They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (23 page)

One evening when Molly was at a meeting and not coming home until late, Joy and Freddie went out to dinner, just the two of them. It was the first time they had done anything like that, and they were both a little nervous, Joy’s discomfort manifesting itself in silence, Freddie’s in chatter.

“Molly doesn’t like this place, she thinks it’s boring, but I love it and I think you might like it, too. The traffic will be impossible on the 10, even in this direction, so I think I’ll take Venice, oh my god, look at them trying to get to the 405…”

Joy opened the window and let the cool air in. It smelled like flowers even on this busy street. She braced herself for yet another restaurant with painfully loud music, painfully hard benches, women in painfully high heels and men comfortable in sneakers, all of them eating spicy, fishy fragments of raw things on little saucers. It was the same in New York, she supposed, but she never went to restaurants like that in New York. She was in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs.

It seemed like a long time before they finally pulled into a parking structure, then spiraled down several levels until they found a space. Disoriented, Joy squeezed out of the car and followed Freddie to an elevator that took them back to street level. Freddie was still talking. Something about her department at the university trying to screw someone over in a fourth-year review and a committee that never met. Joy thought of the museum, of Miss Georgia, of all the orphaned artifacts she could no longer tend to. She was grateful to Freddie for talking, for trying. Freddie was a good sport. Joy remembered being a good sport. It required energy and optimism and faith, and it had been quite rewarding. Really, she had spent her entire life being a good sport. But to what end? She had grown old and uncomfortable, just like a bad sport. And now she
was
a bad sport. There was no protection in good behavior. She felt suddenly compassionate toward Freddie, struggling on in a unilateral conversation that would not protect her from the disappointments of old age.

“You’re a good sport, Freddie,” she said.

Freddie’s face lit up, that tan, weathered face, into an almost goofy smile. How charming, that large unconscious grin. Freddie’s was not a beautiful, womanly face by any stretch of the imagination, more a wary, taut look to her, but when she smiled, the contrast was overwhelmingly pleasant. It made Joy grin back at her. It was like a happy slap on the back, that smile, an arm thrown joyfully around your shoulder. It was as friendly a smile as Joy could remember seeing. It was irresistible. No wonder Molly fell in love with this person. Joy marveled that she had never noticed the warmth of that smile, of everything about Freddie, really. Then she realized she had never really looked at Freddie’s face before. It had been an indistinct oval, an unwelcome blur from the dreaded California.

“This is very nice of you,” Joy said.

They walked a quarter of a block, then turned into a small strip mall. There was a sushi restaurant, a Korean barbecue, a nail salon, and an Italian restaurant. Freddie opened the door of the Italian restaurant.

“It’s so quiet,” Joy said.

“It’s so comfortable,” she added, sliding into a padded booth.

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” she told the waiter happily. “Just what I wanted.”

“This place has been here forever,” Freddie said. “My father used to take us when I was a kid. I bring him back once in a while, but he doesn’t remember it, so it’s kind of sad.”

Joy reached across the table for Freddie’s hand. “It’s awful when they don’t remember what you remember, even when you’re right there with them. It’s like nothing exists anymore.”

Freddie was crying, just a few tears. Joy had never seen her cry. She was such an odd little thing, ebullient and tough all at once. Poignant tears, not like me, Joy thought, with my weeping and wailing every minute. Not like Molly, either.

“No one really understands this particular abyss,” Joy said. “Our abyss.”

“No, they don’t. But why should they, I suppose.”

“We’re an exclusive club.”

“The Abyss Club,” Freddie said, laughing. She took her hand back, wiped her eyes with the big cloth napkin.

They had ricotta cheesecake and cannolis for dessert.

“I’ll pay for it later,” Joy said. “So I always say. But it never stops me.”

*   *   *

Molly and Freddie disappeared the next morning and came home with a very small dog.

“You can walk it,” they said.

“Step on it is more likely.”

“Listen, it’s perfect: Freddie and I went to the pound and rescued this little fellow. Now we have a dog, right?”

“Apparently.”

“But we both have jobs, right?”

“Thank god. I don’t care what the ‘experts’ report about the economy, people are suffering, that’s all I can say.”

“We have a dog, but because of our jobs we don’t have time to walk the dog. So, Freddie and I really need you, Mom. We need you to walk our dog.”

“It would be a big help to us,” Freddie said. She smiled, and Joy of course smiled back and took the new plaid leash attached to the tiny dog.

They were such nice girls, and she appreciated the thought and effort that had gone into the plan. It was creative of the girls, she had to give them that. And she was touched that they cared enough about her mental health to go to such lengths to give her something to do. It was not their fault that the dog refused to cooperate.

The dog was named Gatto, which was amusing. But Gatto did not like to take walks. Gatto hated to take walks. The size of a large rat, he was part Chihuahua, part poodle, part parrot, Joy thought, for he was a very vocal little dog, making his wishes known with a remarkably varied vocabulary of squeaks and yelps, and his wishes were to stay home, curled on Joy’s lap.

“Gatto, indeed,” she said. Gatto squeaked, snorted, stretched, and balled himself up again. Joy patted his head, the size of a nectarine, and dozed uncomfortably. She was afraid to move. She did not want to disturb him.

*   *   *

The days went by, blue skies and pretty smells. She carried Gatto with her on her strolls, mostly as a way of starting conversations. She was uneasy talking to the girls, noticing their impatience, how they interrupted with unnecessarily big smiles to change the subject. Was she talking too much? Had she become boring? She supposed she was and she had. She became more and more quiet at home. But on her walks all kinds of people stopped her to admire the dog. They laughed when she told them his name.

“My daughter got him for me so I could take him on walks, but he doesn’t like to walk,” she would say, and they would laugh again.

Aaron, she thought, you would not like it here. There’s no normal place to get coffee, no normal barber, just an overpriced coffee place where people sit on uncomfortable, oversized wooden boxes, just hair salons for skinny young men. You would not like it here, but you are gone. She sometimes thought he was there beside her, shaking his head at the young people riding bicycles, no helmets, carrying surfboards under one arm.

“Where are all the old people?” she asked.

“It’s gotten sort of gentrified,” said Freddie. “A lot of tech companies moved in.”

“But where are the old people?”

Molly shrugged. “Assisted living?”

Joy did not ask again.

*   *   *

Because Gatto did not like to walk and Joy had gotten so much stronger, Molly and Freddie revised their plans for Joy to be useful. They got her a tricycle.

“It’s red,” she said. She did not know what else to say. What is there to say when presented with an adult tricycle? It had a basket for Gatto. It had an old-fashioned bell. It was gigantic. It was a tricycle. It was red.

“You can ride on the boardwalk. It’s great exercise.”

“You can do errands,” Freddie added. “Which are so…”

“Useful!”

Molly often finished Freddie’s sentences, and vice versa.

“Useful.” Joy wanted to be useful. She wanted that almost as much as she did not want to be lonely. But was a tricycle really the road to relevance? Were errands the answer? And she would look like a kook.

“Wear a hat for the sun, Mom.”

A kook in a hat.

“We got you a water bottle,” Freddie said.

*   *   *

Joy had ridden just such a red tricycle when she was a child. It was not dignified then. It was not dignified now.

“I know they mean well,” she said to Natalie one morning when both girls were off at work and she could speak freely on the phone.

“Don’t you know how to ride a two-wheeler?”

“Of course I do. They wanted me to ride it to the grocery store to get milk yesterday.”

“I thought you were lactose-intolerant.”

“I am, but I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But luckily, I had a terrible bout of diarrhea and couldn’t go. At least it’s flat here. But they really are making an effort, they’re trying.”

“Trying to what? Turn their mother into an errand boy?”

“They think I’ll feel useful, that they’ve given meaning to my life.”

“Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. Don’t they have a car?”

“I just realized something. People will think I lost my license.”

“They’ll think you’re a drunk, an old, eccentric drunk with a DUI.”

They laughed at that.

“Okay,” Natalie said. “Time to come home.”

*   *   *

Joy poked through the bookcase looking for something to read. Molly and Freddie did not get a newspaper. They read it online. What difference did it make, her eyes were terrible anyway. She could read a little if the light was right and she tilted her head and the print was dark. She picked up an old
New York
magazine from a pile in a basket. Interesting that Molly still got
New York
magazine. She must miss New York. Joy caught her breath. Perhaps that meant she would move back. She could get an apartment nearby. They could see each other for lunch. And dinner.

She spent some time searching for her striped bag, then searched through it for her sunglasses. Maybe they were in the green bag. The dog followed her wherever she went. She wondered if he would follow her outside, if it was the leash that made him refuse to go on a walk.

“That way you could get a little exercise, fatso,” she said. He really was getting tubby, and so quickly, too. Molly said it was not healthy for him to be so heavy, that Joy should stop feeding him bits of her own food. “We’ll show her,” Joy said. “You deserve every bit of food you can get after the life you lived, whatever it was.” She imagined him on the street, fighting with the crows for pizza crusts.

She put on her sunglasses, got her cane, opened the door, and called Gatto. He made some inquiring noises, then slunk to the door on his belly. Joy went out and down the steps to the street. She called him again. “Come here, come here, Gatto. Cardiovascular activity! Come on!” He looked at her dubiously, then darted out the door and stood beside her. “Good boy.” Now she walked down the street, stopping periodically so he could catch up. He lay down on her feet after each of these sprints, but they made it all the way down the block before Joy turned around to go back.

And then, from nowhere, a giant of a dog galloped around the corner, gave a deep thunderous growl, a deeper more thunderous bark, and Gatto was hanging from the beast’s jaws like a rag toy.

Probably she hit the dog with her cane. That would account for the owner pushing her out of the way and screaming. Unless the screaming was Joy’s, which it may well have been. She grabbed the animal’s jaws and tried to pry them apart, that she was sure of. She was sure she ultimately shoved her cane in its mouth and yanked down until Gatto flopped out onto the ground and the beast’s owner dragged it away by its collar.

Joy carried Gatto into the house. He was alive. His heart was beating, fluttering like hummingbird wings. There was blood on his belly. Joy wrapped him in a towel and put him in the basket of the tricycle. She pushed open the back gate and pedaled as furiously as an eighty-six-year-old can pedal a tricycle. There was a main thoroughfare one block away, a street with stores and malls and an animal hospital. She pedaled and pedaled and crossed the street against the light and heard cars honking and screamed an obscenity and pedaled some more until she saw the vet’s office and pulled the tricycle onto the sidewalk.

Gatto was stitched up and given some shots. The vet was a young woman with freckles sprinkled across her nose who treated him like a VIP, Joy thought. A VIP, she said to Gatto as she pedaled him home. That’s what you are, a VIP.

When Molly came home, she found her mother in bed, Gatto beside her, shaved and stitched, both of them fast asleep. The gate to the alley had been left open, and when she went to close it, she noticed the tricycle, in its basket a bloody towel.

“This is a dangerous city,” Joy said when she woke up. “I’m taking Gatto home where it’s safe.”

40

The sadness was there, waiting for her in the apartment. I’m sorry, Joy said to the sadness. I’m sorry I had to leave you behind for so long. But, believe me, the blue skies never fooled me, you were in my thoughts, in my heart, every minute. She looked out the window at the rain and the wet trees and the bleary spots of red taillights and white headlights. I’m home, she said, with relief, to the emptiness.

She sat at the kitchen table and Gatto leaped onto her lap, his nails scratching her leg. He was a good traveler. He hadn’t made a peep, zipped up in his bag beneath the seat. She had forgotten he was there, had almost left him behind, abandoned a dog that had already been abandoned, it would have been terrible, and she wondered who would have found him, a flight attendant or one of the cleaning crew, perhaps, and whether they would have taken him home and given him a good life.

“But I didn’t abandon you,” she said aloud. She petted his hard little head and wondered why
she
felt abandoned. No one had left her behind under an airline seat, it was she who had insisted on leaving California and Molly, but it had taken only a moment for the abandonment to rise up, like a cold flame; it had taken only the sight of Molly turning her back after she got her settled in her JetBlue wheelchair.