters all day long, but each time she reached for a sweater she had removed, it was gone, gone to its closet, hung up there by Molly. Books, magazines, sandwiches—they disappeared practically from Joy’s hand. Her toothbrush, which she left on the side of the sink, immediately hid itself in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes, when Joy lifted her coffee cup, a hand with a sponge swiped the spot where it had been on the table before Joy was able to take a sip.

“This is so relaxing, isn’t it, Mom?”

“Very nice.”

“Are you comfortable, Mommy? We got you a memory foam pad for the bed.”

The two girls were so thoughtful, but the bed was so high Joy had trouble getting into it. It loomed before her at night, a great bulbous affair piled with pillows, six, seven, eight pillows. The box spring and mattress and memory foam mattress pad and the down mattress pad on top of that looked like a big billowy hat that might topple off its head at any moment. It might cushion the fall in an earthquake. Then she thought, Earthquake, and could not sleep.

The jasmine bloomed, and it made her eyes water.

She uttered not a word of complaint. Molly was so happy to have her. Even Freddie seemed happy to have her here. Were they insane, both of them? She was a nuisance. Even at her best these days, she was a nuisance.

“I’m very annoying,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” said Molly.

“No, I am. I really am. I’m annoying. I annoy myself, even.”

Molly laughed and hugged her. Joy, hugging her back, felt the sturdy flesh of Molly’s back. “You certainly are strong.”

Molly rolled up her sleeve and made a muscle, like a man. Joy dutifully touched her daughter’s biceps and wondered when it was that muscles on women had become fashionable. “Okay, Popeye,” she said.

Molly was heading out for a walk. She walked very fast and very far every day. Stop and smell the roses, Joy had said once, but Molly said the roses in California did not have much smell.

“I’ll walk you to the gate.” Pretty much all she did. There were no doormen to gossip with, no coffee shop to walk to, no park, no friends to have lunch with, no Karl to bump into. “Just let me find my sunglasses.”

She looked first through one bag, then through another bag. As she pushed the packages of Kleenex and lipsticks and tubes of moisturizer aside, she began to panic. Her sunglasses had to be in her pocketbook, in this brown eyeglass case perhaps, but no, the brown one was empty, and this one, the turquoise, held her reading glasses, the old ones that worked better than the new ones, she had been searching for them all day, and another glasses case, a hard case, white, this had to be the one with the sunglasses, but these were a pair of glasses she had never seen before, where on earth had
they
come from?

“Here, Mom. I found them. They were in the pocket of your jacket. In the closet.”

“Oh thank god. Now I’ll just put my shoes on.”

Before she could put her shoes on, she had to put on her special elastic stockings that helped her circulation. The special rubber gloves she needed to put on the special stockings were somewhere in the guest room where she slept, which was also Freddie’s home office, poor Freddie. She shuffled into the guest room, fumbled through several drawers until she found the rubber gloves.

“Mom, I don’t have that much time before I have to get to work.” Molly was pacing up and down the hall, all decked out in her sneakers and Lycra. A uniform to take a walk. Joy smiled. Molly had always liked uniforms. She had taken up skating just to get the skates and the silly skirt, horseback riding just to get the breeches and the ratcatcher shirt and the white stock and the shiny black boots; skiing, tennis—she had been very good at sports, but it was all about the equipment.

“You were such a good little tennis player.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, all right, but don’t rush me,” Joy said. “I get flustered.”

“Oh, for god’s sake. Why didn’t you get ready half an hour ago when I said I was going out?”

Joy looked up from her sneaker, the lace of which she was trying to untangle. “See?” she said, beaming. “I was right! I
am
annoying!”

*   *   *

Molly and Freddie tried, they did try. They took Joy to the beach to watch the sunset. They took her to dinner. They made her dinner. They walked her up and down the street like a much-loved dog. In the evening they sat outside and had their glass of wine and Joy sat with them, but she was alone in those moments, she was alone in every moment. How could she have explained that to the two girls? That’s how she had come to think of them, as the two girls. Not The Girls. The Girls were her friends back in New York. The Two Girls were here, attentive, dutiful, insufficient.

I have no life, Joy thought. I belong nowhere. I am residing in someone else’s life, in the Two Girls’ life.

The days passed, many days, Joy was sure, though she began to lose track of them.

“Give it a little time, Mom. It’s only been a week,” Molly said.

“It seems like a year. Fish and guests, you know what they say.”

Molly looked crestfallen, a word Joy was sure she had not thought of in years. She could not stand to have her daughter look crestfallen. It broke her heart.

“It’s lovely,” she said quickly. “You two girls are wonderful to me. But what am I doing here, honey? I don’t belong here. I’m in your way and I do have my own home. At home.”

“It’s a change,” Molly said. “A change of scenery.”

Joy tried to smile appreciatively. She must stop complaining or she’d end up with yet another change of scenery, she thought, the parking lot out of a nursing home window.

*   *   *

That night in bed, Molly whispered to Freddie, “I think she misses him.”

“Of course she does, honey. So do you,” Freddie whispered back. “So do I. It’s been just a few months.”

“No, I mean Karl.”

Freddie started to say that was unlikely, but then wondered. “You think she’s like my father?”

Molly, obviously offended, said, “She’s lonely and vulnerable. That’s all.”

“It’s probably pretty boring for her here.”

Molly had tried to interest her mother in gardening. She offered to get raised beds if Joy wanted to grow vegetables. Molly did not like gardening, but she saw no reason that her mother shouldn’t, and if that meant fresh Tuscan kale and artichokes on Molly’s table, so much the better. “It’s very spiritual, Mom,” she’d said. “Working with the soil.” She wished her mother had shown even a little initiative, if not with vegetables, then with flowers. They had a rosebush out front that was not doing at all well.

“She’s always on the phone,” she whispered to Freddie. “And she’s secretive.”

She thought it was usually Daniel, sometimes Natalie or one of the other girls. But it could be Karl, for all she really knew.

“She probably misses her cronies, her routine. Old people like routine. That’s what they keep telling me at Dad’s place. That’s one of the things they can’t understand about him. He hates routine.”

Molly kissed Freddie. “That’s it! You are a genius. We’ll take her to visit your father. She’ll see her peers and feel less lonely. We’ll take her to Green Goddess!”

*   *   *

Joy sat glumly in the backseat. The thin end of the wedge. The way they talked this place up, as if it were a resort in the Caribbean—it had happened to her friends, but she had not really expected this from Molly, her own daughter.

“I plan to go back to work in the fall,” she said.

“One day at a time,” Molly answered.

The parking lot seemed to be home to a number of cats.

“Pets are allowed,” Freddie said, “but the cats are feral.”

The building was pink stucco. The rooms had small balconies. In the center of an inner courtyard a fountain bubbled, and there was a front desk like a hotel. The whole place felt like a hotel, actually, a small hotel just a bit down at the heels.

“Not bad, right?” Freddie said.

Joy gave a weak smile.

They had lunch in the dining room. Joy was alarmed by the bibs the residents wore, but the food was quite good. She had never met Freddie’s father before this, which struck all of them as odd.

“Where have they been hiding you?” Duncan asked.

“I live in New York City.” It felt good just to say that: I live in New York.

“What are you doing here with these two harridans?”

“We thought it would be nice for you two to meet, that’s all,” Freddie said.

Joy felt something on her knee. A hand.

“Well, it’s about time, says I,” the owner of the hand said. He gave Joy his handsome smile.

Joy shifted, freeing her knee. “Oh yes.”

A woman at a nearby table was glaring at her. Joy took a bite of her tuna-fish sandwich. The hand returned to her knee. She felt her throat closing and thought, What if I choke and die with my daughter’s father-in-law’s hand on my knee?

“So when did you move into Green Acres?” Duncan said.

“Excuse me?”

“She doesn’t live here, Dad. She’s staying with us.”

“Green Acres? That’s a good one,” Molly said.

“Remember Zsa Zsa Gabor?” Joy said. “Those were the days.”

“That was Eva Gabor.”

“Sweet girl, Zsa Zsa,” said Duncan. “We worked together. Years ago, years ago.”

As Duncan described an obscure movie in which he had an even more obscure part, Joy noticed Freddie raising an eyebrow at Molly. They exchanged just noticeable smirks. Joy kicked Molly under the table, which had the advantage of also dislodging Duncan’s hand.

“A little respect,” Joy said, first to Molly, then to Freddie’s father. “A little respect.”

“Nothing will come of nothing,” said Duncan in his rich and sonorous voice. He tried his smile again.

“Wasn’t that fun, Mom?” Molly asked as they drove home. “Jesus, Freddie, do you actually aim for the potholes?”

Freddie laughed.

Freddie really was good-natured, Joy thought. “Your father is a ball of fire,” she said. She would not mention the hand. What would be the point?

“Never underestimate a minor character actor,” Freddie said. “It’s already been done. Their whole life.”

“Who was that woman who tried to trip us with her walker?” said Molly.

Freddie shrugged. “One of his girlfriends?”

“I’m sure that was an accident,” said Joy. But Green Garden was even more frightening than she had imagined.

*   *   *

Joy leaned on the grocery cart, weary in body and soul. It was an expensive, trendy grocery store, the kind of grocery store in which half the children were probably not vaccinated against measles. Molly examined a small ugly root vegetable.

“I think you girls deserve some privacy,” Joy said. “You’ve been so hospitable.” She had tried this before but gotten nowhere, and this time, too, Molly smiled an abstracted smile and said, “Don’t worry about it, Mom.”

Joy pushed the cart to the fish counter and waited for Molly to catch up. She missed her apartment, her lonely apartment in which she could roam and mourn at will. She missed the doormen. She missed her friends. She missed the park and Karl.

“I’m homesick, Molly. I keep trying to tell you nicely. I want to go home.”

“I understand that you’re not completely adjusted—”

“Adjusted? No, I’m not adjusted. I don’t want to be adjusted.” Joy realized she was speaking loudly and the mothers of unvaccinated children were glancing at her suspiciously. Careful, Joy. Don’t rile up the natives, don’t rile up Molly, especially. “Sweetheart, you and Freddie have been absolutely wonderful, but put yourself in my position.”

“That’s just what I was talking to Daniel about, and we decided that even more than the change in scenery, even more than the warm weather, that what you need is to be useful.”

“Yes,” said Joy, suddenly jubilant. At last her son and daughter understood.

“Everyone needs to be useful.”

“That is so true.” She would go back to work and insist on getting her projects back. She would call Norman, that fellow on the board, the one who Aaron used to play poker with, why hadn’t she thought of it before …

“We thought you could do something at the Getty, maybe.”

“The Getty?”

“Yeah, you know, like volunteer. Or the Skirball. The training for docents is pretty rigorous, but still…”

Molly prattled away about Los Angeles museums and their volunteer programs as they loaded the cart with healthful food that Joy could not digest. Joy searched the shelves for Cream of Wheat and said, now and then in hopeless punctuation of Molly’s recitation, “Such good ideas! If only I did not already have a museum. In New York.”