Washing the Dead (39 page)

“Don’t you see? I can’t let it go now. It was Mom who wanted us to leave the shul.”

“I do see, and maybe she was right, but it felt awful.” He looked like a little boy whose feelings had just been hurt for the first time. I’d always seen myself as the only victim in all this.

I wasn’t angry with him anymore for keeping me from my mother. “You were a good brother, Neil. The best.”

He pulled a wire from his pocket and fiddled with it.

“I want to go back to the mikveh.” Our code word for my mother’s absence.

“Well, don’t fall in,” he said, and now he was trying to be funny, and we both strained to laugh.

“I have to do this.”

Neither of us had to say, “before it’s too late.”

“Go see Mom,” he said, his eyes beginning to tear.

I stopped by Sendik’s to buy my mother a pumpkin pie on my way to Lakeline, a U-shape building with a big circular driveway lined with pale green gourds shaped like swans. A fall motif, no dead summer flowers. Nice.

Sunlight streamed through the skylights above the lobby, and the scent of freshly baked cookies and Lysol filled the air. A large woman in a long blue smock greeted me at the front desk.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m Barbara Blumfield, and I’m looking for my mother. June Pupnick.” I glanced around the lobby, wondering if I’d spot her.

“You know, I was going to ask if you were Mrs. Pupnick’s daughter. You favor her, so pretty and petite you two are.”

I blushed. “Thank you.”

“I’m Bonnie, by the way. I’ll take you to see your mama.” Her polyester-clad thighs rubbed together as she led me down the hall. She swiped her badge against the side of a large door and waited for a click.

Why was my mother in a locked facility? Hadn’t she just been diagnosed? God, how awful.

“You know, your brother and his wife are real honeys.” Bonnie turned to me and smiled.

“They’re good people.” It was true.

I followed Bonnie through the lounge and dining area, which smelled like old people’s waste. The lounge area was almost empty except for a hunched woman engaged in an animated monologue and a distinguished-looking man in a Brewers cap shuffling to a chair.

“Good work, Mr. Kuper.” Bonnie gave the man a thumbs-up.

Mr. Kuper saluted her.

“Mr. Kuper was a Green Beret,” she told me as we approached a wooden door with a small white sign: June Pupnick. My mother had a room in this ward? “Thank you, Bonnie. I’m okay from here,” I managed to say.

“Doesn’t work that way, hon.” She lowered her voice and tapped my wrist. “I have to announce you to the patient first.” She opened the door and stuck her head into the room. “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Pupnick, your daughter’s here.”

My mother sat in a chair that nearly engulfed her, like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann character on
Laugh-In
. My father loved that bit. She’d lost weight in the weeks since I’d seen her, and the fit of her blouse reminded me of when Lili wore Sam’s old shirts as smocks for her kindergarten art class. Over it, she wore her old
pink cardigan, which Jenny must have had dry-cleaned, because the coffee stain was gone. Gray infiltrated the roots of her hair, now an even brassier red than Jenny had dyed it. She looked well cared for, but the mother I knew would never have left the house without her lipstick.

“I’m glad to see you,” she said in a thin little girl’s voice, but her eyes were clear and focused.

I sat down next to her in one of her plastic chairs. “Me too,” I said.

“We’re all having good fun in the dining room. Would you ladies like to join us?” Bonnie inquired cheerfully.

My mom got up. Maybe she was afraid to be alone with me. I couldn’t blame her after our last visit. We made our way down the hallway, and I noticed that she still walked at a good clip. A woman who looked much older than my mother sat in a hard chair humming Mozart and kneading her forearms.

“That’s Mrs. Noonan. She used to teach piano over at the conservatory,” my mom told me.

The tables in the dining area were filled with groups of people, some talking, some coloring, some hooking rugs. My mother sat down at an empty table and began making a chain out of orange and brown construction paper. I sat beside her and spoke to her in the tone I used with my students.

“Look at the pattern you’ve created!” I picked up her chain. “Orange, orange, brown, orange—”

She cut me off. “Barbara, I’m not an imbecile.” Her eyes sparkled as brightly as a Door County lake. “Well, sometimes I’m an imbecile.”

We both laughed at the preposterousness of the situation.

“Some days are better than others,” she said.

I picked up a sheet of construction paper and ran my fingers over it, soothed by the familiar texture. “I’m sorry I upset you during our last visit.”

“You and I go way back, don’t we?” she said. She put her shriveled hand on mine.

“I’ve been so mad at you.”

She sank into her chair and started playing with the button on her sweater. “I’ve noticed.”

“I brought you a pumpkin pie.”

“You remembered,” she said with irony.

Part of the reason I loved celebrating Thanksgiving was that it was such a non-event when I was growing up. I had no living grandparents, and my parents focused most of their social efforts on entertaining the Schines’ Shabbos guests. My mother would overcook a kosher turkey, and we’d eat it for days, but for dessert she’d serve a homemade pumpkin pie, and the two of us would polish off half of it in one sitting and have the rest for breakfast the next day.

“The boys didn’t much like pie, did they, darling?” she said.

“No, Neil and Dad would eat strawberries topped with non-dairy, pareve Cool Whip instead.” I wrinkled my nose.

“Of course, pareve,” she repeated.

“Nondairy because we’d eaten meat,” I said.

“That’s right, pareve.” She looked pleased with herself.

“Did you have big Thanksgiving dinners when you were little?” I asked, hoping to prompt a memory that might open a door to her childhood in the mansion.

“No. Just Norman, Daddy, and me.” She still looked lucid, but she was struggling for words, as if she were trying to tell me something before the veil lowered over her brain. “And Andy and his dad.”

I grabbed my purse and pulled out the photo. “Did Andy know you when you were a child? Is that why you had this?”

My mother took the photo and smiled. “That’s Norman,” she said in her little-girl voice. I was losing her, but I tried to stick to my childhood instinct to sit tight and let her retreat, knowing she’d come back to me.

“Norman’s so busy now. That’s why he hasn’t come to see me.” She smiled proudly. “He’s writing a big paper on the Spanish-American War.”

“Do you miss him?” I asked, aching for her.

“Oh no, dear. We’re going to go for a splash tonight after he gets done with his paper. Big paper. He’s writing about the Spanish-American War.”

I wanted to crawl into her broken brain and hold up the veil with my bare hands. I wanted to know everything. “What about Andy?”

She looked at me, her eyes clouding, the veil dropping, dropping.

“Let’s have some pie,” I offered. “I’ll go get a knife.”

Her face slackened as if someone had flipped a switch. The mechanics of opening the pastry box and removing the pie baffled her, so I glided my finger along the flap and lifted it, releasing a burst of cinnamon and cloves. I set the pie in front of her and handed her a fork. My refined mother gobbled up most of the custard in four bites, orange goo smearing her mouth. She pointed to the crust, giggled, and scooped out a little more pumpkin filling with her finger. Then she shoved her finger in her mouth, licking it clean like one of the beaters she’d doled out to Neil and me when she was baking our birthday cakes.

“Oh, we can salvage this,” Bonnie announced as she walked over to us. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a packet of wipes. She blotted the damp square against my mother’s chin and upper lip, which was sprouting two coarse gray hairs. She cleaned the creases around her mouth as she stared up at me, her eyes not quite vacant, her sticky hands clutching my knee as if we were sitting together at the Downer Theater watching the scariest movie of our lives.

23

I
’d never missed my mother as profoundly as I did after I visited her at Lakeline. I hungered to learn every detail she’d buried about herself. Then I could go back to the Shabbos goy and ask him who he had been to her. And he’d tell me. He’d wanted me to open my heart to her, and I could. I’d go see her again. I’d catch her on a better day. She’d have more lucid moments, and I’d wait for them. I wasn’t giving up. Now it was time for me to dispose of my letters to Tzippy. I’d held on to this documentation of my resentments long enough.

I went home and headed straight downstairs to the basement. I hesitated for a second before I opened the cedar chest and retrieved my mother’s hatbox from under a mountain of linens. As I was refolding the linens, a joint fell to the floor. My brain slowly absorbed the information in front of me. I knew Lili and her friends had tried pot. Kara’s mother had called me in a snit after she picked the girls up from Summerfest last July and she’d smelled it in their hair. She headed up the D.A.R.E. program at the high school and had a good deal invested in the issue of drugs. Dawn and I had assured her that they were good kids, and they were all contrite when we confronted them.

I put the joint in my pocket. The idea of Lili smoking pot in our house felt like a violation of the nest I’d worked so hard to create, particularly if she’d been smoking with that horrid Taylor. Then a more alarming thought entered my consciousness, shoving aside my Taylor worries. What if Lili had read my letters? I
should never have kept them.

I took the letters upstairs and pulled out Sam’s paper shredder. I dropped in the first letter, mesmerized as it devoured my words and spit them out in shards. When I’d shredded the last letter, I went back downstairs and looked into the bottom of the hatbox, hoping against hope that I’d find a few strands of my mother’s hair, colored the way she liked it. I fished the joint out of my pocket and brought it to my nose, sniffing in the sweet smoky scent. I considered taking a big hit.

On my way to pick Lili up from school, I called Dawn and told her about the joint. She was jammed up at work and asked me to call back later.

“So you’re not worried?”

“Not about the joint,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“God, this is awkward, Barbara.”

“Just tell me.”

“Megan says that Lili hasn’t been herself.”

My mind raced directly to the hospital bed where they would hook Lili’s brain to electrodes. “What do you mean? That she’s depressed?”

“Don’t let your imagination run away with you. Listen, honey, I can call you in thirty.”

“Please call me.”

Lili was waiting for me outside school. She was standing with Taylor and Amanda, another new friend I didn’t like. Lili was spending her babysitting money at the mall, buying skinny jeans and blousy shirts that rolled off her shoulder. She was no longer wearing the boot, but her gait hadn’t returned to normal yet. I rolled down the window as my blood warmed. The thought of her reading my letters, my diary, shamed me. So much for my new calm.

“How about if Daddy grills some steaks for supper?” I asked as she shut the car door. I was trying to figure out how to talk to her
about the pot.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“We need to stop at Sendik’s then.”

“Okay with me.”

“How’d your math test go?”

“C-plus.” It was an improvement.

“That’s good. Maybe the medicine is working?” We never called it by its name. I hadn’t noticed much of a change in her in terms of her focus, and she was growing more distant every day.

“Yeah, I lost the bottle, though. Can we get some more?” There was no apology in her voice.

“Lili, you have to be careful with that stuff.”

“What, like do you think some kid is going to steal it and sell it on the black market?” She cackled.

“That sounds a little extreme, but it is an attractive drug to people.” I told her I’d call the pharmacy.

I failed three times at parallel parking the car because I was so distracted by my drug worries and those letters. What if Lili asked me about them? How would I ever begin to explain everything about my mother? I was just beginning to grasp the story I would someday share with her.

Mindy Hecht spotted us pulling into the parking lot at Sendik’s. When I got out of the car, she hugged me so hard that my earring got caught in her tennis visor. “I can’t wait to tell Ian who I ran into!”

I didn’t get paid much as a preschool teacher, but I did enjoy my rock-star status. “I can still see Ian sloshing around the playground in those alligator rain boots.”

“He’s reading Harry Potter.” She lowered her voice, as if protecting the ears of a parent of a less precocious reader who might be passing by.

“Harry Potter? So young?” I asked with sincere awe. Making Mindy feel proud of her son restored my sense of equilibrium. “I’m not surprised.”