They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (24 page)

Joy pulled the dog up to her face, letting his warmth muffle the silence. “But we didn’t belong there, did we?”

Gatto jumped down and lifted his leg against the leg of the table.

Joy watched him blandly. “You think you can scare me with a little pee? Think again, dog. I’ve been worked over by an expert. With a colostomy bag.”

She wiped up the dog pee. She mourned her husband. She mourned her life, which seemed so far away, lost in time. She longed for her daughter and her son, the sounds of their voices, the strength of their arms, and the loving condescension of their hearts. She longed for Aaron.

She didn’t seem to belong anywhere anymore. But it was good to be home just the same.

*   *   *

“Promise you’ll call me every day and tell me how you’re doing,” Molly had said before Joy left.

Joy took her promise to heart. She called every day, eagerly, hesitant to disturb Molly, but not hesitant enough to stop dialing. Sometimes she called twice a day, sometimes more. It was dangerous to call so much, signaling need and helplessness, she knew that. She made sure to sound happy and engaged, made sure to share only what bits of information she believed shed a pleasant light on her and her days. The deliveryman from the coffee shop looked cold, she told Molly, so she gave him one of Aaron’s scarves, he was so grateful.

“Mom, it’s June. How could he be?”

“The point, Molly, is how nice it is to be able to make a gesture like that and have it mean something to someone.”

“Which scarf? I hope not the gray cashmere.”

Joy tried to monitor her voice and conversation, to weed out any petulance and grievance of tone, but it was difficult. No matter how hard she listened to herself and monitored herself, what she heard was an indolent, wide-ranging, rolling report of the minutiae of a disgruntled old woman’s existence: the chronology of meals, of courses within meals, the digestive consequences of meals; the frequency of sleep and sleeplessness, the details of other phone calls, phone calls with people Molly did not even know. She couldn’t change the course of her words, they rushed along like a flooded river. She talked about her grandchildren and their bad colds, but also the grandchildren of friends and neighbors with colds that were even worse. Those grandchildren, the grandchildren of friends and neighbors, had cousins, too, whose troubles and triumphs she found herself confiding to Molly. Her voice droned on and she was mesmerized by it, helpless to stop, unwilling to hang up. Not that long ago she had been lying on Molly and Freddie’s couch watching television, her daughter giving her a foot massage, and Joy had been longing to be alone with her loneliness. Now she experienced every phone call to Molly as essential, something she could not let slip away.

“I take the dog out every day.”

“Yes, you told me, that’s great for you, to get out.”

“I still have to carry him. It’s good he only weighs a few pounds. I’m not as strong as I once was. But yesterday it was so windy the doorman, that nice Ernie who Daddy liked so much, he wouldn’t let me out the door. I called the hardware store, Feldman’s, the one with all the tchotchkes, and they suggested Wee-Wee pads, but I had to call a pet store to get them. My neighbor upstairs, the man who was always such a sourpuss until he got his poodle, well, he gave me a number, left it with the doorman, actually, and I called…”

“Mom? I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. I really should get off the phone.”

“Oh! The time difference. And why am I rattling on like this? It’s a mild form of senility. Good night, sweetheart.”

“I wish Mom would get hearing aids,” Daniel told Molly after one of his own conversations with their mother.

But Molly didn’t think it would make much difference. Their mother wanted to talk, not to listen. It was an exhalation of words, no intake of breath, no pauses, a stream of consciousness into which no one else could dip a toe, an incompleteness so complete there could be no natural end to a conversation. Molly often found these monologues strangely soothing. She wondered if that was what meditation was all about, that absence of meaning, that sense of eternity. She was almost as helpless in that cocoon of superfluous information as her mother. The truth was, she craved the sound of her mother’s voice. It calmed her, reassured her. Ah yes, the twins’ First Communion. Whose twins? she would wonder idly. But it didn’t matter. They were the twins created by her mother’s voice, created by her mother.

There was little chance for Molly to interrupt, and she stopped trying. She did not say, for example,
I miss Daddy at the oddest times
. She missed him whenever the fog came in. He used to quote Carl Sandburg when there was fog, little cat feet, silent haunches. She missed him when she made gravy because he hated giblets, or when she made lima beans because he hated lima beans, or pea soup because he loved pea soup. She missed him when she got an ingrown toenail and cut a V in the nail the way he’d taught her. She rarely had a chance to say any of that to her mother, and the few times she tried, she felt intrusive and loud. She didn’t say much and she didn’t listen carefully. Her mother’s voice washed over her, intoxicating.

“Until I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Well, an hour on the phone is a lot,” Freddie said sympathetically.

“It’s no skin off your nose,” Molly said. “Why do you care?”

Freddie shook her head and laughed. “You’re impossible.”

“A hundred years ago we would have had to write letters, which would have taken days to get across the country. And I would not have heard her voice. I love her voice. I love to hear it. Until I can’t stand it anymore! And then I hang up, and then I miss her and want to listen to her talk more.”

Freddie tried to remember her own mother’s voice. She could feel it, in her thoughts and in her body, high and fluty, but she couldn’t hear it. That night she dreamed about her mother: her mother had been alive all this time, Freddie was surprised and overjoyed to see her, to hold her hand and kiss her and cry with relief.

*   *   *

“The apartment is a shambles,” Daniel told his wife. “And there are Wee-Wee pads all over. And my mother is in her pajamas and bathrobe. She never goes out. It’s like she’s become a recluse in two weeks. The dog is a fat pig.”

Coco asked cautiously if he wanted Joy to stay with them.

“Oh, I don’t think we’re there yet.”

“She’s so independent,” she said, with obvious relief.

“And California was not exactly a success.”

“But we would be less intrusive,” Coco said. “We would let her go her own way. Your sister and Freddie, well…”

“They can be a little…”

“Overbearing.”

Daniel laughed. He sat next to Coco on the couch and put his arm around her.

“But I hate to think of her in that big old apartment all by herself,” Coco said.

“Big? Not for her. She’s covered every surface with papers and clothes. She needs more rooms to clutter. Anyway, she’s not alone. She’s got the obese dog.”

He tried to imagine his mother in their loft. They would have to box her in, the way they had the kids. But the kids’ little box rooms had the only windows in the back. They could always give Joy a windowless closet, the way the museum did. He remembered the younger Joy, funny and full of eccentric energy. The first day of moving in, she would have had the whole family out bird-watching or making rubbings of manhole covers. Now, though, she spent most of her time shuffling through her apartment looking for her glasses, the dog shuffling after her, or making toast on which she slathered something yellow and glistening that was not butter.

“Oh god, Coco, why are we even thinking about this?” But he was grateful she had brought it up. He wondered what she would have done if he’d said, Yes, that’s a splendid idea, let’s move her in as soon as we can.

“But, Daniel, we’re so lucky to have Cora and Ruby around, I feel almost selfish. They would make things so much more cheerful for your mother.”

Daniel could not argue with that. Both he and Coco considered their children an indisputable addition to any situation. They were always surprised when the girls were not included in wedding invitations or cocktail parties. Again, Daniel tried to picture his mother in the loft. It’s so drafty, she would say. The lighting is so harsh. He knew she would say those things because she had already said them when they once had Thanksgiving there. I just feel uncomfortable, in my head, the proportions are off, Danny, but at least they fixed your elevator. “Maybe we could just lend the children to her.”

Coco said nothing. She was thinking of her own old age. Would Cora or Ruby want her to come and live with them when the time came? She would have to set a good example. “We could make her feel much more at home than Freddie and Molly did.”

Daniel suspected her generosity of spirit was propped up just a bit by her certainty that he would not agree. Even though his mother had been so good to him all his life, especially when he’d been sick, coming to the hospital every day before and after work. In so many ways, Daniel had modeled himself on her, trying to do good, to be generous, to repay the world with some of the care she had shown him. Maybe, it occurred to him, he should be repaying
her
, not the planet. Maybe Coco was right and they should share their lives with her the way she had devoted so much of her life to him.

The girls came running into the living room at that moment and demanded ice cream.

“You girls could share a room if Grandma came to live with us,” Coco said.

Share?
Horror-stricken faces. Pushing. Kicking. Squeals of aggression, squeals of pain.

“Go to your rooms this minute!”

“Yeah, and stay out of my room, too,” Cora said to her sister, delivering one last blow.

“Stay out of my room first,” said Ruby.

“I’m already out of your room. I win.”

Daniel shepherded them into their rooms and shut their doors.

When he came back with two glasses of Scotch, Coco took hers gratefully and said, “I guess that won’t work, sharing a room.”

“No.”

She determined then and there always to have two extra bedrooms when she was old, one for each of her daughters to move into.

41

Daniel asked his mother if she was depressed. She said, “Naturally.”

42

Molly had often wondered, too often to tell anyone, even Freddie, what it would feel like to jump off a building, what your thoughts would be. Would your thoughts be narrowed to a simple unthinking scream? Would you think of all those you would miss? Would you wonder if they would miss you? Would you think, What in the world am I doing, falling, falling, no way to stop, no way to go back? Would you think, Why did I do this? Or would you think, Why didn’t I do this long ago? That, all of that, was what she felt her mother must be feeling. Her mother was falling through the air of her life. Molly had tried hard to ignore it, but she could hear it in her mother’s voice.

And Molly was doing nothing to help her. Nothing.

She sat in the dappled shade of a small garden, admiring a spider’s web that ran from the tea tree branch up to the trunk of the apricot tree, a marvel of fantasy engineering, beautiful in the soft afternoon light, ugly as a weapon, a large beetle imprisoned in its lace. She was sitting, staring at a cruel bit of silver embroidery while her mother floated helplessly in her loneliness, stunned and airborne, not even caught in her fall like the beetle. Molly was watching a hummingbird, listening to the whir of its movement, catching the colors of its throat as they changed, and they were dazzling, and the sound of a finch was musical and a flock of noisy parrots flew high above. The flowers of the succulents were blooming, minuscule, stunted, almost invisible. Everything was soft and green and serene. Molly was comfortable and the neighbor’s cat stretched beyond the fence, a calico cat, and—she couldn’t help herself—she was filled with joy and a sense of wonder. Her happiness made her sad, because it wasn’t fair, it couldn’t be fair to be happy when her mother was falling from a building toward the cold gray sidewalk.

43

Joy took Gatto and a sandwich to the park.

“I went all the way to Daddy’s park,” she told Molly. “I bought a turkey sandwich, low sodium, and ate it on a bench.”

“I went to Daddy’s little park,” she told Danny. “It was very peaceful.”

She’d been looking for Karl, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the coffee shop at his usual time, either. She had missed Karl more than she expected when she was in California. She hoped he wasn’t dead. She considered walking to his building to ask the doorman if Karl had died while she was in California, but if he had, she would be devastated, and if he hadn’t, she would be embarrassed.

“She’s seeing that guy again, I’m sure of it,” Daniel told Molly. “She went to Daddy’s park. That’s like code. She’s very vulnerable right now. In more ways than one.” Daniel had finally worked out where all her bits and pieces of money had been squirreled away in different bank accounts to confuse Aaron, and there wasn’t much left. “The good news is, he’s a fool if he’s after her money.”

“She does
not
want to sell Upstate.”

“She’s running out of dough, Molly.”

“We’ll help her.”

“What if she gets sick again? We can’t afford all those aides. She spent everything on Daddy. She’s broke.”

Molly said, “She’s got the house.”

“My point exactly.”

And so the argument went, round and round and back again. For Molly, Upstate was a tie to home. For Joy, the house was both her past and what she would give to her children’s future. Daniel understood all of it. He felt the same way, really.

“But we have to be realistic, Molly. If she sells Upstate, she’ll be able to plan properly, plan how much she can spend each year.”

“She can’t plan,” his sister said slowly, clearly, as if talking to someone else’s backward child, “because she doesn’t know how long she will live. Why are we pretending she can make plans? Why can’t she just live her life?”